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Feb. 15, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
47:32
Ep. 199 - Will The National Emergency Gambit Work?

Today on the show, we'll sort through the madness with the national emergency declaration and the disastrous spending bill. Also, the Jussie Smollett 'hate crime' claims continue to fall apart before your eyes. Finally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is celebrating after preventing 25,000 New Yorkers from getting jobs. Date: 02-15-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on the Matt Wall Show, Trump signs a disastrous spending bill, but he's trying to mitigate it by declaring a national emergency to build the wall as well.
Will that strategy work?
Will it pay off?
We will discuss.
Also, we'll talk about the latest in the Jussie Smollett case.
It continues to unravel, more and more revelations.
We'll get into all that today as well.
And finally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is spiking the football and celebrating because she prevented Amazon from bringing 25,000 jobs to New York.
Hooray!
What does this tell us about the state of the modern Democratic Party?
We'll talk about all that today on The Matt Wall Show.
I don't even know where to begin exactly, but I guess we'll begin with the most obvious thing.
President Trump gave a speech in the Rose Garden this morning declaring a national emergency so that he could build the wall.
Now, he is also signing a disastrous 1,000-plus-page spending bill that would undermine, undercut, undo everything that he's been trying to do with respect to the wall.
It's more than a thousand pages, like I said, so nobody's read the whole thing.
Par for the course these days.
Nobody knows exactly what's in it.
We just kind of, you know, you just sign it and you'll find out.
It's fun to find out after you've already signed the thing.
Um, it's like one of those, uh, one of those, you know, you went to, when you went to birthday parties when you were a little kid and they gave you a little, uh, little prize, little gift bags, little prize bags.
And, uh, which was a good thing that even everyone had to get a gift at a birthday party.
Right.
Um, which is maybe why millennials have grown up to be, uh, such whiny babies is because we grew up, you know, when we grew up, even we got birthday, got presents at other people's birthday parties.
Anyway.
Um, so thousand pages, nobody knows what's in it.
But we do know some of the highlights, or the lowlights, I guess we should say.
Daniel Horowitz at Conservative Review, he's been on top of this, had a good write-up at that website, and he gives us five insane provisions in the bill.
Including just $1.3 billion for the wall or fence.
No wall, by the way, is allowed to be built with this, which will cover only 55 miles.
That is, instead of the $25 billion and hundreds of miles of wall that Trump originally wanted, it's also less than the $1.6 billion that Democrats originally agreed to.
So things have gone down.
The deal was negotiated down.
Democrats end up with something better for them than their original offer.
The bill also prohibits any fencing on federal or state lands.
Uh, what?
And even in the small slice of area where the fence can be built, local officials who happen to be liberal, for the most part, coincidentally, in the little piece of area where they're allowing the fence to be built, just so happens that those are more liberal controlled areas.
And oh, by the way, the local authorities can veto the construction.
You have to get their approval.
And if they don't approve, it's not going to happen.
So, of course, what does that mean?
It means that probably from this bill, Nothing will be built at all.
More from Horowitz.
He says there's more funding to manage and induce the invasion of immigrants rather than to deter it.
While offering no new funding for ICE deportation agents or immigration judges to speed up asylum claims, as the president requested, this bill adds another $40 million for the Alternatives to Detention program, which moves asylum seekers to facilities in the interior of the country.
Also, the doubling of low-skilled workers.
The bill doubles the number of H-2B, non-agricultural, unskilled seasonal workers who will continue to be a public charge in America.
There's a lot of other stuff.
It provides amnesty for the sponsors of unoccupied miners as well.
The bill is just, is as I say, a disaster.
As for the national emergency part of this, Trump, speaking of disasters, Trump had his
chance to get up in front of the country, make his case for it from the Rose Garden
to explain everything that's going on.
To sign a national emergency is a, it's a, it's a drastic step, right?
Everyone can agree with that.
Whether you support it or not, we all agree.
It's a draft.
You're saying emergency, right?
So you put yourself into the shoes of the president.
Let's say you're the president.
You're going to be signing a national emergency.
Um, and using that as a way to, uh, allocate billions of dollars to fund this project that you want to do.
Okay.
Well, When you have a chance to get up in front of America and make the case for it, wouldn't you want to make sure that you've got a very coherent, cogent speech that you're going to give?
Isn't that what you would do?
But instead, I don't know if you watched the Rose Garden speech, but it was not good.
I wanted to say disaster, but I've been using that word way too much.
