All Episodes
Jan. 10, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
26:55
Ep. 173 - Starbucks Now Needs Disposal Boxes For Heroin Needles

Today on the show, remember when Starbucks flung open their doors and announced that everyone, even non-customers, can use their bathrooms? That worked out... poorly, it turns out. Also, the president of Planned Parenthood makes a stunning admission. Finally, should we tip out flight attendants? Remember to subscribe on iTunes for the full show. Date: 01-10-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Today on The Matt Walsh Show, remember when Starbucks flung open its doors and announced that everyone, even non-customers, could use their bathrooms?
Well, how did that work out?
Not very well, it turns out.
We'll talk about that.
Also, the president of Planned Parenthood makes a stunning and honest admission.
Stunning because it's honest.
And should we tip our flight attendants?
That's the question that we'll also tackle today on The Matt Walsh Show.
It's always sort of breathtaking whenever we get a little bit of honesty out of Planned Parenthood.
You never expect it because the abortion industry runs on lies.
Deception, okay, that's their primary fuel source.
That and the blood of the innocent.
So those two things.
But every once in a while, Every once in a while, someone at Planned Parenthood will kind of peek up from the muck and the dirt and the blood, and they'll accidentally say something honest.
And that's when you stop and you take note.
Because it's such a significant moment.
So that happened this week.
Leanna Nguyen is the new president of Planned Parenthood after the most prolific mass murderer in history, Cecile Richards, stepped down.
Leanna Nguyen took her place.
Leanna Nguyen goes by Dr. Nguyen, but I'm not gonna call her doctor because she's a doctor in the same way that John Wayne Gacy was a clown, okay?
That's just, it's a cover they use.
It's something that they, it's a title that they use to lure their victims in, all right?
But Wen was profiled by BuzzFeed recently, and the BuzzFeed article claims that Wen wants to focus on non-abortion services.
She wants Planned Parenthood to focus on the non-abortion part and kind of highlight that and do more of that.
Well, Wen took issue with this, and here's what she tweeted, okay?
She said—this is the president of Planned Parenthood, by the way, alright?
Just to reiterate, she said, I am always happy to do interviews, but these headlines completely misconstrue my vision for Planned Parenthood.
First, our core mission is providing, protecting, and expanding access to abortion and reproductive health care.
We will never back down from that fight.
It is a fundamental human right, and women's lives are at stake.
Okay.
Again, first, our core mission is providing, protecting, and expanding access to abortion.
Core mission.
She didn't even say, that's one of our core missions, that's a core mission.
She said, that's our core mission.
Providing, protecting, and expanding access to abortion.
Now, I know that if you don't follow these things very closely, Uh, but you, you know, you have a general sense of what Planned Paranoid does, you'll hear that and you'll say, yeah, so, obviously, Planned Paranoid, they, that's what they do, they do abortions.
Well, yes, I know that, you know that, but that's not what Planned Paranoid has been saying about itself.
For the last 50 years, and that's not what Planned Parenthood's proponents say, and those who are proponents of tax funding for Planned Parenthood, that's not what they say.
They have always said that abortion is just a tiny part of what they do, a tiny, almost insignificant sort of afterthought.
They've said that abortion is 3% of their business.
That's the number that we've been hearing over and over again for decades.
Abortion is 3% of our business.
Now, if something is 3% of your business, can you really say that it's your core mission?
If 3% of a restaurant's sales were, let's say, coffee, would it make sense for them to call themselves a coffee place and say that their core mission is selling coffee?
If that's your core mission, then you're really bad at it.
Well, the 3% figure was always nonsense, and all you had to do was look at the numbers.
They've been saying for years that abortion is 3% of their business, yet, if you look at the numbers, you'll see that abortion is, by far and away, the most significant source of revenue for them, or I should say, the most significant non-governmental source of revenue.
Because they get $500 million a year in tax money.
So aside from the tax money that's shoveled into their pockets, it's the number one source of revenue.
