Andrew Clavin’s Ep. 198 weaponizes satire to dissect 2016’s political horror, from a Frankenstein-style reanimated ex-president to the New York Times’ overblown Trump tax frenzy—dismissed as "non-news" compared to Mitt Romney’s wealth. He contrasts Vin Scully’s Venezuela truth with Obama’s silence, mocks SNL’s one-sided Clinton jokes, and pivots to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, arguing Lucy’s vampiric transformation reflects Victorian fears of female sexuality, possibly fueled by Stoker’s suspected homosexuality. Modern horror’s lost taboos, he claims, make classic vampire tales far more chilling, while Paul Barber’s folklore debunking exposes the absurdity of dismissing ancient "soul" accounts. The episode ends with Greg Gutfeld’s "Thrilla of Vanilla" debate jab, framing 2016’s madness as a collective descent into media-fueled hysteria. [Automatically generated summary]
It's October, and that means Halloween, a time of fantastical horror, when the worst creatures of the human imagination rise from their night-black lairs to spread terror and destruction until one of them is elected president.
It's typical at this time of year to recommend some spooky entertainments to help you set the eerie mood for the big night when we all head to the voting booth to demand we be given some free treats lest we throw toilet paper over the White House.
Although it's hard to imagine how we'll ever find enough toilet paper to clean up what's going to be coming out of the White House for the next four years.
So here's a selection of delightfully chilling movies that will turn your thoughts to mayhem and death and take your mind off the really bad stuff that's happening on the political scene.
First, you'll want to view The Exorcist Part 7.
This is the story of a female Democrat presidential candidate who's possessed by a demon such that her face becomes a scarred and terrible mask of hellish torment while her head and her political positions spin around in unnatural directions until she vomits green slime and impossible promises over everyone around her.
Finally, a priest who has lost his faith is called in to deal with the nightmare, but bizarrely, the priest takes one look at this soulless wreck of a human being and says there's absolutely nothing wrong with her, then returns to his day job as editor of the New York Times.
At last, the possessed politician becomes so twisted around that her head is actually planted between her buttocks.
Then she's elected president.
Next, you'll want to see Psycho 4, the story of a female Democrat presidential candidate who dies of old age and is then stuffed and carted from campaign event to campaign event where her handlers move her body around and her top aide and necrophiliac lesbian lover imitates her voice to make people think she's still alive.
In the horrific climax, the dead woman goes on a vengeful rampage, destroying everyone and everything around her.
Then she's elected president.
And of course, you don't want to neglect the classics, so make sure to watch Bride of Frankenstein Returns.
This is the story of a former president so desperate to return to office that he hires a mad scientist to build him a wife out of the mutilated, blood-soaked limbs and organs of dead ideas.
When the hideous construction is done, the female creature is run up through the castle battlements in a lightning storm until a jolt of electricity transforms her into a bizarre simulation of a living being.
Ultimately, the poor monster takes one look at herself in the mirror and screams in endless horror at the corrupt and empty beast she is.
then she's elected president.
Those are just a few of the horror movies you can watch this month that will help prepare your mind for that scariest of all nights when disgusting and horrid monstrosities like vampires, witches, and Donald Trump roam the earth until in a final crescendo of unimaginable abomination.
But I don't want to give away the ending.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Venezuela's Downfall00:03:34
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Life is hunky-dunky when you think about it, you know?
It's actually a philosophical position.
Well, you know, the Clavenless weekend has passed, and probably the worst thing that happens, you know, aside from the country falling apart and all that stuff, Vin Scully retired, the L.A. Dodgers announcer for 67 years, and Andrew Breitbart's possibly his greatest hero.
I mean, Andrew Breitbart loved this guy.
He had heroic fantasies of like making movies about Vin Scully.
He just loved them.
And one of the reasons he loved him is because he was a conservative.
He was a genuine conservative.
Here is just 20 seconds of Vince Scully announcing between pitches, this is between pitches, right, to a batter from Venezuela.
And he says, what's it like to be this guy and read about how Venezuela is going down the drain?
And then he says this.
Socialism failing to work as it always does, this time in Venezuela.
You talk about giving everybody something free and all of a sudden there's no food to eat.
And who do you think is the richest person in Venezuela?
The daughter of Hugo Choppers.
Hello.
Anyway, Owen 2.
Socialism failing to work.
Owen 2.