It was not good.
He rambled for 20 minutes and barely offered one coherent sentence in the whole thing.
Going back, if he was talking about China and talking about North Korea, jumping back and forth to various different topics.
Doing the kind of thing he does at his political rallies, which I guess if you're into that kind of thing and you like the whole shtick at the rallies, I'm personally not a big fan of it.
But when you're giving a speech at the Rose Garden to explain a national emergency that you just signed, this is not the time to just get up with no preparation and no prepared remarks and just ramble.
Not the time for it.
It was just bad.
And of course, I'm watching the reaction on social media, and most people were cringing at it and saying, okay, this is catastrophic for the president politically.
But I also saw there were, you know, Trump's most loyal supporters and fans were saying, oh, this is great.
This is wonderful.
Yeah, he's talking straight.
This is what we like.
We need more of this.
So you're not helping.
First of all, you know, if you watch the speech, you know that it was not good.
You know that.
So to pretend otherwise, why are you pretending and you're not helping?
Don't encourage the president to do that more often.
Look, everyone agrees.
You watched the State of the Union speech.
It was a brilliant speech.
Great performance.
All around, right?
Very compelling.
Well, all of that is now a distant memory.
It's been buried under everything since.
Let me ask you, if you're a supporter of the president, do you think we should have more of the State of the Union type moments or more of what we saw this morning at the Rose Garden?
What do you think is more compelling?
What do you think is going to be more convincing to people?
Especially those who are not already huge fans and totally bought in, the people that are more in the middle, the people that, by the way, the president's going to need if he wants to get reelected in 2020.
Now, if you are all in and you're a big fan of the president, then he's already got you.
No matter what he does and says, you're going to vote for him, right?
So he doesn't need to appeal to you.
He needs to appeal to everybody else.
And the rambling off the cuff, riffing off the cuff thing, it doesn't, it's only appealing to people like you, not to anybody else.
So as far as the national emergency itself, you're going to hear, of course, extremes on both sides.
Again, Trump's most loyal supporters and fans are going to call this, are calling it a move of brilliance, a win, so on and so forth.
It is not that.
This is not a win.
It's a way out.
It's a way around.
It's the thing you do when you don't win.
A win would have been build the wall.
A win would have been a bill that allows them to actually build the wall.
That's a win.
This is plan B or plan C. Now, whether it's a good plan B, whether it's a good way around, that's another question.
But then the usual suspects on the other side, they're all losing their minds, of course, as they do with everything Trump does, claiming that this is some kind of constitutional emergency, it's a catastrophe, it's tyranny, he needs to be impeached, and yada yada yada.
Well, that's not the case either.
Presidents have been declaring national emergencies for frivolous reasons for a long time.
So even if you think this is a frivolous reason, well, he's not the first one to do that.
Obama was certainly a culprit.
Obama also rewrote our immigration laws by executive fiat.
So this is not new.
If we can point out that other presidents have done it, that doesn't necessarily mean it make it good, but that does mean that you can't really panic over it or treat it as unprecedented, especially if you weren't panicking when other presidents did it.
So it's not a constitutional catastrophe.
It's also not a big win.
I think it falls somewhere in the middle.
I think the main problem with it is that it is a political stunt that will not lead to a single mile of fence actually being built, especially when you combine it with the spending bill.
That's the problem with it.
Not a constitutional emergency, but it's not going to do anything.
In fact, Trump even said in his speech that he knows, he went on this whole rambling riff about how we're going to get sued, then we're going to end up in the courts, then we're going to go to a different court, now we're going to be in the Supreme Court.
He knows exactly what's going to happen.
And he knows there's a good chance he's going to get shot down.
He knows that.
Of course he knows that.
Now, should he be saying that when he first signs the, I mean, when you're signing a national emergency, you shouldn't say publicly, yeah, by the way, you know, I'm going to get sued for this.
But of course he is going to get sued.
So that's no surprise.
And it seems unlikely to me that the courts are going to be on his side with this, whether or not they should be.
Uh, it seems unlikely that they will.
So there's at least a very good chance that nothing will come of this.
And that's my problem with it.
Another thing though is you're hearing from from some conservatives that their worry is that now this sets a precedent and so the next Democrat President is going to do the same thing and we're going to get a national emergency declared over climate change.
And and the president is going to use that as an excuse to do whatever they want to do appropriate whatever money do whatever they want to maybe we'll get a national emergency over guns gun violence is a national emergency and maybe they'll use that and somehow be able to confiscate guns.
