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Jan. 2, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
29:15
Ep. 168 - Romney Can’t Decide If He Hates Trump

Mitt Romney is back to attacking Trump after seeking his endorsement a few months ago. Should we take his criticisms seriously? Also, people on the internet were very outraged about a number of stupid things over the holiday. We’ll review. Finally, we’ll discuss why New Year’s resolutions never seem to pan out. Date: 1–2-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on the Matt Wall Show, Mitt Romney attacks Trump after asking for an endorsement and asking for a job.
What does that say about Mitt Romney?
Also, we'll get caught up on some of the internet outrages that you may have missed over the holiday.
You don't want to miss any of them.
And finally, we'll talk about why New Year's resolutions never pan out.
All of that today on the Matt Wall Show.
All right, and we're back.
I hope you had a wonderful Kwanzaa.
Mitt Romney has come out and attacked President Trump.
Mitt Romney has not even taken office yet, and as the new Senator from Utah,
but he's already published an op-ed in the Washington Post attacking Trump's character, his fitness for office.
He says that the president has, quote, "'not risen to the mantle of the office.'"
And then he says some other stuff too.
Now, I think that I can say this with some credibility.
Okay, I think you know that I'm telling the truth when I say that I have no problem
with people criticizing Donald Trump.
There are some conservatives who will get very teary-eyed and tummy hurt when you say anything critical about Trump at all for any reason in any context.
I am not one of those.
People, I criticize Trump myself all the time.
In fact, I think that criticizing presidents in general is a wonderful thing.
It's an American pastime.
We should all be criticizing the president all the time, no matter who the president is.
That's the relationship that we, as the people, should have with the President.
It is one of skepticism and criticism.
That's the American way.
You should do it when you wake up in the morning first thing, like over breakfast, you should be criticizing the President.
Doesn't matter who he is.
That is a healthy and good practice.
Um, which is one of the reasons why I think it's really unfortunate when you've got, whether it's a Democrat president or Republican president, like you've got a Democrat president, so then Democrats feel like they have to defend him no matter what.
Republicans feel like they have to defend the Republican president.
It's just a very unfortunate dynamic because no matter who the president is, we should all enjoy criticizing him or her because that is the American way.
It's what our founding fathers would have wanted.
That said, Um, the question must be asked, can Mitt Romney specifically criticize Trump specifically and be taken seriously while doing it?
I think the answer to that question is obviously no.
Let's just follow for a second.
Let's follow this very windy path of this relationship between Trump and Romney over the last, um, Five or six years.
Romney sought Trump's endorsement in 2012, and he got it.
Then Romney attacked Trump in 2016.
Then Trump won, and Romney went to Trump, asking to be Secretary of State.
Then Romney sought Trump's endorsement for his senatorial run in Utah, and now Romney is attacking Trump again.
So, that's a lot of vacillating, a lot of back and forth.
You know, I want your endorsement.
Oh, you're a terrible person.
Oh, can I work for you?
Oh, can I have your endorsement again?
Oh, you're a terrible person again.
It just, it has the air of opportunism, of hypocrisy, of something extremely, extraordinarily self-serving and fake on the part of Romney.
Romney has a reputation as a flip-flopper, and I think that this only reaffirms that reputation.
This is not, and that's not really what Romney wants to do.
I don't think he wants to reaffirm the reputation as a flip-flopper because it really hurt him in his presidential run.
Now, the thing is, I've always liked Mitt Romney, okay?
I think that he would have made a good president.
I think that if he does more than write op-eds about the president, he'll make a pretty good senator, too.
But this is just, this is just nonsense and it's, it's shameless nonsense. Romney
going between these extremes, between condemning Trump on such a fundamental level, this,
and this is not just, when he condemns Trump, he's not just doing it on, oh, I disagree with
this policy or that policy. He's attacking his character, his, his, his integrity, which again
is fine if you're, if you're going to do that, fine, but then you can't turn around and say,
can I work for you? Or, Or can I have your endorsement?
Why would you want the endorsement of someone who you think is dishonest, an unfit president, has no character, so on and so forth?
So, it's just, you can't possibly take it seriously.
And I also, there's one other thing about Romney that I think needs to be pointed out.
And again, I say this as someone, I like him.
