Ep. 154 - The Hypocritical Reaction To The Kareem Hunt Video
An NFL player is in big trouble for hitting a woman. But from a modern, enlightened, egalitarian perspective, why should it be any great sin for a man to hit a woman? Also, we’ll look at the prison reform bill that President Trump supports. Finally, “Baby It’s Cold Outside” has been banned from a radio station. Will they also ban all of the other sexual charged songs that comprise 90 percent of modern music? Date: 12-03-2018
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, an NFL player is in big, big trouble for hitting a woman.
But from a modern, enlightened, feminist perspective, why should it be any great sin for a man to hit a woman?
We'll talk about that.
Also, we'll look at the prison reform bill that President Trump supports and Baby, It's Cold Outside has been banned from a radio station.
Will they also ban all of the other sexually charged songs that comprise 90% of modern music?
I'm guessing not.
That seems a bit inconsistent.
We'll talk about all that coming up on The Matt Walsh Show.
Alright, as you can see, it is December now, so I'm wearing my rainbow cardigan, which I wear with no shame.
And I've got the fireplace.
Well, the fireplace isn't really going, but it's there, so I've got the whole Christmas vibe.
The Advent vibe, I should say.
I'm going to get myself into trouble by giving a horribly offensive opinion today.
Inappropriate, frankly, just terrible opinion about something.
Kareem Hunt was the star running back of the Kansas City Chiefs.
The Kansas City Chiefs, who, by the way, are playing my Baltimore Ravens this coming Sunday, which is really not relevant to the point at all, but I just thought I'd mention it.
Hunt was cut from his team and suspended by the league after video surfaced, security camera footage came out, of Hunt allegedly brutalizing a woman at a hotel in Cleveland several months ago.
Now, I use the word brutalize, and there are quotes around it because that's the word the media has used, and that's the word that TMZ, which obtained the video and put it out originally, that's the one that they used to describe the video.
It's Hunt brutalizing a woman.
Now, If you watch the video, that's not exactly what you see.
I don't know if I would use the word brutalize.
I mean, brutalize is, when you hear, oh, there's video of an NFL player brutalizing a woman, it puts a certain image in your mind right away, right?
And then, well, that's not exactly what you see.
What you see, if you watch the footage, and it's just, there's no audio, it's just the visual.
You see Hunt along with some other guys in the hallway of a hotel.
You could tell just from, even without any words or anything, you could tell that they all appear to be drunk.
You see the guys, you see a group of women as well.
You see that the women and the men are shouting at each other.
One of the guys, Hunt, is really upset about something.
He's getting very angry.
And he's yelling in particular at another woman who's yelling at him.
And they're shouting at each other.
At one point, he shoves her to get her out of his face.
But she comes back and then smacks him in the face.
And at this point, his friends are holding him back, and she keeps coming back to him.
Now, this guy is obviously furious.
He's just been smacked in the face.
She keeps coming back to him.
At one point, she gets knocked over.
When a guy is knocked over and then falls into her accidentally, she falls on the ground.
Then a couple of minutes later, as Hunt is walking by the woman while she's kind of crouched on the ground, he kicks her in, apparently, looks like maybe in the thigh or the leg or something like that.
And that's the end of the video.
Now, this has gotten a lot of attention.
People are outraged at Hunt.
Everybody is outraged.
As I said, he lost his job.
He's suspended by the league.
There are some people who think he'll never play again.
I think he probably will play again in the league.
But everyone's very upset at him.
People should be upset at him.
He behaves terribly in the video.
He could have just walked away, but he didn't.
And the kick at the end was clearly egregious.
But, let's just imagine something for a moment, okay?
Imagine the exact same situation.
Everything is exactly the same, except the woman is a man.
Okay, so imagine that.
Everything's exactly the same, but the woman is a man.
And let's just say that the man is the exact same height, weight, everything as the woman.
