Kyler Murray won the Heisman so the media decided to dig through his old tweets to try and destroy him. What is the point of this repeated exercise? Also, a teacher was fired for refusing to pretend that a girl is a boy. And the International Space Station captured footage of an alien spacecraft. Date: 12-10-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Today on the Matt Wall Show, the media has set out to destroy a college athlete for no reason whatsoever. | |
| Also, a teacher has been fired for telling the truth, and an alien invasion is imminent. | |
| Space alien, not illegal alien. | |
| That invasion is happening too, but a space alien invasion is imminent, and there's footage that proves it. | |
| We'll talk about all that coming up on the Matt Wall Show. | |
| Don't mind my Christmas sweater. | |
| I don't know why you would mind it. | |
| It's delightful. | |
| See, I've got Spider-Man on there as well. | |
| I don't know if you can see that. | |
| I won't call it an ugly Christmas sweater, though, because it's actually a beautiful sweater. | |
| And that's what I don't like about the whole ugly sweater trend, is that I don't think the sweaters are ugly. | |
| I think that they're wonderful sweaters, and I would wear them all the time if it was socially acceptable. | |
| All right, so Kyler Murray, University of Oklahoma quarterback, won the Heisman Trophy over the weekend, which is a huge accomplishment for a young man. | |
| I'd imagine one of the best moments of his life, as it would be for anyone to win the Heisman Trophy. | |
| And I guess that's why the media felt that they had to ruin it. | |
| They saw that somebody was having a good moment, that they were getting attention for a good reason, and they said, wait a second, we can't allow this. | |
| Let's turn it into a negative story. | |
| So USA Today, among other outlets, but I believe it started with USA Today, and their reporter, Scott Gleason, decided to run an article Hours after Murray's big achievement, reporting on the homophobic tweets that he sent when he was 14 years old. | |
| I don't know what the tweets were. | |
| It doesn't matter. | |
| I don't care. | |
| I didn't look. | |
| They said that the tweets involved him using homophobic language with his friends, so I assume that he jokingly referred to one of his friends as an F-word, a slur for gays. | |
| I don't know, but who cares? | |
| It doesn't matter. | |
| He was 14. | |
| He was 14. | |
| Even if he had said it last week, I still wouldn't care. | |
| But he said it when he was 14. | |
| Offensive language from a 14-year-old boy does not matter. | |
| There is literally nothing that could make it matter. | |
| If it's your 14-year-old boy and you're his mother or something, then yeah, I could see why it would matter to you, that you would reprimand him and say, don't use that language. | |
| But in terms of The news quality or the newsworthiness, it has none. | |
| It has zero. | |
| In fact, it's less than zero in this case because this is offensive language from a 14-year-old boy six or seven years ago. | |
| Now, I want you to look at the way that this is phrased, because here's the first paragraph of the USA Today piece, hit piece, about Kyler Murray. | |
| It says, Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray had a Saturday to remember, but the Oklahoma quarterback's memorable night also, here's the part, the memorable night also helped resurface social media's memory of several homophobic tweets more than six years ago. | |
| That's an interesting way of phrasing it. | |
| It helped to resurface social media's memory of homophobic tweets from six years ago. | |
| Helped resurface. | |
| So they phrase it almost like the tweets literally resurfaced. | |
| Almost like they floated up from the bottom of the ocean and then washed ashore. | |
| Remember the movie The Mask? | |
| The Jim Carrey movie from the 90s? | |
| When the magical mask kind of gets jostled loose from its chest down at the bottom of the ocean and it floats to the top and then it washes ashore and for some reason Jim Carrey picks it up and puts it on. | |
| That's kind of the way, you almost have something, from the way that's phrased, you have something similar in mind. | |
| As if the tweets were contained in a magical chest at the bottom of the ocean and a whale bumped into it or something. | |
| And it made it float to the top and then it washed ashore and somebody was walking along the beach and just stumbled across it and said, oh, what's this? | |
| Oh, it looks like offensive tweets from a 14-year-old boy. | |
| I must go alert the masses. | |
| No, that's not the way this worked. | |
| This was not a passive process. | |
| Someone had to go looking for the tweets. | |
| And how did that someone, whether it was Scott Gleason or whoever else, how did they find the tweets? | |
| What method did they use to look for them? | |
| Well, they could have combed through six years worth of tweets to see if they could find anything, but that's probably not how it was done. | |
| That'd be a little bit inefficient. | |
| And in fact, the way that they really did it is in some ways maybe worse. | |