I mean, so you've got conservatives worrying about that.
I understand that concern.
It is not a unreasonable concern.
But I think that Democrats will do that anyway.
So I'm not in the camp.
I don't think that Democrats are waiting for Republicans to set a precedent before they do it.
Democrats don't need the permission of Republicans to do something like that.
To me, it is all but certain, even aside from this, it is pretty much a certainty that the next Democratic president will declare a climate change emergency because they really do think that it's a global emergency.
They think, and their base certainly thinks, that we are on the verge of extinction as a species because of climate change.
And so it is, regardless of any of this, even if Trump was never elected, I think it was always a certainty that we were going to get a national emergency declarative of climate change, eventually, and then whatever comes of that.
Probably the same for gun violence.
So I think we're heading in that direction regardless.
So I can't join the conservatives who have Um, I think it's a reasonable concern, but I also think that probably it would happen anyway.
Um, my main objection is, like I said, it probably won't amount to anything, but then the second part of that is we had two years.
Uh, there were two years prior to this where the wall could have been built.
And you wouldn't have needed a national emergency.
You wouldn't have needed any of the theatrics.
You wouldn't have needed a shutdown of government.
And I know you could say, well, Mitch McConnell and, you know, he wouldn't allow the Republican establishment, wouldn't allow it to happen.
And yeah, they deserve a fair amount of the blame.
Trump at any point during those, Paul Ryan, you know, is the other one that gets blamed, but during any point in those two years, if Trump had taken the stand that he took once Democrats got into office and said, no, we are doing this now, I am not signing anything until it happens.
If he had done that with Republicans, the wall would have gotten built 100%.
Yeah, they may have been resistant to it, But he has leverage over Republicans.
See, the thing is, once Democrats got into office, once they controlled the House, it was a lose-lose situation.
There was no way it was going to happen.
Because Democrats have no reason to ever agree to building a wall.
Their base doesn't want it.
Their donors don't want it.
They all hate Trump.
So why would they ever agree to something like this?
Of course, politically, it wouldn't make any sense for them.
So Trump has no leverage over Democrats at all.
None.
He does have plenty of leverage over Republicans.
So if he had put his foot down and said, we're doing this now, and then any Republican who refuses, well, then they would have their constituents and their base coming after them.
But Trump didn't take that step for those two years.
He said he wanted it, he complained that he didn't get it, you know, he made gestures towards it a few times, but nothing like this.
It wasn't until Democrats got in that he was willing to shut down the government and, if necessary, declare a national emergency.
If he had that kind of determination for the two years leading up to this, the wall would be—they'd be building it right now!
That's the fact.
And you cannot absolve Donald Trump of all guilt in this, as much as you might want to.
You can't.
It's absurd.
So what we have now is theater.
This is just theater.
All of this is theater, and it's going to amount to nothing.
If this was about actually getting something done, it could have been done.
I've got to move on to something else before I have an aneurysm.
Just everything about this.
Pisses me off.
Everything.
Just everything and everybody.
All sides.
Everybody.
I'm just sick of everything and everybody.
And I want to go live in the woods.
I want to just take my family and go live in the woods.
In a cave somewhere.
Subsisting on honey and wild locusts.
Much like John the Baptist.
All right, meanwhile, news broke yesterday that police suspect Jussie Smollett may have staged the hate crime attack in Chicago two weeks ago, the hate crime attack in Chicago two weeks ago.
Then after those reports surfaced, Chicago police denied, or at least said they could not confirm that that was actually true, that they were investigating whether or not it was staged.
But what we do know and what has not been denied Is that the two persons of interest, most likely the two guys who appear on the security camera footage.
Remember, police have security camera footage of Jussie Smollett's entire walk back from subway, except for 60 seconds.
They're only missing 60 seconds.
And the only other people who appear anywhere on that footage are these, apparently these two guys who they now have in custody or they are questioning.
Now these two guys are Nigerian and they are apparently brothers who, what do you know, worked on the show Empire with Jussie Smollett.
Hmm.
So, I mean, could they be Nigerian rednecks?
Could they be Nigerian racist rednecks?
I mean, is that what we're going to hear next from the left?
Look, it was clear all along that this was a hoax, right?
I've already gone over all the holes in the story.
It was literally unbelievable from the start.
But then once the video footage surfaced, and you could only see a 60-second gap, and this whole altercation was supposed to have happened in 60 seconds, well, then you already know.