It's like more truth between pitches than Obama has said in the last eight years.
So Vince Scully, truly one of the great broadcasters of all time, he retired.
And all right, we're going to be talking a lot of culture today.
Oh, and it's the Jewish New Year.
So happy New Year to Jewish people.
Shapiro's not coming in today, right?
See, this is the problem with the alt-right.
They hate the Jews, but they can't explain how these people have taken over the world and they never come to work.
It's like, every other day, it's a holiday.
They take over the world in their spare time.
So why then are the white races superior?
I can't understand the whole philosophy.
Never mind.
All right.
So we're going to talk a lot of culture today.
We are building in the process of building a satellite so we can bring in our cultural reporter Michael Knowles from the writer's room 25 feet away.
We have to bounce the signal off the planet Neptune before we can actually go to Knowles.
And it doesn't always work, but if we can, we'll have him in.
That will come after you lose our video feed on Facebook and YouTube.
You have us here for 15 minutes, and then you are cast into the exterior darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
But you can come to the Daily Wire and hear the rest there, or you can download us from iTunes or SoundCloud.
If you want the whole thing in video live on the Daily Wire, come to the Daily Wire and subscribe.
It is only, it's free for 30 days and only a lousy eight bucks after that.
I mean, come on.
All right, I will get to it.
You know, plugging myself is one of my least favorite things.
I hate doing it.
I always forget to do it, but I'm going to do it for a couple more days to ask you to go out and get the great good thing, my memoir, The Great Good Thing, a Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
People are writing me every day telling me that this has really moved them, and some of them saying it has changed their lives.
And that, too, is just a couple of bucks.
And you get your life change.
And look, let's face it, your life needs changing.
I mean, or you wouldn't be doing something more important than listening to this, right?
I mean, all right.
Tax Code Controversy00:15:40
All right, so everyone is going insane.
This election is now coming into its kind of the home stretch, and everyone is going out of their mind.
We talked last week about Donald Trump flipping out over this miss universe.
First, she was Miss Venezuela, then she was Miss Universe, then she was Miss Piggy.
She was the Miss Universe who ate too much, and he's still tweeting about it.
Like three in the morning, he's tweeting about her.
But in the aftermath of this, what everybody says was a victory for Hillary Clinton in the first debate.
And let's not forget, okay, that Mitt Romney destroyed Barack Obama in the first debate.
So the first debate is only the first debate.
And seems like she's getting, there weren't any really new scientific polls over the weekend.
It seems like she's getting a bit of a bump.
It was not only the debate, it was the way he reacted by going nuts about this thing.
But now, the other side is going crazy.
The New York Times is going out of their mind.
They are going out of their mind.
Last week, I think it was Thursday, I read an old New York Times article about how Hillary Clinton maligned the people that Bill Clinton abused, the women that Bill Clinton abused.
So while they're attacking Donald Trump for maligning this misuniverse, in fact, Hillary Clinton targeted and attacked and organized these horrible, horrible attempts to discredit the women who Bill Clinton assaulted, essentially.
I mean, he assaulted, he abused them.
One of them says he raped her.
And it's their fault.
Hillary Clinton makes it their fault.
The New York Times went out and rewrote that article today.
It is virtually the same article, except now it is restyled to let supporters know how to spin this in a good way.
How Hillary Clinton, this is the headline, how Hillary Clinton grappled with Bill Clinton's infidelity and his accusers.
How this poor, poor woman, who's just like you or me, folks, just like every woman when her husband steps out.
Donald J. Trump, it says, the Republican presidential nominee, criticized Mrs. Clinton over Mr. Clinton's affairs and her response to them and said he might talk more about the issue in the final weeks before the election.
That could be a treacherous strategy for Mr. Trump, given his own past infidelity and questionable treatment of women.
He didn't go out and torture these poor women.
You know, the women slept with them.
That's like none of my business.
All right, but many voters, particularly women, might see Mrs. Clinton being blamed for her husband's conduct.
I love it when the New York Times advises Republicans on how they should lose the election.
It could also remind voters of a searing period in American history and in Mrs. Clinton's life.
Oh, boo.
I mean, come on.
Confronting a spouse's unfaithfulness is painful under any circumstances.
For Mrs. Clinton, it happened repeatedly and in the most public of ways.
You know, they're trying to reclaim that burst of sympathy she got for being cheated on while she was trying to destroy these women.
