Ep. 172 - Democrats Can't Find Good Reason To Oppose Border Wall
President Trump brought his case for border security to the American people. It's a good case and Democrats have no answer for it. But why did Trump wait until now to take this stand? Also, an actor is in trouble for portraying a quadriplegic in a film. Finally, why are people these days so self-centered? Date: 1–9-2019
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, President Trump brings his case for the border wall to the American people.
It's a good case.
Democrats have no answer for it.
We'll talk more about what his case actually is, but also another question.
Why did he wait until now?
To make this case.
Also, Bryan Cranston is in trouble for portraying a quadriplegic in a film because he himself is not quadriplegic, don't you know?
And finally, why are people these days so selfish and what can be done to treat that problem?
We'll talk about all that today on The Matt Walsh Show.
President Trump made his case yesterday in a primetime address.
He stuck to the script, read from a prompter, explained why we need a border wall or a barrier, I guess.
I guess we're calling it a barrier now.
And he explained why this shutdown is really something that falls at the feet of Democrats who could end it at any time just by agreeing to allocate a little bit of money.
A little bit of money, comparatively speaking.
to protect the border.
And then we heard from Chuck and Nancy in a Democrat rebuttal.
Now you see the Democrats knew that this was a high stakes thing,
very important prime time responding to the president and they needed to put their two best people on the case.
And so it was Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi who stood before the nation looking a lot like a disgruntled old married couple who came to the restaurant for brunch and are very dissatisfied with the service and are going to go back to the retirement home and tell all their friends about it and everyone will sort of commiserate with each other and agree that the service at that place has really gone downhill over the last 25 years.
Um, and in their speech, as far as the actual content of it, they, um, they explained how, you know, it's, it's not their fault.
It's actually Trump's fault and so on.
Now, a few points here about all of this.
Uh, number one.
I don't think it moved the needle at all.
I don't think anyone was convinced.
I think everyone, whatever you thought about the border wall and all of that and immigration before last night, you probably think the same thing now.
I'm not sure that anyone can be convinced of anything anymore.
I think we're all just sort of set and stuck.
In whatever we think, and it's not going to change.
However, I do think it was good to see, in any case.
There are a lot of people that have been complaining about it for this or that reason.
I've seen people argue that it's a degradation of the presidency to have the president up there doing this.
How is it a degradation?
This is an important issue, and so the president is making his case in front of the nation, and then the other side, they're making their case, for whatever it's worth.
That's what we should see.
It's a good thing.
That's what we should see more of that in America.
And whatever programming it was interrupting, I think that this conversation is more important than that programming.
Unless it was interrupting playoff football, and then I would say it's different.
But it wasn't.
So whatever else it was going to be on TV, this is more important.
So I think even if it's not going to convince anyone, I just think it's a good thing in principle, and we should see more of this.
Rather than funneling it through the media, or rather than the president making his case on Twitter, Just bring it in front of the American people, like he did.
So I thought that was good.
Also, I like scripted Trump.
I like Trump when he's operating from a script.
He's on message, he's focused.
Those are always his best moments, is when he is sticking to it, when he's reading a speech and sticking to a script.
And when you see things like last night, it makes you think what could have been Maybe what could be with his presidency.
If he got off of Twitter and he stopped with the pep rally stuff where he's going off script and talking about whatever CNN personality he dislikes, instead just sticking to what actually matters and making the case.
That's the good stuff.
Now, he might not be the most gifted teleprompter reader in the world, but there have been plenty of other presidents who weren't very gifted in that regard.
And it is a difficult thing to do, to stand and look at a camera and read from a script.
It seems easy, but it's actually not that easy.
And that doesn't matter anyway.
The point is the message.
Now, I know you could say, well, he doesn't write the speeches.
So what I'm really saying is, my favorite Trump is when he's saying things that aren't his own words.
And in a way I am saying that, but of course no president writes their own speeches.
But that's not what this is, you know, there's more to it than that.
Because the point is, yeah, although Trump didn't write that speech, he is still willing to say things in a scripted speech that other Republicans are not willing to say and other Republican presidents would never say and never have said.
And he did it again.
