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Oct. 29, 2018 - The Matt Walsh Show

32:20

Ep. 133 - Why Mass Shootings Happen

After the horrific shooting at a synagogue over the weekend, people are asking why these tragedies keep happening. Obviously bigotry and hatred are part of the story, but there’s something else. We’ll talk about the other ingredient that leads to slaughter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Today on the Matt Wall Show, after a horrible week last week, ending with the slaughter of 11 people at a synagogue, we are all asking again, yet again, why does this happen?
	Why does it keep happening?
	Well, I'll try to tackle that question today.
	Also, a column on the Daily Wire this weekend pointed out that young people, millennials, tend to be shallow and unmotivated.
	Well, I'm a millennial myself, and I want to talk about why young people tend to be that way.
	Hint, hint, it's the education system.
	Sorry for the spoilers.
	We'll talk about all that coming up.
	Well, last week was not a good week, to put it lightly, ending with the horrific slaughter of 11 worshipers at a synagogue.
	Pittsburgh, beginning with the mail bombs apparently sent by a clearly insane Trump supporter, and midway through the week there was a shooting at a Kroger in Kentucky carried out by a racist white man targeting black people.
	Two were killed in that attack.
	I have a few things I want to say here.
	And let me first say, speaking specifically about the 11 kill at the synagogue for a moment, and I know that this is not exactly a bold statement, not exactly a statement that requires great courage or insight to say, but it must be said all the same, that anti-Semitism is evil.
	And incredibly stupid.
	Bigotry towards any racial group or ethnic group or any group at all, religious group, is evil and stupid.
	Bigotry is an evil, stupid thing for evil, stupid people.
	But I think especially anti-Semitism among professing Christians, And this scumbag killer claimed to be a professing Christian.
	He's not really a Christian, but that's what he claimed to be.
	And especially among professing Christians, it is evil and idiotic to an extreme.
	For, I would think, a rather obvious reason, which is that Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, was a Jew.
	All of the apostles were Jews.
	Paul was a Jew.
	They were all Jewish.
	Christianity is founded upon Judaism.
	In fact, I heard someone say once that the thing that really kind of is strange about Christianity, one of the things that separates it from other religions, one of the very unique things about it, is that it is the only religion in the world that agrees with one other religion.
	Christianity affirms all of Judaism, in that it affirms the Old Testament.
	Now we have the New Testament, which rests upon the pillars of the Old Testament.
	We have that additional testament then, of which on that point we certainly do not agree, and that is obviously an essential point.
	It is the center point, the centerpiece of the Christian faith.
	But we are in full agreement on the Old Testament.
	So, which I would think is rather significant, right?
	So how can a Christian hate Jews then?
	How do you think that conversation will go when you stand before your Lord on Judgment Day?
	How are you going to explain to your Jewish Lord that you An anti-Semite Christian, to me, seems a bit like a racist white jazz musician or something.
	I mean, how could you possibly hate the people who founded the thing that you've given your life to?
	You may as well hate yourself.
	You do sort of hate yourself in that case, and I think that bigotry, what lies at the root of bigotry, much of the time is a kind of self-loathing in all forms of bigotry, but particularly when it comes to any Christian who hates Jews.
	But with bigotry in general, to deny, to reject the dignity of an entire group of human beings is to deny and reject the inherent dignity of all human beings, which is to say that you reject your own dignity as well.
	Now, we should also stipulate, I think it's important to note and to be clear that anti-Semitism obviously is a huge problem around the world, has been throughout history, has always been.
	And in America, there are fringe, whack job, crazy, but clearly dangerous groups that also share that anti-Semitism.
	But, I think we can say, safely, that antisemitism is not at all common among modern American Christians.
	Not at all common.
	Bigotry in general, I would say, is not common among modern American Christians, because we understand that Jesus condemns all forms of hatred.
	When it comes to Jewish people, I think it's true that, and I'm biased, but I don't think anyone can really disagree, that the biggest supporters of Jewish people and of Israel, outside of Judaism itself, are Christians.
	And specifically, evangelical Christians.
	Now, when this event was unfolding, I wanted to see what was going on, of course, stay up to date, so I could either watch cable news or I could go online.
	That's the choice that we all have, and that's the ultimate lose-lose, the ultimate no-win situation.
	But I usually go with the internet, and that's usually where I go for my news, and especially when there's a breaking news thing, I'm on the internet, not really watching TV, because I can't stand the theatrics of cable news in the wake of tragedy or at any other point.
	But the problem with being online, on social media, when something like this is happening, is that you get a view of humanity at its absolute worst.
