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May 1, 2018 - The Matt Walsh Show
18:30
Ep. 20 - Why 'Cultural Appropriation' Is Nonsense

Cultural Appropriation doesn't exist. On the other hand, gender appropriation does exist. But that's the one kind of appropriation the Left celebrates. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So let's talk about cultural appropriation.
Over the weekend, a high school girl, just a random high school girl, not a public figure, not a celebrity, she tweeted a picture of herself In her prom dress, innocent enough, she thought, right? And she was tweeting it out to her, whatever, few hundred followers.
And she was wearing, I guess, a Chinese-style dress.
And so a Chinese man, Chinese-American man, it seems, saw this tweet and he thought, well, let me...
Attack this high school girl.
And yeah, let me just do that.
Let me try to ruin her day and her week for no reason.
So he screenshotted the tweet and he sent his own tweet saying, my culture is not your damned prom dress.
My culture is not your prom dress.
Which, I mean, he's right about that.
She never claimed it was.
I don't think she ever...
I didn't scroll through all her tweets, but I don't think she ever said, I'm wearing Chinese culture today.
I'm wearing the entirety of Chinese culture today.
No, I think she's just wearing a dress.
Just a dress is a dress.
But his tweet attacking this girl, cyberbullying her basically, got somehow 170,000 likes.
170,000 likes.
And it sparked this avalanche of criticism on this girl.
And it started a conversation about cultural appropriation.
And this goes back to something I talked about last week, where you see now how everybody who's on the internet now gets treated like a public figure.
Everybody gets this intense scrutiny over everything they say and do.
And anyone at all, no matter who they are, even if it's just some 17-year-old girl going to prom, anyone can come under national backlash for something.
And so I guess this girl, her number was up for that.
Now, ironically, this guy, Jeremy Lamb is his name, and he's pictured in his Twitter avatar.
Wearing a baseball cap, board shorts, and a t-shirt.
None of which are traditional Chinese garb, I'm pretty sure.
In fact, even his name, Jeremy, is not Chinese.
That's most certainly Western.
And according to an internet search that I just did a minute ago, just for an example, the most popular male name in China right now is Zhang Wei.
Now, the reason I bring it up is, can you imagine if some lily white American parents, Who wanted to be trendy, you know, if they had a baby boy and they named him Zhang Wei and they sent out a tweet or something with a picture of their extremely white baby saying, oh, my little Zhang Wei was born, eight pounds, nine ounces.
You know what happened?
They would come under, again, intense national backlash.
How dare you appropriate Chinese culture by giving him a Chinese name?
But Jeremy has appropriated a Western name.
He's appropriated an entire Western wardrobe.
I mean, everything from his hat right down to his shoes, okay?
All of it is Western.
And really, if we're going to talk about appropriation, if we're going to get into the appropriation discussion, and if we're going to get into this game where we say, okay, you're not allowed to use anything or wear anything that doesn't originate with your culture, if we're doing that, it's not going to work out too well for non-Westerners.
Because, first of all, by the rules of this game, If the rules were applied evenly, by the rules of the game, if you're a non-Western, if you are of non-Western heritage, first of all, you need to stop doing what you're doing at this exact moment.
Stop doing it. Right now.
Go away. Computers, phones, any kind of phone, these are all Western inventions.
And you can't use them. It's appropriation.
Cars, airplanes, much of modern medicine, antibiotics...
Most of the appliances that you have in your kitchen, dishwasher, refrigerator, all that.
You can't use that. Electricity, light bulbs, movies, TV, photography, democracy, air conditioning.
I could go on and on and on.
And I haven't even gotten to clothing yet.
Jeans, ball caps, t-shirts, sneakers.
Can't wear those under these rules.
Can't wear them. This is why cultural appropriation is utter nonsense.
One of the reasons, anyway. Because it puts cultures into these boxes and it doesn't permit crossover.
And it denies the very diversity that the left pretends to value above everything else.
They say, you know, diversity is the best thing in the world.
And yet they're the ones saying, no, you can't have that.
That belongs to the other culture.
You've got to stick with your own cultures.
Separate but equal cultures, okay?
Stay separate. Stay segregated.
That's what they're saying. Or I should say, let me clarify, back up for a minute.
It denies you the right to cross over into another box if you're white.
So it's a one-way ticket here, basically.