That's enough.
That's all you need to know.
Of course it didn't happen.
Nothing about the story was remotely plausible.
In fact, we don't even have to look at any of the specifics.
We can just look at the fact That Smollett was claiming that two racist skinheads, essentially,
would recognize a supporting cast member from the show Empire as he's walking by in the dark at 2 30 a.m.
Now I guarantee you that almost that anyone who is true anyone who falls into this category some kind of crazy psychotic white nationalist type of person not only have they never seen Empire but they probably don't even know that that show exists.
So that detail alone made it impossible to believe, but everything else is just icing on the cake and it's just, you can't believe it.
Now, I never thought, though, that he necessarily staged the attack.
I figure that he just made it up.
He invented the attackers out of whole cloth.
That would certainly be a smarter move, because at least if you invent imaginary people, then the cops, barring any actual video evidence of when the thing was supposed to have happened, they can never conclusively prove that it didn't happen.
If you just invent people who never existed, Um, then the cops probably will never be able to prove that you made it up because it's all in your head and they can't read your mind.
But if you enlist real people into the ruse and then the cops find them and they confess to it under legal pressure.
Well, now there is positive proof that you lied.
So to actually involve people and do some sort of staged thing, it just doesn't.
It doesn't.
Why would you do that?
So is that what Smollett did?
I don't know.
The involvement of these two Nigerian men who worked on the show certainly adds a lot of credence to that notion.
Either way, Smollett is clearly full of it.
The only question that remains is how will the left deal with this?
They really have three options.
They can either defend him and say that he was traumatized from a life in Trump's America, so he can't be held responsible for his actions.
Or they can say that, yeah, you know, he lied, but he started an important conversation about race and sexuality in America, and let's focus on that.
So they can do that, or they can just ignore it and pretend it never happened.
Those are really the three options.
Or there is a fourth option.
They could be so ticked off at him for embarrassing them and undermining their narrative that they actually do condemn him forcefully.
Which is much like they did with Kevin Spacey.
Remember, Kevin Spacey, after he got in trouble for several abuse allegations by teenage boys, Kevin Spacey tried to deflect by coming out of the closet and saying, yeah, I'm a gay man, as if that was the headline.
And I think he thought that that would get at least liberals to come into his corner, but, but it didn't work.
They turned against him all the more because he was trying to draw this association between homosexuality and his, uh, and his sexual abuse and they didn't like that at all.
So he ended up being even more of a pariah.
A similar thing could happen to Smollett, um, because he is embarrassing the left and undermining their whole hate crime narrative.
Uh, so who knows?
A few other points about all this.
First is, think about the media's role in this, and just consider their performance over the last few weeks.
We don't even have to think about anything else.
Just think about the last few weeks.
First, they run with this out-of-context video clip of the Covington Catholic students, and they paint them as racist, and they tell a version of the story that turns out to be false.
And they, remember, they took that first version, they reported it uncritically, without any
sign of hesitation or skepticism.
And then when the true story came out, the media for a while tried to stick to its original
narrative and continue the lie.
And then when that became impossible, they just dropped it and moved on like it never
happened.
And then right on the heels of that, we have this Smollett thing.
Once again, they took the first version of the story.
They reported it uncritically.
Many headlines in the first few days said things like, Empire actor assaulted in hate crime attack.
No, no alleged, no reportedly.
They just putting it out as a fact.
Amplifying the ridiculous story the guy was telling without even showing any signs of skepticism.
And these people, these people in media have the gall to get offended when we call them fake news.
We've got all the ammunition we need just from the last three weeks.
Forget about the last two years or 30 years.
Just from the last two weeks, we have all the reason in the world to discount most of the mainstream media as fake news.
Fake news is the most flattering possible thing we could call them.
If we wanted to be more accurate, we could call them sniveling, shameless, lying, manipulative propagandists.
And I think that would be more accurate.
Second thing just to, to think about is if, if America is a, this is, this is a brain teaser.
If America is such a racist country, why do liberals constantly have to invent fake hate crimes?
We see these fake hate crimes all the time.
It's very common, especially after Trump was elected.
But if America is so racist, why do you have to invent it?
If America is so racist, it seems like if you're a black gay man, for instance, there should be plenty of real life examples of the persecution and abuse that you faced.
Yet you're going and coming up with fake ones.
It seems like this seems to indicate, possibly, that America is not actually a racist country.