Yet they've been saying for years that it's only 3%.
Number one source of revenue, they say 3%.
How did they come up with that number?
How did they get away with it?
Well, partly it's just a bald-faced lie.
But then also partly, this is what they would do.
They would unbundle their services.
That's sort of the phrase that would be used.
And what that means is that, for instance, if a woman came in, got an abortion, paid 300-400 bucks for it or more, and then on the way out the door was handed a little bit of free birth control, They would put that down in the books as two services provided.
And they would count them equally.
Even though the main point of the visit was the abortion, and that's where all the money came from, and that's the thing that was paid for, because she got the birth control on the way out, they call it two services provided.
So that would be as if Let's say there was a car dealership and you were to go in, buy a car for $32,000.
But while you're waiting there and maybe the guy is going to get some paperwork for you to fill out, so you go and you run to the vending machine real quick and get yourself a Pepsi, so you buy a Pepsi and you buy a car, and that would be like if the car dealership were to write that down in the books as two services provided and count them equally, as if they're exactly the same thing.
As if you came there for the Pepsi and the car, and as far as the car dealership is concerned, they're both as significant as, you know, the purchases are equal in significance in their minds.
That's what it's like.
And then the car dealership can, you know, look at their books at the end of the day and say, look, we sold five cars and we sold five Pepsis, so selling Pepsi is 50% of our business.
Doesn't make any sense.
And now it seems that after all these years, after saying 3% of our business, 3% of our business, 3% of our business, now finally they're admitting that it was all a lie.
50 years of a lie just exposed by Planned Parenthood, just admitted.
You know, it reminds me of the time at a National Abortion Federation conference.
And this was video that got very little attention from anyone, but Lisa Harris is the director, or was anyway a few years ago, the director of Planned Parenthood of Michigan.
And she was caught in an undercover video saying to a crowd of people at a National Abortion Federation conference, this is what she said.
She's talking about what points can be conceded to pro-lifers.
And this is what she says.
She says, given that we actually see the fetus the same way, and given that we might actually both agree that there's violence in here, let's just give them all the violence.
It's a person.
It's killing.
Let's just give them that.
This, again, Director of Planned Parenthood of Michigan.
Speaking at a panel at a National Abortion Federation conference.
And she says, it's a person.
It's killing.
Those are two things, again, that a Planned Parenthood would never admit publicly.
It's a person and it's killing?
Yet when you get them behind closed doors and they think that nobody else is listening, they're going to admit, well, yeah, of course it's a person that we're killing.
No, everybody, all the so-called doctors and everybody, you know, people that work for Planned Parenthood, they all know what they're doing.
This whole idea that it's not killing a person, that's just stupidity that they feed to the lemmings in the public.
And then they sit back and almost scratch their heads, like, how are these people buying this?
Obviously we're killing a person.
That's the whole point of the procedure.
It is specifically designed to kill somebody.
If there was no person to kill, you wouldn't be coming in for an abortion.
But in that case, at least, that's something that was admitted behind closed doors, as I said, when they thought nobody else was listening.
In the case of Leanna Nguyen, She's just coming out and saying it.
Yeah, this is what we do.
We provide abortions.
That's our thing.
It's our core mission.
So then the question is, and I raise this question yet again, I don't know why I keep bringing it up, you know, but will this finally lead to the defunding of Planned Parenthood?
I mean, can this finally be the thing?
Now that you've got the president of Planned Parenthood saying, this is our core mission is to provide abortions, and we're giving them $500 million a year in tax money, can this be the thing that defunds Planned Parenthood?
Well, no.
No, of course not.
Of course not now, especially, because the Republicans controlled Congress and the White House for two years.
That was their time to do it.
Oh, they can't... Remember, when Barack Obama was president for eight years, Republicans really wanted to defund Planned Parenthood.
And they came up with all these different bills that would defund Planned Parenthood, and they said, oh, you know, we really want to do it, but we've got to do it.
I mean, Obama's there.
