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June 27, 2018 - The Matt Walsh Show

21:02

Ep. 55 - We Are Sitting On A Powder Keg

Some people have been predicting a coming civil war. I don't think that will happen. We're too lazy to fight a civil war. But I do think that American society is breaking down, and anarchy, in some form, is on the horizon. We are sitting on a powder keg. It could go off at any time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	So Maxine Waters caused a bit of consternation when she encouraged her supporters to harass Trump cabinet officials and staff.
	I wasn't especially consternated myself.
	Is consternated a word? Yeah, it is.
	It's one of those words that sounds like it isn't a word, but I think it is a word.
	I wasn't especially consternated myself because I expect nothing but bile and nonsense to spew from the mouth of one Maxine Waters, although this, I admit, was several steps beyond the normal bile that you expect from her.
	And it was truly dangerous.
	And this story, along with, or this rant of Waters, that along with the thing that prompted it, which of course is Sarah Sanders getting kicked out of a restaurant in Virginia, seems to have sparked renewed discussion about the possibility that we could be headed into a civil war in this country.
	Now, I don't personally think that Sarah Sanders being interrupted in the midst of her cheese plate is the kind of thing that would normally spark a civil war.
	It would certainly be the weirdest civil war of all time, if that's what it was fought over.
	But I do think that it's symptomatic.
	It is just one really faint, in itself, insignificant symptom of Something.
	And there have been many other symptoms.
	The RNC, and I don't usually say this about the RNC, about really anything the RNC does, but the RNC released a truly devastatingly effective ad yesterday that kind of compiles some of the dangerous rhetoric we've seen from the left recently.
	Can we roll that ad, actually?
	Can we roll it? No, we can't roll it.
	In fact, I'm not talking to anyone.
	There's nobody over there. It's just my webcam, so I can't roll any ads for you.
	But after this, you can go on YouTube and watch it yourself.
	It is an effective ad.
	And it all kind of shows that something not good is happening in America.
	And we're headed to Well, I won't say we're headed to a civil war.
	As I've argued before, I don't see a civil war on the horizon for this one single reason.
	Our saving grace is that we're far too lazy and apathetic to actually fight a civil war.
	Because that requires effort.
	That requires you to get off your couch and stop watching Netflix and put down the Twitter for a second.
	And so you can't fight an actual civil war with memes, is what I'm saying.
	So that's why I don't think we quite have the constitution, the personal constitution, the spine, the motivation to actually go out and fight a civil war.
	But we could very well be headed to turmoil of some kind, to anarchy, honestly.
	We already live in a country of moral anarchy.
	And I think we could see that anarchy bleed out into the streets.
	It already has. I think the situation we could be headed to is, we already got kind of a preview of it a few years ago with all those riots that broke out in Ferguson and Baltimore and other places.
	I think we could see a lot of that happening across the country all at once.
	Maybe that's what our civil war would look like.
	In other words, it's clear that we're sitting on a powder keg.
	And in fact, worse than that, I would say we're sitting on five powder kegs all at once.
	And if they all blow at the same time, then I don't know what happens, but it won't be good.
	So let's go through and let's look at the powder kegs, our sort of cultural powder kegs, just so we understand the situation in our culture.
	The first one is one that I've talked about many times.
	We have nothing in common with each other in this country.
	There is no unifying principle, no unifying idea or characteristic.
	We simply have nothing in common.
	And that's a big problem in any country.
	It's especially a problem in our country because our country was founded upon an idea.
	Our country was founded much more like a religion than a country because it was founded on a doctrine.
	We have founding doctrines.
	We have a national dogma.
	Most countries don't have that.
	They may have their own doctrines, their own ideas, but those developed over time while the country already existed.
	For us, it was different. It was like, this is what we believe, and now we're going to form a country around it.
	So as I've asked in the past, what happens when a large portion of the country no longer believes in that idea?
	Well, you can't really have a country anymore.
	Now, if everybody were to abandon those founding ideas and then coalesce around some other idea, well, then you could have a country.
	It wouldn't be the United States of America anymore.
	It wouldn't be an American country.
	It wouldn't be a country that I wanted to live in, but it would be a country, be some sort of country.
	But for us, we just have no country.
	Because we have nothing in common.
	There's no underlying thing tying us together.
	We don't even share a common language anymore.
	We don't share anything.
	The things that we share are the most materialistic and superficial kinds of things.
	You know what it is?
	We share the same brands.
	Okay, we all like Apple, and we drink Starbucks, and we watch Marvel movies.
	That's what we have in common.
	But that is not enough to make a country.
	That's enough to make a brand.
	That's enough to sustain a company.
	But a country is not supposed to be a company.
	It's supposed to be a country, and so it requires something deeper to tie everybody together.
	It's not enough. This is why all this talk about...
	People say to me all the time, they say, well, why are you being so divisive?