As they not only reported then, they report now.
In this article again, they tell the same story.
They just twist it.
It's all written like that.
And then they've got this tax story.
Now, I may be alone in this.
All I'm trying to do, I have no dog in this fight.
I really don't.
I mean, like I said, I'm viscerally rooting for Donald Trump because I hate the elites and I hate the media so much.
But these are two awful people.
I'm not going to whitewash that.
I don't, you know, in the next 40 years, we're going to have a bad president.
That's what's going to happen.
We're going to have a bad president.
But I may be alone in saying this, but the New York Times got, somebody mailed them Trump's 19, three pages of Trump's 1995 tax returns.
So we're now talking about 20 years ago.
These are 21 years ago.
This is how they write the story.
How Donald Trump turned the tax code into a giant tax shelter.
So just think about that for a minute.
How he turned the tax code into a giant tax shelter.
He used the tax code, right?
It doesn't say he broke the law.
He didn't break the law.
Even they say it.
And now here's how this one is written.
You've got to love these guys.
So this used to be a newspaper.
I swear, I swear.
Within my memory, this was once a newspaper.
New York Times, former newspaper, now it is this trash.
Listen to this.
Now we know.
Okay, so here it comes, folks.
Donald J. Trump racked up losses so huge in the early 1990s that he wouldn't have had to pay federal or New York state income tax on nearly a billion dollars in income.
What?
So he racked up losses, he got to deduct them, right?
None of this seems to have made the slightest dent in Mr. Trump's opulent lifestyle over the years.
It's hard to imagine a starker contrast with the vast number of Americans who struggle to both pay taxes and make ends meet, or a more damning indictment of a tax code that makes this possible.
Mr. Trump's pattern of generating losses and using them to offset other income.
It's like it's a criminal.
That's how the tax code works.
If you make a loss, if you're a businessman, you can deduct your losses from your taxes.
It's obvious, it says if this continued, if this continued, as seems likely, it's obvious why he has not released his tax turns, not because he's being audited or because the returns are too complicated, but because he hasn't paid any taxes.
They don't even know this.
They don't know this.
All they're talking about is there is a law that if he lost like a billion dollars because his casinos went bust, okay?
If a businessman takes a loss, he can prorate that loss over the next several years.
So if you lose a billion dollars, you can take that off your taxes.
By the way, this law, which has been in place since 1916, I think it is, has been added to by Democrats and Republicans over the years because it helps businessmen who are in seasonal businesses like real estate.
You know, these are businesses that go up and down.
You have big ups, you get big downs.
You have to be able to deduct your losses or you go out of business.
You go out of business.
Guess what?
All the people who work for Donald Trump are unemployed.
To me, this is a non-story.
But here's how McCaskill, like this is Senator Claire McCaskill speaking for Hillary Clinton.
Here's their spin.
Well, if you look at the way Donald Trump has conducted business, he crashes businesses into bankruptcy, leaving scores of businesses unpaid, people really hurting with the losses his companies have suffered.
But he walks away unscathed, and it appears he walks away with a golden ticket that allows him under the tax code to avoid taxes for decades.
I think that the key here is how is he going to fix it?
Well, look at his tax plan.
Guess who his tax plan benefits?
Billionaires.
His tax plan benefits Donald Trump.
That should be no surprise to anyone, since that is the way he sees the world.
He doesn't care about those small businesses he didn't pay.
He doesn't care about the people who lost millions of dollars in all of his bankruptcies.
He cares about Donald.
So now here's the Trump spin from Rudy Giuliani.
This is perfectly legal.
And the Times makes that point about 26 paragraphs into the opinion.
Number two, the Times fails to point out that he has an obligation as the head of a business to take advantage of and to use the lawful deductions and tax advantages that are available to you.
I advise my clients to do that because if they don't do it, they get sued by their co-investors, by their investors.
They lose jobs for their employees.
And the reality is this is rather common in large, gigantic American businesses, loss carryforwards.
But you might remember a few years ago it was pointed out that GE paid no taxes.
So the reality is this is part of our tax code.
The man's a genius.
He knows how to operate the tax code for the benefit of the people he's filled with.
That's interesting.
Okay.
Now, all I want to say is this: I'm not making any excuses for Donald Trump.
The way Donald Trump has behaved over the last week make me think there's something really wrong with the guy that he can't stop in a presidential race, tweeting at 3 o'clock, 5 o'clock in the morning, whatever it was, tweeting about some miss universe thing that happened 20 years ago.