America is in fact probably the least racist country on earth.
And it is so not racist that you have some people in this country who are so desperate to be victims and yet they find so little supply of real victimhood.
They find so few opportunities to really be a victim that they have to invent it.
This is what we talked about a few days ago.
People in this country are, from a very young age, are raised to see victimhood as a desirable thing.
We see victimhood as power.
Victimhood equals power.
And so people are desperate to be victims.
They see it as some sort of trump card that they can always play.
A trump card that they can use to win any argument, to get sympathy whenever they want it, to get job opportunities, whatever.
And if they can't really be a victim, then they'll make it up.
But that tells you something.
That if these, if these, if these frauds would just stop it, I mean, think about there's the famous line from, I believe it was Morgan Freeman.
It was interviewed on 60 minutes several years ago.
And you see this clip pop up on, on Facebook a lot where, uh, he's asked, uh, first, what he said, if he likes black history month, what he thinks of black history month.
And he said, he doesn't, he's not a fan of it.
And then he was asked, well, uh, you know, what do we do about racism in America?
How do we, how do we stop racism?
And, and Freeman said, stop talking about it.
Just stop talking about it.
And this is coming from, you know, an elderly black man who, when he was growing up, he really did experience severe racism.
And this is coming from him.
I think there's a lot of truth there.
There's a lot of wisdom to that.
That if we would just stop trying to make race an issue all the time, Stop inventing hate crimes.
Stop looking for every opportunity to paint someone as a victim, someone as the, you know, persecutor.
If we would just stop doing that, we could almost maybe really live in something close to a post-racial America.
Maybe not across the board for everybody, but there are a lot of people that, you know, they just When you're a kid, if you grow up in a diverse environment and there are a lot of different races and religions and different types of people that you're growing up with, you're going to school with them, you're hanging out with them after school, then it just wouldn't even occur to you to be racist because that's just your environment.
You just take it for granted.
When I was growing up, I grew up in a very diverse area, went to a school with with a whole range of different sorts of people, both when talking race, ethnicity, socioeconomic backgrounds, everything, you know, and it's very common for a lot of people, especially if you live on the on the East Coast, like I did.
And I remember growing up all it just never even race, never even, I never even saw it as an issue at all.
When I was in first and second grade and I was in school and we had Hispanic kids in class and black kids and Asian kids and white kids, Jewish kids.
I didn't look around and see, oh, there's so much diversity.
Look at that.
Well, you have that sort of person over there and that sort of person over there.
No, these are just kids.
These are just my classmates.
These are just friends.
Which is what we're supposed to want, right?
Isn't that the kind of country we're looking for?
But it seems like what happens Especially with academia and the media is they see that and they come in and they try to interfere with it.
And they say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And especially they start saying to the black kids, oh, no, well, that's a white kid over there.
You need to be suspicious of him.
See, he's got privilege and he's got all these things you don't have and all these advantages.
You need to be suspicious.
And he's inherently racist.
And they say to the little girls, be careful of the little boys over there.
They're dangerous.
Toxic masculinity.
And they say to the kids who come from less wealthy families, they say, look at the kids over there.
Their families have more money.
You should hate them for that.
No, they shouldn't have that money.
It's not fair.
Look at all these things they have that you don't have.
And they start whispering into the ears of kids like serpents, like snakes.
Trying to engender hatred and division and racism and envy and everything.
And they're successful.
And then you end up with guys like Jussie Smollett, a fraud and a liar, who would make up something like this.
And in so doing, he is trying to paint an entire race of people as potential psychotic, violent bigots.
All right, one other point before we get to some of your emails.
Amazon was, speaking of, well, this has to do with what I've just been talking about.
Amazon was supposed to build a massive new headquarters in New York.
They were gonna hire 25,000, I almost said 2,500, they were gonna hire 25,000 people and open a base of operations in the city.
But after pressure from liberals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Who didn't want Amazon in the city because Amazon is a big corporation and big corporations are bad.
Now, Amazon has changed their plans and they won't be going there and bringing all the jobs.
The jobs and the positions will be filled elsewhere like places like Dallas and other places.
So, Cortez spiked the football yesterday on Twitter.
She said, anything is possible.
Today was the day a group of dedicated everyday New Yorkers and their neighbors defeated Amazon's corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world.
This is, to be clear, a politician celebrating that 25,000 new jobs won't be coming to her city.
She's bragging that she helped to prevent her constituents from getting jobs, which is total madness.