The entire speech that he gave last night, he didn't write it fine, but it was a good speech, and that was a speech that other Republican presidents wouldn't be willing to give.
And so there's a lot of value in that.
If we can get Trump doing the good things that other presidents wouldn't do.
Yeah, other presidents also wouldn't spend all day on Twitter getting into Twitter feuds with Kathy Griffin or whoever.
But that's the stuff that other presidents wouldn't do for good reason.
But here now we have good things, substantive things, that Trump is willing to do. And so that's why I like it.
Good example, I thought his best line in the speech is the one that a lot of people are pointing
out.
It's a good line.
He says, some have suggested a barrier is immoral.
Then why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences, and gates around their homes?
They don't build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside.
The only thing that's immoral is the politicians who do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be horribly victimized.
That's a great line.
Now, it's obviously not the first time I've heard that line.
This is a point that conservatives have been making for years.
But it's good to hear it from the Oval Office, from the President.
It's a good line to have out there.
And it is unanswerable.
It is an unanswerable point.
It completely dismantles the argument against the wall or the barrier or whatever we're calling it.
Because as he said, you can't say that there's something in principle immoral about erecting some sort of barrier to keep people out when you rely on that level of security around your own home.
It just doesn't make any sense.
Or when you say, uh, build bridges, not walls.
Okay, well, are you building a bridge into your own home?
No, you build walls around your home.
And your home itself consists of walls.
Why is that?
Well, it's the same sort of principle.
So it, that's why it's a good line.
The only thing that Trump didn't do in that speech that I wish he would have done, and I think would have been really effective, is if he had spent some time specifically quoting Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Obama, other high-profile Democrats on this issue of the wall and border security.
Because all of them in the past Have come out in favor of some kind of barrier on the southern border.
They have all said that Hillary Clinton is another one.
They've all said things in the past about how obviously we need to protect the border.
And now they've changed their mind because Trump is the one who wants it.
And he did allude to that, it's a good point, but I think he should have specifically quoted them.
And if he had quoted Schumer and Pelosi, and then you immediately cut to Schumer and Pelosi standing there about to give their rebuttal, that would have been a very effective moment.
But even aside from that, it was a good speech.
What we saw from the Democrat rebuttal is that they have no arguments here.
They really have nothing to say.
What's their argument against it?
Too expensive?
Okay, well, yeah, $5 billion is a lot of money to you or me, but to the government, it's nothing these days, unfortunately, in comparison to how much they spend on so many other things.
On how much they spend on foreign aid, or on the welfare state, or on so many other things.
$5 billion is nothing, in comparison.
So, considering Democrats support all of these other really expensive measures, they can't now pretend that, well, you know what, $5 billion, we just don't have it in the budget.
We can't do it.
They can't become fiscal hawks all of a sudden on this issue.
It doesn't make sense.
So what are they going to say next?
It's immoral.
Well, we've already dealt with that.
They obviously don't think walls and security are immoral, because they've supported it in the past on the southern border, and they obviously, in their own lives, rely on it.
So what?
It doesn't work?
Well, we know that's not true.
You know, all you have to do is talk to Border Patrol agents.
Talk to the people who are actually down there dealing with this issue on a daily basis.
Talk to the people whose job is to deal with this issue.
And they're going to say, of course, some sort of physical barrier is going to be extremely effective.
It's not going to solve the problem in and of itself, but it's going to be an effective measure.
It's a big help to have it.
And if you look at the portions of the border where we have a physical barrier right now, you're going to find that there's a lot less illegal crossing, of course, because it's more difficult to do.
That just makes sense.
So they have no argument.
Their only real argument is is that Trump wants to do this and we don't want to give him a win So that's why we don't want it, but they can't say that So they have to resort to other talking points that make no sense So, okay That said There's there's another question here that I think Conservatives should be asking and most conservatives are not asking and that is Why did Trump wait until right now to take this stand?
Republicans controlled the House and the Senate for two years leading up to this.
They passed budgets several times.
Trump could have said any time in 2017 or 2018, I'm not going to sign a budget that doesn't have border wall funding.
He could have said that.
He could have taken that stand then.
And he didn't.
If he had taken that stand in 2017, we would have a wall right now, or at least the beginnings of the makings of a wall.
