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Feb. 19, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show

49:25

Ep. 201 - A Brave Journalist Tells The Truth About The Media

Today on the show, a mainstream media journalist shows some rare courage. Also, Democrats are trying desperately (and hilariously) to distance themselves from Jussie Smollett. Finally, headlines claim that a middle school student was arrested for refusing to stand for the pledge. That’s not the whole story. Date: 02-19-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Today on the Matt Wall Show, a truly courageous journalist speaks the truth about her profession.
	Also, Democrats are trying desperately, along with the media, to distance themselves from Jussie Smollett now, but we shouldn't let them do that.
	We need to hold them accountable.
	And finally, headlines claim that a middle school boy was arrested for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.
	But as always, the headlines are misleading, so we'll get to the truth about this story today on The Matt Wall Show.
	Here's a look.
	He just announced today, officially, that he's running for president.
	He's going to make another run at it.
	And there are plenty of reasons to not support his run.
	He's a nutty socialist, for one.
	That's probably the main thing.
	But his age also does matter, okay?
	Age is not just a number.
	Age is a physiological reality, okay?
	No, it's not just, oh, age is just a number.
	No, no, it's more than that.
	It represents the amount of time that you've spent on earth, and unfortunately, in a reality where only death and taxes are certain, it means that as we embark on this Inevitable unceasing march towards our own demise.
	And as we get closer to it, we start to break down physically.
	Uh, it just, it happens to everyone.
	It's happening to me right now.
	I'm only 32 and it's happening already.
	Um, I'm already doing the thing at 32 where you, you know, you, you walk into a room and then you, you can't remember why you walked into the room.
	Or where you're looking for your phone, and then you tell someone to call your phone, and then you look at your hand and realize, oh, I was holding it the whole time.
	So I'm already doing that at 32.
	Sanders is 77.
	He'll be 79 in 2020.
	So if he were to win the presidency, which of course he won't, but if he did, he would be 79 at that point.
	The average age of death for Americans is 78.
	Which is actually a lot lower than I thought.
	I thought we were in the 80s, but apparently it's 78.
	So just putting that in perspective, that at 79 you're already on borrowed time, statistically speaking.
	At 79, you simply do not have the mental or physical capacity to take on the most demanding and stressful job in the world.
	And that's not an insult.
	It's just the reality of it.
	Look at a picture of Barack Obama when he first went into office as a relatively young man, when he came out eight years later.
	Or George Bush, or, I mean, you see what it, what eight years in the White House does to a person.
	I mean, it's like when you're in the White House, you're on dog years, basically every year is seven years of stress.
	So if you know, so, so George Bush went in, in his whatever fifties, he came out, he was like 80.
	Um, and so when, if, if Bernie Sanders wins the presidency, which again, he won't, but if he did, when he gets out, he'll be 275 years old.
	Really?
	So it's just, look, when you're 79, how arrogant—this is my problem with it—how arrogant and how power-hungry and just egotistical and self-obsessed do you have to be to run for president when you're 79?
	I mean, just go home and retire, go be with your family, go fishing or something.
	You're 79!
	But you're so desperate for power.
	You cannot imagine existence without power and pursuing more power.
	And that's how desperate you are for it.
	That you will even keep younger and healthier people out of office just so that you can sit on the throne.
	Even if you die on the throne, you just want to feel it.
	You just want to be on it.
	What kind of arrogance is that?
	Really?
	Just step aside already.
	Let it go.
	Go home.
	The, the Democratic, uh, you know, presidential field is going to be filled with people like this.
	People in their, in their, you know, older people in their se- Joe Biden, uh, Bernie Sanders, who knows?
	Maybe Hillary Clinton will run again.
	Just people who can't let it go already.
	Go home and enjoy the rest of your life.
	That's my problem.
	It's, it's arrogant.
	Um, All right, so a bunch of things I want to talk about today.
	I don't want to spend a lot of time on Bernie Sanders.
	We'll move on from that already.
	The media, you know, likes to credit itself with having courage.
	Journalists like to pretend that they have a lot of courage.
	But I think that courage is actually probably the most wrongly attributed And least often actually demonstrated virtue in modern society.
	So in other words, it's a virtue that we're always attributing to people and to actions, but very often we do so wrongly.