What we see now on the left is a complete investment in class warfare.
This goes back to the sewing division that I was just talking about.
And they're all in on this.
So it's not just about race and gender and creed and sexuality anymore.
Now it's definitely about how much money you make.
So we've got we've got Cortez boasting about kicking jobs out of her city.
We've got Elizabeth Warren sharing pictures of rich guys on their yachts and saying, oh, he shouldn't be able to buy this boat.
You've got Democrats screaming at Howard Schultz for committing the crime of being financially successful.
Howard Schultz, who, by the way, I'm no fan of him.
The guy's a left wing.
I disagree with him on many subjects.
He lived in the projects when he was a teenager.
He started with one little coffee shop in Seattle and he built it into a billion-dollar enterprise.
As Americans, that's the American dream, right?
Or at least it used to be, to start from nothing with one little seed and to plant it and to have it sprout into something incredible.
That used to be the American dream, and we used to admire men who were able to do that.
But now we have Democrats saying, no, don't admire them.
They're thieves.
Somehow Howard Schultz is a thief.
Somehow he stole.
I don't know how exactly.
He built up his own operation, made his own money, but he stole somehow.
The fact that he has billions and I have less than billions, well, that's his fault.
He's been reaching his hand into my pocket invisibly and stealing from him.
No, for me, I don't buy it.
It's just un-American.
It's un-American to look at rich people and hate them for being rich.
Now, on the other side of it, I also don't think we shouldn't worship wealth.
And I think sometimes on the right, among some, there are certain types of conservatives who can venture a little bit too close to the idol worship of rich people and money and success and all of that.
And I'm not on board with that.
We shouldn't worship money.
And also on a personal level, you shouldn't hoard your wealth.
You should help the less fortunate.
Willingly, through your own volition, through your own choice, not because you're forced to by the government.
So I believe that.
But I also believe that envy is not American.
That's not supposed to be an American value.
And it's not healthy.
And certainly not Christian.
And we should admire success.
We don't worship it, but we admire it.
Because it takes It takes a certain brilliance, ambition, creativity, ingenuity, to go from nothing to something.
That's American, to admire that.
This, though, what we're seeing with the Democrats, this is not.
I don't recognize this.
I don't recognize this as American.
All right.
I guess we'll jump ahead to some of your emails before we wrap up for Friday, because I had a few really good ones that I don't want to miss.
You can always email the show.
Remember, mattwalshow at gmail.com.
I had a few people just kind of chiming in on some of the topics we've been talking about.
This is from Ash.
She says, Hi Matt, thinking on this Jussie Smollett thing tonight, and I am really mad.
If this proves to be a hoax, And as of 1am mountain time, it appears to be that way.
Then it is undeniable proof that the left has weaponized racism as a means to silence and intimidate conservatives.
I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, the Old South in the 80s and 90s.
I've experienced real racism and seen older generations of racism up close.
Making false claims about this, especially if he actually made a noose and put it on his own neck, is a bridge too far.
This is so wrong, as a mother raising three white males, I am pissed off that a rich, incredibly privileged actor can perpetuate racial stereotypes of white men and falsely claim that something this horrific was done in their name.
And you will probably get away with it too.
And didn't his Empire co-star make false racism claims about her son recently as well?
I don't know about that.
I haven't heard about that.
With the media's complicity, this feels very much like a coordinated attack on conservatives, specifically white male conservatives.
As a mom and as an American, I'm outraged.
The media is absolutely to blame for the America we find ourselves in.
They have way too much power.
I give thanks and praise to God for alternative media and for you guys at The Daily Wire.
Sincerely, Thank you for everything you do, Matt.
Ash, I thank you for that, and I completely agree with what you're saying, and I sympathize with it.
And it makes me angry, too.
Although I will say that, yes, this is more proof that the left has weaponized racism, but this is certainly not the first piece of evidence that we have for that.
This is from Brittany.
She says, on the subject of drag queens, I do feel offended by what they do.
Not necessarily because it's disordered, which it definitely is, but because of its influence on girls in our culture.
As a teacher, I see the way young women dress and do their makeup every day.
Drag has had significant impacts on the makeup trends that we see on the internet and in schools.
One drag queen in particular has his own makeup line, which he markets to women and girls.
Girls are wearing mask-like makeup with drag queen-like eyebrows, gigantic false lashes, and over-lined lips, as well as overly contoured features.