Generally, as a politician, I wish you won in 2012.
But there is something really disturbing to me about A person who cannot stop running for office.
Like someone who is addicted to running for office.
Obviously Hillary Clinton is a top offender in this category, but Romney is too.
Romney ran for the Senate in the 90s and lost.
Then he ran for Governor and he won.
Then he ran for President and lost.
And then he ran for President again and lost.
And then he ran for Senate again at the age of 70.
And, like I said, obviously he's not unique.
A lot of our current politicians are like this.
They just keep running.
They can't stop.
They just keep on going and going and going.
They must have political power.
They cannot accept a world that they don't partially control.
Think about Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is probably going to run for president at the age of 78.
Joe Biden has been In political office, in positions of political power for, you know, five or six decades or whatever, and now he's going to be 78 in 2020, and he's going to run for office again.
Rather than just going home, you're 78 years old, life expectancy for men, I think, is 84 or 85.
So, according to normal life expectancy range, you've got, you know, you've got six, seven years of life left.
And so rather than just going home to be with your family and to enjoy the last few years that you have left, you're running for office, you're campaigning.
It's an addiction.
Now, I know that if we wanna be optimistic or if we wanna be generous, which we should never be generous to politicians, but if we wanted to be optimistic or generous about them, maybe we would say, well, these people have a passion for public service, right?
They just, they really wanna, they wanna help and they want to be, well, we could say that, but really, if you're rich and you've been in power forever and you're old now, And you really have a passion for helping, then you could volunteer at a soup kitchen.
I mean, if you're running for Senate or President, it's because you need to be in control.
You cannot accept a reality that does not feature you in a position of power and control.
So, that even apart from this back and forth with Trump, Romney is just another one of those guys even if he seems like a pretty decent guy and all that as I said, but This you just keep on running.
You can't let it go and It's it's kind of disturbing it.
It really it is an addiction and And I'm concerned about him, I guess that's my point.
All right I So now I want to talk now about a few stories that... That's quite enough politics for my first day back.
So I want to talk about a few stories that nobody really cares about anymore.
And that's my point, really.
That's why I'm talking about them.
I was on vacation for a week.
Last week, and then I had to work on New Year's Eve, and then I was off again for New Year's Day, and now I'm back today.
So, on Monday, as I kind of wandered bleary-eyed back into the wilds of the internet and social media, I had been, you know, I hadn't paid attention to any of that stuff for, you know, seven or eight days, which was very nice.
But I'm back in it, and it's part of my job, so I gotta go on Twitter, and I gotta go on Facebook and social media, and figure out what are the controversies everyone's talking about today, what did I miss, right?
And I discovered on Monday, I discovered that people on Twitter were very, very mad about something, which, you know, they're always mad about something, and so on Monday, they were very, very, the thing that they were very, very mad about was Louis C.K., who's a comedian, He apparently made jokes.
If you can believe it, just get a load of this.
Louis C.K., a comedian, made jokes at a comedy club during a comedy set.
I know, it's very upsetting.
And the jokes were vulgar and they were edgy and they were inappropriate.
He joked about, he had some material about the Parkland school shooting.
He joked about, that's the edgy inappropriate.
Then he also joked about gender fluidity or whatever, which is perfectly fine.
But the point is, those are the exact kinds of jokes that Louis C.K.
has been telling for two decades.
Where he's joking about things that you're not supposed to joke about, really edgy, you know, inappropriate stuff.
That's what he's been, that's been his shtick.
That's what he's been doing for 20 years.
And it's exactly the kind of thing that once earned him basically worshipful praise, like deifying praise from the very people who were now very, very mad about the jokes that he made.
So people were upset about that.
And then there was also, at some point in the days prior to that, I got wind of another outrage that I had missed.
There was outrage over comments that had been made by a TV chef named Andrew Zimmern, who's the host of a show called Bizarre Foods, which is actually one of my favorite shows.
I love that show.
Anyway, he made comments about Chinese food restaurants in the Midwest.
Apparently Zimmern said that Chinese restaurants in that part of the country are horse crap.
Only he didn't say crap, he used the S word.
Now, this is an observation that every person who has ever eaten Chinese food in the Midwest has also made, probably verbatim, because they are horse crap for the most part.