He's just going to veto it.
Oh, shoot.
I mean, we'd love to.
We just can't.
And then Donald Trump gets into the White House, and they control Congress, and somehow this issue that they supposedly cared about for eight years and really wanted to do just slips their mind for two years.
And here's what I'm guessing.
That now that Democrats control the House, Republicans are all of a sudden going to rediscover their passion for defunding Planned Parenthood.
Now they're gonna decide that, oh yeah, what was that thing we wanted to do?
Oh yeah, defund Planned Parenthood.
Hey guys, let's do that.
Oh, we can't now because the Democrats control the House.
Oh, man, we missed it again.
Absolute cowards.
Cowards and liars.
That's basically the story of abortion and how abortion has remained legal all these years, and how Planned Parenthood has remained funded all these years.
Okay, let's get to some karmic news.
Starbucks!
You may recall the great bathroom outrage at Starbucks.
Of course, there are so many contrived outrages in a year that it's hard to keep track of all of them.
But this one was so phony and so divorced from anything resembling reality that it's really worth keeping in mind.
It's one that I've remembered.
Maybe you have as well.
But if you haven't, just a quick refresher course.
This was back in April or May of last year.
A Starbucks manager at a location in Philadelphia became the target of the Pitchfork Brigade after refusing restroom privileges to a couple of people who came in wanting to use the restroom.
The only problem was that the people who came in were not customers and they weren't buying anything.
And so the two men, who happened to be black, were told that, well, if you want to use the restroom, you have to buy something.
Hey, good news!
You can buy a coffee here for, like, two bucks.
Or you could buy a bottle of water.
I mean, you could buy anything.
And you're a customer, just like that.
And now you can use the bathroom.
But they decided that They didn't want to use the bathroom, or they didn't want to buy anything, so they couldn't use the bathroom.
This was not a policy that this manager invented on her own.
This was a corporate policy at Starbucks at the time, and this is also a policy that many restaurants and stores enforce, especially in urban areas, because you've got a lot of people coming in, it's very jammed, very crowded, and so they need to make sure that the people that are taking up tables and using the facilities are actually customers.
So, um, the men sat down at a table after, you know, after asking to use a restroom, being told only customers can use the restroom, declining to buy something, they then went and sat down at a table while still refusing to purchase something.
And so the manager goes over.
After they've just called attention to themselves like that, now she knows that they're there, not buying anything, taking up a table.
Again, this is a busy Starbucks.
It's not fair to take up a table.
Like, if you've ever been into a Starbucks before, you know that tables can be hard to come by.
And so if you have your coffee and your little Danish or whatever that you bought and you can't sit down because there are two guys taking up a table who didn't even buy anything, that's not fair.
It doesn't make any sense for a store to allow that.
So she goes over to them and she says, hey guys, if you want to sit at a table, you got to buy something.
And then this was the context that came out later.
She offered to serve them right there at the table, like she was a waitress.
She said, can I get you a coffee?
Can I get you something?
And they still refused to buy anything.
And finally, after refusing, the police were called because they were trespassing, and the two guys were taken out in cuffs, as they deserve to be.
Because if you are trespassing like that, and you're not following the rules of an establishment, and you're taking up space without buying something, and you're asked to leave and you refuse, you deserve to be hauled out in handcuffs.
But, of course, racism was immediately assumed.
Despite a total lack of evidence to support the charge.
And the racism charge was especially idiotic.
Number one, because the woman was simply following corporate policy.
Number two, because it's a Starbucks in Philadelphia.
Presumably, black people come into that store all the time.
Presumably, this manager has interacted with and served black customers hundreds of times without any incident.
So now if anyone could have ever come up with evidence that she, on a regular basis, would kick out black customers for no reason, well then maybe now you have a reason to suspect that there's racism involved.
But if hundreds of black customers have come in and out, and she has served them, and there's been no incident, and all of a sudden there's an incident with these two particular guys, It doesn't make any sense whatsoever to assume that race had anything to do with it at all.