They look fake and feel the need to wear this kind of makeup, but they ironically no longer look feminine because of it.
Thanks for bringing this up.
I think that's another excellent point.
I think I think girls and women are harmed in many respects by a lot of this gender nonconforming stuff.
This, you know, this idea of of gender being this fluid thing so that a man can actually be a woman.
I think women are harmed many in many ways, not the least of which being when you've got men coming into bathrooms and locker rooms with your daughter.
But this is another angle as well.
I appreciate you bringing that up.
This is from Jesse.
He says, Hey Matt, love the show.
I have a question for you, please.
How can you reconcile not believing in the death penalty with the existence of truly evil people?
Why should Gosnell, El Chapo, Bundy, Mason, Manson, that is, et cetera, be allowed to sit behind bars for life on everyone else's dime when they could never be set free?
If there's another, if there's eternal life, what's wrong with releasing them for judgment a bit earlier and removing our responsibility of protecting ourselves from that evil?
Hi Jesse, well it's not necessarily the case that I don't believe in the death penalty.
I've wavered on the issue back and forth.
I've flip-flopped on it, I admit, quite a bit.
I've never been in principle against it, absolutely.
As in, I've never felt that there's no circumstance where it's okay.
I've never believed that.
For a while, I was of the opinion that it's only ethically appropriate in third-world countries, in those sorts of situations, where they don't have the prison infrastructure to segregate dangerous people from society for decades.
But recently, I have expanded my view, I'll admit.
I've realized that When you have someone, especially someone as evil as what you just described, if you're going to keep them in prison for decades, that requires, I think, an undue and unfair burden on the public, on the taxpayer.
Because if you think about it, some people are so evil, so horrible, so monstrous, that even their fellow inmates won't tolerate being around them.
So these people have to be held in protective custody forever, for their whole lives.
Or you could have people who are so dangerous and so sociopathic and so manipulative that you can't risk having them around other prisoners because you don't know, you know, you can't risk them kind of sort of starting their own little prison cult and being able to manipulate prisoners and get them to do their whim.
So either way, when you have people like that, the Manson types, And we can't execute them, then the only other option is to hold them in protective custody, solitary confinement for their whole lives.
And so we have to ask ourselves, are we really morally required to keep someone in protective custody, solitary confinement for decades just to protect them because their crime was so heinous that even their fellow murderers don't want to be around them?
And I think, no, I don't think so.
I think in the end, That doesn't seem ethical to require that of the public and of the taxpayer and of society.
And you can even argue that it's actually less humane to keep somebody locked in solitary confinement for 50 years than just to execute them.
I was reading about where they're probably going to send El Chapo.
I mean, they're sending El Chapo to this fortress in, I think, Colorado, and he's going to be in solitary confinement in a little concrete box for 23 hours a day for the next however many decades.
I guess they have no choice but to do that, but could we even say that's more humane than execution?
So I agree with a lot of what you're saying there, Jesse.
All right.
Finally, for whatever reason, I've gotten like three emails in the last few days about space aliens.
Did I talk about space aliens recently?
Maybe I did.
Maybe that's why.
But I've got three emails all with a similar point or question.
And I want to address that question.
The question is basically this.
If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and I believe there is, but if there is, how does that work theologically?
In other words, wouldn't this other race, Or are these multiple other races?
Wouldn't they have their own salvation histories?
And how does that happen?
Did Jesus go to all these planets?
And how would that work?
If Jesus is fully divine and fully human and he went to some other planet, would that make him fully human, fully divine and fully Klingon or whatever?
Isn't such an idea heresy?
So there are a lot of difficult questions raised by the idea of intelligent life on other planets.
And I have thought a lot about it.
This is the kind of thing that I think about all the time.
I think about it like every day, probably, because I am mentally unstable.
So here's how I respond to that.
I don't have a complete answer, but here's what I'll say.
First of all, it seems to me that there are many options here.
You could have unfallen races.
You could have races where no redemptive act was necessary, so that this kind of avoids that problem.
Or you could have races that are fallen but unredeemed.
That's always a possibility.
Or they could be fallen and redeemed some other way.
There are a lot of theories about the atonement, of course, but I think most theologians agree that Christ didn't have to die on the cross to save us.
He chose to.
It was a choice.
That's the point.
It wasn't something that happened by force of necessity, but by his own free will, his own choice.
He could have theoretically gone about it some other way.
What way?
Well, who knows?
I don't know.
Nobody does.
But the cross was a choice.