So let's say it's a scrawny little white guy, and he's getting into a shouting match with this NFL player.
He gets shot, he comes back, smacks the NFL player in the face, keeps coming back, and eventually he's knocked over and Hunt kicks him.
Okay, imagine that.
Now do you think there'd be anywhere near the same level of outrage?
Do you think that Hunt would potentially lose his whole career over it?
Do you think he even would have lost his job?
Do you think that he would have even gotten cut from his team?
No.
Obviously not.
In fact, you know, I think arguably, if it was a white guy, this is a white woman, so if it was a, if we keep the races the same, And it was a white guy acting that way to Kareem Hunt, and then he was treated the same way in response.
I think probably there'd be people taking Kareem Hunt's side, saying that he was in the right.
They may even accuse the white guy of racism.
Who knows?
But no matter what anyone, you know, even if they don't take Karim Khan's side, I think the response from everybody in that situation would just be to yawn and say, who cares?
You know, everyone would say, well, these are just a bunch of drunk people in a hallway at a hotel.
They got into a scuffle, whatever.
That's the response everyone would have.
But not with this.
There is obviously a double standard here.
And it's a double standard that I personally am okay with.
I'm okay with the double standard.
Um, my problem is that feminists and progressives should not be okay with it.
They are okay with it, but they shouldn't.
Because these are the people who are always saying that there shouldn't be a double standard when it comes to men and women.
The standard should be the same.
They should be treated exactly the same.
That's what feminists and progressives say.
Yet, when it comes to situations like this, they all of a sudden abandon that position and, um, And that's the problem. Now, before I get into how progressives
should view cases like this, I'll just give you my take personally. I will say, first of
all, it's very hard for me to call the woman a victim in this case. I think that that's, to say
that she was brutalized and she was a victim, I think is absurd.
She chose to get into a shouting match with this guy.
She smacked him, apparently, in the video.
She kept coming back to him.
She could have just left, but she didn't.
She could have put an end to the confrontation at any time by just leaving, but she didn't.
Probably because she was drunk, and so was he, presumably, and so the situation just blew up from there.
And she has some culpability in that.
To say that she has no culpability is to treat this grown adult woman like a child, which she isn't.
And that's, from what I've seen from the response, people watch this video and they say, oh, that poor woman, that woman, she's been victimized.
What are you talking?
She played a role in this, and she also physically attacked Hunt.
So I think we need to stipulate that to begin with.
It's been alleged by Hunt's friends that the woman, or one of the women, hurled a racial slur.
Now, I'm not sure if that's true.
They also say that what started the whole confrontation is that they were partying with
the girls in the room and then they found out that the girls were only 19 when they
thought they were 21, and so they told the girls they had to leave.
The women claim that the fight started because Hunt or one of the men wanted to get intimate
with the woman and she refused, so she was kicked out.
Now, who knows what really started it?
I have no idea.
It's a he said, she said type of situation.
I think maybe we could just, like, toss out the most extreme accusations from either side, and we could say, well, maybe there was no racial slur, and they weren't getting kicked out for refusing to have sex with the men, so let's just put those to the side, and we're left with a bunch of drunk idiots at 3 a.m.
having an argument.
That's basically what we're left with.
Now, that said, Hunt himself could have de-escalated the situation, but he didn't.
He could have walked away, but he didn't.
The kick at the end was completely unnecessary.
As I said, egregious, bad, terrible.
Just retaliatory because he was angry.
That's the only reason he did it.
Obviously it wasn't self-defense or anything like that.
So he behaved very wrongly.
And apparently he also lied to his employers about this situation, so he deserves to be fired just for that alone.
And because I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy...
And I admit that I'm old-fashioned.
I do believe in chivalry.
And I believe that women are the physically weaker, fairer sex, and therefore, we as men should never use our strength against them, except in maybe some extreme cases of self-defense.
So, I, I, which, which, this was not self-defense at all.