	Let's be unifying.
	Let's talk about what unites us.
	Okay, great. Well, then tell me what the thing is that unites us, and I'll talk about it.
	Go ahead. Let me know, because I... What is it?
	You want me to talk about the things that unite us?
	Okay, what? Anything?
	There's nothing. So it sounds really nice to say, let's be united.
	Let's all unify.
	You have to unify around something.
	You can't just unify for the sake of unifying.
	And that requires some kind of commonality.
	So here's the problem.
	If I were to open my door and invite a radical leftist in, which I would certainly have no problem doing.
	We could sit down, we could have a beer.
	And talk. But the issue is that the radical leftist, and there's really no distinction between a radical leftist and a non-radical, there really is no such thing as a non-radical leftist anymore.
	So the leftists, you know, they live in a world, or this hypothetical leftist who's coming to my house and is sharing a beer, he lives in a world where there is no God, there is no objective morality, The institution of the family is patriarchal and oppressive.
	Marriage doesn't matter or doesn't really exist, honestly.
	Babies aren't people.
	The biological differences between men and women don't exist or don't matter.
	There is no real difference between men and women.
	The history of our country is shameful, and we need to apologize for it.
	America is fundamentally an evil country.
	The West is fundamentally evil.
	And on and on and on.
	That's the world he lives in.
	Where's the unity?
	I have nothing in common with this guy.
	Yes, I can be polite to him.
	I can be nice. I can be decent towards him.
	I can even be civil.
	Most of the time. It's a little bit difficult, but I can even be civil.
	But if you ask me to unite with him, well, I literally can't do that, because there's nothing there.
	There is a great, vast chasm that separates me from him, and there is simply no way to bridge it.
	There is no bridge that will connect those two sides.
	We live in two different universes.
	We have different ideas about literally everything.
	There is nothing.
	There is nothing at all to unify around.
	So it's just not helpful.
	And this is the problem. There are people who, you know, they want to be the good guys.
	So they want to talk about, oh, let's stop with the divisiveness.
	Let's unite. Okay, shut up with that for a second and tell me what we're uniting around.
	And if you can't tell me that, then stop talking about unity and admit that there can't be any.
	So that's the first problem, the first powder keg.
	The second powder keg is that many of us were raised in unstable or broken or emotionally chaotic families.
	And that links to the third powder keg, Which is that a great many of us have had no real moral formation to speak of.
	Traditionally, typically, a person is morally formed, and that's a process that needs to happen.
	It needs to be an active process.
	You can't just throw somebody out there into the world and say, hey, figure it out.
	What you need to do with someone from a very young age is morally form them, is to teach them right from wrong, and how to live as a decent person.
	So traditionally, where do you look for that?
	Well, first you look to the family.
	Well, not first, but together you look to the family, the domestic church, and you also look to the church, the Christ church.
	Okay, so you look to religion and you look to the family, to morally form people.
	Well, there's a big problem here because a great many of us have fled from religion.
	We've fled from the church.
	And we come from broken families.
	So where are we going for moral formation?
	Who is helping us from a young age?
	Who is helping to shape us into moral and decent people?
	Nobody. A lot of people have just been left to kind of figure it out for themselves, and they haven't figured it out, unfortunately.
	And understandably, Without the church, without religion, without a family, then where do you look?
	You end up looking to TV, you look to the media, you look to Hollywood, God forbid, you look to academia.
	Even worse than that, God forbid, you look to the government and politicians.
	Well, you're not going to find it anywhere there.
	All you're going to find is moral corruption, insanity, confusion, manipulation.
	You're not going to find firm formation.
	So those are two and three.
	The fourth powder keg is that we have been desensitized.
	And a big part of this, without moral formation, that makes us susceptible to the desensitization.
	And then, on top of that, we sit around watching screens all day.
	We watch TV. We sit in front of screens for like 10 hours a day, without exaggeration, 10 hours a day, watching TV or on our phones, on the internet.
	And so there's this kind of disconnect, especially on the internet.
	There is this disconnect where you can engage with other people but without necessarily recognizing their humanity.
	And that's why people are so nasty and disgusting to each other online.
	And I know it's really easy to say Well, that's just the internet.
	You know, that's not the real world.
	Yeah, people are horrible to each other online.
	They say the worst kinds of things.
	If you look at the comment section under a YouTube video or if you go on Twitter or Facebook or anywhere really on the internet, you're going to find people treating each other just in the most atrocious ways imaginable.
	But that's not the real world.
	That's not how it is in the real world.
	What are you talking about?
	Those are people saying those things.
	What do you mean it's not the real world?
	It's not a fantasy.
	Those aren't imaginary characters.
	The person who's anonymously saying disgusting things online, that's a person saying them.
	That is a person revealing what is inside their own heart.
	Now, the fact that that person can then put down the computer or put down the phone and go out into the real world, and maybe if you encountered that person at the supermarket, they would nod nicely to you and say, hey, how are you?