| Because what they would have had to do is they would have had to Plug in Kyler Murray's name to the Twitter search bar and then also put in, you know, the F word slur for gays, or they would have had to come up with a few offensive words and just plug it in to see what comes up, to see if Kyler Murray ever at any point in his life used those words on Twitter. | |
| And they would have done this just because he won the Heisman and for no other reason. | |
| Someone would have had to say, or multiple people in the media would have said, Well, this guy won the Heisman. | |
| Let's go see if he ever insulted gays. | |
| That is literally the thought process. | |
| That's the way it would have worked. | |
| Well, he's in the news for a good reason. | |
| Let's go see if we can find a reason to destroy him. | |
| And then what do you know? | |
| They found it. | |
| Mission accomplished. | |
| Now we can destroy him because Because why? | |
| Because he dared make the news for a positive reason? | |
| Because he dared accomplish something? | |
| You know, people often complain that the media never reports good news. | |
| Well, or they never report the positive news, and if it bleeds, it leads, right? | |
| They don't focus on the good stories. | |
| Well, it's actually worse than that, because what they do is, it's not just that they only report negative stories, it's that they will turn every story negative. | |
| So, they'll take even a positive story, and they'll turn it into a negative. | |
| Instead of doing a story about this exceptional young man and his great achievement, they decided to report on the language he used when he was 14. | |
| It's not as though there weren't other interesting angles they could have gone. | |
| So it's not like they're saying, well, yeah, he won the Heisman, but I mean, how much can you really say about that? | |
| The guy won the Heisman, right? | |
| We need more. | |
| We need more content. | |
| Okay, if you're looking for more content about Kyler Murray, How about the fact that he just won the Heisman as a college quarterback, but he's already been drafted by, I think, by the... | |
| By Oakland, I think, to play professional baseball. | |
| So this is a guy who just won the Heisman, and he could go play professional football, but he's going to play professional baseball. | |
| So that's how good he is at two different sports. | |
| That's interesting. | |
| I didn't even know that myself until I looked him up today. | |
| I don't really follow college football that closely. | |
| And I looked it up. | |
| I said, wow, that's interesting. | |
| How about doing a story about that? | |
| I mean, this guy could play either one of the sports. | |
| To be that talented in two different sports, that's an interesting angle. | |
| It's an interesting, positive, uplifting angle. | |
| Nobody gets hurt. | |
| No one's destroyed. | |
| It's just, why not report on that instead? | |
| If you're looking for a Kyler Murray content, how about that? | |
| What position is he going to play in baseball? | |
| How good is he at baseball? | |
| These are all things we could talk about if you're looking to do a Kyler Murray story. | |
| But instead you say, no, let's talk about his tweets from seven years ago. | |
| So, what is this? | |
| What's the point? | |
| Why do this? | |
| Why do this to people? | |
| Part of it is political, of course, as always. | |
| There's always a political element. | |
| Part of it is about buttressing the left's victim narrative. | |
| I think it's also just that there's also a lot of simply pure malevolence, pure maliciousness involved. | |
| Even putting politics and ideology aside, a lot of it is simply destroying people for the sake of it, just because, for entertainment. | |
| It really is the modern version of the Colosseum. | |
| I know that that analogy is maybe overused, but it really is in this case. | |
| It's like the Colosseum, except it's less honest. | |
| Because, at least back in the old Roman days, you would go to the Colosseum and you would watch two gladiators kill each other, or you would watch someone get ripped apart by lions. | |
| Whatever. | |
| Just a nice day out with the family. | |
| Nice wholesome family entertainment. | |
| And that's what you were doing. | |
| There was no hiding it. | |
| You were going to the Coliseum to watch somebody get ripped apart by lions. | |
| So if it was a date night with your wife and you got a babysitter, you would say, hey, honey, I heard they got a couple new lions. | |
| The guy down at the marketplace that was just arrested for trying to steal an apple from the produce stand, he's going to be ripped apart by a line. | |
| Do you want to go watch? | |
| Let's go get something to eat and we can go watch the guy get ripped apart. | |
| And so everyone knew that's what they were doing. | |
| There was no hiding it. | |
| But now, it's kind of the same thing where people like to watch a person get ripped to shreds in a different sense Have their reputation and their lives ripped to shreds. | |
| We still like to watch that, except that we can pretend that that's not what it's about. | |
| We can pretend that it's not entertainment for us. | |
| This is about justice. | |
| It's really a noble thing. | |
| We could pretend even that we have some sort of righteous anger at this person because, oh, this is justice. | |
| They said something terrible six or seven years ago. | |
| So it's not as honest. | |
| That's my problem with it. | |