	And it's kind of rare that we see real, actual courage.
	Um, so for instance, a journalist who stands up against Trump, Jim Acosta doing one of his showy little things at a press conference, taking it to Donald Trump.
	Now these, they might get credit for that from other people in the media for being courageous, but that's not courageous because you're doing something that everybody else in your profession will agree with and admire you for.
	So.
	And that doesn't mean that you shouldn't stand up against politicians and powerful people if you're a journalist.
	You shouldn't do it the way Jim Acosta does, but in general, in principle, that is a good thing to do.
	I'm just saying that when the politician is a Republican and you're in the media, well, right or wrong, you know that when you take him to task, all of your friends and all of your colleagues are going to agree with you.
	So it doesn't take courage to do it.
	But a journalist standing up against other journalists?
	Okay, well, now that takes courage.
	Which brings us to Laura Logan, who is a reporter.
	She was on a podcast called Mic Drop with retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland this weekend, and she's a reporter, I believe, for CBS.
	During the course of that discussion, she called her own profession to task, and she's been getting a lot of attention for this over the last day or two, I think rightly so.
	Let me just, I'm gonna read a couple of the, a few of the lines here from her interview, some of the things that she said.
	She said, the media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just in the U.S., but in this country, 85% of journalists are registered Democrats.
	That's just a fact.
	No one is registering Democrat when they're really Republican.
	So the facts are on the side that you just stated.
	Most journalists are left or liberal or Democrat, whatever words you want to give it.
	How do you know you're being lied to?
	How do you know you're being manipulated?
	How do you know there's something not right with the coverage?
	When they simplify it all and there's no gray.
	There's no gray.
	It's all one way.
	Well, life isn't like that.
	If it doesn't match real life, it's probably not.
	There's something wrong, she's saying.
	So for example, all the coverage on Trump all the time is negative.
	That's distortion of the way things go in real life, because although the media has historically always been left-leaning, we've abandoned our pretense, or at least the effort to be objective.
	And she goes on to talk about how the media has become political activists, and you may even use the word propagandist, she says.
	Now, none of that is news to anyone, right?
	But I think it's worth paying attention to.
	Well, number one, because when somebody in the profession is telling you this.
	Um, then, you know, it's true because she's got no reason to say this if it wasn't true.
	And also it takes guts and integrity for someone in that world to say it.
	See when you actually risk something, when you put something on the line, when speaking truth will cost you something, something real.
	Something tangible, when you could actually be tangibly, palpably hurt in some way by speaking a truth.
	Well, then that's when it's courageous to do it.
	So good for Laura Logan.
	On the other end of the spectrum.
	So that's what courage looks like.
	A unfortunately rare example of it.
	But let's look at some examples of cowardice.
	Which is something in far greater supply.
	We have a surplus of cowardice in our culture.
	And so we have a very cowardly display from Democrats and a lot of people in the media who are trying to play clean up now and trying to save face after the Smollett thing blew up and humiliated them.
	But they're not doing a very good job of it.
	For instance, both Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, you may remember when the news broke about Jussie Smollett, when the fake news broke, when he came out with his whole made-up story, within hours, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker both came out, and they both used the exact same phrase.
	They said, it's a modern-day lynching is the phrase they used.
	They called it a lynching.
	And they went on to talk about how this is hatred and bigotry and so on and so forth.
	But now, suddenly, now that the story has shifted, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, now they're getting more cautious and they want to be more thoughtful and they want to wait for the facts to come in.
	So let me show you.
	This is a clip of Kamala Harris.
	Remember what she said, she originally called it a modern-day lynching, but then yesterday she was asked again about Smollett, kind of a follow-up, like, hey, what do you think now?
	And this is what she said.
	Which tweet?
	What tweet?
	About saying that it is a modern-day lynching.
	Sorry.
	Jesse Smollett.
	Okay, so I will say this about that case.
	I think that the facts are still unfolding, and I'm very concerned about, obviously... Okay, so she's very flustered there.
	And by the way, that shows you, you see there?
	It shows you that Kamala Harris, as a liberal Democrat, she is not used to being challenged at all by the media, and she is not used to being asked difficult questions.
	Which, this shouldn't even be a difficult question.
