The media wants us to panic over a government shut down. But the only real problem with the shutdown is that it’s limited and temporary. Also, some people are upset because I criticized superhero movies. Why do people take their entertainment so seriously and so personally? Date: 12-13-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Today on The Matt Walsh Show, the media wants us to panic over a government shutdown, but in my opinion, the only real problem with the shutdown is that it's only temporary. | |
| Also, some people are upset because I said superhero movies are stupid. | |
| I will elaborate on this very crucial point that is so important to all of our lives today on The Matt Walsh Show. | |
| So California state regulators have looked into a plan to tax text messages. | |
| Not only tax text messages, but even tax them retroactively. | |
| So they'd be taxing the last five years of text messages that were sent. | |
| And this, of course, is California for you. | |
| I have no idea why anyone would choose to live in this state. | |
| And I say this state because that's the state that I'm in right now as I speak. | |
| And I can't wait to get back to the liberty and sanity and conservative values of Maryland. | |
| It is It's unfortunate, though, really, because every time I come here to California, it's such a geographically beautiful state, minus the trash and the smog and everything, but if you can literally dig... | |
| Through that, you will uncover quite a lot of beauty. | |
| But this is the way that it often goes, you know. | |
| It seems like liberalism infects some of the most beautiful states. | |
| It's the same thing in the Northeast. | |
| I'm wearing a New Hampshire shirt. | |
| So, it infects it and disfigures it. | |
| And next thing you know, text messages are being taxed. | |
| All right. | |
| Speaking of... | |
| Great transition, by the way. | |
| I want to talk briefly about the shutdown because it looms. | |
| The government shutdown looms. | |
| Looms is the word that the media very ominously uses. | |
| It's looming. | |
| The shutdown is looming. | |
| We're only two weeks away from a shutdown. | |
| A shutdown that Donald Trump has threatened, they tell us, if he doesn't get funding for the wall. | |
| I must say that the hype that we give to these shutdowns, or to these potential shutdowns, is really so silly. | |
| It's one of the silliest things in modern politics, and I know that that's saying quite a lot. | |
| The media wants us to tremble in fear at the possibility of some portion of the government not operating for a few days, and in this case, it would be not operating over the holidays when it probably wouldn't be operating anyway, so it's even more ridiculous. | |
| Also, it's... | |
| 75%, in this case, 75% of the government is already funded. | |
| So the Pentagon has been funded, the Department of Homeland, the Department of Health and Human Services has been funded, the Department of Labor. | |
| Military pay most likely will not be affected. | |
| 75% of the government is funded. | |
| So, we're supposed to be worried. | |
| We're supposed to somehow be worried. | |
| That 25% of the government may shut down for a limited number of days over the holidays. | |
| That's what we're supposed to be worried about. | |
| We're supposed to care about that for some reason. | |
| Why should we care about it? | |
| How is it going to affect any of our lives? | |
| I have no idea because I never explained that part because it won't affect us at all. | |
| It really is embarrassing. | |
| I'm always embarrassed by this. | |
| I'm always embarrassed by the hand-wringing over government shutdowns, the panic. | |
| Now, not the panic on the part of most regular people, because we don't care, but the panic on the part of the media. | |
| What would our founding fathers say? | |
| Okay, what would they say if they saw a government comprised of millions of people with a budget in the trillions of dollars? | |
| Trillions. | |
| And yet, rather than working towards permanently shutting down wide swaths of this monstrous behemoth, We instead are trying desperately to avoid shutting down even a small smidgen of it for a few days. | |
| And can we just, I don't want to gloss over that, because let's just circle back around. | |
| Trillions of dollars. | |
| I know we hear this, we hear these numbers a lot, billions, trillions, and it just kind of goes over our head. | |
| But the federal budget is something like three or four trillion dollars. | |