We'd have portions of a wall built.
So, it seems very odd to me that he waited to take this stand and take us into a shutdown.
He waited until Democrats controlled the House to do it.
It just makes no sense.
And it's part of a pattern with Republicans.
This is what Republicans always do.
They wait to try and do something until they no longer have the power to do it.
Have you noticed that?
Republicans become very forceful, very principled, you know, fighters, the moment they no longer have the power to actually do all the things they're saying they want to do.
And that really troubles me.
That's been the trend with Republicans for decades now, and we're seeing it continue with President Trump.
And you can't tell me, well, you know, he couldn't do it before because Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan... First of all, okay, so you're telling me Trump couldn't do it because they told him no?
All right, well, now we've got Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi who are saying no.
But he's not listening to them, is he?
He's saying, he's saying, I don't care what you say about it.
This is important and it needs to be done.
So he's willing to have that fight with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, but he wasn't willing to have that fight with his people in his own party?
It just doesn't make sense.
That's the big question here.
I mean, literally, as soon as Democrats took over, that's when Trump says, all right, let's get that wall built.
It could have easily been done before that.
No problem.
I mean, do you really think that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell would have let a government shutdown go on for weeks, refusing to allocate the funds for a border wall?
No way!
They could have easily been forced into it.
It's going to be really hard to force Democrats into it.
Because for Democrats, there's no incentive.
There's very little incentive for Democrats to cave.
They don't want the wall.
They don't want to give Trump a win.
Their base doesn't want it.
So this is a very difficult fight to win for that reason.
Because there's not much in it for them to cave.
But if you want to put this all on establishment Republicans before, they wouldn't let the wall get built.
There would have been huge incentives for them to give in if Trump had actually had that fight and took in that stand and said, this is going to get done.
There would have been huge incentives for Republicans to go along with it, because their base wants it.
It's something they said they always wanted.
You know, they're all part of the same party, so there are huge incentives.
Now there's no incentive.
Now he's dealing with people who he has very little leverage over, because they want two completely different things, and their bases want two completely different things.
He could have done it for two years.
He waited until now.
Again, it's not unique.
I mean, this is what Republicans do.
But it's the same pattern.
It always repeats itself.
And what troubles me about it is that it really seems like Republicans are not as interested in actually doing things.
In fact, they don't want to do anything.
They want an excuse.
Okay, so they want to pretend they're trying to do something, and then have the Democrats prevent it, and then they can point fingers at the Democrats and say, oh, we want to do it, but we can't.
And then they can go into the, you know, and then they can go into the re-election campaign and say, no, re-elect us so that we can actually do it this time.
And then it's just on and on and on.
It continues like that.
But then they never actually have to do the thing.
So that's an important question.
I think that needs to be asked.
of President Trump.
Why did you wait until now?
Why now?
I hope it gets done.
It's an important thing.
But we had two years to do it.
It seems really strange that now all of a sudden this is the number one priority.
All right.
Let's see.
The latest famous liberal to be devoured by his own side is Bryan Cranston.
Bryan Cranston, who is the star of my favorite television show of all time, Breaking Bad.
Corey, reading now from the Daily Wire, it says, former Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston is being forced to defend his decision to play a severely disabled man in an upcoming film called The Upside after social justice warriors criticized both Cranston and the studio for not casting a true quadriplegic in the role.
The BBC reports that Cranston is speaking out, defending not just his business decision to star alongside Kevin Hart and Nicole Kidman in the dramatic comedy premiering this month, but also defending his right as an actor to take roles that force him to leave his comfort zone and adopt a new persona.
Cranston said, we live in a world of criticism.
If we're willing to get up and try something, we have to also be willing to take criticism.
We're very aware of the need to expand the opportunities for people with disabilities.
The Ruderman Family Foundation, which advocates on behalf of disabled Americans, was quick to point out that Cranston took a role that could have gone to an actor actually suffering from near-complete paralysis.
Taking a page from previous campaigns against white actors playing people of color, the foundation suggested that Cranston's casting was discrimination.
Others, primarily social justice advocates, compared Cranston's portrayal of a quadriplegic man to blackface.
And on and on it goes.
Now... Of course this is absurd.