He was not, he was not fearing for his life or his physical safety because of this 19-year-old drunk woman.
So, I ascribe to the maxim that a man should never hit a woman.
I do not ascribe to the maxim that all women are helpless, innocent flowers.
I don't ascribe to that.
And I don't think that a woman is automatically a victim just because the man doesn't live up to the chivalric standard.
I do expect men to live up to that standard, but not all women are necessarily victims just because men don't.
That's just my view.
But what is the supposedly modern enlightened feminist view?
Well, that view is that men and women are equal and that men should treat women exactly as they would treat other men.
That's what we're told all the time.
We're told that women are not necessarily weaker than men, and they certainly shouldn't be treated as if they're weaker.
That is the supposedly modern feminist view when it comes to the relationship between men and women.
And if people are consistently applying that view, then they would look at situations like this.
And they would say, well, Kareem Hunt is just treating that girl exactly as he would treat any guy.
If he got into a shoving match with a guy, and the guy smacked him in the face, he would react the same way, presumably.
Probably worse.
I imagine that if it were me, and I got into a shouting match with Kareem Hunt, and I smacked him in the face, I would probably fare much worse than the woman did.
So, his crime Isn't simply that he attacked a woman, it's that he treated a woman almost like he would treat a guy.
He reacted to her almost the same way that he would react to any man.
That's his sin, right?
And if the modern enlightened feminist person is being consistent, they would just shrug their shoulders at this.
The same way they would if it was two men having this altercation.
Again, if the woman was a man of the same physical stature, nobody would care.
We would all say, well, that's what happens when you get into an altercation like this with an NFL player.
That's what happens.
You shouldn't do that.
But that isn't what the modern enlightened feminist says in this case.
All of a sudden, they rediscover chivalry.
And they say that the worst thing in the world that a man can do is hit a woman.
You should never hit a woman, they say.
The problem is they make that statement and they don't follow it through.
They don't accept the full implications of that statement.
Like I said, I have no problem with the idea that a man should never hit a woman.
As long as we allow for certain qualifications.
Maybe I do have a problem with that idea, actually.
To just say, blanket statement, a man should never hit a woman, that's obviously absurd.
There could be legitimate cases of self-defense.
A man has every right to assert himself physically in an effort to defend himself if he's actually being attacked and really needs to defend himself.
But aside from that, yeah, a man should not hit a woman.
I believe in that maxim, and I believe in the truth that underlies the maxim.
And that truth is this, that the sexes are not equal.
Men and women are different.
One is not inferior to the other, but they are different.
Men are stronger than women.
Men are more aggressive, are more physical than women.
The whole point of chivalry is to recognize That fact.
And then to say to men, okay, you have this strength, you have this aggression, you have this physicality, more so than women do, and so you should use it in service to those who are weaker to protect them, not to dominate them or intimidate them.
And that's why people don't like chivalry these days, because chivalry begins with an acknowledgement of the inequality of the sexes.
But progressives won't acknowledge that.
They won't agree with that.
Yet they still say, or they'll still treat a man hitting a woman as much, much, much worse than a man hitting a man.
And again, they can't claim that, well, no, it's just because this particular woman happens to be smaller and weaker than that particular man, and so that's why we're so upset about it.
No, that's not why they're upset, because NFL players get into fights with weaker men all the time.
Most men in the world are going to be weaker than NFL players.
These are going to be some of the strongest and biggest guys around.
And you hear about NFL players getting into fights at bars and stuff like that all the time.
And nobody cares.
Nobody goes and looks at the security footage and says, wow, that man seems a lot smaller than an NFL player and gets really upset about it.
Nobody cares.
Only if it's a woman do we care.
And that doesn't make any sense if we're taking the feminist view.
If we're going to take the feminist view and we're going to take it seriously, then that reaction makes no sense.
So what I would say to progressives and feminists is you've got to decide.
What's it going to be?
Are men and women unequal?