	This is just, hey, you made this comment two weeks ago.
	More facts have come out.
	What do you think now?
	So it's not like a gotcha question.
	It's a very fair, basic question that, as a politician, she should absolutely be prepared to answer.
	But she wasn't prepared to answer that question.
	She didn't think she'd be asked it.
	Because this is the media, right?
	Right? They're supposed to help her.
	You know, they're supposed to be friends with, they're supposed to be her friends, her PR team.
	And she was asked that question and she was flummoxed.
	Bye.
	Booker was not quite as flummoxed, but just as cowardly.
	Here's Booker's answer when he was asked to follow up on his modern-day lynching phrase.
	Well, the information's still coming out, and I'm going to withhold until all the information actually comes out from on-the-record sources.
	Okay, so both of them now are saying, well, well, well, let's wait.
	Let's hold off.
	Let's wait for more facts to come in.
	I just want you to appreciate the irony here.
	When there were no facts, when no facts had come in, when we knew nothing and there was no evidence of anything either way, both Harris and Booker were ready to call it a lynching and go into a whole spiel about hatred and bigotry.
	But now that there are facts, now they don't want to say anything.
	So when no facts were in, they didn't want to wait for the facts.
	And now that we have a bunch of facts, now they want to wait for more facts before they say anything else.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Meanwhile, like we talked about yesterday, the media is also trying to back away from this.
	And, uh, I played a couple of clips on the show yesterday of the media, um, doing their own kind of Kamala Harris impression and sort of stammering and yammering and trying to find a way around this, trying to explain that.
	No, really they were, um, they reported this fairly all along, you know, they, they weren't Duke.
	No.
	Hollywood celebrities and maybe politicians, okay, they jumped on the bandwagon too early, but not the media.
	No, we didn't do anything wrong.
	We were the courageous, truth-seeking, fact-finding journalists, and we could never be guilty of reporting fake news.
	No.
	Fake news, that's an offensive slur that Donald Trump used.
	It's not fair.
	We don't engage in fake news.
	That's what they're claiming.
	But I thought it could be worthwhile before they stuff their own reporting down the memory hole, which they're attempting to do right now.
	It could be worthwhile to catalog some of the headlines from the days immediately following the attack.
	So I want to give you a brief sampling just so we remember, you know, how they really did handle this, despite what they're claiming now.
	And so I'm not going to read you tweets from celebrities and politicians.
	These are reputable news outlets, and these are some of the headlines.
	So from the first few days after the supposed attack.
	So this is from CNN.
	CNN's headline.
	Empire star Jussie Smollett attacked in possible hate crime.
	And there were identical headlines that could be found in The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline and other places.
	Now, notice something.
	It's sort of not very subtle, but it's a little subtle.
	Because the word possible is in there, but look at where they put that qualifier of possible.
	Empire star Jussie Smollett attacked in possible hate crime.
	So there's only uncertainty around the motivation.
	It's a possible hate crime.
	But the attack itself is reported as fact.
	You know, there's a big difference between Empire star Jussie Smollett possibly attacked in hate crime and Empire star Jussie Smollett attacked in possible hate crime.
	There's a big difference between those two headlines.
	And the media knows that.
	The New York Times says Jussie Smollett, star of Empire, attacked in what police call a possible hate crime.
	Yet again.
	Now this is This is totally intentional.
	Okay.
	Uh, it's, it's, it is manipulative.
	It is completely intentional when they're making this headline.
	They know that most people only read the headline, especially in this day and age of social media and everything.
	People are just scrolling down social media.
	They're seeing the headlines and they're getting in their impression of what's going on.
	Um, so even if they use more cautious wording in the text of the article, it's the headline that matters.
	And there's a conscious decision here.
	To not put a word like possible or alleged or reported or supposed or whatever in front of attacked.
	Because they want you to think that that was an actual fact.
	The AP, this was their headline, Jussie Smollett strikes emotional chord.
	Attackers won't win.
	Now, this headline could have been written by Smollett's just hired defense attorneys.
	This is just pure propaganda, pure PR for Jussie Smollett.
	And the word alleged appears nowhere in the headline.
	It also appears nowhere in the text of that particular article, by the way.
	From Variety, Chicago PD seeking persons of interest in Jussie Smollett attack.