	So as per usual, as to be expected, If you were online when this was all going on, you would have seen that people were immediately politicizing the tragedy without any hesitation.
	The narratives were being formed.
	The mud was being flung.
	The sickening, almost gleeful fervor of people who believe that a mass killing will be useful to them politically and ideologically, all of that was on display.
	And we're so used to that display.
	We're so used to that spectacle that there's almost no point in bringing it up or complaining about it at this point.
	It's not going to change.
	It's never going to change.
	But I do bring it up here because I think it speaks in some ways to the question of why this stuff happens, which is the question that we always have.
	Why is this happening?
	And these mass killings do seem to be happening with a certain terrible frequency.
	It's true that the media may exaggerate the frequency of mass killings for political reasons.
	They'll tell you that there have been, whatever, 200 school shootings in a year or some crazy number like that, which simply is not true.
	And there's no reason, not only is it cynical and awful to lie about something like this, but there's no reason to lie about it because there are plenty of real examples that you can use.
	And so, no matter how frequent it is, no matter how that stacks up compared to other points in history, we know that it's far too frequent now.
	And so why?
	Why is it happening?
	Well, we've already talked about bigotry.
	Clearly, bigotry plays a big part.
	But that's not the whole story, because even the average rabid bigot probably isn't going to go and kill anybody.
	You've got a subset of bigots, and among those bigots, there's a smaller subset of bigots who are willing and who may actually go out and do something like this.
	Because there's something else there.
	There's bigotry, there's hate, but there's something else.
	There's another ingredient, I think, that's needed in order to make a mass killer.
	And I think you can see that ingredient.
	You can observe it by looking at the kinds of people who excitedly exploit these kinds of events and practically cheer when the culprit ends up being someone from the other side.
	Because those people I mean, it really seems like they are happy when this happens.
	They are happy when it happens if it's something that they can use.
	There are people like that.
	That's really what it seems like.
	They would never say that.
	They would never be explicit about it.
	They would never admit it.
	But when you listen to them, when you see the way they carry on, there doesn't appear to be any sadness.
	A person who does that, I think that's a person who has a complete lack of empathy.
	thing right after the bodies have hit, a second after the bodies hit the ground, I'm going
	to grab it and I'm going to use it as a club to beat my political enemies with.
	A person who does that, I think that's a person who has a complete lack of empathy.
	That is a person who is callous, who is empty, who is unable to recognize, it would seem,
	the humanity of their fellow humans.
	They see these kinds of events.
	They don't see the cost in human life.
	That's not the point to them.
	That doesn't register on them.
	They just see, oh, good, well, here's a point I can raise in an argument.
	I think among the ingredients that make a mass killer, the indifference to human life, this sort of hollow, unhuman disposition, this emptiness, this all is, if you will, the yeast that makes the bread rise.
	And my point is that you find that ingredient, and this is the really terrifying truth, but you find that ingredient in the hearts of many people, of apparently normal people.
	Of every person who goes on Twitter seconds after the bodies hit the ground and cheerfully uses a mass killing to their advantage in an argument, all of those people have a bit of this ingredient within them.
	Now, do I think that all of them are going to become mass killers?
	No, because they need the other ingredients, right?
	But they are part of the way there.
	And I would even say a significant part of the way there.
	Because that is the main thing that you need.
	To cook up a mass killer, the main thing, more than anything else, is indifference, callousness, lack of empathy, emptiness.
	Because with that ingredient, you don't necessarily even need the hatred and bigotry.
	There have been plenty of mass killers who It would seem they have hatred, but they don't appear to have any special bigotries.
	The main thing is they are completely empty.
	And it's easy, I think, to become like that in this country.
	It's easy to become, at a minimum, desensitized.
	To the loss of human life because we hear about it so much and it just becomes, it can become, if we're not careful, part of the background noise.
	It can become just a thing, a news cycle that you read about and then move on.
	But then even more than that, I think when we're, we spend so much time online, It's never a surprise to me with these mass killers that you find that they spend so much time staring at screens, so much time online, in these various internet forums and whatever.
	It's almost every time you find that.
	And that's no surprise to me, because when you spend so much time immersed in this world, in this kind of insulated, anonymous world where you're
	interacting with a lot of different people, but it's very easy in those interactions, in that
	artificial cyber world, it's easy in those interactions to forget that that's an actual other human
	being. And I think if you are in that environment enough too much, and you don't keep a proper
	perspective, eventually you may find yourself, even when you're outside of that environment,
	walking around in the real world, you still have that same desensitized, compassionless
	mentality.
	Just look at, again, we get so used to it.
	Look at any of the horrible comments that you see under news articles or YouTube videos, people telling other people to kill themselves and so on and so forth.
