Ep. 286’s Madison McQueen celebrates Pollie Awards wins for Clinton campaign ads while dissecting Shakespeare’s alleged Catholic subtext in Macbeth and Richard III, arguing his villains—like Aaron and Richard—embody Nietzschean moral collapse. The episode pivots to Erdogan’s European influence ops, hacked Twitter accounts (Bieber, Amnesty), and Dutch backlash, framing Islamist integration as a double standard. It dismisses Obama-Trump wiretap claims but insists unmasking leaks demand accountability, praising Gorsuch’s confirmation and mocking media Russia-collusion hysteria before critiquing The Shack as saccharine and Shakespeare’s plays as secretly Christian. [Automatically generated summary]
Europe is having a ton of trouble with its Turkish immigrants.
In the old days, of course, Europeans used to do battle with the Turks because the Turks were trying to conquer Western civilization.
Nowadays, Europeans actually invite Turks to sweep into their countries in droves because things have changed.
The Turks are still trying to conquer Western civilization, but Europeans are now weak and stupid.
The latest troubles began when Turkey tried to get Turks in Europe to support a Turkish referendum that would give dictatorial powers to Turkey's president, Recep Erdogan, pronounced Erdogan because the G is silent, as in angst.
Until recently, Turkey had been slowly modernizing because of the secularizing reforms instituted last century by Mustafa Kemal.
Kemal is usually known as Ataturk because of all the people shouting, Atatürk, you instituted secularizing reforms.
Unfortunately, these reforms have been gradually eroded by President Erdogan, pronounced Erdogan, because the G is silent, as in Wiz.
How come you're eroding all those great reforms?
The Turks tried to gin up support for the president's most recent power grab by staging rallies in European countries.
But the Europeans shut down the rallies because they were afraid they would lead to riots and threats of holy war.
To prove these concerns were unfounded, the Turks rioted and threatened holy war.
The Europeans put down the riots, which angered President Erdogan, which is pronounced Erdogan because the G is silent, as in hottest.
The Turkish president accused the Europeans of being Nazis, which the Europeans generally don't like because some of them actually used to be Nazis, but are now pretty nice.
What's more, Turkish hackers spread the Nazi accusation by hacking them into very important Twitter accounts like those of Justin Bieber, Amnesty International, Forbes magazine, and myself, which made me feel like a very important person who was accusing the Europeans of being Nazis, even though they're now pretty nice.
Geard Wilders, a hardline anti-Islamist with amazingly gigantic hair, hoped that he would ride the Turkish troubles to election as the Dutch prime minister.
Wilders had promised to de-Islamize the Netherlands, but his election bid was rejected because the Dutch apparently preferred to Islamize.
And also the big hair was considered a negative.
All the same, the Europeans do finally seem to be debating whether letting Islamists sweep over their countries, rape their women, kill their men, and destroy their culture is really as good an idea as it sounded when they first thought of it.
On the one hand, the EU recently enacted a ban on headscarves in the workplace, feeling Muslim women should be treated fairly at work before returning home to be chattel again.
On the other hand, Germany's Angela Merkel recently bowed to Erdogan's request that a German comedian be prosecuted for insulting the Turkish president.
Personally, I'd have told Erdogan to eat stuffed.
The G is silent.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky, life is tickety-boo.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunkity.
Ship-shaped hipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray for ZipRecruiter00:03:10
Hoorah, hooray!
Hooray!
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, it's Monday.
We're back along.
That was a brutal, brutal, clavenless weekend.
All these classic people were dying.
Chuck Berry, Jimmy Breslin, great daily news columnist, Derek Walcott, good novelist, good poet, and novelist.
A lot of people gone, but now we're back and we'll bring them all back to life, so it's okay.
And we have best-selling cultural correspondent Michael Knowles is with us to discuss the entertainments that came out from the left and right.
Knowles, of course, his book, brilliant book, Reasons to Vote for Democrats, is number three on Amazon, despite or possibly because of the fact that it has no words inside.