	Manager was on phone during incident.
	Yet again.
	No alleged.
	No indication of any kind of skepticism.
	Just reported as fact.
	Forbes headline.
	Empire actor Jussie Smollett issues statement after vicious attack.
	I'm okay.
	Now this one I love because the folks over at Forbes, they knew that they had to put some kind of qualifying word in front of attack, right?
	They needed something there.
	They couldn't just say attack.
	So they were thinking, ah, should we put alleged there or possible or reported or no, no, no, let's put vicious in front of it.
	So this is what, um, this is what the media does now consider, consider for a second, how these headlines would look.
	If a conservative—let's just take a very similar kind of incident, but change the politics around a little bit, and the racial dynamics.
	So consider how the headlines would look if a conservative Hollywood actor, like let's say Dean Cain, okay?
	What if he claimed that he was jumped by two liberal black men in Elizabeth Warren for President t-shirts who were shouting leftist slogans as they stomped him half to death?
	And imagine that he said that this supposed assault happened in Huntsville, Alabama.
	War in country, as the attacker supposedly shouted as they were stopping him.
	And there are no witnesses of it.
	There's no footage to confirm the story, but that's his story.
	It is inconceivable that CNN or the New York Times or the AP would publish headlines like this.
	If they reported the claim at all, it would be conveyed with extreme, extreme and warranted skepticism.
	And we all know that, of course, and so it gets redundant after a while to point it out.
	But I think we do have to point it out and we do have to keep pointing to the truth as the media tries to bury it.
	All right.
	Enough about Smollett.
	Here's an interesting story out of Lawton Childs Middle Academy in Lakeland, Florida.
	The story that you may have seen yesterday—again, if you're just reading the headlines—the story was that a middle school kid, a sixth grader, was arrested for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance before school.
	And that was what was going viral on social media and everything, that a kid was arrested for refusing to stand for the Pledge.
	And by the way, yet again, When I was on Twitter and I saw all kinds of people posting about this story, or, you know, just retweeting a headline, the headline and some from some news outlet about how a kid was arrested for refusing to stand for the pledge.
	And, you know, people retweeting the headline with a little caption saying how insane this is.
	And I thought this is America and blah, blah, blah.
	It's like people never learn.
	I mean, how many times—we just went through this with the Smollett thing.
	How many times do we have to go through this before people learn?
	You need to read the story for yourself.
	You cannot come to any conclusions at all based on headlines.
	If all you've read is the headline, then you should not be saying anything about the story publicly.
	You shouldn't be posting about it.
	You shouldn't be retweeting it.
	You shouldn't be offering your opinion, because you don't know anything about it!
	All you read is a headline!
	And the headlines can be, and often are, and are at this point almost certain to be, misleading.
	How is it that people still don't understand this?
	Because with this story, if you would just read, actually click on the stupid little headline and read the article, you'll find that there is more to the story.
	The kid was not arrested for refusing to stand for the pledge.
	That is not the story.
	That is not true.
	Let me read a bit from Emily Zanotti's story in the Daily Wire.
	A sixth grader in Florida was reportedly arrested after he refused to participate in a class recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, a move which escalated into a confrontation with police and school officials, according to local news sources.
	Media in Lakeland, Florida reported that the 11-year-old, a student at Lawton Childs Middle Academy, called the flag racist and described the National Anthem as offensive.
	Though the national anthem was not being played at the time.
	A substitute teacher who was minding the student's class reportedly asked the student why, if it was so bad here, he did not go to another place to live.
	They brought me here, the boy replied, according to a statement taken by the school's resource officers.
	The teacher reportedly retorted, well, you could always go back because I came here from Cuba.
	And the day I feel I'm not welcome here anymore, I would find another place to live.
	At that point, the substitute teacher called the office, noting that she could no longer deal with the student.
	The school's dean of students reportedly tried to calm the student down, but after asking the student to leave the class 20 times to no avail, the dean called in the student's school resource officer.
	So this is a police officer that's on campus to deal with these kinds of things.
	The school resource officer then intervened and asked the student to exit the classroom and he refused.
	And the student left the classroom eventually and created another disturbance and made threats while he was escorted to the office.
	According to the arrest affidavit, the student was arrested by the school resource officer because he refused to follow multiple commands.