That is not a strategy.
That's a symptom.
That is a symptom of narcissistic personality disorder.
Hillary Clinton was advised by psychologists or psychiatrists in her debate.
Prep, she baited him.
She went after him.
Narcissists can't stand to be criticized.
They have to set the record straight, and that's what he's doing.
But, and I will finish that sentence in just a minute, but first I have to say goodbye to our friends on Facebook and YouTube.
come over to the Daily Wire, and here what comes after the but, and Michael Knowles will be here.
But there is such a thing as overplaying your hand.
You know, there is such a thing as overplaying your hand.
This tax thing, and I'm sure there'll be more to come because we all know the IRS.
By the way, the IRS has been standing in front of Congress taking the Fifth Amendment to hide their crimes for four years now, for five years, more than that.
You know, we have no respect for the IRS.
See, these people think that they are going to do to Trump what they did to Mitt Romney, but Trump is starting from a different position.
Mitt Romney made excuses for his wealth.
Trump wears it all.
You know, Trump walks around with that big, like, gold Trump sign on his head.
He ain't making any excuses.
And ordinary people do not hate the rich.
They hate the elites.
That's a different category of people.
The New York Times is the elite.
Nonetheless, Trump is not elite.
He's kind of a down-to-earth crazy man like the rest of us.
So, I mean, this is not going to play.
I'm just telling you the way I have been reading this thing so far pretty well in terms of the polls.
People think that he is in self-destruction mode.
They're right.
They are absolutely right.
He's nuts.
He's in self-destruction mode.
So is the other side.
I mean, Hillary Clinton lies when she doesn't have to.
You ask her what day it is, she lies.
You know, that is also a symptom.
These are two symptomatic crazy people, and one of them is a lawbreaker, Hillary Clinton.
And Trump so far, they haven't got him.
They haven't got him on this.
I'm not doing a Hannity here.
I'm really not.
Let me just show you another side of this: the tone deafness of the left.
Here is Bob Woodward shown.
First, it starts with a tape of Hillary Clinton reacting to the debate.
And Bob Woodward, who's a pretty good, very good reporter, an excellent reporter, and pretty even-handed.
I mean, he's always been a Republican, but he's pretty even-handed.
Here's his reaction to Hillary Clinton.
Did anybody see that debate last night?
She's enjoying herself.
Bob, you say that you were on the road this week in North Carolina.
You talked to a lot of people, and that that kind of, I think it's fair to say, gloating, didn't set too well.
Yeah, you know, she won the debate.
I think there's universal agreement on that.
I guess Trump would not agree, but she really did.
But, you know, that clip shows this kind of self-congratulation, this self-satisfaction.
And as we know, and as we try to teach our children, when you win something, don't gloat.
Humility works.
And the problem for her is this feeds the notion that she's in this for herself.
I mean, you see that she was overjoyed with what she did.
Fine, take a victory lamp, but there is, you know, something like that doesn't get dialed back, and it probably should.
I think he's hitting it right on the head.
They are going insane because the polls were getting so close, and they think now they've got an advantage with this debate, and they do, but they are overplaying it.
You know, last week we played this Joss Whedon thing that he did with all the movie stars, Downey Jr. and all these guys, coming out and telling us that not only is it important for us to vote, but we've got to vote for Hillary Clinton because Trump is out of his mind.
So a political consultant, his name is John Brabender, made a response to this with ordinary people responding to the movie stars.
Here it is.
Election Day is Tuesday, November 8th.
I know this because some famous actors told me.
Thanks, famous actors.
I had no idea.
No idea.
I was just thinking sometime in December, maybe January.
Wait, it's this year?
I thought it was over.
It turns out this election is important.
Really important.
Really important.
Really, really important.
Because I thought it was, you know, no big deal.
Again, thanks famous actors because it's times like these when we realize just how lucky we are to have famous Hollywood actors to guide us, to guide us.
They know stuff we just don't know, stuff we can't know.
Because we're not famous actors.
And they're not just acting smart.
They are smarter.
They are smarter.
And thank goodness they made it clear that we must vote for Hillary.
The hatred we bear to the New York Times and the Hollywood establishment and the academic seminar, it's like a dog whistle they cannot hear.
They cannot hear the hatred coming down the track at them.