And we are giving this away, are we not?
If you subscribe for the year, you got to have an annual subscription, just a lousy eight bucks a month for a year, and we will send you a free copy of this book.
And if we run out of this, we'll just send you a ream of paper.
Now, you know, you've noticed that the, you've noticed the quality of workers we have here, and you've probably said to yourself, how can I stop that from happening to my company?
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Find out today why ZipRecruiter has been used by Fortune 100 companies and thousands of small and medium-sized businesses and why we here at the Daily Wire often sit up late at night weeping into our beds that we didn't use ziprecruiter.com when we brought this motley crew on to run our shows.
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It's got to be better than what's going on here.
All right.
So I was gone.
I was gone for the National Review Summit.
That's why so many people died over the Clavenless weekend.
This was the National Review Ideas Summit where all these important people and me were there.
You know, I walked on, as I walked on stage, Tom Price, the new health and what's it, health secretary, was walking off.
And as I walked off, Paul Ryan was walking on.
And I thought, like, what was I doing there?
Trump vs. Obama Tweets00:15:26
I don't know anything.
But it was really good.
I like to go there.
It reminded me, it made me think back on another, I go to these National Review things, and I was on one of their cruises, and I was on a panel on one of the crews, and John Miller, a pal of mine who's now a professor at Hillsdale, said, asked the panel in general, what did we think, how did we think history would record Barack Obama?
And everybody had a kind of elaborate thing, what history would say about Barack Obama.
And I said, I thought that Barack Obama would get one sentence in history for a while, that he was the first black president.
And then after that became unimportant, he would have no place in history whatsoever.
I mean, he would be like Millard Fillmore or like, you know, Martin Van Buren or something like this.
I now believe that to be, that I got that exactly right.
Now, of course, I always get these things exactly right.
For those of you who are leaving comments saying that I'm wrong, you know, it'll save you so much groveling later on if you don't say that.
But I really do think Obama is already, he's like a kind of vague memory.
Like I can barely remember what's going on.
And it makes me realize that these eight years of Obama were like a dream.
They were like a dream that the left was having out loud of this salvific black president who was going to lift us all and everything was going to be different.
Now we were going to be, let's give him the Nobel Peace Prize because now, give him the Nobel Peace Prize before he does anything because now everything will be peace.
And in fact, it's been the longest period of war under any president ever.
The fewest number of laws passed, any president ever.
Now everything he's doing is being erased one way or another by Donald Trump.
His party has been destroyed.
And I just don't think he's going to have left much of a mark, except on the minds of these people who imagined it.
And so now we have Donald Trump.
And, you know, there's this old saying, nobody knows exactly who said it, that the news is the rough first draft of history.
But really now, the news is an alternative history.
It's like reading science fiction.
It's like reading a word.
So here's, we're entering this big week.
This is a big week for the Trump administration.
Neil Gorsuch, Supreme Court guy, his hearings begin.
The health care law is supposed to come up for a vote as early as Thursday.
It has one more committee to get through.
And that comes up for a vote.
Now there are all these investigations.
These are going on as I speak.
So stuff is probably happening as I speak that I'm not watching.
But the Intel investigations into Russia's influence on the election and Trump's accusations that Obama wiretapped him and all this stuff.
So here's a piece from the Wall Street Journal this morning.
I'm just going to read like a little bit of it that is giving, it gives the general impression that the press is giving us about this administration.
Since President Donald Trump's election, equity and bond markets have been on the rise.
Business leaders are applauding his call for tax cuts and consumer confidence in the U.S. economy is up.
It's actually way up.
But halfway through his crucial, but here's the butt.
Halfway through his crucial first 100 days in office, it has been tough going for the new president's agenda that inspired much of that optimism.
So people are optimistic, but the agenda is in trouble.
Republican infighting is bogging down a health care bill and the litany of legislative issues lined up behind it, including an overhaul of the tax code.
