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Oct. 22, 2018 - The Matt Walsh Show
25:25
Ep. 128 - Why The Gosnell Movie Is Being Ignored By The Media

The Gosnell movie was dropped from a third of its theaters in its second week, despite a very strong box office performance. The media and the Left have been stonewalling this film from the beginning, and they haven't let up. But why are they so terrified of the Gosnell story? Why have they ignored it? I think the reason is pretty clear. We'll talk about it now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Coming up on the Matt Wall Show today, the movie about Kermit Gosnell entered its second week this weekend after an extremely impressive showing in its first week.
Yet, the film is already being dropped from hundreds of theaters.
Is it being blackballed?
Yes, of course.
But why?
Why is the left so terrified of Gosnell?
Why is the media so terrified of Gosnell?
Well, we'll talk about that now.
Stay tuned.
Oh, man.
This is a tough day for me.
It was tough waking up this morning and finding the reason.
To go on.
The Ravens lost yesterday.
My Baltimore Ravens lost on a missed extra point.
On a missed extra point in the final seconds of the game.
They've got the most accurate field goal kicker in the history of the league.
He's never missed an extra point in his entire career, including college.
Like 300 straight made extra point kicks, and this is the one that he decides to miss.
And then we lost the game.
And to make matters worse, after the game last night, I was sitting in the living room in a state of deep shock and misery, in a bit of an existential crisis, asking myself, what's the point of life?
What's the point of anything?
And then my daughter comes in and she says, what's the matter, Daddy?
Are you sad?
You look sad.
And I said, yes, I'm very sad.
The Ravens lost on a missed extra point at the end of the game.
And she said, what's an extra point?
And I said, well, it's the field goal that you kick after a touchdown if you're not going to go for two.
And she said, what's a field goal?
What's a touchdown?
What's going for two?
And I said, please stop interrogating me.
Can't you see that I'm traumatized here?
And she said, are you going to cry, Daddy?
And I said, yes, I might cry.
I might cry.
And she said, well, daddies don't cry.
No, daddies don't cry.
And I said, you're right.
Daddies don't cry except when their football team loses on a missed extra point at the very end of the game.
Then they might cry.
And then she said, and I'm going to quote her exactly, OK?
She said, that's silly, daddy.
That's silly to cry over football.
Football is silly.
And so what was I going to do?
I called the police on her.
Had her carted away.
Which is not the kind of thing that you want to ever, it's not a decision you ever want to make as a parent, especially when your daughter is five years old.
But what else was I going to do?
If she's going to go around saying things like that, she's a threat to society.
All right.
But I will, in an act of great courage and resilience, I will try to soldier on and move on somehow with my life.
All right.
What I want to talk about.
The film about Kermit Gosnell has entered its second week at the box office.
It entered its second week this past weekend.
And despite only showing on 600 or so theaters in its first week, and despite the limited budget, and despite being ignored by the media, it managed to crack the top 10 in its first week, the top 10 at the box office.
Which is extremely impressive, okay, to get into the top 10 given the situation.
Now keep this in mind when it comes to box office totals and you hear about, you know, you hear about a movie like Avengers is number one at the box office for 10 straight weeks or whatever.
Well, keep in mind, That movies like The Avengers, they open on 4,000 screens and they have hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing and merchandise.
I mean, you can't avoid them.
For six months leading up to the movie coming out, the movie's everywhere.
Everywhere you go, you see it.
You see previews of commercials and merchandise.
And then it's on every single screen across the universe.
Um, and so a movie like that, it has to be number one.
It's got to be number one for two months.
If it's not that it's a massive failure because the movies, the movie studios pay a lot of money to manufacture interest and to get the movies out there.
And so that's why in my mind, there's nothing particularly impressive about a massively hyped, massively expensive movie, uh, showing on 4,000 screens with 15 showings a piece ending up number one at the box office.
But.
Um, that's why I'm never, you know, every time there's a new Marvel movie or Star Wars and everyone's like, oh, it's the number one movie in history again.
Well, of course, number one that, you know, movie tickets now cost $87 as opposed to, as opposed to in the, in the nineties when there were $5.
Um, and the, the, the movie studios paying millions of dollars to brainwash us into seeing the freaking thing.
So of course, of course it's number one, that's not impressive, but a movie like, like Gosnell, With no press, very little marketing, on a few screens and a small budget?
Well, cracking a million dollars, and the top ten in that case, is huge.
Yet, as the Daily Wire reported this weekend, the film was dropped, again, only its second week, it was dropped from almost 200 screens, of the only 600 it was showing on, In its second week.