Same for Mexican food in the Midwest, same for a lot of different kinds of food in the Midwest, honestly.
There are some good, there's some good food too in the Midwest, but a lot of bad food, you know, if I'm just being honest.
But people were very mad about it, especially on Twitter.
And they said it was I don't know.
They thought it was racist.
It was this and that.
And then it ended up with production on Zimmern's Travel Channel show being halted because of comments that he made about Chinese food restaurants in the American Midwest.
There was another outrage that I missed over the Christmas break.
Chris Rock.
Apparently got into some trouble for not correcting Ricky Gervais and Louis C.K.
yet again when they used the N-word on an HBO show seven years ago.
Now, this one takes a little bit of explaining.
So, back in 2011, Ricky Gervais, Louis CK, Chris Rock, and Jerry Seinfeld apparently filmed some sort of discussion show for HBO where they sat around in a room on chairs and they talked about comedy for an hour.
And, you know, so that was the show.
I actually watched part of it when I heard about this.
It was actually kind of interesting.
But during the course of the conversation, Gervais and CK joked about the N-word and about how they themselves sometimes use the N-word during their stand-up sets.
And then Chris Rock, who was the only black guy in the discussion, instead of correcting them, he egged them on and he joked around also about the word with them.
Now, nobody cared about this for almost an entire decade, right?
For like seven or eight years.
Nobody cared.
Nobody noticed.
Nobody, just nobody cared.
Then suddenly, some very mad people on Twitter discovered the clip, posted it, and a two- or three-day Twitter outrage cycle ensued, which I basically missed.
The only reason that I'm aware of it is that people emailed me about it, but if you go on Twitter now, you're not going to see any hint of any of this.
And you especially won't see any hint of any of these Internet, Twitter, social media outrages if you put down your phone and you go out and you interact with people in a three-dimensional physical environment.
Here's a really fun experiment, okay?
Don't actually do this because it'd be kind of awkward, but if you were to just walk down the street and then stop a random person who's walking by you and say to them, hey, what do you think of that whole Chris Rock controversy?
Or say, hey, what's your take on those offensive jokes that Louis C.K.
told?
Or you could say like, excuse me, what's your opinion on Andrew Zimmern's comments about Midwestern Chinese food?
Now I would bet you $100 that the first 50 people you stop will answer with some version of, what in the world are you babbling about?
And that's because normal humans in the real world don't care about any of this.
They aren't paying attention to it.
They have no idea what people on the internet are very mad about, or why they're very mad about those things, and they aren't going to take the time to find out because they simply don't care.
The people that you encounter in the world are concerned about things that are much closer to them and much more relevant to their lives.
So if you're in line at the supermarket, the woman in front of you, she's not thinking about what Ricky Gervais said on HBO in 2011.
She's thinking about, she's getting all her coupons together and that's what she's thinking about.
Or if you drive by a guy in traffic, he's not thinking about, he's not dwelling or stewing over Over offensive jokes that Louis C.K.
told at a comedy club last week.
He's thinking about, he's worried about layoffs at his job or something like that.
The girl sitting across from you at the coffee shop, she's not worried about Chris Rock or what Andrew Simmons said about Chinese food.
She's studying for her exam that she's going to have in a couple of weeks.
Those are the things that people care about.
And we should also keep this in mind, that even if the girl at the coffee shop Or the guy driving down the street.
Or the woman in front of you at the supermarket.
Even if they actually did stop at some point during the day to write an angry tweet about the outrage of the day, they still don't really care.
Because obviously, when we can't really Have this firm delineation between the real world and the internet because people in the real world are on the internet.
So it may be if you stop someone on the street, they may in fact be aware of these things and maybe they actually said something about it.
Maybe they voiced their opinion.
But they aren't going to do anything with their outrage.
That's the point.
They aren't spending all day thinking about it.
It costs a person nothing at all to send an angry tweet or to post a, can-you-believe-that-so-and-so-said-such-and-such type of Facebook post.
You can churn that out, kind of reflexively, and then you go back to your day, and it doesn't really matter to you.
And that's the most striking thing about Internet outrage, is that it is so utterly, completely, aggressively, Consistently empty and meaningless.
It has almost no natural real world correlation or consequence.
