Ep. 328 pits principle against Trump, framing LGBTQ+ pride parades as leftist tools exploiting victimhood while mocking "Garrilus Von Self’s" claim that wickedness sells. Theresa May’s UK defeat and Jeremy Corbyn’s rise—backed by terrorist-linked policies—expose Western decline, with millennials trading capitalism for socialism. James Comey’s memos are exposed as manipulative, with Loretta Lynch’s corruption ignored by biased media, while Trump faces unfair scrutiny despite Obama-era scandals like Fast and Furious. The left’s radical anti-Western shift demands conservative unity, but nuance over absolutism is urged amid moral dilemmas like torture debates. Cultural collapse—from transgender advocacy to London’s diversity-over-values response—mirrors lost purpose, with tech obscuring natural order while the Catholic Church’s teleology offers a counterpoint. [Automatically generated summary]
For those of you who weren't paying attention or couldn't give a slice of a rat's backside, or perhaps had something better to do, like picking the little pieces of sock fluff out from between your toes.
Gay Pride Day is a day when the more irritating sort of homosexuals strut around making a show of themselves, which is pretty much like every other day, except they all do it in one place, so it ties up traffic.
Gay Pride Day is traditionally followed by gay sloth day, gay envy day, gay wrath day, and gay gluttony day, as gays around the country try to indulge in all seven of the deadly sins in hopes of bringing back the good old days when they were regarded as wicked and fascinating instead of just sort of annoying.
As gay pride organizer Garrilus Von Self put it in an interview with a Barbie doll he stole from his sister when he was 10, quote, it used to be people considered gays sinful, and that gave us the cachet of being naughty and sort of forbidden.
Once we were more or less accepted, it turned out we were just a bunch of people who sleep with members of the same sex, which when you come to think about it, isn't even as interesting as sleeping with the opposite sex, which can lead to all sorts of hilarious misunderstandings and complications, like a completely new human being coming out of your wife.
For us, it's just sex, and then, you know, that's it.
So we thought we'd have a parade, unquote.
In fact, the entire idea of pride, when applied to a group of people like gay pride or black pride or trans pride, not only has nothing to do with pride, it has nothing to do with being gay or black or trans.
It's simply a way of roping people into the slavery of leftism by convincing them they're part of a victim group that needs government help and that they can only have pride in themselves by banding together and announcing they have pride in themselves, which just by the way, doesn't actually work.
Organizers of the LGBT Pride Parade in Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina were at least honest enough to admit the leftism by making their parades about attacking Donald Trump, the most openly pro-gay person ever to be elected president.
But the fact is, you can go walking around in black skin or dress up and pretend you're the opposite sex or make out with your male friend until he regains consciousness and calls the police without for one second believing that the state should own the fruits of your labor or that speech should be censored or that centralized government should be involved in every decision you make about everything.
You can be black or trans or gay and be a conservative, which is called being self-reliant and free, which will give you real pride.
And then you won't have to have a fake pride parade and tie up traffic.
Problem solved.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing, hunky-dunky-dicky.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is if it is in.
It's a wonderful day.
Hooray, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Manipulating The Press00:17:04
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, we're back broadcasting or podcasting out of my home, out of my house, because we're still moving into the new studio with its champagne fountains and, you know, the elephants.
We have to have room for the elephants and the cages for the elephants and the dancing girls.
We have dancing girls in cages, which may be illegal, I'm not sure.
But anyway, we'll be here for another couple of days and then we'll move into the new studios, which I haven't seen.
I mean, I've seen them, but they were all just full of, just rooms full of furniture.
So for now, here we are.
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All right.
So it was a big, clavenless weekend, especially in Britain.
It was almost, I mean, it was almost like the clavenless abyss in Britain where they had this election.
And Theresa May thought she was going to increase her majority.
So it was going to give her some leverage when she went in to negotiate Brexit with the EU.
And instead, she got nailed.
And all of this, you know, Americans talk about why this happened.