	He repeatedly called school leaders racist and was disruptive.
	They said he threatened to get the school resource officer and principal fired and to beat the teacher.
	Eventually the student was placed under arrest.
	Okay.
	So that's the whole story.
	Now you could still disagree and say, he shouldn't have been arrested.
	It shouldn't be dealt with that way.
	That's fine.
	But he was not arrested.
	The thing on the arrest affidavit is not going to say, refuse to stand for the pledge.
	That is not the crime that was committed.
	That's not a crime.
	That's not what he was arrested for.
	He was arrested because he was basically begging for it.
	Now, of course, the mother has come out and complained that her poor and innocent son is a victim.
	You know, come to his defense and everything, which is very different from how my mom would have responded.
	When I see all of these parents, you know, rushing to the defense of their unruly, disruptive kids, I always just have to scratch my head because that is not how I was raised at all.
	That is so foreign to me.
	As a parent now, and thinking back to my experience as a child, If I had, I mean, if I had refused to listen to my teacher, which I did that plenty of times when I was a kid, I must admit, but if I had refused to listen to my teacher, um, to the point where the school resource officer had to be called in, and then I still refuse to follow the instructions that I was given.
	And then as I was being led away forcefully, because I refused to leave the class, I threatened to physically assault my teacher and I was arrested for it.
	I can tell you my mom would not be on camera crying crocodile tears of sympathy for me.
	I can tell you that right now.
	Neither would my dad.
	I would be facing whatever the legal penalties are and the school penalties and then I would go home and I would face even worse penalties.
	That's what would have happened to me.
	But this, of course, is part of what makes the job of teacher so difficult today, is that they have to deal with these awful kids and their terrible parents who will defend their awful kids, no matter what their awful kids do.
	And it's well awful.
	And again, as a parent myself, I don't even understand that instinct.
	Like, you know, my kids are younger, but when we leave our kids with a babysitter or something like that, because my wife and I are going to go out for a date night, go watch a movie or something.
	And if we ever come home and we get a report from the babysitter that our kids were being unruly, disobedient, disrespectful, that is going to make me very, very angry.
	And they are going to face severe consequences.
	You know, on the few occasions when we've come home and the babysitter has given us a bad report, my first instinct as a parent is not to say, Oh no, my little baby never would do that.
	It must be your fault.
	You're being mean to my, to my precious little babies.
	No, see, that's not my first instinct.
	My first instinct is to believe the adult.
	Okay.
	Does that make me a bad parent?
	My first instinct is to side with the adult over my kid because they're adults.
	And I know how kids are.
	I was a kid myself once.
	So when I hear a story about my kid being disrespectful, I think, yeah, well, I mean, I know they can act like that sometimes.
	I've seen it myself and it's totally unacceptable.
	And so then what will happen is I will apologize to the adult for having to deal with that.
	And then I will get my child and make them apologize.
	Um, here's a, Here's a newsflash for this precious little snowflakes mom.
	If a kid is being told to leave the classroom, he needs to leave.
	Okay?
	If your son is being told to leave the classroom, he needs to leave.
	He doesn't get to refuse.
	It's not up to him.
	He's not the adult.
	He needs to respect his elders.
	See, at this point, it's not even about the pledge.
	It's not about respecting the pledge or the flag or the country.
	It's got nothing to do with that now.
	Now it is about listening to and respecting the adults.
	That's all it's about.
	It doesn't matter how he feels about the pledge.
	Doesn't matter.
	That's fine.
	Doesn't want to stand?
	Fine.
	But he was asked to leave.
	That substitute teacher was put in charge of the class for the day.
	Your son's not in charge of the class.
	Your sixth grade son's not in charge.
	The teacher's in charge.
	That's the adult.
	And you, as an adult, should be backing up the other adult in the situation, who you have entrusted your child to.
	See, by sending your kid to school, you have put other adults in the position of watching your kid and dealing with whatever outrageous behavior your kid decides to engage in.
	So the least you can do as a parent is have the other adult's backs.
	Don't send your awful kid to school and then they behave terribly.
	And so not only are you inflicting your awful kid's awful behavior on other adults, but then you're on camera, you're on TV, calling for them to be fired over it?