It's acting.
He's playing a role.
That's the whole point of acting.
He's pretending to be something that he isn't.
That's the point.
Okay, Daniel Day-Lewis portrayed, he also portrayed a severely disabled man in a great movie called My Left Foot, which I guess just would not fly these days.
But he portrayed Abraham Lincoln a few years ago.
He's not actually Abraham Lincoln, okay?
Now, we all know that.
But he's pretending to be Abraham Lincoln.
Because that's what acting is.
That's the point.
And that actually, a lot of times, that's how we identify really great acting performances is when someone is playing a character that is really, that's far outside of who they actually are.
So that's why it's, I haven't seen the movie, but if Cranston really pulls off this performance, we would say, well, that's a great acting performance, because he's not himself quadriplegic.
So to try to inhabit that role must be pretty difficult.
Right?
To play a historical person, the person that has existed far outside of your own environment, your own culture, that's a difficult thing to do.
So we say, well, that's a great, that was a great acting performance.
I mean, how many quadriplegic actors are there to choose from in the first place?
I'm not saying there aren't any, but it's just...
And in any case, that's not, when you're looking to cast a role, what you're looking, and I've never been through this process myself, I don't work in Hollywood, but it seems to me, what you're saying to yourself when you're looking to cast a role is, let's find someone who is really good at pretending to be this thing.
Because that's what acting is.
So obviously it's ridiculous.
You know, as I said, this is just Bryan Cranston, liberal Hollywood celebrity, like many others.
Now he's being devoured by his own.
I just think, at what point are—whatever reasonable leftists might still exist out there, however many reasonable leftists are left on that side, I would just say to them, I would appeal to them.
And maybe Bryan Cranston is among them.
I don't know.
You know, now's the time to get out.
I'm not saying that you have to leave leftism and immediately become a conservative.
I'm just saying that now's the time, you know, to separate yourself from that.
Because you see how crazy it is.
And you just, with these Hollywood celebrities, especially recently, when they're getting in trouble for things, and they're facing backlash and outrage, it's always from their own side.
I mean, conservatives could complain all the time about the stuff you see in Hollywood, and we do complain sometimes.
Rightfully so.
But most of the big outrages, the backlash, people losing their jobs, controversies, all that, these days, most of it is coming from the left.
And so that is my appeal to any reasonable leftists that remain, is you can leave.
You can disassociate yourself from all of that.
Because they, you know, they're going to turn on you eventually and devour you.
I think we've seen that by now.
Finally, I received this email a few days ago, and I've been wanting to respond to it.
It's kind of a standard millennial lament, but there's a point that I wanted to make about it.
So here's the email.
It says, Matt, can you talk about the narcissism of the millennial generation?
I've noticed that they are very self-centered and can't see beyond themselves, and now we've got millennial politicians like AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in office, and I fear that the path they will take us down as a country is a very bad one, and it continues from there.
Yes, the narcissistic, selfish millennials.
The emailer is right, of course.
There are a lot of people in that category in my generation, no question.
And we're going to talk about how they ended up that way.
But it should be stated up front that narcissism is not a problem unique to young people.
I don't think there's any evidence that it's even appreciably worse among the young.
I don't think there's any evidence of that or any reason to believe it.
I mean, if you look at the baby boomer generation, you're not going to see very much evidence of selflessness and generosity in that generation, okay?
And if you look at boomer politicians, now, so you could say, look, if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the millennial representative of my generation, In Congress, then, well, think about all the representatives of the boomer generation that have been on the political scene over the last few decades.
Among boomers, you see some of the worst political leaders our country has ever endured.
Let's start with the Clintons, okay, and go from there.
But this isn't a generational squabble.
This is just the human condition.
Selfishness is part of the human condition.
It's ingrained in us.
And a lot of work has to be done, starting at a very young age, to pry people away from that self-centered way of thinking.
And these days, it's true that that work is often not done, or at least it's not done very well.
And it's also clear that it wasn't always done well back in the old days either.
So here's, I think, the problem.
It's very difficult to look at the world and realize that you yourself are not the star player.
You aren't even a very significant player at all.
But you experience things through your own prism, because what other choice do you have?