It happened for purely local reasons.
It happened because she was, you know, she's kind of got no charisma.
She cut the police force.
She cut the police force funding.
And then there were these terrorist attacks.
I'm not sure how much that had to do with it.
But she really is not somebody who has won the affection of the public.
And she's not a very good politician, it appears.
So she really got nailed.
But the thing that is really, for Brexit, Brexit goes forward because they've already filed that Article 50 or whatever.
They've already said they're leaving.
They will leave.
All this stuff about negotiating a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit shouldn't bother Americans one way or another, even if they leave and they have no deal with the EU.
You know, it's not going to be a disaster.
It hasn't been a disaster up till now.
If you think back and remember the way they were talking about this, you know, set your hair on fire, run out into the street screaming, this is the worst thing that ever happened.
Turned out wasn't the worst thing that ever happened at all.
The economy was fine until this election.
The problem here is Jeremy Corbyn, and the problem is that young people voted for him.
And we're going to get back to that later in the program because it really does say something.
Jeremy Corbyn is a loon.
He's a bad guy.
He is not just a communist.
He's an anti-Westerner.
He consorts with terrorists from the IRA to Latin American terrorists to Hamas and guys like that.
And he's all about like when these terrorists, he said that we shouldn't shoot the terrorists.
That's overreacting.
We just want to settle things peacefully.
That is how you settle things peacefully with terrorists.
You shoot them.
That is the best possible way to settle things peacefully with the terrorist.
This is a bad guy.
And the fact that people voted for him, I mean, he doesn't like, he kind of is for Brexit too, because he's from the left, he hates the EU.
But the fact that people voted for him tells you something about how lost the West is.
I've talked about this before, about the fact that we've lost this consensus that we had after the war.
We're like in this zero-gravity room with all the furniture floating around.
We don't know where it's going to land.
And that's what's affecting us here, too, why so many people are so angry and so many people don't, they don't even understand.
This is kind of part of what I want to talk about.
They don't even understand the basics, the bases of their own philosophy.
So they just know they're angry when somebody disagrees with them.
But before we look at Britain, let's go back and look at some of the stuff we were talking about before, as the week ended and descended into the horrifying Clavenless weekend.
I'm not even sure how many of you are still with us survived the Clavenless Weekend.
But I want to talk about some of the ramifications of Comey's testimony that are still going on today as people are kind of sorting through it.
You know, the thing about Comey's testimony is it really brought out more than anything for me the disparity between the way Trump and his Justice Department is treated and the way Obama's Justice Department was treated because Obama's Justice Department, it now seems clear from stuff that came out last week and stuff that Comey said, it now seems absolutely clear that this was a tremendous, tremendously corrupt Chicago machine that Obama was running.
And he really ran Washington, D.C. on the basis of Chicago machine politics.
So here's, you know, you remember that one of the things we learned is Comey said that Loretta Lynch, and we always called her the blandly corrupt Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, because she always had that bland way of explaining things to you like she was mommy when she was saying things that were utterly corrupt, you know.
And so Comey sat down and he said that Loretta Lynch, the only time he ever took notes with anybody was just with Trump because Trump was so bad, so evil, so dishonest.
But Loretta Lynch called him in and told him during the Hillary Clinton campaign not to call the investigation into Hillary Clinton an investigation, to call it a matter.
And listen to Louis Gohmert react to this.
This is cut number three.
Louis Gomert really understands why this is such a bad thing.
As a former prosecutor, judge, and chief justice, I can tell you credibility is always relevant.
It's always material.
And when Comey said he took a memo of what the president said because he was afraid of what he might do in the future, whereas you have the Attorney General herself basically telling him to lie.
She knew it was a criminal investigation.
The FBI is not allowed to look into matters.
It's got to be an investigation.
There's got to be a criminal probe that they're getting into.
Otherwise, they have no business getting into fishing expeditions or phishing matters.
So he totally ruined his own credibility, what was left of it.