A series of court rulings are stalling his immigration policy changes, and his own tweets and White House comments are broadening several probes into whether Russia tried to influence the outcome of last year's presidential election on behalf of the Trump campaign.
So let's take a look at this for a minute.
The one part that I immediately agreed with to some degree is that a series of court rulings stalled his immigration executive orders, not necessarily his immigration policy changes, because one of the things about those executive orders is they're kind of irrelevant.
Like he doesn't need to do that stuff.
There's so much he can do by just calling up ICE and saying enforce the law that would change everything.
But it is true that these judges who have struck down this latest executive order have betrayed their trust.
And I mean, it's getting, on the right, people get a little bit, what's the word, hyperbolic maybe?
You know, people shouting, it's a coup, it's a left-wing judicial coup.
It's a couple of bad decisions by a couple of dishonest judges.
You know, maybe not corrupt, but they're ideologically corrupt.
And that stuff tends to rebound.
It tends to blow up in your face.
So I'm not really as concerned about that.
I think that's going to make these judges look bad and may even end with the Ninth Circuit being disbanded or rearranged in some way.
So, you know, I'm not that worried about this.
But let's talk about, for instance, well, first, since it's happening now, let's talk about these hearings, okay?
The hearings about Russia, it seems pretty clear now that there is no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
They keep saying Russia hacked the election.
So far, all that boils down to is Russia phishing John Podesta and releasing some emails and all this stuff.
So that is just now a lot of kind of slander, just people saying this stuff about Russia.
So that's going to kind of disappear, I think, over time.
If they had anything, we would know it by now.
It would be a big scandal.
This is a lot of journalists making a lot of noise about something that does not seem to have actually happened.
I mean, I do not believe, first of all, I don't believe that Putin could have possibly known that Trump was going to win.
No one knew that Trump was going to win.
He was looking for information against the person he thought was going to be the president.
He was looking to discredit Hillary Clinton because he thought she was going to be the president.
Now, there is this stuff about the Trump tweets that Obama bugged him.
Okay, and so today, here's the latest thing we have, is James Comey being questioned by Adam Schiff, a partisan Republic, a partisan Democrat on the Intel Committee.
And Schiff is asking him about these allegations that Obama bugged Trump.
And here's Comey.
Director Comey, I want to begin by attempting to put to rest several claims made by the president about his predecessor, namely that President Obama wiretapped his phones.
So that we can be precise, I want to refer you to exactly what the president said and ask you whether there is any truth to it.
First, the president claimed, quote, terrible.
Just found out that Obama had my wires tapped in Trump Tower just before the victory.
Nothing found.
This is McCarthyism, unquote.
Director Comey, was the president's statement that Obama had his wires tapped in Trump Tower a true statement?
With respect to the president's tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets.
And we have looked carefully inside the FBI.
The Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same for the Department of Justice and all its components.
The department has no information that supports those tweets.
So this is no big surprise, right?
We knew we had already said in the Republican on the Intel Committee, Devin Nunes, he also said the same thing.
But here's what I think obviously did happen.
And I say obviously, I'm putting this together a little bit, but it seems to me that the narrative is pretty clear that what did happen is there were legal taps on foreign actors like the Russian ambassador.
That some of these actors, as these people do, you know, there's nothing illegal or wrong about it.
Some of them talk to people in the Trump campaign.
I think Obama decided that he was going to create this narrative.
Maybe he believed the narrative.
I don't know.
He picked this stuff out.
He cherry-picked the stuff where legally tapped Russians spoke legally to people in the Trump campaign.
He then changed the rules of who had this information just before he left office so that it was spread around.
And somewhere along the line, the names were unmasked.
You're supposed to mask any American who gets swept up in these intelligence bugs.
You're supposed to not release who the guy was talking to because he's an American citizen.
have to get a warrant to tap his phone, right?
So you're supposed to, but obviously with Michael Flynn and possibly with others, that didn't happen.
And that's where the criminal scandal really lies because essentially, okay, you know, to say he tapped the phones, it's not true.