It tells whites to stay in their box and never go outside of it.
But people of other races and ethnicities, they can come into our box all they want.
They can take what they want, browse around, look around, take this, take a sneaker, put on a ball cap, use some air conditioning, take a flight back and forth from...
I mean, they can do whatever they want.
But for us, we have to stay right here in this box, and we can never go and do anything outside of it.
So the double standard is so blatant.
Just so extremely blatant and in your face and just so unashamed is this, shameless I should say, is this double standard that it's almost shocking.
As accustomed as we all are to the double standard, it almost succeeds in shocking.
But the real double standard with this appropriation stuff has nothing to do with culture or race or anything like that.
The thing is, because there is one place, there's one area where real, live, honest-to-God appropriation actually does occur.
Harmful, degrading, demeaning appropriation.
That is happening.
But the one place where it actually happens...
The one place where appropriation actually happens and is actually harmful and is actually offensive and degrading.
That's the one place where the left celebrates it.
And of course I'm talking about men who appropriate womanhood by pretending to be women.
That is the one actual real example of appropriation.
And it's the one place where the left...
It's not that they look the other way.
They actually applaud it and say, yeah, it's brave, it's inspiring, it's beautiful.
But here is real appropriation.
Here's a man who has reduced femininity to a caricature, to a cartoon, basically.
And he says he has an urge to wear dresses and to wear high heels and to wear lipstick.
And this urge somehow indicates that he's really a woman inside.
By intruding on womanhood, he turns womanhood into nothing more than a fashion choice, essentially.
He says that a woman's body, what goes on inside her, what goes on inside her mind, all of that, what goes on inside her soul, her ability to create human beings and to harbor them inside her body and to nourish them with her body,
all of that, those things that are really authentically, uniquely, fantastically, beautifully woman, those things, None of that.
Those things don't matter.
None of that matters. According to the new way of looking at it.
Because in order for the man to take part in womanhood, well, then we've got to strip womanhood of all the things that are unique to it.
Because he can't have any part of that.
He can be a woman, he says, without any of that.
So none of that matters. As long as he puts on a dress...
And maybe he changes his name, and he grows his hair out, and maybe he gets implants or something, and he mutilates his genitals.
If he does all that, well, now he's a woman.
All the rest of the stuff that used to be the territory of women, doesn't matter.
So, see, here we have the actual consequences of appropriation that the left worries will happen with cultural appropriation.
Here we have it actually happening.
Because their arguments...
What is their argument against a white girl wearing a Chinese prom dress?
What's their argument against it?
Why are they worried about it?
What's the big deal? Well, according to them, by wearing the dress, she reduces Chinese culture to a fad and to a novelty.
She takes part in it.
She benefits from it. She borrows its beauty.
She kind of like steals it without understanding it.
And thus she makes it into something superficial and hollow and just like something to parade around, like a costume, basically.
She turns Chinese culture into a costume.
That's the argument. Now, that doesn't really happen when a white person wears a Chinese dress.
Or when a white person, I don't know, whatever else gets them accused of a problem.
It listens to Beyonce or something like that.
That doesn't do any harm to anybody.
It doesn't cheapen Chinese culture, black culture.
It doesn't. Because cultures intermingle.
They blend. And fashions and styles change.
And so there's this exchange between cultures that goes on.
And that used to be what the left celebrated and said we should be doing, is this intermingling and exchange of cultures.
But womanhood and manhood, on the other hand, are absolutes.
They are poles.
They're like north and south poles.
And when men come in and they blur those lines, they really do blur the lines that give women their identity.
Because in order to have an identity, there must be lines of distinction.
And it used to be, and it still is scientifically, but our culture doesn't recognize it anymore, it used to be that we all recognized that there were certain lines that defined a woman.
And those lines were really obvious.
Among them, as I said, she can create a person.
Okay, she could conceive a person within her and bring that human being into the world.
I mean, this is like a supernatural ability.
It's such an incredible power that she has.
The fate of all human civilization rests on the woman because we need the woman to propagate civilization.
Of course, the woman needs the man to take part in that, but the woman has this very essential role of actually harboring the child, bringing the child forth.
And then the child, even when he's born, you know, after he's born, the child has a real physical need for the mother.
Technically, the child doesn't even need the man.
I mean, kids do need their fathers, don't get me wrong.