He did vast damage and raised big red flags and questions over Loretta Lynch's job as head of the Justice Department.
She was using her official position to help the campaign of Hillary Clinton, and that didn't seem to bother him enough to do a memo.
On top of this, by the way, on top of this, Comey revealed what to me was his own corruption by saying that he leaked his memos to the press.
He leaked the memos to the press, hoping to get a special counsel appointed.
And remember that I said when they appointed a special counsel, this was the biggest mistake they made because the GOP panics when the press gets hysterical.
And if we had just stayed calm, if people had just stayed calm, I was making jokes about it on the show and people were calling me up and saying, how can you say be calm?
Why are you fronting for Donald Trump?
It had nothing to do with that.
I just knew there was no there there.
There was no collusion.
Now everybody admits there was no collusion.
Comey himself says there was no investigation into Trump.
There was no need for a special counsel.
Now, Comey has maneuvered this special counsel by leaking.
And Newt Gingrich is the only guy.
I mean, he's not the only guy who said it, but he really came out and said he sent out a tweet.
Here's Chris Wallace talking to Newt Gingrich.
And Chris Wallace starts out by reading the tweet that Newt Gingrich put out saying that this special counsel, Robert Mueller, is now tainted, right?
Because Robert Mueller is James Comey's friend.
And now we know that the reason that he was appointed had something to do, a lot to do with this leaked memo.
So it was all maneuvered by Comey, and he got his friend appointed.
Here's Newt Gingrich reacting.
Chris Wallace starts by reading his tweet.
Republicans need to focus on closing down independent counsel because it clearly isn't independent.
What's your reasoning and wouldn't that really look like an obstruction of justice?
Well, first of all, look at what Comey said.
Comey said, I deliberately leaked through an intermediary to create this counsel, who happens to be one of his closest friends.
Then look at who Miller's starting to hire.
I mean, these are people that, frankly, look to me like they're setting up to go after Trump, including people, by the way, who have been reprimanded for hiding from the defense information in two major cases.
I think this is going to be a witch hunt.
I think that Comey himself, by his own testimony, tainted this particular process.
You have a director of the FBI deliberately leaking in order to create a special counsel who we're now supposed to believe is going to be this neutral figure.
I think that's just nonsense.
So you heard it here when they appointed this guy.
I said the problem is he can't fire him because it does look like obstruction of justice, even though it's not.
I mean, look, none of this is obstruction of justice.
You know, Trump can fire Comey any day.
He can fire Comey any day he wants for whatever.
He can fire him for chewing gum, for picking his toes in Poughkeepsie, whatever he wants.
That's how he can fire him.
So it's not obstructing justice.
But now he's got this dogged investigator on his tail with a brief from Comey basically saying, get this guy for firing me.
And that's essentially what happened.
And he can't fire him.
And it was a big, big mistake.
And it's all about the press.
Listen for a moment of accidental honesty from John King of CNN, okay, when he's reacting to the testimony about Loretta Lynch.
Listen to what he says carefully.
A number of significant things.
One, this won't get much attention because it's in the rearview mirror, but a pretty damning account from Jim Comey there about Loretta Lynch, the former attorney general in the Obama administration, and her handling of the Clinton Email investigation.
It won't get much attention, but that was pretty damning.
Number two, he said that Reynolds Lynch told him, don't call it an investigation.
Call it a matter.
And he said he was confused by that and concerned by that.
So listen, this is the way the press always talks.
It's not going to get much attention.
Now translate that into honest.
And it's, we are not going to pay attention to this.
We are not going to pay attention to this.
We are going to sweep this under the rug.
A rare moment of honesty on CNN.
Hey, I got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, which means you, if you're on Facebook and YouTube, have to come on over to thedailywire.com.
And while you're there, you can subscribe.
You could watch the whole thing on the site right there.
And you can be in the mailbag on Wednesday.
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Come and do it.