And Trump is a loudmouth and he talks, he's a loose talker and he talks the way people talk when they're in bars rather than the way you talk when you're in the Oval Office.
And that's one of the problems with his tweets.
It's his own fault.
He's distracting from his agenda.
It is true.
He is.
But I do not think it's criminal on Trump's part.
I have to stop and say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
We have the great and powerful Michael Knowles, who we only get here by, you know, we have to pay him now to come on.
We haven't started paying Knowles.
Oh, thank God.
All right, but we have him coming on.
Come over to theDailyWire.com.
You can hear the rest of the show or you could subscribe and you could watch it right on the site straight through.
So Rand Paul makes the point that even though, like I said, Trump's a loose talker and he's got a big mouth on those tweets that he really, I don't think at this point is helping himself.
You know, Trump has said that without Twitter, he wouldn't have been elected.
It was Twitter that helped him get elected.
And all the time he was tweeting, people were saying, stop tweeting.
So I think that I can understand why he doesn't want to listen to people.
I think he should stop tweeting some of this stuff.
I mean, even as these hearings are going on, he's tweeting stuff, and he's not quite getting it right.
He's kind of distorting what people are saying.
And I just think he ought to dial it back.
But Rand Paul made the point over the weekend that the real crime here is the release of the name of at least Michael Flynn and maybe others, and whoever did that should be prosecuted.
We know one thing for sure, that the Obama administration did spy on Flynn.
Now, whether it was direct or indirect, somebody was reading and taking a transcript of his phone calls, and then they released it.
It is very, very important that whoever released that go to jail, because you cannot have members of the intelligence community listening to the most private and highly classified information and then releasing that to the New York Times.
There can only be a certain handful of people who did that.
I would bring them all in.
They would have to take lie detector tests.
And I would say, including the political people, because some political people knew about this as well.
But we need to get to the bottom of who is releasing these highly classified conversations.
And if the president was surveilled, he probably wasn't the target.
I don't know that he was or wasn't.
But if he was, they probably targeted someone in a foreign government, but then they listened to the conversation with Americans.
But our government's talking to foreigners all the time.
We can't allow people in the intelligence committee to release the contents of that information to the media.
So someone in the Obama administration, probably with the tacit approval of Mr. former President O, you know, was actually not tapping the guy's phone, but is using taps of Trump Tower phones to damage a campaign, which is okay.
It's not quite as bad, but it's a thin, thin line, and it is criminal, and it's the only criminal action we know about.
So this kind of idea that, oh, bad week for Trump because he tweeted this, but this is the case, not so much.
And this thing about the health care law is utter garbage.
I mean, really, the health care law is doing what laws do.
You know, you forget.
Kim Strassel had this great column where she said the newspapers have run out of synonyms writing about the health care law for division, disunity, discord, conflict, struggle, mess, right?
This is the way laws are made.
This is the sausage factory.
We forget this because for eight years, Obama sat in the White House signing executive orders and never passed any laws.
This is the way laws are made.
People are arguing.
The thing is getting better.
Here's Paul Ryan, play the first Paul Ryan cut, number one, just basically saying that it looks like it's going to come up on Thursday, and he thinks it'll win in the House.
We feel very good where we are.
We're still having conversations with our members.
We're making fine-tuning improvements to the bill to reflect people's concerns, to reflect people's improvements.
The president, you say people being at the seat at the table.
The president is bringing people to his table.
And I'm very impressive with how the president is helping us close this bill, making the improvements that we've been making, getting the votes.
And so we feel very good where we are.
We like the process because it's the regular order process.
We're going to make those changes at the rules committee that the budget committee and others have asked for.
And so we feel like we're on track and we're right where we want to be.
So what would you say are the prospects that you have the votes and we'll be able to pass it on Thursday?
Yeah, I feel very good about it, actually.
I feel like it's exactly where we want to be.
And the reason I feel so good about this is because the president has become a great closer.
He is the one who has helped negotiate this bill with members from all over our caucus.
I call it getting the sweet spot.