But a newborn child has a physical need for the mother.
The newborn won't even notice his dad for like several months.
Believe me, I've had three.
He needs his mother. So there's that motherly maternal connection.
And it's just that those were the things that used to define womanhood.
But we've torn down those lines.
We've destroyed them. We've obliterated them for the sake of these cross-dressing men.
And so the LGBT lobby has actually done to womanhood what the left says this girl did to Chinese culture.
But the girl in the Chinese prom dress is villainized.
A man in a prom dress is canonized.
The girl in the dress is accused of turning Chinese culture into nothing but a dress.
The man in the dress actually has turned womanhood into nothing but a dress.
He's actually done it.
At least in the eyes of society.
Yet he gets away with it.
It's incredible.
All of this talk about appropriation.
Here it is.
It's actually happening.
Let's talk about that.
And it's doing real harm to women.
It's part of the reason why now you've got to worry about your daughter ending up in a locker room or in a bathroom with a man.
Because of this. Men have come in and appropriated women.
They've even taken their bathrooms from them in their locker rooms, their private, intimate spaces.
Men have come in and taken.
I should specify the LGBT camp has come in and taken.
So how is this happening?
How is this being allowed to happen?
Well, the answer is, as I've explained in the past, the left has what I call a victim pyramid or a victim hierarchy.
Now, we know that victimization is currency on the left.
Victimization is power on the left.
And whoever is the most victimized victim of all, well, they're going to have the most power.
They can do whatever they want and they can't be questioned.
So there's this jockeying for position among the various demographics on the left.
Who can be the most victimized?
And there's always this competition about who's the most oppressed, who's the most persecuted, who's the most bullied, and so on and so forth.
Right now, The LGBT folks are at the very top of the victim hierarchy.
They're all the way at the top. They've ascended to the peak.
And this is a big moment for them, where they're here at the top, and they're reaping all the benefits.
And what it means is that they can do whatever they want, and nobody can criticize them.
And really, transgenders have even ascended to the top of the top.
I saw some headline on Twitter recently that gay men are being told that they can't dress as drag queens anymore because...
Oh my gosh. Just try to wrap your head around this.
The new thing that I've seen is that gay men cannot dress like drag queens.
Because they're appropriating from transgenders, okay?
Now men in dresses are appropriating from other men in dresses.
Anyway, so the transgenders have ascended all the way to the top of the top of the top, and they can do whatever they want, and no one can criticize them because they're the most victimized of all.
From my own observations of studying the left, it seems to me, and like I said, there's a jockeying for position and kind of it's sort of this Game of Thrones that goes on.
But right now, transgenders at the top and then the rest of the LGBT XYZ squad, they're there right underneath them.
And then racial minorities are right below them.
And then women. Women are actually kind of at the bottom right now on the left in terms of the victim hierarchy.
Which is why...
Even after all the work that feminists have done, especially modern feminists, they spend a lot of time finding persecution where it doesn't actually exist.
They find rape culture where it doesn't exist.
But meanwhile, you've got actual dudes walking into their bathrooms and their locker rooms, and they're not allowed to complain about that.
They can complain about manspreading on the subway, they can complain about anything else, but they can't complain about that.
They've basically been told, shut your mouth and go with the program.
And for the most part, on the left and the feminists, most of them do.
They're put in their place by the LGBT and so they just go along with it.
So that's how we've ended up in this really absurd situation.
And I'm sort of waiting And it's happened a little bit.
There's been a few examples of it.
There have been a few liberal feminists who have sort of very gingerly ventured into the territory of kind of criticizing the transgender thing.
But I'm waiting for the moment when the feminists really just get fed up with it and they say, you know what?
No, we're not going to tolerate this anymore.
I mean, they've spent all this time telling men that you're not even allowed to have opinions about women's issues if you don't have a uterus.
That's been their refrain for decades.
They've said, no uterus, no opinion.
And now they've got to sit there and just deal with it, while men not only have opinions about women, but actually become women without uteruses, and they're not allowed to.
So eventually, I think the feminists are...
I'm going to get fed up with it, and there's going to be a full-on civil war on the left over this issue.
But as it stands right now, men can appropriate all they want.
And it's the one kind of appropriation that the left never says anything about.
And that is the real reason why appropriation is nonsense.
All right. Have a great day, everyone.
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