Do we expect them to recognize the inequality in each other and to respond accordingly?
In other words, here's really the question that you have to ask yourself.
When a man is interacting with a woman, do you want him to treat her like a woman?
To recognize the differences?
To recognize that she's a woman and treat her differently because of it?
Or, do you want men to treat women exactly as they would treat other men?
You have to decide between those two.
You can't have it both ways.
You can't say, well, sometimes treat her like a woman, sometimes pretend she's not a woman.
That doesn't work that way.
It can't work that way.
Your message to men, that cannot be your message.
Your message cannot be something as arbitrary as that.
Your message to men is either forget about the differences, treat women like you treat men, or it's treat a woman like a woman.
What's it going to be?
Which is it?
And then have the courage of your convictions.
Stop being so cowardly.
Have some courage.
Be consistent.
And if you're going to say, well, men should treat women like men, then you have to look
at the Kareem Hunt situation, watch the video and say, no, okay.
I mean, that's, that's exactly what he would have done to a man.
And if those were a bunch of men going at it, nobody would care.
That's what you have to say.
Only people like me, only people who are more conservative and old fashioned believe in
We're the only ones who really have any right to be especially upset when a man hits a woman.
Because we do recognize the differences, and we do expect men to treat women like women.
But if you don't expect that, you can't all of a sudden change your tune.
So just decide.
What's it gonna be?
And let me know what your answer is.
Let everyone know what your answer is, and then we can proceed accordingly.
All right, something else in the news I wanted to mention briefly.
President Trump has thrown his support behind a bipartisan measure called the First Step Act.
And the idea with the First Step Act is to reduce the federal prison population and supposedly correct some of the injustices that the people in that system have suffered.
So some of the things that the bill will do Some of it seems pretty... I don't think anyone could have a problem with it.
Like, for instance, it will end the practice of shackling pregnant women as they deliver their babies.
It also will make it easier to release terminally ill and elderly prisoners so they can live out the last few days or months of their lives.
With their families, and it will try to ensure that prisoners are placed within driving distance of their families when they're in prison.
So, all of that is fine.
I don't see why anyone would necessarily oppose any of that.
The problem, though, is that the bill intends to reduce the federal prison population by a lot more than just a small percentage of terminally ill and elderly prisoners.
It wants to cut the population in half.
And proponents of the bill say that it will do this by providing a path for nonviolent drug offenders and other similar offenders who are not a danger to their communities to be released.
Well, that sounds okay, but let me read a bit from a Weekly Standard piece which enumerates the issues with this whole approach.
It says, but if the system is too big, the First Step Act Might not be the appropriate fix.
In its drive to act, Congress may pass a bill that would unduly free numerous federal offenders, including many drug traffickers and some 4,000 prisoners, whose early release would come without regard to their future dangerousness.
This is because the federal system, relative to state and local incarcerations, is comparably small.
Just 8% of all prisoners in the U.S.
are incarcerated at the federal level, about 180,000 people total.
That number has fallen year over year since 2012.
Of those in the system today, about 30% are incarcerated for immigration offenses and
are mostly excluded from First Step.
Another 30% are in for drugs.
More than 97% of those are drug traffickers.
By contrast, there are only about 200 possession offenders in the federal system.
The remaining 40% are charged with a mix of fairly serious crimes, 12% for firearms offenses, 12% for fraud and other white-collar crimes, about 3% for child pornography offenses, and the remaining 10% or so for a mix of mostly violent offenses.
So, it seems as though there just aren't enough of the low-level drug offenders in the federal system to make this work.
These efforts should be concentrated on the state level, where most of the prisoners are in general, and most of the non-violent prisoners are there.
So, I fully agree that we shouldn't really be tossing drug addicts in prison.
If somebody's only crime is trying to buy heroin for themselves, then I think it's crazy to just toss those people in prison, especially when you have so many violent people out there who I think are more deserving, and we should save the space for them.