| It's not honest. | |
| At least admit. | |
| You know, if you're going and you're combing through somebody's tweets to see if they ever used an inappropriate word so you can throw it against them after they've just achieved something, then at least admit that you're doing that because you think it's fun to destroy people. | |
| That's all. | |
| At least admit it. | |
| Have a certain amount of honesty. | |
| Have the courage of your convictions and admit that's what you're doing. | |
| Okay, there's another story I wanted to mention here briefly from the Daily Wire. | |
| It says, this week a Virginia high school teacher was fired because he wouldn't use the preferred pronoun of a female student who claimed she was now a male. | |
| The unanimous decision from the five members of the West Point School Board to fire Peter Vlaming, a French teacher at West Point High School, which is roughly 265 students, followed a four-hour hearing. | |
| The board only discussed the case for an hour before rendering their decision. | |
| Vlaming had taught at the high school for almost seven years, had taught the student in question in the 2017 school year, when the student identified as female. | |
| Then over the summer of 2018, the girl decided that she was a boy. | |
| So she went, you know, she left school in the 2017 to 2018 school year, And she was a girl and then she came back and she said, actually, I'm a boy. | |
| So this school year, Vlaming addressed the girl by the new name she had chosen. | |
| So he did use the new name. | |
| A name's a name, you know, you can choose any name you want for yourself. | |
| But he would not address the girl by her preferred pronoun because it conflicted with his Christian faith. | |
| The student went and complained and processes were carried out and then finally the guy is fired. | |
| The school board Rose's statement, and it says, in part, we do not and cannot tolerate discrimination in any form or actions that create a hostile environment for any member of our school family. | |
| Mr. Vlaming was asked repeatedly over several weeks and by multiple administrators to address a student by the pronouns with which this student identifies. | |
| The issue before us was not one mistaken slip of the tongue. | |
| Mr. Vlaming consistently refused to comply going forward. | |
| A willful violation of school board policy. | |
| While we understand that some do not agree with our decision, we hope that our discussions, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | |
| All right. | |
| Only, just one thing I want to say about this, and that is, this is actually not really about Mr. Vlaming's Christian faith. | |
| That is included in this. | |
| It's true that as a Christian, there's no way as a Christian that you can use someone's preferred pronoun if it is not the actual pronoun that's attached to them grammatically. | |
| Because a pronoun is not like a name. | |
| You don't get to have your own pronoun. | |
| You don't own the pronoun. | |
| A pronoun is a matter of grammar. | |
| There are certain grammatically correct ways of referring to a person depending on their biological sex. | |
| And that's all it is. | |
| So this is a matter of biology and grammar. | |
| Personal pronouns, that is a convergence of biology and grammar. | |
| And so, your own preferences and desires have nothing at all to do with it. | |
| That is not part of the convergence. | |
| It's just your biology, and then grammar. | |
| You don't decide your biology, you also don't get to decide grammar. | |
| All of these things have already been decided, and so that's where your personal product comes from. | |
| So, it's true that if you're a Christian, You could not possibly use somebody's preferred pronoun if | |
| it's not the real pronoun, because that would be dishonest. And as Christians, we are | |
| forbidden from telling lies. | |
| But it isn't just Christians who would say that lying is wrong. | |
| This is really simply about honesty. | |
| This is about truth and honesty, plain and simple. | |
| No matter what your religion is. | |
| Doesn't matter if you're Christian, Jewish, Muslim. | |
| Doesn't matter. | |
| Doesn't matter if you have no religion. | |
| If you value truth and honesty, then you should be on Mr. Vlamingh's side. | |
| Because that's really... I think it is... | |
| Not a good thing. | |
| It's not going to help us progress on this issue and restore sanity to this issue, I should say. | |
| It won't help us do that if we turn this into a religious thing. | |
| If we turn this into a Christians vs. whatever, religious liberty. | |
| That's not what this is. | |
| This is not a religious issue. | |
| You don't need to be Christian. | |
| You don't need to believe in the Bible to understand that women are women and men are men. | |
| And you don't get to have your own pronouns because grammar is grammar and you don't get to decide for yourself. | |
| You don't need to be Christian to understand that. | |
| This is a universal thing. | |
| This is just truth and honesty. | |
| That's all. | |
| And so if you value truth and honesty, which hopefully every Christian does, but also hopefully everyone else in the world would too, if you value truth and honesty, then you You would have to be on Mr. Vlaming's side, and you couldn't possibly use someone's preferred pronoun if it's not the correct pronoun. | |