And when they're set, we know what Donald Trump is.
Some of us do, a lot of us do.
And Michael Moore said it the other day.
He said, it's like we're throwing a bomb into the establishment.
They're right.
It's because of the establishment.
You know, whenever people look back into the past for historical examples, because most people know about Adolf Hitler and most people know about the fall of Rome, they always look into the fall of Roman Adolf Hitler.
But really, of course, those things are very, very rare.
Those are things that happen every couple of thousands of years.
And that's not it.
My pal, Barry Strauss from Cornell University, is a professor of a professor of classics at Cornell University.
And he wrote a piece in the New Criterion about the Gracchi.
And it's funny because behind the scenes, we've been getting into these arguments.
Ben and Jeremy and I have been getting to these discussions about what this is like.
And I keep saying it's like the Gracchi.
It's like the Gracchi.
But the difference is Barry actually knows what he's talking about.
See, I'm just talking.
But in the last hundred years of the Roman Republic, populists rose up who had a point.
The land that the Romans had been acquiring through conquest was supposed to be shared with some of the soldiers who did the conquesting and with some of the ordinary people, but the rich stole it.
They just seized all the new land that was coming in.
And so these populists rose up who tried, some of them, a couple of them were brothers named Gracis, that's why some of them are called the Gracchi, but they were just called the popularis in general.
They rose up to try and reform the land deal so that ordinary people got the land.
Some of them were conmen.
Some of them were not.
Almost all of them were killed, including Julius Caesar, who was the biggest one of them all, the biggest popularis of them all.
He was saying, you guys are being cheated by the elite.
Here is Barry's conclusion about this, because the elite weren't going to give up the land.
They were going to kill these guys if they could.
And this is the kind that finally devolved into the civil war that ended the Republic, okay?
Barry ends this piece, Barry Strauss ends this piece by saying, principled populists will limit any resort to class, principled populists will limit any resort to class conflict, and they will aim at the rule of law and not at mob rule and will try to compromise with the elite rather than engage in revolution.
Jokes About Candidates00:05:28
Wise elites, on their part, will take populist movements as a wake-up call instead of merely denouncing populism and saying, problems, what problems?
The problem of populism is the problem of elitism.
The more just and astute the elite is, the less angry the people are.
The situation is they think we're going to hate Donald Trump for being rich, but populists are always rich.
The people don't turn to each other until it's revolution time to tear down the government.
They turn to the powerful and say, be one of us, speak for us.
And that's what's happening with Donald Trump.
I'm not telling you they picked a good instrument.
They didn't.
The people didn't.
But the anger is real and the elite unwillingness to let go of power, to let go of this ability to tell us what to do, to regulate every step we take, our businesses, to take our money and spend it on what they want to spend it on.
That's the problem.
And by the way, I include conservatives in this, conservatives who say we've got to stick with our principles, even if the people starve, ain't going to work.
It's not going to work.
The people are the country.
The people are the country.
This is government by the people, for the people, and of the people.
And if we have to be flexible to make sure the people aren't furious, aren't left out, then we have to be flexible.
There's got to be some give and take.
It's not happening now.
And that is why this bowling ball of destruction is rolling out our government at high speeds.
All right, let's talk about the culture.
Let's see what can we bounce this off Neptune.
The signal is going up to Neptune, coming back around.
Have we got anybody?
Nothing.
We're nothing.
Pee-pee-boop-boop.
There he is.
There he is in the writer's room, 25 feet away.
Michael Knowles, our cultural correspondent.
How was your weekend?
It was very good.
I had a pretty good weekend.
Saw a good movie, and then I saw this popular sketch on SNL that's making the rounds online.
This is the debate sketch.
This is the debate sketch.
Okay, you know, I actually haven't watched it yet.
What's it like?
Well, that's why I watched it.
So I don't have to.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You know, it's too bad because Alec Baldwin's impression of Trump is really good.
Yeah, he's a talented guy.
Well, he's a talented actor, and they look very similar.
They're both these sort of overweight, aging, angry white guys, a little bit doughy.
But anyway, the trouble with this sketch is it could have been so much funnier if they'd actually made it Hillary.
Wait, you're breaking out our contact with Neptune.
Okay, if they had made jokes about Hillary, okay.
That's right.
Yeah, I know the signal could make it 23 feet.
It's at last two feet.
It's the last two feet.
We're not making.
All right, go ahead.