This is a top 10 movie that was dropped in its second week and dropped from theaters with 20 or 30 screens where it was in the top 10 among all those films.
And many of those theaters dropped it after one week, which is unprecedented.
It's unheard of.
Despite what anyone might want to say to try to come up with a rationale, this is unheard of.
This doesn't happen.
Even if a movie performs really poorly in its first week, it's pretty rare for it to be dropped after one week.
Usually it at least gets one other week.
But to be a top ten movie and then get dropped after seven days in the theater, it's just...
It's ridiculous.
Let me read a little bit of the story from The Daily Wire.
It says, according to John Sullivan, the film's marketing director, who also served as a producer, the drop cannot be written off as a mere coincidence or, quote, business as usual.
He says, he told The Daily Wire, I can tell you from my experience in 15 years of releasing movies independently, we're in uncharted territories.
It is an impacted fall, no doubt about it, but the fact that we've been dropped from theaters where the movie is the number six or number nine movie is just something you don't see.
It's hard not to believe it isn't about the content of the movie.
We have theaters that are dropping on the movie that are top theaters that are performing very well.
We've been the number six in a 15-plex theater, and it gets dropped this week.
We've been number nine in a 30-plex, and we're getting dropped this week.
So it's the number nine movie out of 30.
And they drop it.
There are about 15 theaters like that where typically you would not get dropped.
He says, I do recognize it's a crowded marketplace because Halloween is going to be a huge opening, but it's very odd to me that you're within the top 10 and you're getting dropped out of a movie house.
The filmmakers have also received varying reports of theaters actively preventing customers from buying a ticket by not advertising the film or declaring it sold out before capacity is reached.
While some of those situations may be the result of human error, Sullivan says the apparent blackballing is too consistent to be ignored.
And then he goes on to talk about how it's unprecedented.
And a public statement on Facebook, the film's producer, said he had received worrying reports from across the country regarding customers' inability to buy tickets.
And then he talks about some stories of people that, you know, even in the theaters where it's being shown, they're being prevented or it's being made difficult to buy tickets to the movie.
One of the ways that you know this isn't all a coincidence is because this is just totally in keeping with how the Gosnell story has been treated, and how the Gosnell movie has been treated, and the actual event itself before then.
But speaking of staying on the movie for just a minute, we should also mention that hardly any media outlets even bothered to review the movie.
Rotten Tomatoes, which is a site that compiles movie reviews, so you could go and see, um, you know, get a, get kind of an aggregated percentage score on, on, on how good the movie is, even though the percentages are, are, are oftentimes very misleading.
But, um, it could only find 10 reviews for Gosnell across the entire internet.
It could find, it could find 10 reviews.
By comparison, the Halloween movie, which came out this weekend has over 200 reviews.
So that's 200 reviews to 10.
Now, obviously, Gosnell isn't as big a movie as Halloween, despite being scarier and having a more evil villain, and a more prolific killer, also, at the core of the movie.
But still, that disparity is ridiculous.
Only 10 reviews.
Whereas, you know, a movie will typically get 100, 150, 200 or more.
That is not a coincidence.
As the marketing director of the film pointed out, this is not a coincidence.
There is an active decision being made to ignore this movie, to blackball this movie, to censor this movie.
Now, can it be justified on any kind of practical level?
No.
As I said, the movie has been a success in spite of all this, obviously showing that there's intense interest in the movie, The average movie, if it's only playing on 600 theaters, and it's not getting any press, and there's hardly any marketing, the average movie like that is just, it's not, it's gonna make a few, it's gonna make a few thousand dollars, and then it's gonna be gone.
But as I said, to pull in a million, get into the top ten, that shows that there is enormous interest in the movie.
So you can't justify it on that.
You can't say, well of course it's being ignored, it's just a, you know, it's a movie nobody cares about.
People do care about it.
And then the story.
You can't say, well, the story doesn't matter.
I mean, it's an irrelevant story.
No, the story is very dramatic, very relevant, very current.
Gosnell is, as the tagline of the movie correctly points out, Gosnell is the worst serial killer in American history.
Now to recap very briefly in case you've forgotten about Gosnell or if you never heard about him in the first place, the abortionist was officially charged in 2013 with the murders of seven infants and one woman.
But the total body count is much higher than that.
Gosnell used scissors to sever the spinal cords of hundreds of live babies.
Hundreds.
Maybe even more.
Maybe thousands.
Um, one employee of the of the clinic in Philadelphia testified that she personally witnessed this procedure, um, snipping, as Gosnell called it, at least 30 times.