You've got to get 218 Republicans who come from all different walks of life to come together to agree on the best possible plan to repeal and replace Obamacare.
And the reason I feel very good where we are, we all, all of us, all Republicans in the House, Senate, and the President, made a promise to the American people that we would repeal and replace this faulty, collapsing law, and we're going to make good on that promise.
I gotta say, I know conservatives are still cranking about this bill, and I know you don't get everything you want.
The House cannot pass a law that makes it seven years ago.
They can't pass a law that sends us back in time, and that's an unfortunate thing, because it would be nice if we could clear this out.
Although there's so much, the healthcare system is so much mess.
It's way before Obamacare, the government was messing it up.
But, you know, if you remember that CBO report, right?
The Congressional Budget Office.
If that is like half true, it cuts the budget by $337 billion over 10 years, right?
It cuts taxes by nearly $900 billion.
It cuts spending by $1.2 trillion.
It is the biggest reform of Medicaid of any entitlement program in 30 years.
I mean, smile, you know?
I mean, it's like, it ain't bad.
And, you know, they're still fighting over it.
They're still having it.
But this is the way laws get made.
And so what I'm saying is in the same way that the Obama administration, as it was told by the press, was completely a daydream.
It was a complete daydream during which not much was accomplished.
Bad stuff happened in the Middle East.
This stupid Obamacare law was a mess.
The guy was an incompetent.
He was an ideologue and he was an incompetent.
He didn't govern well.
He didn't deal with his opposition in the Congress well.
The Congress just became a complete party of no, as it had to be, I think, given who their base was.
You know, nothing much happened for eight years.
Obama was not an important president.
And in the same way, I think it is really early.
If we come out of this week, or the next two weeks, say, with Neil Gorsuch confirmation, with this health care bill moving forward, with these investigations, which are eventually going to turn to smoke and disappear, I think, and blow away, this administration is going to have accomplished quite a lot.
And I think there is this open question.
Look, what I'm saying right now is conservatives should be dancing in the streets.
Conservatives should be like doing the happy dance because we're getting a lot of stuff we did not think we would ever see again.
Are we getting everything we want?
No, because this is the world.
You know, we're living in reality.
We're not getting everything, but we're getting a lot.
There's still questions about Trump, about his personality, about his character.
Why Schumer Hated the Movie00:07:48
I get it, all that stuff.
But in terms of what is actually happening, it's pretty good.
Let's talk to Michael Knowles.
Knowles, your book, number three.
It dropped at three.
Come on, three.
And you know, the shack is now beating me.
I am so comfortable.
That's what really formed my opinion about the movie, and that it was a terrible movie.
So you went and saw the shack.
I did.
I went and saw, I saw a few movies this weekend after I was so distraught because after 10 days at number one, Reasons to Vote for Democrats is now number three worldwide.
Put some words in it.
I could have kept this going another week or two.
So I did go this week.
I thought, because I was reading the media reports, that Beauty and the Beast was going to be some outrageously left-wing.
Yeah, that's what they said.
And it has the exclusively gay moment is what they talk about.
So I went to see it, looking forward to hating it.
I thought it would make it really easy to talk about today.
This is about as close as an exclusively gay moment as you get.
Do we have a cut from Beauty and the Beast?
I think you get the idea.
Yes, Beauty and the Beast is an exclusively gay movie.
That's true.
It's a musical, right?
It's a musical comedy from Disney.
I guess they've made the character of LaFou a little bit.
Fae, foppish.
Ironically, though, they really went in for it.
I mean, they didn't go the Will and Grace route.
They made him into like a 1950s caricature of a gay man.
So he makes Paul Lind look like John Wayne.
I mean, this guy, they leaned into the light and the loafers part of things.
Yeah.
And I suppose there are a couple other moments I won't ruin the movie.
But all in all, it was a very enjoyable experience.
You know, there were some criticisms to make of the movie, but it looked pretty good.
And my daughter, who's a big Disney fan, she loved it.