Now, here's a guy I really like, Jeff Greenfield.
He and I used to play tennis together.
He's a really nice guy.
He's reacting.
You know, Brian Stelter is in a panic because Donald Trump, the evil Donald Trump, has undermined, in Stelter's mind, the credibility of the press.
It's not the fact that for eight years they lay down on their backs like puppies waiting for their tummies to be scratched and did nothing while Obama turned Washington into a Chicago machine.
It has nothing to do with that.
It has to do with mean, mean old Donald Trump.
And listen to Jeff Greenfield's explanation of this, and then I'll tell you why I think Jeff's wrong.
I think the singular political success of President Trump, going all the way back to his campaign, is that he has convinced the core of his supporters that anything you hear critical of the president is by definition fake.
And so I think that has served that relentless campaign on Twitter and in his comments, fake news, fake news, fake news, has been to convince that group of people that there is no such thing as a set of facts independent of your politics.
If you are criticizing Donald Trump, if you're pointing out inconsistencies or outright falsehoods, by definition you are lying.
And that has certainly served to continue and accelerate what you've talked about as a long process of declining trust in news.
Yeah, it's a long process, and all Trump did is drive his truck into the rotten underpinnings of this enterprise because our press has become a completely corrupt corporate left-wing press.
And this is the mistake people make, that in the old days, the Republicans were the party of big business, so they think that's still true.
Not true.
Big business, big corporations are all in favor of the left because big government and big corporations collude to make things hard for the little guy.
They may not mean to, that may not be their intention, but it's what happens when you have all these regulations.
That absolute deluge of regulations that Obama let loose before he left office that Trump's been trying to get rid of.
All that stuff, that makes it impossible for you or me to get started in an enterprise while the guys who have all the lawyers can cut through that red tape really easily.
Big business loves big government, and so big business is the party of big business.
The Democrats are the party of big business, really big business.
So Jeff is just wrong about this because the fact is Trump was just pointing out the fact that it's all lies.
The news is all lies, not because they get their facts wrong all the time, but because it's always slanted to the left and not just a little bit anymore, all the way, all the time.
In fact, I would say, I would say that the Democrat Party basically doesn't exist anymore as an entity for selling ideas or promoting ideas.
It is only the press, only the press that drives the Democrat Party, not the other way around.
So why does this matter?
Why do I keep hammering the press?
And people keep saying, you know, even guys on the right who dislike Trump say, so the press is on the left.
What difference does it make?
It's the way, the effect they have, both on the politicians and on us, the dilemma they create for us.
And this is the point I want to get to, all right?
The Obama administration was a Chicago machine, okay?
They used the IRS to silence their enemies.
They used the Justice Department to help their friends.
Their big achievements, their big achievement was a healthcare law that doesn't work, right, that they sold to the public by lying.
They sold it by lying, where you want your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
Remember, it was Jonathan Gruber who said we depended on the stupidity of the American voter.
And his other big achievement, if you want to call it that, is basically making Iran a huge power player in the Middle East, this terrorist state.
He turned it into a power, and he did that.
That they also bragged about the fact that they manipulated the press.
Remember, it was Ben Rhodes, who, by the way, is the brother of the president of CBS, who went on and said to the New York Times, we knew reporters didn't know anything, so we told them all this stuff about the moderates and Iran and how we're dealing with them and all this stuff.
So this is a complete, a lying, dishonest administration we had for eight years, and the press did nothing, okay?
And remember now, all we hear about is the independence.
Comey has to be independent.
Purpose vs. Torture00:13:19
It's not right for Donald Trump to say, I hope you let Michael Flynn go.
Just remember that the previous AG, we've not only heard now how dishonest Loretta Lynch was, and not just saying that she wanted him to refer to the investigation of Hillary Clinton as a matter, but remember he also said, Comey also said that her meeting with Clinton on the tarmac was kind of the last straw in convincing him that the Justice Department was so slanted that he himself couldn't trust them.