| Trillion. | |
| A thousand billion. | |
| A billion a thousand times. | |
| Do you know how much a trillion is? | |
| Can you conceive of how much money a trillion dollars is. | |
| If you were to make a stack of a trillion dollar bills, or of a trillion one dollar bills I should say, it would reach, just the one stack of one trillion dollars would reach about a fourth of the way to the moon, that's 67,000 miles. | |
| Which means that the whole federal budget would literally reach the moon. | |
| If there was a guy Sitting on the moon right now, and for some reason he needed a few bucks. | |
| We could easily get it to him. | |
| All we'd have to do is just stack the federal budget, one dollar on top of another, and then it would reach him on the moon. | |
| He would just have to stand up and just grab a couple of the dollars. | |
| I'm not sure about the physics in that. | |
| I don't know if the physics really work out, but you get the idea. | |
| It's a lot of money. | |
| It is a whole lot of money. | |
| The government is so massive. | |
| That we can't even conceive of it. | |
| We can't even wrap our heads about it. | |
| We can't get our minds around it. | |
| It's reached a point of being so big that we don't even notice it anymore because the bigness is too much to comprehend. | |
| We're using these words that don't mean anything. | |
| When we hear a trillion dollars, it may as well be, you know, they may as well say, the federal budget is a boogle-smoogle dollars. | |
| It's a word that just means nothing. | |
| A trillion doesn't mean anything because it's so much. | |
| But a trillion is a real number, it's a real concept, and the government is so wasteful that the word wasteful doesn't describe it. | |
| So, shutdown? | |
| Yes, please. | |
| Shutdown more than 25%. | |
| When Donald Trump said a few days ago that he's gonna shut down the government, it was One of the greatest things that I've ever heard a president say. | |
| I think that statement alone was greater than the Gettysburg Address. | |
| It was one of the best things any president could ever promise, to shut down the government. | |
| Shut down more than 25% of it. | |
| Shut down 75% of it. | |
| more than 25% of it, shut down 75% of it forever. | |
| That's what we should be asking for. | |
| That's what we should be demanding. | |
| 25% is nothing. | |
| That's chicken feed. | |
| They could shut down 25%, never open it up again, and you would never notice that it had been shut down. | |
| If it weren't for the media, you know, having a meltdown over it. | |
| So, no, I say shut down so much of it that we do notice it. | |
| And then never open it up again. | |
| Because enough is really enough. | |
| If a $4 trillion government is not enough, then we really are saying at that point that it can never be too big. | |
| Because if a $4 trillion government isn't too big, then what are we waiting for? | |
| A zillion dollars? | |
| When does it get to the point? | |
| If a trillion dollars doesn't do it, then what will do it? | |
| No, this is just so... Can you just imagine what Thomas Jefferson would say if he could see this now? | |
| He would have a heart attack and then die again, so he wouldn't even be here for very long to witness it. | |
| Mercifully so. | |
| Wanted to mention something else. | |
| Some people, quite a few people, are upset at me, again, as per usual, but this time because I wrote a piece on the Daily Wire yesterday arguing that comic book movies are terrible. | |
| Now, what prompted me to write this piece, first of all, is that it's true, because comic book movies are terrible, but second, because this Aquaman movie is coming out. | |
| And I just feel like, come on, haven't we reached our limit yet with Aquaman? | |
| Can't we at least agree that the superhero movie thing has gone way too far now that we're getting movies about Aquaman? | |
| Aquaman is a guy that has a magical trident. | |
| He lives in the ocean. | |
| He lives in a pineapple under the sea with Spongebob. | |
| He has a fish scale suit that he wears. | |
| He rides a dolphin or a shark around, I assume. | |
| It's just It is the kind of character that an eight-year-old boy would invent in his head while he's daydreaming during math class, and then he would doodle like a picture of it on his binder. | |
| That's the kind of character we're dealing with now. | |
| So if you're doing Aquaman as a straight comedy, meant to be completely stupid and ridiculous and you're supposed to laugh at it the entire time, then fine. | |