Yes.
It could have been funny if they'd made jokes about Hillary.
I watched the sketch and I just counted the jokes that were made.
Now, there were 15 pretty brutal jokes about him.
I'll just quickly his supporters are trash.
He's ugly, vulgar, racist, a liar, taxes, racist, gay.
Just a new one.
Racist, sexist, stupid, sexist, immature.
Okay.
Man, I counted the jokes about Hillary.
There were none, but there were six that I could almost call.
The first one is that she's sick.
She sort of hops out.
I think we might have a clip.
Do we have a clip of this?
All right, we'll show it.
Hold on.
Welcome to the first presidential debate.
A quick reminder for our audience: there is no cheering, no clapping.
And to the Trump supporters, no shirt, no shoes, no service.
Now let's bring out the candidates.
First, she's been battling pneumonia, and we hope she's feeling better tonight.
It's Secretary Hillary Clinton.
And, finally, he's the man to blame for the bottom half of all his kids' faces.
It's Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Oh, wow.
So that's really fair.
That's really fair and balanced.
I like it.
Yeah.
So they almost make the joke.
They almost make the joke, and it turned it into this Willy Wonka thing where surprise, surprise, she's all better, nothing to see here.
Yeah.
The rest of the jokes about her are that she's too prepared.
She's too prepared for the debate.
She's too unrelatable because, you know, Hillary Clinton is just so great.
How could we ever relate to her?
She's unsubtle.
She's unlike, not because she's dirty rotten screwing over the people.
No, she's unlikable because of her face, which is really a way of saying she's unlikeable because she's a woman.
And the final joke about Hillary Clinton is that she really wants to be president.
She really wants to be President Badley.
Yeah.
Those are the six.
That's it.
That's it.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, you know, this is, I was just talking about how much we hate the elites.
This is why.
This is why, you know, it's like we wouldn't mind.
I think that people will listen to jokes about their candidate if they don't feel he's being hammered, you know?
I mean, so it's like, it's like half, it's like SNL saying like, we're very much.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
It's like SNL.
It's like, you know, thank you very much for keeping us on the air for 25 years.
Screw you, half the audience.
Vampire Stories Scare Us00:06:29
All right, Michael Knowles, we're going to have to send him back to Neptune.
We can barely hear him.
The incredible, the incredible technology.
Unbelievable.
Thank you.
We'll see you again next Monday.
Boy, that was like the worst connection ever.
The guy is literally, I could literally, if I could punch through the wall, I could grab him by the collar and bring him in here.
All right, it's time for Halloween stuff I like.
Now, I did this last year.
I did this last year, so there's going to be some overlap because there are only a certain amount of grace.
You know, before I talk about that for a minute, I just want to talk about one other thing.
I saw a lot of stuff over the weekend, so I want to give some reviews, but I want to talk about how disappointing Westworld was.
Did anybody else see this?
Oh, man, I was real, I was in, you know, the whole thing was this is supposed to tide us over to Game of Thrones, you know?
And it's written by Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan.
And the one thing about this, I've always wanted to see, you know, I like to see the guy who's kind of the second half rise up.
That's kind of cool.
You know, but the problem with most of Christopher Nolan's films are the scripts, and they're all these big ideas without enough character development, because really when you're watching a story, what you want to see is a person doing a thing.
You want to see a person going through something.
And this is the problem with Westworld.
It's about this amusement park where you get to go and play with robots as a Westerner.
And it's really kind of a sex place because you get to sleep with the girls and then have gunfights with the guys and all this.
But the robots start to go bad.
But all the characters who are interesting are robots.
And the people who are going to a place like that are necessarily not that appealing.
Who wants to see people?
And then the scientists behind the scenes are not that appealing.
So you have some cool scenes going on, but you just don't care about anybody.
So anyway, I'm going to watch it one more time.
Hopefully it'll pull itself together and get better.
But I was actually, my head was falling forward, you know, as I was dozing off.
It was not that good.
All right, so Halloween stuff I like.
And like I said, I did this last year, so there are going to be some overlap.
But I want to start today, what I'm going to do a little differently.
I'm going to start with the kinds of stories.
So here's a story about, so I want to first talk about vampires.
And for good vampire stories, for really great vampire stories, I'm talking about literature here, you really have to go back in time.
You have to read old ones.