And this is a Democrat talking about other Democrats.
And let's not forget it was the Obama machine that appointed Comey in the first place.
But the previous guy, Eric Holder, who was just absolutely eviscerated in this House report that came out last week for covering up Fast and Furious, you remember that Eric Holder said, I am the president's wingman?
They asked him if he was going to stay, and he said, I'm still the president's wingman, so I'm there with my boy.
And nobody, not a word, a pin could drop.
How independent was the Justice Department where the AG considered himself the president's wingman?
So here's the problem, okay?
We're having this debate on the right.
The debate is between guys like Dennis Prager, who have just backed Trump, saying we're in a civil war.
Trump is leading us in this civil war.
We can't give the left any comfort.
We can't give comfort to the enemy.
Stop criticizing Trump.
And then you got guys like Jonah Goldberg, who feels like he's not a never-Trumper because Trump is now in office.
He says he's not a never-Trumper, but he's constantly criticizing.
He's calling balls and strikes.
He's calling balls and strikes.
The problem with calling balls and strikes, you know, first of all, it's the people who say it's not a civil war, of course they're right.
It's not a civil war.
But the left is anti-freedom.
The left is no longer your daddy's left.
It's no longer the left that says we should have some social programs.
This is a left that hates the West.
This is a left that hates the Constitution.
This is a left that is willing, as we've heard on the show from legal experts, this is a left that is willing to reinterpret the First Amendment to take away your First Amendment rights, okay?
It's a dangerous party.
This is a dangerous radical party that is the left.
And really is represented more by the media than it is by the politicians in some ways.
If their guys can do whatever they want and have no scandal, which is essentially what Obama did, if they can turn Washington into a party machine and have no scandals, no special counsels, no threat of impeachment, nothing.
And remember, people were saying, remember, you know, the Speaker of the House was saying, we're not going to impeach, guaranteeing we're not going to impeach.
So there was no threat of that.
If they can do whatever they want and get away with it, and our guy, if he steps out of line, gets nailed and thrown out the door, we're going to lose the fight.
And so we're stuck in this terrible, terrible situation where our principles that we want to stay true to can sometimes have to be compromised to keep to our higher principles, which is keeping the country free.
And look, this is a problem that comes up all the time.
And the reason people like to declare something is a war, a war on poverty, a war on this, a war on that, a war on drugs.
The reason for that is because in war, this is where the situation comes up most often.
If a guy, if the good guys step out of line and kill a few people they shouldn't have killed in a war, we all say, well, it's war.
This happens.
If a CIA agent is questioning an al-Qaeda terrorist and the terrorist happens to fall out of the chopper to his death, do you care?
I mean, I think that's wrong.
I don't think we should be throwing terrorists out of helicopters.
But what's a terrorist here or there?
Do I care?
I mean, the obvious example is waterboarding.
Waterboarding, I was very much in favor of waterboarding terrorists to stop terrorist threats.
I didn't see any moral problem with that.
But it is torture.
There's no saying that waterboarding is not torture.
And I'm against torture, right?
Look, you're causing pain to get information out of somebody.
That is torture.
So I'm against torture as a principle.
And yet, if that torture is going to save 100 American lives, if it's going to save 10 American lives, if it's going to save one American life, suddenly my principles are getting compromised for the higher goal.
When people hear this kind of reasoning, they immediately say, as well they should.
They immediately say, but by that reasoning, you can do anything you want for a higher good.
You can become utterly evil saying, well, the ends justify the means.
Well, welcome to the human condition.
This is the problem that we're facing.
This is the reason I'm not angry at Jonah Goldberg.
This is the reason I'm not angry at Dennis Prager.
This is a difficult thing.
The reason that principles are foggier than we'd like them to be is because we are equipped with a conscience that recognizes, if we think about it, that recognizes those times when our principles have to be compromised.
It's a difficult, muddy business, and we're all struggling with it.