And I say natural because obviously it does have artificial, it can have artificial real world consequences.
So people on the internet were very upset about whatever Kevin... I don't even... What was the Kevin Hart thing?
Kevin Hart got in trouble.
I know he lost his Academy Awards game.
I don't even remember anymore what he got in trouble about.
Do you?
I don't think anyone does.
But that's another one.
No one really cared about that.
There was a lot of outrage online.
But that's another one.
If you'd stop someone on the street, they would say... They either wouldn't be aware of it or they really wouldn't care and they wouldn't want to talk about it.
In spite of that though, although it was empty, artificial, Meaningless outrage, he really did lose his Academy Awards job over it.
Andrew Zimmern really is, you know, suffering professional consequences as well.
But that's only because the decision makers in these companies, these corporate decision makers, they don't understand this extremely obvious point that I'm making right now and that you already knew.
So they cave to this non-existent pressure.
And they think that a bunch of mad tweets actually mean something when they really don't.
They don't realize that they could simply ignore this stuff and it would all go away within a few days.
If the Academy Awards had just completely ignored the Kevin Hart thing, Nobody would care right now.
Just like nobody cares now about the Kevin Hart thing, and that would be the case no matter how the Academy Awards reacted to it.
They could have just completely ignored it, said nothing about it, pretended it wasn't happening, and within a few days everyone has moved on to the next thing, so it doesn't matter.
But these people, they kind of like surrender and cede to the demands of Twitter avatars for no reason.
They remind me of an armed security guard who's frantically opening the bank vault for a six-year-old with a squirt gun.
You can hardly even call that robbery.
You can't even blame the six-year-old for it.
You blame the security guard.
Now, obviously, it doesn't help that while you've got these cowardly corporate decision-makers, on one hand, you also have the media.
Which will so often inflate the significance of these very mad internet posts.
They write whole stories and construct whole narratives around the angry tantrums of six or seven random nobodies on social media.
They write stories saying, outrage has erupted because of something that Louis C.K.
said or whatever.
And then when you look at it, you see that the eruption consists of like a few dozen
people who are writing salty tweets about it.
That's not an eruption.
That's not what an eruption is.
An eruption is a volcano.
It's lava spewing all over the place and destroying everything in its wake.
That's not what internet outrage does.
Internet outrage is not an eruption.
It's more like flatulence.
It's just this gross, annoying sound that smells bad.
bad and then disperses itself into the atmosphere and five minutes later you
didn't you know you it's it's like it never happened so just hold your nose
for a few seconds and wait it out that's how you respond to it so I think this is
what we need to do collectively we need to treat internet outrage with the
dismissive contempt that it deserves.
We should just laugh in its face, or better yet, yawn in its face, and then put our phones down and live our lives.
And that's it.
Knowing that somewhere out there in cyberspace, people are whining because so-and-so said such-and-such, and it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter at all.
It is just sound and fury and angry-faced emojis signifying nothing.
That's the incredible thing, is that when you put your phone down and just walk away from it, it's like a tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it.
That's all it is.
I think I've told you before that I myself have been, I've been the target of internet outrage many times.
And I've had the experience where I get, I've experienced it both ways.
I've had the experience where the internet outrage is coming fast and furious at me.
And I'm in the midst of it and I, and I, for some reason, I'm not able to put my phone down.
And so I'm reading all the comments and I'm getting all the emails and everything.
And sometimes in those moments it can feel very real and you could, you feel like this really means something.
And, um, and maybe you even get a little nervous.
You think like, Oh no, what's going to happen.
But then I've also had the experience of, I don't know, I'll send a tweet or something and then I'll just put my phone down and go about my day.
Not knowing that the tweet goes viral and people are very angry about it and I'm getting hundreds of messages and comments and people are freaking out and I'm oblivious to it.
I don't even know that it's happening.
And then a day later, I'll go back online and I'll see that this happened and it's already evaporated.
The outrage has already evaporated and I just missed it.
So then I can say, oh, okay, well, so that happened.
People were upset about that.
Who cares?
That's the way it always goes.
It just, it doesn't matter.
One other thing.
Um, for the rest of the week, uh, for the rest of this week, anyway, people will be, uh, talking about their new year's resolutions and asking you if the, I'm sure you've already been asked this question, but people are gonna be asking you, uh, what are, what are your resolutions and so on and so forth?