Nevertheless, the Starbucks CEO publicly threw this loyal employee under the bus.
And finally, in their last act of corporate cowardice, Starbucks reversed their restroom policy and made a big show of announcing that now anybody can come in, sit at the tables, use the bathroom.
You don't have to be a customer.
It doesn't matter.
All right.
So that's the background, right?
Just to refresh your memories.
Fast forward a few months, and here we are.
And now it has been reported that certain Starbucks locations, less than a year after announcing this enlightened new bathroom policy, now are going to be installing special disposable boxes for used heroin needles in their bathrooms.
Okay.
They're also going to be removing trash cans from some of their bathrooms because the employees have expressed concern about getting pricked with needles when they change out the trash bags.
There have been reports of condoms, alcohol bottles, blood stains on the floors and on the walls.
Ironically, this free bathroom policy, this bathroom free-for-all, has made the bathrooms less accessible.
There was a report in the New York Post a few weeks ago about some Starbucks in New York where you can't use any bathroom because the stalls are closed for extended periods of time due to, the New York Post says, prolonged cleaning efforts.
You gotta wonder what's going on in those bathrooms if they have to be shut for days to be cleaned.
Now, it could be pointed out That Starbucks probably had many of these problems before the new policy.
So it's not like these problems just started now.
Yeah, fine.
That's exactly the point.
That's why the policy existed in the first place.
That's why stores and restaurants have policies like this.
And that's why these policies are especially enforced in urban areas.
Because it's just a fact of the matter that a spacious, private, single-stall bathroom at a place like Starbucks in an urban area is a very attractive place for drug addicts and drunks and vagrants and other assorted characters.
Most businesses, though, are not interested in becoming de facto homeless shelters or de facto halfway homes.
Starbucks is in the business of selling coffee.
They're not in the business of providing, or at least they didn't used to be in the business, of providing safe spaces for heroin addicts to shoot up heroin.
And historically, that's why they reserve their bathrooms and their tables for people who are actually interested in purchasing a product.
Now, that's not a fail-proof plan.
Just because you have that policy doesn't mean you're necessarily going to be able to stop everyone from going into the bathroom to get high or drink or, you know, engage in other sorts of activities, messy activities.
But It's still relatively effective.
It's a relatively effective way to stop that stuff from happening in your bathrooms.
There's a reason why some stores now need needle disposal boxes, and that only became necessary after they changed the policy.
Starbucks changes its bathroom policy, says, okay, anyone can come in, even if you're not a customer, and now they need special boxes to dispose of heroin needles.
What does that teach us?
What have we learned here, is the question.
Now, it's likely that the people at corporate Starbucks have learned precisely nothing at all.
But the rest of us, I think, maybe have discovered, yet again, That caving to the unthinking, outraged masses will profit you nothing in the end.
There's no reason to do it.
Because if you abandon a thoughtful, well-reasoned path, If you have a reasonable policy that you give up on, that you abandon, just because some imbeciles are shouting words at you that end with "-ist," or "-phobic," you are going to end up paying a much higher price than the price that the imbeciles may have been able to extract if you had not caved to them.
And in Starbucks, in the case of Starbucks, you're going to wind up shamed and embarrassed with bloodstains on your floor and heroin needles in your trash can.
But at least nobody will call you a racist, I guess.
That is, until they come back and think of another reason to call you a racist.
Who knows?
Maybe the heroin disposal boxes, maybe those are racist, too.
Maybe next we'll have the outrage mobs saying, no, you know what?
Heroin addicts, they have every right to leave their needles wherever they want.
How dare you?
If a heroin addict wants to come into your bathroom and leave a needle just sitting there on the ground, that is his God-given right.
And it is elitist and classist and racist and sexist somehow for you to provide these boxes for people, these shameful boxes that exclude and otherize and make them feel less than other people.
You know, who knows?
Maybe that'll be the next argument.
Because it never ends.