Now, I keep saying Donald Trump has not, in my mind, done anything so bad that I would say, you know, I'm willing to let him go by the boards as long as he is doing things that enhance my freedom or at least don't threaten my freedom.
But it's hard.
It's hard to draw that line.
And that's the reason we shouldn't be yelling at each other, but we should be discussing this as we go along.
It's very tough.
We are being put in a position by a left that is willing to let its politicians do anything they want without threat of impeachment, basically.
That Obama could turn Washington into a Chicago machine with a corrupt Justice Department and a corrupt IRS, and that Donald Trump is getting pilloried for nothing.
We now know that there was no collusion from Trump with the Russians.
We also know that what did he say?
I hope Michael Flynn will let Michael Flynn go.
I hope that's going to be a high crime and misdemeanor.
I don't think so.
I'm not going there.
You know, I wish Trump would learn to shut up.
I really do.
And yet, and yet he seemed to blunder along and make his way.
So maybe he knows more than I do.
I wish he would just dial it back a little bit because he creates so many of these problems.
And what I want is I want a legislative agenda.
All right.
So that is why I see this kind of very difficult, very difficult dilemma that we're in and why people like Jonah and Dennis should be discussing this.
They should be debating it on every level.
But they shouldn't be screaming at each other and there's no call to pound your fist into your palm because these are difficult human things, a difficult part of the human condition.
This brings me back to the BBC, the BBC.
It brings me back to Britain and their election.
The fact that they gave, that young people especially gave credence to Jeremy Corbyn, this pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, communist loon, is really, really disturbing about the state of play in the West and among the English-speaking people.
Take a look for a minute at just the BBC reporting these election results.
Well, this is largely as I predicted, except that the Silly Party won.
I think this is mainly due to the number of votes cast, Gerald.
Oh, well, there's a swing here to the Silly Party, but how big a swing, I'm not going to tell you.
Well, if I'm there, I think the interesting thing here is the big swing to the Silly Party, and of course, a very large swing back to the Social Party, had a tendency to wobble up down in the middle of the country without squeezing.
I'm afraid I can't think of anything.
Yeah, the Silly Party won is exactly right.
And we see this here too, is that millennials, according to Pew Poles, like socialism better than they like capitalism.
And a lot of times what young people think doesn't bother me too much because young people are ignorant.
That is, youth and ignorance are synonyms.
I mean, you cannot be young and not be ignorant.
You simply haven't had time to learn enough about life to know what works and what doesn't, and to learn about the philosophies of things, and to understand that capitalism makes people free and wealthy and raises all boats and socialism.
I mean, we're sitting here with Venezuela going down the socialist hole right in our own hemisphere, and young people are going, yes, socialism, that's a good idea.
But it is connected to an even larger idea.
The idea, and this really struck me over the weekend because I'm in LA and there was this gay pride stuff and all this.
And I have no brief against gay people, but I do have a brief against pride, this idea that we're proud of being gay.
It's like, really?
Are you?
Is that something you're proud of?
Is that something you achieved?
Is that something you worked for?
Is that something you did?
It's nonsense.
It's just nonsense.
And I understand this to fight back against people who condemn them, but it doesn't work in the first place.
Parading around saying you're proud doesn't mean anything.
We have lost the notion of human beings as things with a purpose, as creatures with a purpose.
This is the old-style notion, the old-style notion that a human being is made for something.
His intellect is made for something.
His spirit, his conscience is made for something.
Things have a purpose.
This way of thinking went out of fashion really back in the 18th century, and it's now an assumption that we have that we have no purpose except our own freedom, our own pleasure, our own self-development.
This is why you have this nutty stuff going on in universities where they say that you can be a woman even if you have a penis.
The idea that the things on your body have a purpose, have a reason.
Deaf people saying, you know, being deaf is a culture, so if you can cure deafness, don't do it.
I don't know how many of these people really say that, but there are one or two deaf people who say, no, we don't want to cure for deafness.
It's our culture.
Ears have a purpose.