But that's not how you generally end up in federal prison.
So when you hear about this, and people are talking about it and saying, well, it's bipartisan, so it's great.
First of all, general rule, You should be especially suspicious of bipartisan bills.
The bipartisan ones are the ones that you should be suspicious about.
And in this case, for good reason, because it's being sold.
They're targeting the federal prisoners, but the types of prisoners that they're supposedly looking to free and let out and be merciful towards, there just aren't enough of those types in the federal system for this to make any sense whatsoever.
So, like, with most of the serious problems in society, if it's going to be solved, it has to be solved on a more localized level.
And that especially is the case here.
Last thing, a radio station in Cleveland, Star 102, has banned the song Baby It's Cold Outside because the song allegedly promotes date rape.
Now, this is an annual tradition, of course, people getting upset about this song, because the song is, you've heard it, obviously, I assume, the song is sung by a man and a woman, and the woman spends the whole song trying to, or the man spends the whole song trying to convince the woman to spend the night at his place, while she keeps saying that she's gotta go.
And the point that he keeps raising in the song is that it's cold outside, you know, as the title suggests.
He also says that the snow is up to your knees out there, which is kind of a legitimate concern to raise, I think.
He raises a few good points in the song, really.
He says that the snow is up to your knees, you can't drive, the roads are treacherous.
He says there are no cabs, so we have to assume that this woman is You know, a few miles probably from her house.
The snow's up to her knees.
The roads are shut down.
You know, what is she going to do?
Walk through a blizzard?
So if you want to be optimistic, you would say that the song is really... The song isn't about sex at all.
The song is about a man trying to save a woman's life by stopping her from venturing out into a blizzard in the middle of the night.
I mean, she could die.
He's trying to save her life in the song.
Now, the more cynical And perhaps correct interpretation of the lyrics is that the guy just wants to be intimate with the woman and so he's trying to convince her to stay.
Alright, let's just say for the sake of argument that that is really what's going on in this song.
I would be fine with people saying that the song is inappropriate.
I would even be fine with radio stations deciding not to play the song on their airwaves if they applied that same standard and that same criticism To 90% of the pop music and the rap music out there, because 90% of it is all about men trying to have sex with women, and women trying to have sex with men, or some other combination of sex is going on in these songs.
That's what 90% of modern music is about.
I mean, 90% is a conservative estimate.
It might actually be closer to, like, 100%.
And in most cases, the point The sexual point is made in a way that is much cruder and much more vulgar.
So what's always interesting about stuff like this is people hear this Baby It's Cold Outside and they say, oh, you know, that's really inappropriate.
You shouldn't be playing that song.
That's the kind of thing that you would expect.
Like, you would expect if someone is saying that about a song like that, you would expect that person to have a huge problem with almost all of the music on the radio, not just that one particular song.
And if they do, you know, if you're someone who you hate all this music and you don't like that song because it's hypersexual in your mind, then I say fine, you know, you're being consistent and I think maybe you're being a little overly sensitive, but that's fine.
I totally respect that point of view.
But to just single out that song, while maintaining that all the rest of this stuff is perfectly acceptable, when it is even more sexually charged, it is even more aggressive, and as I said, much cruder and much more vulgar, that just doesn't make any sense.
So yet again, there is a...
An inconsistency here.
I guess that's the theme today.
It's just people not consistently applying whatever standard they set.
They set the standard and then they refuse to consistently apply it.
And I think that's something we need to look at and make an effort.
Whatever your principles are, make an effort to apply them consistently.
That's the point.
All right.
Hope you guys have a blessed beginning of the Advent season.
And I'll talk to you tomorrow.
Godspeed.
Hey, I'm Ben Shapiro.
On today's show, we talked about the death of President George H.W.
Bush, the continued unfolding of Russiagate, and why the New York Times thinks the Rockettes are too white and why they're all weirdos.