	And we say, well, that's normal.
	That's just how people are.
	No, it's not.
	It may be normal for the Internet, but it's not a normal thing for people.
	You say something like that to someone, it doesn't matter that you're online saying it.
	That is a horrible, horrific, evil, wicked, disgusting, despicable thing to say to someone.
	And the fact that you're saying it online makes no difference.
	It's still just as evil.
	But the fact that we think that, well, you're online and you're saying these things, so somehow it's not quite as bad.
	Well, see, that's the problem.
	And I don't know, I think people can, It builds a kind of mentality that I think can ultimately contribute to this.
	All right, one other thing I want to talk about, switching gears.
	Dennis Prager had an interesting column on the Daily Wire yesterday.
	He was talking about his experience car shopping recently and what it taught him about young people.
	And he says that That the young salespeople that he encountered while he was car shopping, they were friendly, they were very sweet, but they knew nothing about cars, he said, and they didn't appear very anxious to actually land a sale.
	They didn't seem very ambitious.
	They didn't know anything about cars.
	They didn't really care about selling them.
	And he pointed out that young people, millennials, tend to be less ambitious and less knowledgeable about things.
	So he was using this anecdote as a way of illustrating that point.
	Now, there's plenty of truth in what he says, and I enjoyed his column.
	I found it interesting.
	I do think, for the record, that the problem is not confined to millennials and to young people.
	I think it's more cultural than generational.
	I've, like we all have, I have also encountered plenty of not very knowledgeable, not very ambitious, not very helpful customer service people in my day, and people in general.
	And I would not for a moment say that a significant majority of them have been millennials.
	I've dealt with plenty of older people who fall into that same category.
	One example, I was at a restaurant a few days ago, the waiter, Probably in his 40s or 50s, and he was one of the worst customer service people I've ever come across in my entire life.
	He was absolutely horrible.
	And so, you know, that's not uncommon, right?
	And I've had plenty of customer service interactions with people that are about my age or younger, and they're very knowledgeable, very ambitious, very energetic, and all that kind of stuff.
	So you get it across the board.
	I do think a lack of ambition is a problem among Millennials, more than it's a problem among older generations, certainly.
	Ignorance, lack of knowledge, I don't think that's uniquely a Millennial problem at all.
	I have run-ins with ignorant people all the time, mostly online, but also in the real world quite a bit, and plenty of them are older.
	I find plenty of incredible ignorance and frankly, stupidity among older people and among younger people.
	So I think again, that's kind of even.
	But lack of ambition.
	Yeah, that's more uniquely a young person problem.
	It's a bad, it is a real problem too.
	But even that, to some extent, there's another side of that coin.
	And so on the other side, You have boomers who I think in life have, some of them, many of them, have tended to be, you might say, too ambitious or ambitious in the wrong way.
	Valuing money above all else, being very materialistic at the expense of their families and their marriages, which is why the boomer generation has been a disaster for the marital institution.
	The boomer generation has been a wrecking ball.
	On the marital institution, divorce was epidemic in the 80s and 90s.
	And a lot of that was because our parents' generation had decided that professional success was the only thing that mattered.
	So they were ambitious at the office, at work, about making more money.
	They were not necessarily ambitious about being good spouses and good parents.
	This is a generalized comment, I realize.
	It's not the case for all of them.
	But if we're going to make generalized comments about one generation, we can make them about the others too, right?
	My point here is simply that there are flaws in every generation.
	And if older generations want to convey anything to younger people, they have to begin by admitting what they did wrong, what their flaws are.
	And this is one of the reasons why millennials have closed themselves off and are not interested in hearing the criticisms of baby boomers, because we can look at the baby boomer generation and say, wow, what a disaster this has been in so many ways.
	There are some very obvious problems in that generation that have manifested themselves in catastrophic ways.
	So if you're not going to acknowledge that, And all you're going to do is look at younger people who, by the way, your own kids who you raised, this is the generation you raised, we should clarify, and you're going to look at them and blame them for everything.
	Well, it's just how are we supposed to take that?
	We can't take it seriously.
	We couldn't possibly take it seriously.
	So there has to be some self-analysis and some self-criticizing.
	I don't see that often among the older generations.
	And I say this as a millennial.
	I criticize millennials all the time.
	Millennials criticize the millennial generation all the time.
	It's a very common thing.
	And I have spilled much ink over the last four or five years doing exactly that.
	You just don't find that as much with boomers.
	I'm not saying it never happens.
	There seems to be less of a willingness to look within and say, wow, we really screwed up in these areas.