| But if we're supposed to take this at all seriously, even a little bit, then it's too much. | |
| It's too much is what I'm saying. | |
| The movie studios have mined way- have just mined all the way down to the point now where we've got Aquaman and Wonder Woman Right? | |
| A superhero called Wonder Woman who flies around in an invisible airplane. | |
| And what's worse is that these movies are critically acclaimed. | |
| Wonder Woman is treated as this cinematic masterpiece when it's just an incredibly stupid movie with really nothing going for it whatsoever. | |
| But people go and watch it and the critics watch it and they find this deep, significant meaning underneath all of it. | |
| There is no meaning to it. | |
| And it's not just Aquaman or Wonder Woman. | |
| Superhero movies in general are bad and meaningless. | |
| And there have been maybe two good ones in the last 20 years. | |
| Batman Begins and Dark Knight. | |
| And those were really the only good ones. | |
| And even those are massively overrated. | |
| Dark Knight is a good film, but if you take Heath Ledger's performance out of it, it's mediocre. | |
| Or put another way, if you take Heath Ledger's performance and you put it into literally | |
| any movie at all, that movie would be, it might not make sense with that performance | |
| stuck into the middle of it, but that movie would be worth watching because of his performance. | |
| That's how good the performance was. | |
| But in terms of plot and general execution, even Dark Knight has serious problems. | |
| But I will say it was a good movie. | |
| The rest of these movies, though, are pretty awful. | |
| And my biggest gripe with them is that they aren't really movies. | |
| They are actually commercials for merchandise. | |
| That's why they exist. | |
| They exist really to do two things. | |
| Number one, to sell merchandise, because that's really where they make their money. | |
| And number two, to perpetuate themselves like a virus. | |
| So, each new superhero movie exists to set up the next superhero movie. | |
| So that there can never be any kind of resolution, or any kind of conclusion, or triumph, or defeat, or anything. | |
| Which means, there can never be any real stakes, there can never be any real danger for the characters, because there always has to be the next movie. | |
| It always just, it always has to come back to square one. | |
| There can never be any progress. | |
| No matter what happens, it always just has to circle back to the beginning, and then we could do it all over again for the next movie, because the franchise must live on. | |
| Each individual movie exists to extend the franchise, and the franchise exists mainly to sell merchandise and, in general, to make billions of dollars. | |
| Which is fine, okay? | |
| There's nothing wrong with making billions of dollars. | |
| If I could make billions of dollars making a superhero movie, I would certainly do it. | |
| But movies that exist solely or primarily for that purpose are going to be, by definition, lifeless, boring, pointless, dull, redundant, stupid. | |
| That's all I'm saying. | |
| I'm not saying you shouldn't watch them, I'm just saying that's what they are. | |
| 10,000 years from now, these things are so... it just continues on forever so that 10,000 years from now, As the next installment of the Avengers saga is released to the screens that I assume at this point will be implanted directly into our eyeballs, philosophers are going to be debating whether these superhero franchises even had a beginning at all. | |
| And I bet they might conclude that the Marvel and DC universes had no first cause, no prime mover. | |
| They just existed since the beginning of time and they just go on and on and on into the infinite abyss. | |
| That is my opinion about superhero movies. | |
| You don't have to agree. | |
| It's just my opinion. | |
| And as I said, I don't begrudge anyone the right to watch stupid movies. | |
| I just think we should expect more out of our stupid movies. | |
| And it bothers me that Hollywood can just toss a superhero movie at us, and it will automatically make a | |
| billion dollars. | |
| They don't even have to try anymore because they're not trying with Aquaman. | |
| Let's get real. They're just like, alright, here's Aquaman. Give us our billion dollars. | |
| And we say, sure, here's a billion. Here's another billion. | |
| There's something cynical about it. So I don't... | |