If yours aren't working, they're broken.
They should be fixed if you can fix them.
This is not to attack deaf people, obviously.
It's simply to say if you have an understanding of human beings as being for something, you look at them differently.
And this is where, for instance, the Catholic Church's theories about sex come from.
It's always looked at as being small-minded or hateful that the Catholic Church condemns gays or condemns birth control.
I'm very much in favor of birth control, but the point the Church is making is your sex life has a purpose.
The purpose is to create children.
The purpose of children is that you should take care of them, therefore you should be married and have a staple home.
They're not just making stuff up.
They're not just saying you should do it this way.
It comes from a way of looking at the world, a way of looking at people.
And the thing is, when you have technology that makes you able to have sex without thinking about it and without having children, you've changed the state of play, but there's a price for everything.
So you're always paying a price for everything.
And if you don't know what the price is, if you don't know what you believe, you don't know what you're paying.
I don't think that a woman should have to have 15 children, a poor woman should have to have 15 children because somehow the Catholic Church says that she shouldn't use birth control or that she shouldn't have sex.
I think the technology that allows you to have sex without having children is a technology that enhances life.
But like everything, it comes with a price.
And the price it comes with it obscures the purpose of what you're doing.
It obscures the purpose of what you're doing and it leaves you floating in space.
So you have to try to remember the context in which you're doing things.
You have to make up that context.
In this moment, when we have lost consensus, in this moment when our teachers are fools, our professors are fools preaching a leftism that hasn't worked anywhere, in this moment when our children are ignorant and have lost the, they have no longer being taught our traditions or why we think what we think.
We have to start thinking again about whether or not we do have a purpose and what that purpose is.
And if we don't start thinking in those terms and talking in those terms about the very basic things that we believe, I think we're going to lose what the West is.
You know, I was listening to the police chief of London after the terrorist attack.
Her name is something like Cressida Dick, which is a great British name.
And she was talking about how wonderful it was that the victims of the terrorist attack had so many different nationalities as it points out the diversity of London.
I mean, that's really what she was saying.
Those were the words coming out of her mouth.
And I immediately thought, yes, but the people who killed them didn't have any diversity.
They all believed the same thing.
They were all from one religion.
And this notion that somehow our tolerance, our religious freedoms demand that we tolerate a set of beliefs that is out to destroy us is an act of insanity.
And it's the kind of insanity you have when you don't know why you believe what you believe.
You just have this feeling that it's true.
And this is true of most people in life at most times.
They have a feeling, there's a narrative around them that they're swimming in.
And we are swimming in a narrative that we are purposeless, that we are just here because we're here.
That narrative, which I believe was invented because it was useful to science, I believe that narrative has played out.
I think we have to go back and start thinking again about why we're here and what we're doing.
And it'll take care of a lot of these other problems that we see that are symptoms of that.
They're symptoms of this idea that we're just here because we're here and we're just part of nature.
Gothic Stories and Misunderstandings00:05:14
The old idea was that nature is here for us, is here for man.
And I actually believe that's closer to the truth.
All right, stuff I like.
Over the weekend, I saw this new film, My Cousin Rachel, with Rachel Weiss.
And it's based on a Daphne Des Maurier book.
And I didn't really like the movie.
The movie has this great setup.
It takes place, it looked like it was supposed to be early 19th century.
It takes place in Cornwall, where most of Daphne Des Maurier's books take place.
And the setup is this.
The setup is a guy's cousin, who is kind of his father, it was his father figure, marries a woman in Italy and starts writing letters to this young man saying, this woman is killing me.
She's poisoning me to death.
And the guy is furious, but when he gets to Italy to find out what happened, he finds that the doctor says the guy dies, and the doctor says that his cousin had a brain tumor and was going mad.
And this idea that she was poisoning him was just madness.
And then the wife shows up in the territory and she's absolutely in Cornwall and she's absolutely charming and delightful.
And this young man has to decide, did she poison him or not?