And in experiencing things that way, you start to see everything as if it exists in relation to you.
Everything is defined by its relation to you.
So you say, and all people are also defined by their relationship to you.
So you say, well, that's my brother, that's my friend, that's my child, that's my spouse, that's my mother, that's my co-worker, that's a stranger, that's my neighbor, that's a random person, and so on.
Everyone is labeled and categorized according to how they fit into your life.
And again, that's unavoidable, and there's nothing wrong with it in principle.
There's no other way for us to think about these things.
But the trouble is that we can easily revert back to this default way of thinking where my brother and my friend and my child and my spouse and my co-worker, all of these people are solely and only those things.
So they are mine, in effect, in the end.
They are defined only by their relationship to me, and they have no existence outside of that.
I am the only fully-formed, fully-independent, complex, interesting, emotional human being in the world.
Now, of course, very few people will think this way in the front of their minds explicitly.
Most people aren't going to go around saying stuff like this.
But it's just kind of a general, unexamined attitude that we all carry around with us, and it will bleed more and more into our conscious thoughts unless we make the effort to see the world differently.
And a lot of that work does have to be done at a young age.
So, like with my kids, my kids are very young, and they don't... they really don't understand yet, or they can't fully understand.
That the world doesn't revolve around them.
I mean, they really think it does.
Because my oldest, our twins are five years old, so that's just what they think.
And they look at us, they look at my wife and I, and they think, well, we're mom and dad.
And we are.
But they can't conceive of the idea that we might be more than that as well, that we might be other things on top of that.
So they see us and they think that our whole point in life is to care for them and be at their beck and call all the time.
That's just what they think.
And that's why kids always have no problem interrupting a conversation that adults are having, because in their minds they think, well, I have something I want to say to mommy, and of course mommy's going to listen right now and drop everything she's doing because she's my mommy and she can't possibly have anything else she wants to talk about or do right now except just attend to me.
Over time, kids have to be helped to overcome this way of thinking, and that's what growth is about.
But often that work is not done, and they aren't taught to think unselfishly, and often they are taught exactly the opposite, especially these days, where it's constantly put into their heads that you're special, you're wonderful, and some of that In moderation is okay, but when that's constantly the message and there's never a humbling message on top of it, then the problem only gets worse and worse and more harmful as they get older.
But it's very hard, you know, it's very hard to think unselfishly and to truly live in a way that is not self-centered.
Because that involves more than like giving to charity and being a nice person.
I mean, you could do those two things and still be a very self-centered person.
I think it involves seeing the world in a completely different way, and it involves an immense amount of humility.
It involves the realization that I, myself—now, I'm a child of God, so that makes me sacred and valuable, but in terms of the general scheme of what the world has going on, as far as everyone else is concerned, in terms of the day-to-day practicality, I'm really not that important.
I could die tomorrow and most people wouldn't care.
I could die tomorrow and a few people would be completely devastated.
A few more people, not as close to me but still somewhat close, would be really sad for a while.
And in my specific case, I think some of you Might be a little sad and you would say, oh, you know, that's really sad.
I can't believe that.
He was so young.
And then some of you might be quite pleased about the news, actually.
But then the vast majority of people on earth, almost everyone in comparison, won't even notice.
It'll mean absolutely nothing to them.
The world would just continue along without me and so many billions of people won't even know what they're missing.
They'll never know that I'm gone because they never knew that I existed in the first place.
You know, that's kind of the realization that we always have to have in our minds if we actually want to live and think unselfishly and not turn into absolute narcissists.
And we might say, well, that's kind of a depressing thought.
But it's not really depressing.
It's just a recognition that the world, in fact, does not revolve around me.
And that's okay.
It's kind of exciting, actually.
What a boring world it would be if it actually did revolve around me.
What a boring world it would be if I actually was the center of it.
I mean, have you ever had this thought?
I'm sure you have.
You know, we've all thought this when we're driving down the highway or something and then you're driving along and a car passes by you and you think to yourself, the person in that car is a person.
They have their own dreams and hopes and fears, their own life, their own story.
It's a story that's happening out there completely apart from me, and I am totally irrelevant to it.
And they're going to go on and live their life, and we crossed our paths that we'll never cross again.