	Now, I don't mean that as a comment directed at Dennis Prager, by the way, who I think is a brilliant guy and I really admire him.
	I just mean this as a general comment.
	But to Prager's point, OK, I don't want to I don't want to I'm not going to try to ignore it.
	I think it's let's focus just on millennials here.
	There's a lot of truth to what he said.
	No matter how prevalent these problems may also be in other generations, he's absolutely right.
	That among millennials, there is not enough passion, not enough ambition, not enough knowledge, not enough expertise, not enough skill.
	But the lack of passion and ambition to me is one.
	Because I've got a lot of problems myself, a lot of flaws.
	That's one that I haven't struggled with as much.
	So it's hard for me to even understand, like, how could you be a young person and not have goals and dreams and the willingness to go out and grab them?
	To me, that just seems so natural.
	And so when I see that in younger people, I also feel like what, what in the world is wrong with you?
	But I think if we're going to talk about that, let's talk about why that might be the case.
	What has gone wrong?
	That has potentially created multiple generations now of people who do not seem very knowledgeable and do not seem very ambitious.
	Well, if we're going to try to figure out why, and I don't mean to beat up on one of my favorite punching bags here, but, you know, I'm sorry, we do have to look at the education system.
	If you're talking about a young person who's 25 years old, well, this is someone who just recently emerged from the education system and has been in that system his entire life up until this point.
	So if there's something wrong with him, And especially if there's something wrong with an entire generation of people around that age, it makes sense to look at the system that they spent their formative years in.
	You probably can find the source of many of these problems in that environment, logically.
	So, it must be said that the education system is simply not set up To develop skills, or to give a deep base of knowledge in any subject at all, or to find and ignite a person's passion, or anything like that.
	It does the opposite on every score, and it is even designed to do the opposite.
	It creates people.
	This is what the education system does.
	It creates people who are like very large, sprawling, wide kiddie pools.
	It creates a person who, you know, the typical person coming out of the education system is going to be like a one mile wide, two inch deep kiddie pool.
	Very broad, very shallow.
	At the end of 12 or 13 years in the education system, a kid will have a tiny bit of knowledge on many subjects.
	He will not be competent in any of them.
	He will have no area of expertise or specialty or special interest.
	And then he will go to college as a kind of blank slate, which is how it's designed.
	That's what the colleges want, right?
	And he'll have no idea what he's good at, no idea what he cares about, no real idea what his interests are.
	And he'll decide sort of randomly then what his major is going to be.
	And at the end of four years, five years at college, he'll be 22, 23, 24 years old with still a very shallow but broad base of knowledge, no expertise, no skills, no special interests.
	And his one area of more in-depth knowledge, his major, will be maybe an area that he doesn't even care about because he picked it arbitrarily and without knowing anything about it before he chose it.
	Now, as I've shared before, When I was in school, I realized very early on that I was especially interested in writing and history.
	I also realized that I was especially terrible at math, and I hated it, and with a passion, and it just did not click for me.
	It clicked, you know, up through arithmetic and the really basic stuff, it clicked, clicked, clicked.
	Once we started getting into algebra and things like that, that's when it left me behind and I did not have the brain for it.
	Whereas, I can remember even being in, you know, in a much younger student and looking around at some of my Some of my fellow classmates who seem to struggle with writing and reading and things like that.
	And it was hard for me to like, how could you struggle with this?
	And I would see kids who are really brilliant at math and seem to be very smart, but then it's like they write, they were, you know, I'd see how they were writing.
	They're writing at a level that was three or four steps below where I was.
	And that's how people are, you know?
	So here's the problem.
	There were the subjects that I was really interested in, and I really cared about, and I was good at.
	In an education system that's effective, And in an education system that is set on creating the kind of people that Dennis Prager wants, and that I want, and that most of us want, in that kind of system, I would have been able to double or triple up on the subjects that I really cared about, dive into them, explore my interests in those areas, develop those skills, learn those subjects.
	And at the end of my time in school, I would have a deep base of knowledge, a deep reservoir of knowledge on a few subjects.
	And I would then have the beginnings of a skill and a vocation and a calling.
	Right?
	Most people, unless you're Leonardo da Vinci, unless you are a historic genius, most people are never going to have a deep reservoir of knowledge on every subject.
	The most you can hope for, to be a really competent, interesting, interested, successful, knowledgeable, smart person, For most people like that, you have that deep base of knowledge on a few subjects.
	But the school's not interested in that.
	They're not trying to create people like that.