	It's your fault that your kid's acting that way!
	Teach him some respect!
	He doesn't get to do what he wants?
	He doesn't get to shut down the whole class?
	Bring everything to a grinding halt?
	Force everyone to deal with his temper tantrum?
	You know, I saw this plenty when I was in school.
	These kids that would get upset at the teacher for whatever reason, and whether they're right to be upset or not right, it makes no difference.
	But then they're asked to leave the class because they're causing a disruption, and they refuse to leave, and they just sit there, and they won't listen.
	And so now everybody has to stop what we're doing.
	We have to stop learning.
	We have to stop everything we're doing to deal with your kid.
	Doesn't that embarrass you?
	Shouldn't you be embarrassed by that as a parent?
	See, if I was the parent, I would be humiliated.
	I would be so embarrassed.
	The last thing I would want to do is be on camera.
	If there was a camera, I'd put a paper bag over my head and try to rush to the car so that I wasn't caught on camera.
	I'd be so embarrassed that my kid was doing that.
	Um, and you know what?
	If he wants to get real big, if you, if your kid wants to act big, act like a big boy and start threatening, start making physical threats.
	Okay.
	You know, once you start making physical threats, uh, the cops not going to mess around with that.
	Especially these days.
	I don't know.
	Maybe you've watched the news and you've seen the stories about school shootings and stuff like that.
	Violence in the schools.
	Yeah, guess what?
	If you make violent threats in a school to a teacher or to anybody else, and there's a school resource officer there, your butt's going to get hauled away to jail.
	That's what's going to happen.
	Because they're not going to mess around with that.
	They're not going to take any chances, and they shouldn't.
	Again, this has got nothing to do with the Pledge of Allegiance.
	As far as the Pledge of Allegiance goes, it's a totally separate thing.
	And, you know, as it happens, I do kind of have an issue with the Pledge, but again, that's totally—it's got nothing to do—it's a completely separate issue, because this is about respecting elders and doing as you're told as a child.
	But, you know, there are aspects—here's the thing, even though it's totally unrelated now that I'm on the subject, here's the thing I don't like about the Pledge.
	There's really just one line in the Pledge that I don't like.
	I know these days there are a lot of people who don't like the under God part.
	No, I like that part.
	That part is good.
	There's one line in the pledge I really don't like, and that is indivisible with liberty and justice for all.
	Now, I like liberty and justice.
	That part I like.
	That's good.
	But indivisible?
	See, I disagree with that.
	I don't think the country is indivisible.
	I think that's incorrect because I believe in states' rights.
	So the state of Texas, for instance, is not owned by the federal government.
	It is not owned by the collective.
	It is not an indivisible part of the United States.
	It has the right, or it should have the right, I believe, personally, to leave if it wants to.
	So at the very least, the idea of an indivisible country is controversial.
	I mean, we fought a war over it, for goodness sake.
	It is not a universally accepted thing.
	Yet we have our kids stand up and say indivisible without encouraging them to think about what that means and whether or not they even agree with it.
	Because that's an opinion, and not a universally held opinion, that the country is an indivisible whole and it cannot be divided up.
	So, um, at the very least, if we're going to have our kids stand up and say this every morning, they should be encouraged to think about it and to be, um, and to be, you know, uh, to be analytical.
	But anyway, that's, that's beside the point.
	The real point again is do as you're told as, as a child in school.
	Finally, uh, before we get to emails, okay.
	I almost forgot this.
	We got to talk about this.
	I need to show you something.
	And I want you to prepare yourself because this is very disturbing.
	All right.
	I happened to swing by the grocery store yesterday.
	I went to a giant supermarket.
	And as I was walking in, I was immediately greeted by this.
	Look at this picture.
	Now, I want to leave this picture up on the screen for a bit because I want you to really soak this in, okay?
	That is a robot that you're looking at right now.
	That is a robot called Marty, the robot.
	I read this.
	I'm not kidding.
	I really, this was at the grocery store and it moves around the store.
	It's it's got, it's on wheels.
	You can't see the whole thing in the picture I took, but it is, uh, it is, I was afraid to approach it on this.
	I didn't know if it was going to, you know, zap me with a laser beam or something, but it is, uh, it's on wheels and it, it just, it moves around the store, this robot.