And that's just the setup.
That's the first five minutes.
It's not a good movie.
It's stagnant.
The information is always conveyed by somebody finding a letter, someone making inquiries, nothing really happens.
But it does have a wonderful performance by Rachel Weiss.
Here's just a clip of her charming this young man who, at the same time he's being charmed by her, feels she might be a poisoner.
Why has everyone always assumed that Louise and I were married?
Sorry.
She finds you very beautiful.
Does she now?
As do the Pasco girls.
How terribly flattering.
The vicar does not agree.
Oh dear.
But he finds you feminine.
Extremely feminine, for his exact words.
I wonder in what way?
I suppose in a way that's different to Mrs. Pascoe.
And how would you define it?
Define what?
The difference of femininity.
Mrs. Pasco's and mine.
God knows.
All I know is I like looking at you.
I don't like looking at Mrs. Pasco.
That's Sam Claflin.
You've seen him in Pirates of the Caribbean, a couple other things.
So, like all Gothic stories, Gothic stories are almost always about a misunderstanding.
And half the time, in a bad Gothic story, if someone would just ask the question, you know, like, what's going on here?
What's happening here?
That misunderstanding would be cleared up and the story would be over.
But this is, so I didn't like this movie very much.
The performances are good.
The setup is really interesting, but it just was kind of a stagnant movie.
But it reminded me of how much I really do like Daphne Des Maurier.
Daphne Des Maurier was, you know, she died in like 1989, so she was around through the 20th century, basically.
She wrote most famously, she wrote Rebecca.
She was the granddaughter.
This is kind of interesting.
She was the granddaughter of George DuMaurier, who wrote Trilby, which has the character Svengali.
I don't know if people still know who Svengali was.
He's the guy who takes over a singer, kind of Phantom of the Opera is a Svengali story, and he became a kind of byword.
But she was the granddaughter of that writer.
But she went on to write the almost so much of what she did was made into movies, a lot of them by Alfred Hitchcock.
Rebecca was, Jamaica Inn was.
She wrote a short story called The Birds.
The Birds was one.
She wrote a short story called Don't Look Now, which is a great scary movie by Nicholas Rogue, I think was the name of the director.
The thing is, she's a wonderful writer.
Rebecca is an absolutely entertaining novel, really good novel.
But like a lot of good storytellers, and she was kind of in that realm of Somerset Mom or Graham Greene, where modernism was coming in.
The James Joyces and the Faulkners were coming in, but she was still delivering good stories, well written.
And like a lot of these people, her main art was in her short stories.
Her short stories are really, it's really hard to find a good collection of her short stories.
The New York Review of Books, which has one of the best collections of republished stuff that has gone out of fashion, they republish stuff that's gone out of fashion.
Their collection is not very good.
It's edited by Patrick McGrath, who's himself a very good gothic writer, and he picked it sort of with a professional eye, and it's a little inside baseball.
But if you can find a collection of Daphne Des Maurier's short stories, Don't Look Now and other stories, or The Birds and Other Stories, and there are stories like The Apple Tree and Monte Verita, which some people hate.
I think it's a great story.
She was a great, great short story writer.
She was a terrific short story writer, incredibly entertaining.
Don't Look Now is really good.
The Birds is really good.
The Apple Tree I mentioned before, but just really good stuff.
And Rebecca is still a terrific novel and worth reading.
So that is stuff I like.
Doing This Podcast Tomorrow00:00:40
All right.
We are going on in our ramshackle way from my house, doing this podcast for another couple days.
them will move into our incredible new studios with white tigers and all you know just rainbow rain that will come down and it's just going to be absolutely amazing so hang with us until then get your questions in for the mailbag on wednesday we didn't have michael knowles today because we can't we don't have the technology it's unfortunate we don't have the technology to have guests while i'm broadcasting out of my home but when we get back we will bring we will let michael knowles out of his coffin and he will come back And be on the show next Monday.