| That's what I don't like about it. On the part of the movie studios. | |
| The cynicism on their part is really what I don't like. | |
| So that's why I get my stupid movie fill by watching Liam Neeson. | |
| Movies. | |
| The Liam Neeson movies where he plays a, you know, the grizzled ex-FBI agent slash assassin who has to recover slash revenge a kidnapped slash murdered family member. | |
| Those kinds of movies. | |
| There have been 15 of them. | |
| I watch all of them. | |
| They're great. | |
| And they're incredibly stupid. | |
| Incidentally, there's a movie coming out in a couple of months. | |
| I'm not making this up. | |
| This is true. | |
| There's a movie coming out called Cold Pursuit. | |
| Where Liam Neeson plays a vengeful snowplow driver who has to track down and kill the drug cartel members who murdered his son. | |
| Okay? | |
| So that's... I'm not... that's... I'm serious. | |
| And I will be there on opening day, probably without my wife, because she'll refuse to watch it. | |
| Am I being hypocritical? | |
| Because I criticize comic book movies even while waiting with breathless anticipation to watch a movie where Liam Neeson kills drug lords with a snowplow. | |
| I don't think so. | |
| Or maybe you could call me a hypocrite, you know, because I also love Tom Cruise action movies. | |
| I'm a proud apologist for Tom Cruise movies. | |
| So you might say those movies are just as stupid, just as pointless as superhero movies. | |
| Maybe they are. | |
| Maybe you're right. | |
| Maybe I'm a hypocrite. | |
| But that doesn't mean that I'm wrong about superhero movies. | |
| It doesn't make what I'm saying wrong. | |
| And at any rate, the thing I don't understand... Okay, so forget about the movies for a minute. | |
| But the thing that I really don't understand is just how incredibly angry people get when you criticize their entertainment choices. | |
| This is always when I get into the most trouble, is when I venture into even light, sort of half-teasing criticisms of entertainment, which is really what I'm saying here with the superhero thing. | |
| People get very, very upset. | |
| And I don't have to get into details because I know you can imagine it, but I'll just say that the superhero fans have been coming after me over the last day, and they've been making their opinion known, and it is not a flattering opinion. | |
| They are very, very angry at me for not liking superhero movies. | |
| In fact, there was one person who accused me of bullying. | |
| He said I was bullying comic book movie fans by not liking comic book movies. | |
| And my favorite are always the people who angrily shout, they'll say, why do you care about this so much? | |
| Why is this even worth talking about? | |
| And then they proceed to launch into a 6,000 word rant explaining why the Avengers are actually super awesome. | |
| The truth is, I don't care about it that much. | |
| I've written hundreds of articles in my time, and precisely one of them has been on this subject. | |
| So I don't think that qualifies as me caring a whole lot. | |
| That qualifies as me not caring that much. | |
| Caring enough to just say something about it. | |
| But a lot of other people really do care about this subject. | |
| And they care about it a lot. | |
| Many people take their entertainment very seriously and will defend it passionately if you dare criticize. | |
| Why is that? | |
| That's not a rhetorical question. | |
| I guess it has to be because I'm talking to a camera. | |
| But I really don't know the answer. | |
| Why people care that much. | |
| Why they take their entertainment that seriously. | |
| If somebody made fun of Liam Neeson movies, or of Tom Cruise movies, I wouldn't be offended. | |
| I wouldn't cry about it. | |
| I wouldn't yell at them. | |
| If I did cry, I would have the decency to do it in private. | |
| I would lock myself in the bathroom and cry. | |
| Like any man would. | |
| But I wouldn't do it publicly. | |
| Probably, it would make no difference to me at all. | |
| And I may even agree with the mockery that's being heaped on my entertainment choices. | |
| You can make fun of the things that I like to watch for entertainment, and if what you're saying is true, I might agree with it, even. | |
| Same with the NFL. | |
| I'm a big NFL fan. | |
| If you come along and say that football is stupid, you're wrong. | |
| But it doesn't hurt my feelings. | |
| And I wouldn't blame you for saying it. | |