So could it be that if there are multiple races of fallen rational creatures that they've all been redeemed in dramatically different ways?
Possibly in ways that wouldn't even make sense to us?
That would be literally unintelligible to us if we were told about them?
I think that's possible.
All of that seems weird to me, I admit.
Hard to imagine, kind of unsettling, but they are possibilities.
And here's the other point.
I think theological challenges are raised More so by the idea of aliens not existing than by the idea of aliens existing, and I'll explain what I mean.
We know that the universe is a very, very, very, very, very large place.
There are something like 100 billion stars in our galaxy.
That's just in our galaxy, 100 billion.
And if each star has a few planets, then that means that there are easily 200 or 300 billion planets, possibly more, in our galaxy.
How many galaxies are there?
Well, probably 100 billion, at least.
So 100 billion galaxies times 100 billion stars times however many planets, on average, Um, what does that equal?
It equals a lot.
It equals an incomprehensible amount.
It equals an amount so huge that we may as well call it infinity.
I mean, for all intents and purposes, we may as well say there are an infinite number of planets in the universe because the number is just so big that you couldn't even write it.
It would take you days to even write the number of zeros that would be required.
Um, Is it really plausible that all of those planets, all of those trillions of planets are dead except for ours?
Then why do they exist in the first place?
Why make a universe so vast and so dead and so full of pointless mindless violence and explosions and black holes and emptiness and everything, if it's all just meant to be the home of one tiny little group of mortals on one small speck of dust in one unimpressive corner of one terribly ordinary galaxy?
I mean, yeah, it could all serve some sort of mysterious cosmic purpose that we can't understand, fine, but the point is that such an idea, such a theory, does raise its own unanswerable questions.
And there's a bigger question or challenge, I think.
Keep in mind that the most commonly used proof for God's existence is the fine-tuning argument.
Okay, the fine-tuning argument, which I think is a great argument, I use it all the time, very forceful argument, it says that the universe was finely tuned for life.
There are certain constants in the universe that, had the dial been turned just a hair this way or a hair that way, would have made life impossible.
And it is so vastly improbable that things would be calibrated this way to make life possible that you almost have to admit some kind of God to explain it, because it's the only way to explain something that improbable happening.
That's the argument in a nutshell, if I didn't just butcher it.
But if this universe of 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars apiece is almost entirely completely dead except for one infinitesimal little speck of dust hiding out in one little corner of it, then it seems that the fine-tuning argument loses a lot of its force, right?
Because then the atheist can just say, well, it's not finely tuned.
I mean, look at the universe.
It's almost completely dead.
What are you talking about, finely tuned for life?
There's almost no life in it.
It's dead.
They could also say that, yeah, life is very improbable, but the universe had trillions of chances on trillions of planets to roll the right combination of dice to make life arise.
And so if you mix up a bunch of chemicals on a zillion planets, it's almost certain that one of them will turn into life.
That could be their argument.
Now, I'm not saying that it obviously doesn't disprove God.
If we're alone in the universe, that wouldn't shake my faith any, but I'm saying that it would make one of our best arguments less compelling.
Um, saying that a universe with 50 trillion dead planets is finely tuned for life is like saying, I don't know.
It's like walking into an abandoned shopping mall with five stories and seeing a little raccoon eating a stale Cinnabon over in the corner and, and coming to the conclusion that the, that the mall was built for the raccoon.
Um, it just, it, it just, maybe it was, but it just doesn't, it doesn't make as much sense.
But if the universe is teeming with life, which I believe it probably is, then the fine tuning argument is back in play.
Back with a vengeance.
Because now you've got this huge, massive thing with life all over the place, and again, you can say, well, clearly it was fine-tuned for life.
So in my view, I think a universe with other life presents fewer challenges theologically than the other option.
Though in the end it doesn't matter, because we'll never know anyway.
We will never know what life is or isn't out there, so it just doesn't really factor in in the end.
The alien hypothetical is just that hypothetical.
But it's an interesting hypothetical to think about in any case.
All right.
I'm glad I was able to get my alien spiel in at the very end there.
And if there are aliens out there, I can only hope that somehow they're watching this show right now.
All right.
I'll talk to you on Monday.
Have a great weekend.
Godspeed, everyone.
Today on the Ben Shapiro Show, Jussie Smollett's hit crime story begins to utterly collapse, President Trump prepares to declare a national emergency, and the 2020 Democrats move even further to the left.
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