Once you start caving to them, it never ends.
They're going to keep coming back and back and back, and there's never an end to it.
Finally, last thing today, quickly.
I thought this was worth mentioning.
Tipping flight attendants.
That is the newest trend, apparently.
And it's mainly one airline, Frontier Airlines, that's on the forefront here.
They will now give you the option, so generous, they've given you this option to tip your flight attendant.
Yeah.
No.
No way.
Look, I'm a proponent of tipping, okay?
I like to think of myself as a good tipper.
Tip the waitress, tip the pizza delivery guy, tip housekeeping at a hotel, tip your Uber driver.
I'm all about that.
Fine.
But the main thing with all of these different people who you tip is that number one, they are low paying jobs where the tips account for a large percentage of their overall income.
Being a flight attendant is not really a low paying job.
I think the average income for a flight attendant is 50 or $55,000 a year.
Also, these people, they can really make your customer service experience negative or positive depending on how well you tip.
So there's an incentive.
You know, it's a bit of a pro-quo thing.
There's an incentive.
If you tip them, then it kind of greases the wheels and it makes things run easier for you.
When I delivered pizzas, and this is just something that you should know.
I mean, it should be obvious.
Just so you know, this is the way it works with pizza delivery.
I deliver pizzas for a little bit.
You better believe that I remembered who the non-tippers were.
I mean, that stuck out to me.
And worse still, the people who tip like a quarter.
Somehow, there's just something about it, but people who tip nothing, they were bad, but somehow even worse than that were the people who, like if the total was $19.87, they'll give you a $20 and say, keep the change, as if they're doing you a big favor.
Keep the change.
Oh, thank you.
$0.13, that's my tip.
Thank you so much.
I would rather that you demand exact change back.
Which I actually had the guy do that once.
He demanded exact change.
I didn't have it.
So he demanded that I go back to the store to get him his exact change and then bring it back to him.
Which I did because I had no choice.
But then I made sure, and I let everybody in the store know, this guy is a huge jerk, and so if he orders a pizza and it happens to show up four hours late, I mean, you know, it happens.
And so I would keep track of that, and I made sure that if you tipped well, I made sure that your order was right, I made sure the pizza got to you soon, and who knows, sometimes I might accidentally bring you an extra box of chicken wings or something.
You scratch my back, I scratch yours.
It's that kind of thing.
Bad tippers are always punished.
Good tippers are rewarded.
But an airline is a totally different thing.
An airplane is a totally different thing.
Mainly because airlines think of new ways to make the experience more miserable and more expensive every year.
You know, they get together and they say, well, you know, it seems like our customers aren't broke and miserable enough.
So how can we solve that problem?
Then someone says, oh, I know what we should do.
Let's remove legroom altogether.
And then you have to pay a $299 upcharge if you want the privilege of having blood circulate through your legs during the trip.
And so they're doing that kind of stuff every year, and it just removes any incentive to tip, in my mind.
It's expensive enough as it is.
Besides, I don't really need the flight attendant to do anything for me on the flight.
I bring my own snacks.
I bring my own drink.
I already know that the seat cushion is a flotation device.
You don't need to tell me that every single time.
And, you know, it's great to know that, by the way, because if the plane happens to crash into the ocean, it'll be good to know that my mangled, bloodied, dead carcass can float on the cushion for a while before it's consumed by sharks.
So that's nice.
But other than that, I don't really need the flight attendant to do anything for me.
Thus, the incentive to tip is even less.
I don't know.
What do you think though?
Should flight attendants be added into the category of customer service people that we tip?
I'm saying no, but who knows?
Maybe I'm wrong.
It happens every once in a while that I'm wrong, though rarely.
All right, we'll leave it there.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
It's a fact that fact-checkers are checking facts, and it's a fact that fact-checkers have no idea what a fact really is.
We will analyze the history of fact-checking and facts themselves, then the APA deems masculinity harmful, finally the mailbag.
Export Selection