| If you really think that it's stupid, great. | |
| Make your case. | |
| State your opinion. | |
| Maybe you'll convince me. | |
| Like, explain to me why it's stupid. | |
| You won't, because you're wrong, but I won't care. | |
| It won't make me mad. | |
| A lot of things do make me mad, but this isn't one of them. | |
| So I just, I don't understand. | |
| There's nothing wrong with enjoying stupid things, as I said. | |
| And I never said you shouldn't enjoy superhero movies. | |
| I'm just establishing that they are stupid and boring and pointless. | |
| But it seems to me as though, in this country, we do more than enjoy our entertainment. | |
| I think that's really the problem. | |
| We don't just enjoy it. | |
| We adopt it as a kind of, like, lifestyle. | |
| We see it as a statement about ourselves. | |
| We identify ourselves with it. | |
| That's the weird phenomenon that I've noticed, is how we get so defensive of our entertainment choices. | |
| As if we ourselves had written the script. | |
| We cling to it and we develop this intimate relationship with it. | |
| Someone actually told me yesterday that superhero fans get upset when you criticize superheroes because it's their culture. | |
| And you are criticizing their culture. | |
| And you see that's the problem because it's not a culture, it's a product. | |
| Products are not culture. | |
| They may be an element of a culture, especially a consumerist culture like ours, but they are not themselves a culture. | |
| So, me making fun of Captain America or Spider-Man is not the same as if I were to, say, mock all Italians. | |
| The Italians have a culture and identity. | |
| Captain America, Spider-Man, these are just make-believe characters. | |
| There is no culture there. | |
| So, I think this is a sign of the emptiness that's so common in modern times. | |
| I'm not saying that people who watch these movies are empty. | |
| That's not what I'm saying. | |
| I'm saying the people who take the stuff so seriously and care about it so deeply and cannot stomach any criticism of it, they, I think, have a hole within themselves that they have filled with this stuff. | |
| And when I say this stuff, I don't just mean superhero movies. | |
| I mean entertainment. | |
| Any kind of entertainment. | |
| Movies, TV, video games, music, sports. | |
| As I said, I love sports. | |
| But this is another great example. | |
| There are people who, for them, their sport fandom is their whole life. | |
| It's the most important thing to them. | |
| And they take it way, way, way too seriously. | |
| Think of the idiots who get into physical fights with fans of other teams. | |
| You know, insult their team and they'll act like you insulted their mother. | |
| So I'm not playing favorites here. | |
| As a sports fan, I certainly noticed that myself. | |
| And it's a very strange thing. | |
| And I don't think it's healthy. | |
| I think it's fine for us to be entertained. | |
| It's fine for us to enjoy mindless entertainment. | |
| I think we probably enjoy mindless entertainment a little bit too much. | |
| We say, well, it's nice to turn off your brain every once in a while. | |
| The problem is we turn off our brains and we don't turn them back on. | |
| Or we go home and we sit down on the couch at 7 p.m. and we turn off our brains and it's | |
| off because we're watching five hours of TV and it doesn't turn back on until the next | |
| The problem is when you're turning off your brain too much, eventually you'll lack the mental energy and capacity to turn it back on. | |
| And then you end up with these zombies walking around. | |
| But in principle, nothing wrong with mindless entertainment. | |
| I think when we find ourselves so attached to it and taking it so seriously, That if somebody criticizes or makes fun of or, you know, teases an imaginary character that we like to watch on the movie screen, and if someone does that, we get personally offended. | |
| Once we notice that, I think it's clear that it's gone too far. | |
| Maybe at that point we should pull back and, like, go for a walk or something. | |
| Bring ourselves back into the real world. | |
| Because, uh, We are certainly an entertainment-obsessed culture. | |
| But if you do go watch Aquaman, I hope you enjoy it, and I hope that he wins his battle against the mutant squid or whatever he's going to be fighting. | |
| Thanks for watching, everybody. | |
| Thanks for listening. | |
| Godspeed. | |
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