I mean, what about the whole feminist angle?
Because what's her name?
What's the star?
That hot little English tomato.
That hot little English tomato.
I forget her name.
Hermione.
Emma Watson.
Emma Watson.
Yeah.
So they said, oh, it's going to be a feminist film.
Was it more feminist than?
I guess they tried to.
Luckily, they're constrained because it is just a good musical.
They're constrained by the institution of this musical and the songs and the story.
So they tried to make her a bit more feminist.
All right.
You know, it didn't bother me too much.
It's kind of dopey because the entire story is about the fact that women transform men from beasts into princes.
That's basically what it is, which is not a feminist message.
There's no way you can spin that, really.
That is exactly right.
So, you know, I walked out of that movie very disappointed at having enjoyed it.
And I decided I was going to compare two movies, Bad Art on the Left and Bad Art on the Right.
So we'll move on to Bad Art on the Right.
Okay, what have we done?
Yeah.
You made me see the shack.
I did make you see the shack.
I can never forget it.
But only because I don't like you.
That's right.
It's personal animus completely.
That movie was so bad.
I can't, I don't even know how to describe how bad it was.
Do we have a cut of the preview?
McKinsey, Alan Phillips.
I've been looking forward to this.
Do I know you?
Not very well.
But we can work on that.
He's still having a hard time believing this is real.
Why did you bring me here?
There's no easy answer that'll take your pain away.
Where were you when I needed you?
I never left you.
So she's.
So we have to explain.
We have to explain that she is God, right?
This is a guy who's lost his child, and he gets a note saying, come to the shack, and he meets God, isn't that?
I've had a lot of images in my mind of the divine infinite logos.
Octavia Spencer is not one of those.
She gave a good performance with what she could, with this absolute twaddle of a script that they had it there.
But it is the worst of bad conservative art because it is so sentimental, it is so saccharine, and it just clubs you over the head with a message.
It misses the art form entirely.
We do this on the right sometimes.
We do this.
And it just reminds me that at their worst, conservatives are Philistines, and at their worst, leftists are children.
You know, I mean, they're just absolute children.
The movie I saw on the left was this Amy Schumer leather spot.
I have seen a goodly part of that.
I mean, I want to say, before you talk about this for me, I want to say that I am not one of these people who dismisses people who disagree with it.
I think Sean Penn is a great actor, even though he's a communist.
Absolutely.
Amy Schumer has done some funny stuff.
I like Trainwreck.
I thought that was cute.
She has the show Inside Amy Schumer, which had some cute skits.
So I'm not just, because she was complaining, because it's got one star in reviews, and she was complaining it was the alt-right.
And obviously, I despise the alt-right.
This is laugh-free.
I mean, it is Sans laughter.
The closest thing I came to laughing is she pointed out that she looks a little bit like a college softball player, which is basically.
But every single joke, I mean, every joke is about some orifice of her lower body.
That is true.
And it's so, I mean, look, I'm not prudish or overly judgmental in a comedy show.
If you want some of like potty humor, that's fine.
I guess you can sprinkle it in.
But this was every single joke, and one was less funny than the next.
I think the premise that they have is that a woman is going to say crude male humor, and that is going to be subversive and therefore funny.
But first of all, it isn't funny when men do it.
And men don't really even make these jokes a lot.
And it isn't subversive.
It's the dominant culture.
So it really fell flat.
I mean, she just basically told one bad fart joke after another.
And it is too bad because she's done other pretty good work before.
But there was something wrong with this.
There was something almost like pathological about it.
I thought it was like hammering, hammering, hammering the most grotesque version of sex, the most grotesque version of going to the bathroom, all this stuff.
And again, I'm the same way.
I have a big raunch tolerance.
I have a high tolerance for raunch.
But it's got to be funny.
You've got to do something new.
I saw Robin Williams once do a raunch show that had me in stitches.
It was just really funny.
And there was something wrong with her.
I mean, I just thought, I mean, I don't have a lot of patience with this idea that it is somehow empowering for women to act like the worst of men.