| Because you are then participating in a lie. | |
| You are telling a lie. | |
| Unless you don't know that it's not true. | |
| But if you know it's not true, And if you know that this girl is a girl, and you refer to the girl as a hymn, that is a lie. | |
| A lie is a willful deception. | |
| It is when you willfully tell... It's when you willfully, intentionally say something that is not true. | |
| She is not a hymn. | |
| So, if you call her a hymn, then you have said something that is not true. | |
| You have told a lie. | |
| And that's all. | |
| It's not that the school board was trying to make Mr. Vlaming betray his Christian beliefs, although they were trying to do that as well. | |
| But even before that, they were trying to force him to tell a lie. | |
| They said that if he wants to keep his job, he has to tell a lie. | |
| And he got fired simply because he wouldn't tell a lie. | |
| That's what's going on here. | |
| All right. | |
| One other story. | |
| I have to mention this one. | |
| In the live feed from the International Space Station, you could see a blue and white object. | |
| This was last week. | |
| The International Space Station has a live feed where you can go and check it out and see what's going on with the Earth at any given time. | |
| Well, last week, if you were watching the live feed, you would have seen a blue and white object appear in space and then hover over the Earth. | |
| And then as soon as it appeared, the feed went down. | |
| Okay? | |
| Now... | |
| Obviously, people are going to start with the conspiracy theories when you see that. | |
| But as usual with these kinds of stories, because I read that story, and like you, I was super excited. | |
| So then I went and I watched the footage, and it's always a letdown. | |
| I mean, every single time you hear about a mysterious object was seen in space, and then you go and look at it, and you say, well, that looks like just a smudge or something on the lens of the thing, or it looks like light refracting from somewhere or whatever. | |
| It doesn't really look like an object. | |
| So I went and looked at the feed and it, I don't know what the thing is, but it doesn't even look like an object. | |
| It's obviously some sort of illusion. | |
| Although it is suspicious that the feed went down as soon as the thing appeared. | |
| So who knows? | |
| Maybe it was aliens, but probably not. | |
| But every time you see one of these that, you know, it brings up the conversation of, well, do you believe that aliens exist? | |
| Is there intelligent life out there? | |
| And I find that question to be To be almost absurd, because the answer is so obvious. | |
| Let's just think about this. | |
| There are, we believe, about a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. | |
| So, a hundred billion galaxies in just the little sliver of space that we can see. | |
| And who knows how much space there is outside of that? | |
| One hundred billion galaxies. | |
| Now, our galaxy, the Milky Way, has about 100 to 200 billion stars. | |
| And most stars have planets around them, so there are probably a couple of trillion planets in just our galaxy. | |
| And if there are, let's say, a trillion or so planets in every galaxy, then that means it's like 1 or 2 trillion times 100 billion. | |
| And whatever that number is, 2 trillion times 100 billion, whatever that number is, that's how many planets probably exist in the universe. | |
| So even if the odds of an intelligent civilization An intelligent alien civilization, even if the odds are let's say 100 billion to one, or even a trillion to one, that would still mean that there are billions or at least millions of planets in the universe with intelligent civilizations. | |
| Which means, when you look at the numbers, it's not even like an interesting question. | |
| Of course there's intelligent life out there. | |
| It is pretty much a mathematic certainty that there is intelligent life out there, when you think about the vastness of outer space. | |
| And no matter how you look at it, whether you're looking at this from a supernatural perspective or a natural perspective, because if you don't believe in God, well then you've got this, we've got a hundred billion galaxies, life arises randomly, even if it's extremely rare that life arises, when you look at just the numbers that we're dealing with, even a very rare occurrence has almost certainly occurred billions of times. | |
| But if you believe in God, And you're going to say that there is not intelligent life in the universe, then what you're saying is that God created a universe with 100 billion galaxies and trillions of planets and then put nothing on those other planets except ours. | |
| Which seems absurd. | |
| Why do all these galaxies exist? | |
| Do they exist just to look pretty in the sky? | |
| That's a lot of effort to go through, to create entire galaxies so that we could see pretty things when we look in telescopes. | |
| It's hard for me to believe that's the only reason the galaxies exist. | |
| So we know that intelligent life exists in the universe. | |
| I think we call it a certainty. | |
| But we also know that the closest solar system to our own is about four light years away, which is, I think, about 20 or 25 trillion miles. | |