So although he was, although he was only charged only, uh, charged with murdering seven infants, as if that's not bad enough, you've got just one witness who says, well, I saw it happen 30 times.
Um, in some cases, uh, she was given the child's severed feet or any or another severed body part to put in a jar and keep as a trophy.
Uh, to be clear, children were, I just think this needs to be emphasized.
Children were, were born alive outside the womb, fully formed.
These are born infants and then they were decapitated.
That's what was going on.
Hundreds and hundreds of times over the course of 30 years.
There's a reason why this clinic was dubbed the house of horrors because it's not a cliche.
It really it really was there were quoting from from a one medical student who saw it.
He said there were fetuses and blood all over the place.
You could another nurse reports that you could literally hear the screams of children who were born alive and then butchered.
So if you can imagine this butcher shop where there's bloodstains on the walls, body parts in jars and buckets, and the screams of children being murdered.
I mean, it's just carcasses and body parts were stored in shoeboxes, water jugs, break room, refrigerators.
And this is to say nothing of the unsanitary medical equipment which caused disease and infection in the patients.
One woman had to go to a hospital and have part of her intestine removed after contracting an infection from Gosnell's clinic, and then another woman died.
At least one woman died as a result of this malpractice.
Now, the point is, this is a significant story that deserves to be told, that should be told.
It's the kind of story that if it were happening in any other profession, any other alleged medical field, there would have been five movies and two TV specials about it already.
I mean, if you can imagine an orthodontist or a pediatrician murdering hundreds of patients, it would be the biggest story in the country and film adaptations would come almost immediately.
That's the way it would be treated.
This, because it's an abortionist, has always been treated as a non-story.
One Washington Post reporter infamously said that Gosnell's systematic slaughter of infants over the course of 30 years is just a local crime story.
That's how she, when asked to justify her paper's decision to ignore the story, she said, well, it's just a local crime story.
Hundreds of dead babies, local crime story.
So, and to put that in context, by the way, this is not long before Ferguson, where you had one, you know, One teenager that was shot by a police officer in what turned out to be a totally justified shooting.
But that, you know, one person being killed, that wasn't treated as a local crime story.
Nobody said that was local crime.
The Washington Post was all over that.
Yet hundreds of babies being killed in a major American city in an alleged medical facility over the course of 30 years, that's just local crime.
So why is this happening?
Why did the media ignore?
Why does it still ignore the Gosnell case?
Why does the left in general treat this like it never happened?
Why are they so terrified of Gosnell?
That's the question.
And I think there are three pretty obvious reasons that we'll get into.
Now, so why is this being ignored?
Number one, I think the Gosnell case really explodes one of the most common pro-abortion talking points, which is namely that the prohibition of abortion will lead, if you prohibit abortion, that's going to lead to horrific and unsanitary back-alley abortions and so forth.
That's what we're told, you know, we're told.
You can't get rid of an abortion because then it's going to be this, it's going to be a horror show where there's women, you know, getting abortions in these unsanitary conditions, unsafe conditions, as if it's possible to safely, as if it's ever possible to have a safe abortion, which of course it isn't by definition, because by definition in every abortion, in every successful abortion that's ever been performed, At least one human being has been killed.
So there's no such thing as a safe abortion.
But those kinds of abortions that the pro-abort people worry about, those kinds of abortions happened at Gosnell's Clinic for 30 years, even though abortion is legal.
And I think a person who takes note of that fact Who says, well, hold on, this is exactly the kind of abortion that I thought we were preventing by having abortion legal.
And so I think if you notice that, and then if you get really curious and you start investigating and you say, well, I mean, is Gosnell really unique or have there been situations like this in other clinics across the country?
And if you investigate that, you're going to discover, no, Gosnell is not unique, in fact.
Now, he might be on the more severe end of the spectrum, but in terms of unsanitary, unclean, just horrifically disgusting environments at abortion clinics, you find that across the country.
That is not unusual.
As well as, by the way, babies being killed after being born alive.
That is also not unusual.
So, a person who takes note of that fact may begin to understand that abortion is a fundamentally dirty, unsafe, violent, gruesome thing.
And you can't change that fact by making it legal.
So, that's one reason why the case is ignored.
Number two, on a political level, it is impossible to report on this story without implicating the Democrat Party.
Philadelphia is a city run by Democrats.
And it was in that Democrat-run city that a serial killer was able to operate his enterprise for 30 years without interference.
I mean, all you needed to do was walk inside the building to see that something was terribly wrong.
From all the reports that we've heard, all the witnesses, all the people that worked there, all you had to do was walk inside.
And you could see that something was very wrong.