And that's just a totally separate existence from me.
I don't see that as sad.
I see it as sort of beautiful, and it's absolutely necessary.
This realization is absolutely necessary in order to become a well-developed and adjusted person.
This, by the way, I think is one of the reasons why really famous celebrities often become drug addicts and wackos, because it's very hard to develop and adjust in their situation.
You know, whereas most of us on a daily basis, we have this very freeing and humbling and refreshing experience of being in large crowds of strangers or passing by strangers on the sidewalk or on the highway and being just one of those strangers in relation to them, being kind of a nobody, a nameless face, a member of the crowd.
We all have that experience, most of us anyway, all the time when we go out in public.
But if you're a famous celebrity, you've never had that experience.
Or at least it's been a very long time since you've had it.
So if you're Johnny Depp, well, Johnny Depp is Johnny Depp wherever he goes.
He is never a nameless face.
He's never just a member of the crowd.
He is a part of everyone's story because we all know his name, we've seen his films.
Now, of course, we know he's not a very important part of our story.
If Johnny Depp died tomorrow, we would all say, oh, that's too bad.
He was a real talent.
You know, things went off the rails.
It's too bad.
Maybe we would post something on social media about it.
But then we'd go on and we'd live our life.
And, you know, we'd go to the store.
We'd eat dinner.
We wouldn't even think about it that much.
We wouldn't be that terribly broken up about it.
Not because we're sociopaths, but just because we're living our own lives.
And Johnny Depp actually is not at the center of our lives.
But from Johnny Depp's perspective, everyone knows him.
Everyone makes a big deal about him.
Anytime he walks into a room, everyone goes, holy crap, it's Johnny Depp.
And so how can someone in that position not become an egomaniacal lunatic?
To be really down-to-earth as a famous celebrity, that is just a Herculean feat of modesty and humility.
And most people aren't capable of that, and so that's why so few of them really are down to earth, and most of them are insane.
Because I think fame at that level drives you insane, because there is just no humbling force in your life at all.
But most of us don't have that problem.
And I think that's a good thing.
As I said, it's freeing as well.
There's a famous quote, I don't know who it originates with, But it goes something like this, that you'll be a lot less worried about what people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
And I think that's, if we want to talk about what are we supposed to say to kids to stop them from being narcissists, I think that's one of the most important things they can learn.
And it's not depressing.
It is a freeing thing.
So I think it's one of the, you know, when kids are really worried about, you know, someone said something mean to them at school or this or that person doesn't like them, I think, maybe you think of a delicate way to put it, but a message that needs to be communicated to them is that, well, number one, you shouldn't care what they think because, you know, You shouldn't live your life that way.
But also, those people don't really care that much.
I know they said that mean thing to you, but they don't really care.
I mean, they're off somewhere right now, not even thinking about you.
They just don't care that much.
It's not that important to them.
Oh, you feel like you embarrassed yourself at school today?
You know, nobody cares.
I mean, they might kind of laugh about it, but they're not thinking about it right now.
Right now, you're the only one in the world thinking about it.
Everyone else has moved on.
Because they don't care that much about you in the first place.
As I said, I think maybe we'd be delicate about the way we communicate that to kids, especially when they're younger, but that is just... And it's something we all, as adults, we need to realize.
When we sit around worrying about, you know, how did I come across?
Or what do people think of me?
They're not really thinking about you.
They don't really care that much.
Because you're not the center of their life.
You are a very, very, very minor player in their life.
And for most people, you're not a player at all.
And it is in that realization that we can have humility and not be narcissists.
And so, you know, the millennial generation, do they have a more difficult time with this concept?
Probably.
And then we could get into the media and the internet and how that kind of feeds into this self-centered way of thinking about it.
We can get into that.
We won't get into it now, but yeah, it's probably a bigger, at least a slightly bigger problem now than it used to be.
And I think this is how we get over it.
All right.
We'll leave it there.
Thanks for everybody.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Godspeed.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Chuck and Nancy get memed for their American Gothic response to Trump's Oval Office speech.
We will analyze why responses to presidential addresses never, ever, ever work.
Then, the American Psychological Association declares masculinity harmful.