	I was in the produce section.
	I was trying to find avocados, of course, because I'm a millennial, and the thing was blocking the avocados.
	And I'm like, robot, please, Marty, excuse me.
	So it moves around the store looking for shoplifters.
	And if it finds a shoplifter, it shoots anthrax in its face.
	No, actually, that's not technically correct.
	It says that there's a little sign on it.
	It says that it's looking for spills to clean up.
	But I swear this thing followed me around the store with its huge, dead googly eyes.
	Look at those eyes.
	You're staring at the apocalypse, folks.
	All right.
	The end of all things.
	This is how it ends.
	First, they're cleaning up broken jars of mayonnaise in aisle 12.
	and next thing you know, Marty and his robot compatriots are enslaving mankind.
	So beware.
	All right, let's get to some of your emails.
	You can email the show, mattwalshow at gmail.com, mattwalshow at gmail.com.
	This is from Cheerilee.
	Cheerilee, I think is how you pronounce the name.
	Great name, by the way.
	It says, I love your show.
	I listen to all the episodes, yours, Andrew, Michael, and Ben, in the morning on my commute to work.
	That must be a long commute, by the way.
	Um, I would like to thank you and the others for doing what you do and helping me get through my day from dealing with healthcare being a right to the Mary Poppins books being racist because the chimney sweep is doing blackface in some fashion.
	You guys keep me grounded in sanity.
	Thank you.
	Seriously.
	Thank you.
	I hope you have a wonderful day.
	God bless.
	Thank you, uh, cheerily for watching all the shows in your commute or listening to them anyway.
	Hope you listen to them and not watch them if you're driving.
	Uh, this is from Jared.
	It says, it seems that you are an effing idiot.
	Seems.
	See, I appreciate that little, so you hedged your bets a little bit there.
	Seems that I'm an effing idiot.
	Seems.
	But looks can be deceiving, Jared.
	This is from Dustin, it says, Hi Matt, just listened to today's show.
	I, like you, am on the fence about the death penalty.
	I would hate to be in a position where I had to make such a decision, either as a juror or a prosecutor.
	However, part of my concern about the death penalty is that it actually costs more to execute someone than it does to incarcerate them for life.
	Trials where the death penalty is sought also cost more.
	A quick Google search will net you at least a few scholarly articles on the topic.
	Thanks for all you do.
	Keep up the good work.
	Yeah, that's true, Dustin.
	Death penalty opponents will trot out that fact quite often.
	But the thing is that when we talk about the death penalty being more expensive, first of all, this doesn't really come down to cost per se, but it also has an inflated artificial cost.
	Because the cost comes from all the appeals and all the years on death row and everything.
	It doesn't have to be that way.
	I mean, carrying out a death sentence can be a rather cheap and simple process.
	And I think we make it a lot more complicated than it needs to be.
	So, you know, that is just something to keep in mind every time you hear about how expensive it is.
	This is from Andy.
	It says, Hey Matt, I listened to a podcast about Munchausen syndrome the other day, so it got me thinking.
	With regards to a seeming increase in faked hate crimes, sexual assault allegations, and racism claims over the last decade or so, I wonder if this could be an unintended consequence of social media that leads to some sort of Munchausen-type problem in our inwardly focused society.
	I say this not as an expert by any stretch, but because there seems to be similarities in these two phenomenon.
	Just as people with Munchausen syndrome make themselves sick or injure themselves mainly for attention or sympathy, people make up these accusations because they know that the media and Twitter will rush to pay attention to them and feel sorry for them without the need for evidence or a backstory about the event.
	I may be just trying to connect the two unrelated dots of my dislike of social media and these allegations that keep coming out, but I just want to share my two cents.
	I think you're exactly right, Andy.
	That's a very good point.
	That I wish I had thought of myself.
	Munchausen.
	It is kind of a Munchausen syndrome.
	I think it's sort of sort of exact.
	It's it's the motivations are exactly the same.
	My only problem is when you attach a word like syndrome to something, you make it into a disease or disorder or whatever.
	Now, it seems like you are, which I know isn't your intention, but part of the effect is removing The accountability from the person who's doing it.
	Which, of course, we can't do because it's still their fault.