	Instead, the school says, no, you can't spend too much time on those subjects that you care about and that you're good at because we need you to take Spanish for some reason and trigonometry and you need a credit in some kind of art class and you need to take physical education for one year for some reason and oh yeah we need you to take something like aquatic science too you know because why not and um and oh you have to keep advancing into more and more advanced math classes and science classes even if you have not mastered the first level we're gonna gonna push you on anyway um
	But the problem is there's no point in knowing just a little bit of Spanish, or a little bit of calculus, or a little bit of aquatic science.
	It's great to know a lot about those subjects.
	If you're bilingual, great!
	That's a great advantage to have.
	If you know calculus backwards and forwards and you really know math and you're a math expert, great!
	There's a lot you can do with that.
	And it's not just do with it, but that will make you a more knowledgeable, intelligent person.
	So that's all fantastic.
	But you can't do anything with a little on those subjects.
	So with something like a foreign language, there is no point Enforcing a kid starting in ninth grade, from like ninth to 11th grade, to take a couple of Spanish classes for 45 minutes, you know, every few days for, you know, it's like, there's no point in that.
	You're not going to learn the language that way.
	You're not going to really learn anything.
	The most you could hope is that at the end of that, they're going to know how to say a couple of sentences.
	They can ask for the bathroom, name the colors, you know, and that's the most they'll know.
	But that's nothing.
	That's not even hardly the beginning of something.
	There's no point.
	With those kinds of subjects, either you've got to really know them, or you might as well not know them.
	So I graduated high school, and I had that very shallow bit of knowledge on all these different areas.
	But what happens with shallow water?
	It evaporates.
	And so that's what happened with me.
	A lot of my knowledge, whatever little bit of knowledge, it was forced into my head on advanced math concepts and foreign languages and aquatic science.
	Whatever little bit of knowledge was, all of that evaporated.
	It was already useless.
	I couldn't have done anything with it.
	But then within a couple of years, it was completely gone because I didn't care about it.
	I didn't try to build on it.
	I didn't want to.
	I knew I didn't want to.
	And so it just went away.
	What was the point?
	There was no point.
	It was a total waste of time.
	But you know what?
	There is a point in knowing just a little bit about the mechanics of a car.
	There is a point in knowing just a little bit about, like, budgeting and things like that.
	Because even if you never expand on that base of knowledge, even the bit you know will be useful to you.
	If the only thing you know about a car is you can point to a couple of the parts of the engine, you can change the oil, check the fluids, change the tire.
	Maybe when you hear the clanging of the engine, you can kind of figure out it might be this or that.
	If that's all you know about cars, that's not enough to get a job as a car mechanic, but that's going to be very useful to you.
	So if the schools are going to force kids to develop a little bit of knowledge in certain areas, why not those areas?
	Why not force every kid to take at least a class about cars?
	We all drive cars.
	That's actually useful knowledge that kids could use, even if they never master it.
	But the schools say, no, well, we don't have time for that.
	We don't have time for that because we need you taking calculus when you're in 11th grade, even if you'll never touch math ever again when you graduate.
	I know people say, well, what do you mean?
	You use algebra?
	Is it daily?
	You could use algebra every day.
	No, you don't.
	I have lived, you know, I like to say pretty competently and successfully as an adult for many years now.
	I have never really used algebra, ever.
	Never used it.
	Whatever little bit of math I need to do, I just pull out my phone, do it on the calculator.
	That's the modern world for you.
	I have no need for it.
	So it just doesn't make any sense.
	The subjects where a little bit of knowledge would be useful, those are precisely the subjects where kids are given no knowledge.
	And the subjects where there's no point to those subjects unless you're going to master it, kids are forced to develop a little bit of knowledge.
	It's just a total waste of time.
	So it's no surprise that young people have little knowledge and little in the way of interest and ambition because these things have not been fostered.
	They have, in fact, been stifled purposefully by the school system.
	The school system wants broad, shallow, docile people.
	And it will resort to pretty much any measure to create those kinds of people.
	And so that's how you end up with my generation, or at least that's maybe not the whole story.
	That's a big part of the story.
	What can we do about it?
	What can we do differently?
	Well, I think for the education system, for the education system to really function properly and to really create knowledgeable, intelligent, competent people, I think for that to happen there would need to be a total overhaul of the education system.
	The education system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
	I think it's just completely wrong in how it goes about almost everything.
	But that's not going to happen anytime soon.
	It might never happen.
	Which means that most of us, what needs to happen instead is that once we get out of the system, And we are young adults.
	That's when the real work begins of actually learning and growing and developing skills, developing knowledge.
	I've said before, and I really believe it to be the case, that almost everything I know now, I learned after I graduated.
	Almost everything.
	So that's the work that we need to do.
	All right, we'll leave it there.
	Thanks for watching.
	Thanks for listening.

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