And the reason you have to read old ones are vampire stories used to be about losing your soul and what it does to you as a physical being, what it means to be turned into a pure physical being without a soul.
Today, when we talk about that, we talk about zombies.
Zombies are just pieces of meat that eat other pieces of meat.
And that's how we talk about our anxiety that we are just being made into material.
But the vampires were kind of like this, what happens.
And I just want to read you a couple of passages from Dracula.
If you've never read the novel Dracula, it is a great, genuinely great horror novel.
I mean, the first hundred pages are as scary as anything.
The last hundred pages are as exciting as anything you can read today.
And a lot of it is fascinating in between.
But in this, there is a girl named Lucy, Lucy Westinra, I think her name is, who gets eaten by dragon, you know, gets killed by Dracula.
And she turns from this beautiful Victorian virgin into, it says the sweetness, her sweetness was turned to adamantine, right?
Heartless cruelty, and her purity was turned to voluptuous wantonness.
And she comes to her husband, I can't remember if it's her husband, Arthur, or her fiancé, and she says, come to me, Arthur, leave these others and come to me.
My arms are hungry for you.
Come and we can rest together.
And so it's like this sexual, this pure virginal woman is being turned into a sexual creature.
The point, you know how they kill vampires by driving a stake through her heart.
Listen to this.
Arthur finds her in her coffin.
It says, Arthur took the stake and the hammer.
And by the way, he insists on going first because it's he who loves her.
He took the stake and the hammer.
And once his mind was set on action, his hands never trembled nor even quivered.
Van Helsing opened his missile and began to read, and Quincy and I followed as well as we could.
Arthur placed the point of the heart, and as I looked, I could see its dint into the white flesh.
Then he struck with all his might.
The thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips.
And it goes on and on, and it's clearly a description of sex.
I mean, it's clearly a very sexualized description.
Brom Stoker wrote Dracula, was probably a closeted homosexual.
There's a lot of evidence of this.
And he was horrified by female sexuality, and that horror became the horror of Dracula.
Once we have, now that we have no sense that there is any sexual license that is too great, any sexual perversity that is too wrong, it's very hard to get horror out of that situation.
Now that we have lost the sense that people even have souls, the zombie apocalypse is almost a joke, and so are vampires.
So in order to get the horror of vampire stories, you really have to go back in time and read some of the classics.
There is a book called The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories.
It's a terrible title.
The Dracula Book of Great Vampire.
It is a great collection of great vampire stories.
I recommend that you don't read them all at once because vampire stories tend to be a little samey.
Somebody comes to visit, somebody else starts to get pale and wan, and what's the point?
Why are there these two points of wounds on her neck and all this stuff?
But there are three great stories in there.
One is The Room in the Tower by E.F. Benson.
I think I did mention this last year.
It is one of the great ghost/slash vampire stories ever written.
E.F. Benson was kind of a comic writer, and he wrote these ghost stories on the side, and they're brilliant.
Dracula's Guest is a chapter that was taken out of Brown Stoker's Dracula that he cut and it is excellent.
And Carmilla by Sheridan Lafenu is famous because of its weird sexuality.
The other book about vampires that I really recommend is a book that is not a story called Vampires, Burial, and Death, Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber.
And it is the weirdest book.
It is an honest look at what happens to bodies after people die and why uneducated people might have thought that these were vampires.
And it all makes perfect sense.
This is one of the things about the way intellectuals look at history that always bothers me.
They look at the Iliad about the Trojan War and they say, well, it's just a legend.
It was just a myth.
Vampires, Burial, and Death00:00:58
It's just this.
And then they find Troy.
They look at the Bible and they say, well, when they said, you know, there was a hundred and you know, they pulled in, I can't remember the number, 151 fishes, that represents this, and the numerology means this.
They never think, well, maybe the guy was just reporting how many fishes there were, okay?
So this is a book about how the people who were talking about vampires were actually doing good reporting on what they saw and why they might have seen vampires.
Vampires, Burial, and Death, Folklore and Reality by Paul Barber.
It really is a good book, and it's disgusting.
I mean, because it's about what happens to bodies after death.
So it's for Halloween.
All right, that is everything we have to say.
Tomorrow, the vice presidential debate, Greg Gutfeld is calling it the Thrilla of Vanilla, which I thought was very good.
But we'll cover that.
And we'll be back to talk about more of this insane season.
It really is a group of people, Republicans, Democrats, and the media, all going mad.