	Good morning. And walk by you.
	That doesn't prove that what's happening online isn't real.
	And the fact that you can have a polite exchange with that person in the real world doesn't prove that they're actually a decent person.
	No, if they act like a monster online, then they're a monster.
	The fact that they're polite in the real world just means, honestly, that they're cowards and that they don't have the guts to be that way when they're facing someone face to face.
	But how they act online, when they're able to be anonymous, And when they have that protection of the screen, and when they're able to remove, as I said, the kind of separate a person from their humanity and engage with a person as if they have no humanity,
	you know, how a person acts in that context really tells you everything you need to know about them and what's going on inside their soul.
	If you have ever gone on a YouTube video and told someone to kill themselves, well, you're just a horrible person.
	I mean, deep inside, you are just a horrible, terrible person.
	And I don't care how nice you are at work to your co-workers.
	You're only nice because you're a wimp and you would never say that to their face.
	But that's what's going on inside your heart.
	And the internet breeds that kind of thing because it desensitizes us, it numbs us.
	And there's just this kind of filter, this separation, where we're able to engage with other people and encounter things that are really horrible, yet it doesn't affect us the same way that it would if we encountered those things in the real world.
	And so again, it just has the effect of numbing us.
	And then you add on top of that media, movies, TV, video games, everything else.
	Where we just typically, we look to the most horrible, the darkest, most violent things for entertainment, and that continues to numb us even more.
	And then we get to the fifth powder keg after we've already, you know, we're already living in a country that's not united.
	We have nothing in common. Many of us come from unstable families.
	Many of us have had no moral formation.
	Many of us are desensitized and numb.
	And then you get to, now we're very vulnerable for this fifth step, this fifth powder keg Which is the dishonesty and manipulation of the media and politicians and academia and basically all of our leading institutions, the institutions that have taken on the responsibility of leading the culture.
	And unfortunately, they are all infested with dishonest, manipulative people.
	And we, most of us, are very susceptible and vulnerable to those dishonest and manipulative people because of the last four things that I mentioned.
	Those are the powder kegs.
	What happens when they all blow up?
	I don't know. Like I said, I don't know exactly.
	What can we do about it?
	I mean, how can we avoid this explosion?
	How can we reclaim America?
	How can we Come right up to the precipice of disaster and then quickly swerve and go the opposite direction.
	I don't know exactly, but I do know one thing.
	I've been saying this for a long time.
	I know it's not what people want to hear because what people want is a quick kind of just snap your fingers, switch on a light sort of solution.
	And I don't have that.
	I don't think that solution exists.
	What I do know is we've gotten to this point as a culture over the course of generations.
	So what does that tell me?
	It tells me that if we're going to go the other way and we're going to solve these problems and we're going to have a real country again where we are meaningfully united around something.
	Well, it took us generations to get away from that point.
	It's going to take us generations to get back to it.
	So you and I We're not going to see, more than likely, what we're going to see is we're going to see things get worse.
	We're not going to see the united America.
	I'm sorry, we just won't.
	Because you can't wander that far away from it for so long, and then all of a sudden just, you know what, never mind!
	And then the entire culture says, you know what, let's just change and do this instead.
	That doesn't happen. I'm sorry.
	It is a generational struggle.
	Which is going to require selflessness on our part.
	Where we're saying, you know what?
	We're in for some rough times, you and I. But we need to start thinking about the future.
	We need to start thinking about our kids and our grandkids.
	How can we put them on a trajectory where they don't have to suffer through the same kinds of things?
	How can we put them on a trajectory where maybe they can live in a real country?
	Because we don't, and we won't.
	So that's what we need to work on, is accept the fact that we have kind of made our bed, culturally speaking, and you and I, we're going to have to lay in it.
	And it's not going to be fun.
	But I think generally, over the course of generations, maybe we can, maybe there's light, you know, there at the end of that tunnel.
	And that's going to require what we look at these five steps.
	Well, we kind of have to do the opposite with our own kids.
	We have to get married, form families, have kids, and do the opposite of all these things with them.
	Number one, we have to give them real solid principles and ideas that can motivate them and also they can unite with others around those ideas.
	Number two, we have to be a stable family.
	Number three, we have to morally form our children.
	Number four, we have to do what we can to protect them from the desensitization that happens online and when you're obsessed with screens and everything else.
	And then number five, if we do all that, then maybe they won't be as vulnerable to the manipulation of politicians and the media and academia and so forth.
	That's the solution. Where there is hope, but it's further down on the horizon.
	And we have to be willing to do the work to get there.
	All right. So it's not all doom and gloom.
	I mean, unfortunately, there's a lot of doom and gloom before you get to the hope.
	But, you know, we have to be willing to suffer through that.
	Thanks for watching, everybody. Thanks for listening.

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