| We don't have anywhere close to the technology to go those distances. | |
| The Andromeda Galaxy, which is our next door neighbor in terms of, in galactic terms, that is 3 million light years away. | |
| If a light year is 5 trillion miles, then that's 3 million times 5 trillion miles. | |
| So what does all this tell us? | |
| It tells us that there is almost certainly intelligent life in the universe, and we know that because of the size of the universe, But it also tells us that we will almost certainly never find it, ever, because of the distances. | |
| So it is a humongous universe with tons of stuff in it, but everything is so far apart that we will almost certainly never come in contact with the life. | |
| It's out there, but we will never come in contact with it. | |
| Kind of sad and depressing, but I think that's simply the reality. | |
| All right. | |
| One other thing. | |
| I don't know why I was thinking about this, but before we wrap up, I have to tell you one thing that annoys me, and I know it's surprising to hear that I'm annoyed by something, but hear me out. | |
| Something you see online a lot, and I just saw this yesterday, so that's probably why I'm thinking about it. | |
| But something you'll see online a lot, especially on Twitter and Facebook, is this thing where people post pictures of their dogs allegedly doing something cute, and then they'll have a caption that says something like, we don't deserve dogs, or what did we ever do to deserve dogs? | |
| Have you seen that? | |
| You know what I'm talking about? | |
| It's become kind of an internet meme almost. | |
| We don't deserve dogs. | |
| Now, In general, I always feel nauseated by this groveling that people do to their pets. | |
| Oh, we aren't worthy of you, dog. | |
| Oh, great dog, we aren't worthy. | |
| We don't deserve you, dog. | |
| Oh, great dog. | |
| It's kind of sad, because we should have more pride as a species. | |
| But more than that, I have a dog, okay? | |
| I feed my dog. | |
| I walk my dog. | |
| I clean up my dog's poop. | |
| I buy him toys. | |
| I take him to the vet. | |
| He sleeps all day and never lifts a finger or a paw to help with anything around the house. | |
| He doesn't do anything. | |
| He does not help at all with anything. | |
| So if anyone is failing to pull their weight in our relationship, it isn't me. | |
| I mean, if anyone doesn't deserve anyone else, isn't it more true to say that dogs don't deserve us? | |
| What do you mean we don't deserve dogs? | |
| What else could we possibly do for these animals to deserve them? | |
| We do everything for them. | |
| So, if anyone doesn't deserve anyone, isn't it the other way around? | |
| Dogs are the most privileged animals in the whole animal kingdom. | |
| They get treated like royalty. | |
| We spend literally billions of dollars on them. | |
| The other day, I walked outside of my house, And I saw a raccoon eating out of my garbage can. | |
| And that's what life is like for wild animals. | |
| Life is short and cold and miserable and they eat garbage and then they die. | |
| And when they die, they are consumed by scavengers or bugs. | |
| That's what it is. | |
| That's what it is for a wild animal. | |
| Now, my dog eats garbage too, but that's just because he's a glutton. | |
| It's not because we don't feed him. | |
| Dogs have it so much. | |
| They have it better than any other animal. | |
| Dogs are so lucky that they were domesticated and that we have this affection for them. | |
| They are so lucky. | |
| They're the luckiest animals on earth. | |
| I'm just saying, dogs have it much better than any other animal. | |
| To say we don't deserve them makes no sense. | |
| To say we don't deserve to have these pampered creatures lying on our sofas, that doesn't make any sense. | |
| So listen, this is my message to my fellow humans. | |
| I'm not saying you should hate your dog. | |
| I'm not saying you shouldn't have. | |
| I have a dog too. | |
| Okay? | |
| I like my dog. | |
| But this is about self-respect as a species. | |
| Okay? | |
| We need more self-respect as a species. | |
| So, here's what I want you to do. | |
| When you go home tonight, I want you to walk into your home. | |
| Go right up to your dog and say, Listen, Rex, you don't deserve me. | |
| I'm the king of this house and only by my generosity do you survive. | |
| You should be thanking me. | |
| And then take him outside and clean up his poop with a plastic bag like a slave. | |
| But all through that process, remember who you are. | |
| Never forget you. | |
| You are the master. | |
| You are the human being. | |
| And we need to reclaim pride in that. | |
| It's okay to have pets, but we have gone way overboard with our pets. | |
| They're so much better than us! | |
| Look at these animals! | |
| We are nothing compared to them! | |
| Oh my gosh! | |
| Do you think these animals are saying that about themselves? | |
| No, they have pride in themselves! | |
| Your dog is saying, I'm a dog, I'm great! | |
| So, you should say the same, because we own the planet, okay? | |
| I mean, we won. | |
| The species lottery. | |
| We achieved the most. | |
| Self-respect. | |
| All right. | |
| That was my pep. | |
| That was my very weird pep talk for the day. | |
| And I'll talk to you tomorrow. |