Right.
Like the kind of man that I wouldn't want to know anyway.
So like, why is that empowering for a woman to be like that?
I mean, if women said we want to act more like polite gentlemen, I might think, oh, yes, yeah, that works out for you.
The best part of the show was in the middle, she goes on a sort of bizarre moral rant about gun control, which there weren't even jokes in there.
I mean, she was just ranting about how we need to have gun control.
And it made it clear to me that bad art is didactic and politically didactic, but the forms are just very different.
I mean, it seems that the left wing and Amy Schumer falls into this didactic grotesque, and the right falls into this saccharine sentimentality.
And certainly neither serve the art forms, but also neither serve their political and moral narratives that they're trying to convey either.
No, it's not only talking, you're absolutely right.
It's not only talking to the choir, it is alienating even the choir.
Shakespeare's Psychological Villain00:09:14
That's right.
We are the choir.
We would go with them.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Really interesting stuff.
And I would apologize for making you watch the shack, but it made me laugh.
See, it made me laugh that you were watching the shack.
No, that's always sad.
I was sitting having a drink thinking, Noel's just watching the shack.
God puts an empty book on the bestseller list.
You deserve every minute.
All right.
Do I get the Presidential Medal of Freedom now, though?
Yes, you do.
Maybe you will.
You absolutely do.
It was heroic.
All right.
Stuff I like.
First, before I, well, part of stuff I like, I have to talk about the Pollies.
Political consultants gave awards for the best advertising, and my friends at Madison McQueen, Mad Mac, Owen Brennan, and the boys, Justin Folk, all of those folks who I love over there, they cleaned up.
They cleaned up.
They won the gold award for best use of humor for Damn It Feels Good to Be a Clinton, which was part of the Cruise for President campaign.
The best use of negative or contrast advertising.
They won the Silver and the Bronze.
They won the Silver for Best Use of Humor in Broadcast advertising.
Madison McQueen, congratulations.
That's great stuff.
All right.
Now let's talk about somebody a little more important than Madison McQueen, namely Shakespeare.
We're going to talk about Shakespeare.
I want to talk about Shakespeare a little bit because there was a book a few years back called Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt, one of the foremost Shakespeare scholars in the world.
And I thought the book was just absolutely delightful.
If you've never read Will in the World, it's a delightful book about what Shakespeare's world looked like.
But weirdly, and Greenblatt, I think he's at Harvard.
I mean, he's like a big deal.
Every time he would read the plays, I thought like, that's not what's in the play.
I mean, really just very, very overt mistakes.
And one of his big things is that Shakespeare, and this Academics have been saying for decades now that Shakespeare is among the most secular writers.
Although Greenblatt speculates that he might have been a Catholic, he might have been a Catholic trying to keep it down because of all the, you know, you never knew when you were going to get burned at the stake for being a Catholic.
And then the next week it was the Protestants being burned at the stake.
So he had to keep it down.
And I really believe that because Shakespeare, I do think Shakespeare was a Catholic, and I think because he had certain opinions that he couldn't safely put into his plays, he came up with a brilliant strategy that made him William Shakespeare, which was that he simply wrote the moral world that Christianity posits, that not all religions posit, but Christianity does.
And if you take a look at his plays, you are constantly finding the Christian world without, I think he mentions the Gospels once in all his plays.
And only Macbeth, I think, makes some derisive comment about the Gospels.
But the world that Shakespeare writes about did not exist.
You know, for instance, villains.
I don't think there is a villain as we think of a villain, like Hannibal Lecter, until Shakespeare.
If you go back to the classics, the classic plays, there are people like Medea who do terrible things, but there's nobody who says, I am going to be evil.
Shakespeare's supposedly earliest play, I think, is Titus Andronicus, and it has this more in it, Aaron the Moore, who's just bad.
He basically just says, if I ever did anything good, I am sorry, I am sorry.
And of course, his classic villain is Richard III.
And Richard III makes this incredible speech at the opening of his play.