And if you actually walk past the lobby into back where these things were happening, you would see dead humans in buckets and in jars and you would see all this stuff.
Yet somehow city and state officials didn't notice for 30 years.
Or they did notice and they chose to look the other way.
And I think clearly that's what happened.
Because either this clinic was completely unregulated.
Nobody checked on it.
It's allegedly a medical clinic.
No regulation.
No checking on it.
Nothing.
No oversight.
Zero for 30 years.
Or there was some oversight, there was some regulation, and those people chose to look the other way and so actually participated in a cover-up.
I mean, if the media had actually been interested in doing its job, and again, this is why it didn't want to do its job here, but if it actually had decided to do its job and really dig into this and find out who knew about this, This was not happening on an island.
There was obviously a cover-up going on.
There were people in the government who had to know about it.
Had to.
And chose to not do anything about it.
So how deep did that go?
Well, we never found out.
Because they ignored the story.
But I think the third thing.
Most important.
The most fundamental reason, the most kind of visceral reason why this story is ignored is because this is abortion.
I mean, what Gosnell was doing is abortion.
That's all.
Yeah, he was doing it when the babies were born as opposed to right before they were born, but this is abortion.
For all of the pretending that there is some dramatic difference between regular old murder and abortion, when it comes down to it, of course, killing an innocent, helpless human is killing an innocent, helpless human.
Murder is murder is murder is murder.
After all, what exactly is the substantive difference between killing a baby moments after it leaves the birth canal and killing it moments before?
You know, you've got a baby who just emerged from the birth canal.
The doctor is holding the child.
Rewind the clock, you know, a few seconds.
What, and then, you know, if you rewind the clock and then fast forward, you go back, what is in between the emergence from the birth canal?
What is happening in that?
So it's a human being, you know, as soon as it comes out, it's a human being, you know, a person, a human being deserving of rights and dignity and all that kind of stuff.
And right before that, it has none.
Well, what exactly is happening?
What magical, mystical thing is happening?
As the baby comes out of the birth canal, to change, to fundamentally change it from a worthless, pointless blob of lifeless tissue to a human being.
I mean, what exactly is happening?
Well, the answer is nothing.
The difference between the two is simply geographic.
The difference is location.
And that's what it comes down to.
I think the proponent of abortion sees the Gosnell case and thinks, yeah, I mean, I guess that's really not too different, is it?
And he knows that.
And so he looks away and he turns away and he ignores and he doesn't want to dwell on it.
He doesn't want to see abortion for what it is.
And he doesn't want us to see.
You know, I'm very glad that Kermit Gosnell is in prison for the rest of his life.
That's what he deserves.
He probably deserves something even worse than that.
He certainly deserves something even worse than that, I should say.
But at the same time, you know, at the same time, the argument that he made in his defense was a pretty good argument.
His argument was, well, I was just performing abortions, which are legal.
I'm no different from any other abortionist.
And you know something?
He's right.
And that's really why the left doesn't want us talking about Gosnell.
Because they know that he's right.
That he's really no different from any other.
You go to any average Planned Parenthood, you go to any abortion clinic, And the abortionists there, they're no different from Gosnell.
Yeah, Gosnell was more unorthodox in his approach.
He didn't care as much about hygiene and being sanitary.
But when it comes down to it, they're both killing babies for a living.
And they both know that that's what they're doing.
And I think that's why Gosnell didn't care.
For him, the baby comes out, he kills the baby.
It didn't matter to him.
He'd already signed on to killing babies.
He does it every day.
He did it every day for 30 years.
He knows that there's no difference.
And let me tell you something.
Every abortionist knows it.
Because these people, although they are not legitimate doctors at all, they're literally the opposite of doctors.
Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath, do no harm, and all they do is harm.
That's their whole life.
That's what they've dedicated their life to, to harming children.
But they do have medical training.
And they do have scientific medical knowledge.
And so they know, they absolutely know, that what Gosnell did is no different from what they do.
It is exactly the same.
which is why every abortionist should be locked in a prison cell.
And that's simply an observation and a conversation that pro-abortion people don't want to have.
And so they just ignore it.
That's the incredible thing with Gosnell this whole time.
It's not like the left ever came up with some narrative to explain away Gosnell.
No, they just ignored it.
They knew, and they know now, there's nothing they can say in defense.
They know that this case is bad for them.
And for their whole worldview, their whole philosophy, their ideology, everything.
They know it's terrible for them.
And so they just say nothing about it.
These are the people that say everything, that have something to say about everything.
On this case, they just say nothing.
That's how terrified they are of it.
And that's why you should go out and support the movie if you haven't.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
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