Well, I've got that question already a few times.
I have an idea for a New Year's resolution that we all can make, okay?
And here's the New Year's resolution.
We should resolve to stop making New Year's resolutions.
I think that's the best New Year's resolution we all can make.
Because here's the thing.
There's a reason why New Year's resolutions are notoriously short-lived.
And it's not just New Year's resolutions, by the way.
New Year's resolutions get a bad rap, but it's not just New Year's resolutions that are short-lived.
It's resolutions in general.
In fact, I would say that you can always be certain, or almost always be certain, that a person is not going to do a certain thing if they ever announce a resolution to do that thing.
And you can be sure that they're going to continue doing a certain thing if they've ever announced a resolution to not do that thing anymore.
Now, I know this is true in my life.
There are good things that I've successfully started doing, good habits that I've successfully formed, and there are bad habits that I've successfully broken.
Not many on either count, admittedly, but it has happened.
But the point is, when on the rare occasion I have actually successfully formed a good habit or broken a bad one, it has never happened after announcing my intention to do it.
Now I have many times announced my intention to do this and this, or not do this and that.
In every case, I have not followed through.
But on the cases where I have actually done the good thing, continuously, formed the good habit, broken the bad habit, I didn't even notice that it was happening while I was doing it.
As an example, I have many times resolved to start eating healthier, as we all have.
And then, most of the time, when I make that announcement and I say to someone, whoever's around me, to my wife or someone, that, you know, from now on, I'm going to start eating healthier.
And then three hours later, I'm drinking a milkshake.
But there have been times when I've, when I've suddenly kind of stopped and noticed and said, wow, I've been eating healthy for six weeks.
And that's because I never really officially resolved to do it.
I never said, from now on, etc.
I just did it.
That's all.
Like Nike, I just did it.
So my cliched and self-helpish kind of point that I want to make is that things are simply done.
You make the choice in the moment to do it or not do it.
With bad things or unhealthy things, you make the choice in the moment to not do it or do it.
And you can't make a years-long choice.
You can't make a choice that lasts even six weeks.
You can't make a choice that even lasts six minutes.
The choice lasts for the moment that you make it, and then it dissipates.
And you have to make it all over again, continuously, until it becomes a habit.
And even when it's a habit, you're still making a choice.
It's not on autopilot, it's just a little bit easier.
So, if you were really gonna start exercising, or eating right, or whatever else, you would just do it.
You would just start doing it.
Not on some arbitrary day, or time, or at some special moment, not with any ceremony attached to it, but just now, in the moment, right now.
So, if you were eating a Big Mac last week, And then you were thinking to yourself, come New Year's, I'm not going to be doing this anymore.
Then most likely, here we are on January 2nd, you've already probably broken that resolution.
You're probably eating a Big Mac right now as you're listening to this.
If you're serious about a certain choice, you would just make that choice and initiate it whenever you happen to think about it.
So, you would make the choice on January 2nd, or March 12th, or April 4th, or whatever.
Just on some random day, at whatever random time, it pops into your head, and you would just do it.
Those are the only resolutions that mean anything.
The resolutions that are not really resolutions at all, but are just simply good momentary choices followed by another good momentary choice, and so on.
You know what the only, I'll tell you, the only real function of New Year's resolutions is just to make you feel better while you're making bad choices up until New Year's.
So that's really the only reason why anyone ever announces that they're going to start eating healthy because nine times out of ten when you make that announcement, you're announcing it as you are eating unhealthily.
So it's just your way of making yourself feel better about the thing that you're doing right now, which is the opposite of your resolution.
But if you were serious about eating healthy, you just wouldn't have ordered the Big Mac in the first place.
The fact that you ordered it means that you're not serious about it yet, and so that's it.
So that's my self-help sermon for the day.
Whatever good thing, just do it in the moment, and then do it in the next moment, and then on and on.
Alright, we will leave it there, but I hope you all did have a good New Year's, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
Godspeed.
The 2020 race officially begins as Liz Warren hits the campaign trail of tears, then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Spencer Christmas attacking me on Twitter, Mitt Romney attacks President Trump, and The New York Times is right about the song of the year.
We'll get to all of that.
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