He kills his way to the throne, right?
Richard III just murders and seduces his way to the throne.
And here is a little bit of his opening speech, in which he starts out by saying, basically, men have two, the world has two phases: it has war and it has love.
And now the wars are over and it's time for love.
But Richard III has a humpback and he's deformed, and so love is no good for him.
And that's what he's saying.
But I, that I'm not shaped for sportive tricks, nor made to court an amorous looking glass, I that I'm rudely stamped and want love's majesty to struck before a wanton ambling nymph,
I that I'm curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature, deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world scarce half made up, and that's so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them.
Why I, in this weak, piping time of peace, have no delight to pass away the time unless to spy my shadow in the sun and descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover to entertain these fair, well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain.
So that's pretty sound psychology.
I mean, pretty sound.
He can't be a lover, so he's got all this kind of sexual, pent-up energy that would usually be, that had been expelled in war, but now it can't be expelled in war, so he's going to expel it, murdering his way to the throne.
He's determined to be, to prove a villain.
And that is like, that doesn't exist before Shakespeare that I can think of.
Now, maybe you can pop one at, you can find an example that would prove me wrong, but it would be an example that sort of proved, it would be the exception that sort of proves the rule, because Shakespeare invents this character who now becomes what we think of as a villain, a guy who knows right, he knows wrong.
He's not saying that there is no right and wrong.
He's saying there is such a thing, and I choose this.
And the effect of that in a Christian world would be to warp the moral law.
It would be to warp the moral universe, and therefore there would be a reaction.
See, this is the whole thing that guys like Nietzsche and the left today tell us there is no moral universe.
There is no objective morality.
It's just the narrative.
Whoever has the power tells the narrative.
That's what makes for right or wrong.
And the Christian says, no, there is a moral universe.
It is God's universe.
And when you push against it, when you break that moral law, there are consequences.
By the end of the play, Richard III is lying in a tent waiting for the final battle at which we know he's going to be killed.
And all the people that he murder that he's murdered come back to him as ghosts.
And they say, despair and die.
They command him to despair and die.
And he wakes up from this.
And here's the speech.
I couldn't find a version of the speech that made it clear what he was saying.
And he wakes up and he says, I love myself.
Wherefore?
Why?
Why do I love myself?
For any good that I myself have done unto myself?
Oh no, alas, I rather hate myself for hateful deeds committed by myself.
So he's saying he's divided now.
He's divided into two people, right?
He's divided into the person essentially that he should have been and the person that he is.
He says, I am a villain, yet I lie.
I am not.
Fool of thyself, speak well.
And then he says, Fool, do not flatter.
He's torn himself apart.
He's torn himself between the man he was made to be, which God made him to be, and the man he decided, determined to become.
He says, My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain.
That's what he said he wanted to be, right?
He said, I'm determined to prove a villain.
And he says, He says, All several sins, all used in each degree, throng to the bar, crying all guilty, guilty.
I shall despair.
There is no creature loves me, and if I die, no soul shall pity me.
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself.
So it's an amazingly, you know, it just is a character who did not exist before the Christian understanding of morality.
And because of the Christian understanding of morality, it requires psychology.
It essentially, he's inventing, Shakespeare is inventing psychology in order to explain why people go wrong in Christian morality.
There's nothing in here that Sigmund Freud, who always said Sigmund Freud always said that he didn't make up what he did, the great writers had already made it up, and he was just explaining it.
And I'm not a Freudian, I'm not a Freudian, but much of what Freud said, there was much truth in what Freud said.
So he's inventing psychology to explain the fact, the mechanism by which people violate the moral law.
That is a thoroughly modern vision, but it's a vision that comes only out of a thorough understanding of the Christian truth of morality and the Christian life and the Christian reaction of sin, the reaction of sin, that it divides you from yourself.
It divides you from the self you were meant to be.
More on Shakespeare as the week goes on.
The clavinless, long, long, clavenless weekend filled with death and destruction is over.