	It's a choice that they've made to make up these stories, and they should face the consequences for that.
	All right, finally, this is what I really wanted to get to.
	This is from Grace.
	I mentioned this on the show yesterday that I was going to respond to this question.
	Here's the question again.
	It says, Hi Matt, I've been wanting to know your opinion about something.
	Sometimes I will hear Christian apologists argue the case for Christianity on the basis of near-death experiences.
	They point to all the stories of people being medically dead and then experiencing a vision of Christ or heaven.
	Do you think this is an effective argument?
	What is your position on NDEs?
	NDE, near-death experience.
	Hi, Grace.
	That's a great question.
	I thank you for it.
	Here's the thing.
	I've thought a lot about this, and I differ from a lot of my fellow Christians on this point.
	I don't think that near-death experiences are a great apologetic tool.
	And more to the point, I am skeptical of every near-death experience story I've ever heard about.
	Which isn't to say that I think people are lying.
	I think that they really did experience something.
	It's just they might be misinterpreting their experience.
	The question is whether or not these experiences people have where they, you know, are near death, or sometimes they'll claim that they medically died or whatever on the operating table, and then they went to heaven, or they saw Jesus, or they saw their dead relatives, or what have you, and then they woke up again.
	I don't doubt that these people saw the things that they thought they saw, but the question is, is it a psychological phenomenon?
	Or did it actually happen?
	And I tend to think it's more psychological, and I'll tell you why.
	Number one—this to me is the main thing that I can't really get around—near-death experiences are common among all types of people of all faiths all over the world.
	Now, if only Christians had these experiences, or if Christians were much more likely to have them, then maybe I'd say that there's something there, but that's not the case.
	There's no evidence of that.
	So all kinds of people all over the world will have these.
	Well, what does that mean?
	It means that Muslims who have NDEs will have Islamic visions of the afterlife, and Hindus will have Hindu visions.
	And Buddhists will have visions consistent with that philosophy.
	Sikhs, the same thing, etc.
	So, if the experience that someone has in a near-death experience is actually real, As in, they are really seeing the afterlife, then how do we explain the Hindu who goes off and meets Vishnu?
	How do we explain the Native American who, in a case that I read about recently, went to the sky and convened with a council of elders in the sky, in the clouds?
	It seems that, as Christians, we must either assume that all non-Christian NDEs are false or demonic, Which I think would be a silly assumption and definitely a case of special pleading.
	Or we must say that all religions are right.
	So they really are all, you know, so all visions of the afterlife in the end, they're all right.
	They're all exactly, you know, they all, whatever your vision is of the afterlife, that's where you go.
	Which we know as Christians is not the case.
	Or, well, you know, I'm not sure what else you do with this fact.
	If you want to believe that NDEs are real things, you're experiencing something real and really seeing the afterlife, then I'm not sure what you do with all of these conflicting experiences of the afterlife that people have based on their religious faith.
	Unless you conclude that NDEs are a neurological phenomenon, essentially a hallucination, like a dream, That reflects whatever ideas and beliefs the person having the experience already held.
	See, that's the only conclusion that I think sufficiently accounts for the prevalence of these experiences among all religions.
	Second thing, people have claimed to be on the operating table and like hovering above their body.
	Or they've claimed to teleport to other places in the hospital or what have you.
	But studies have been done, controlled studies, to try and replicate and test these stories.
	Because they are very impressive stories, but they're just stories in the end, right?
	And when there have been attempts to actually, in real time, test these stories, they always fail.
	So for instance, I heard about a study that was done at some point where I think it was like a word was written on a sticky note and it was put on a high filing cabinet in an operating room.
	You know, put up really high so you couldn't see it unless you're on a ladder.
	And then when people came back from their near-death experiences and they claimed that they were hovering above their bodies and hovering above the room, they were asked Well, what's the word on the note?
	Did you see the word up there?
	No, you should have been able to see it.
	What did it say?
	And nobody could say, you know, because in this controlled environment, all of a sudden these stories kind of aren't as impressive anymore, which I think tells us something.
	And, you know, not to mention just metaphysically, it just, it doesn't really make sense to me.
	Like you're on the operating table and what your soul gets up and goes for a jog around the hospital.
	So your body for that period is soulless.
	What is that?
	How does it even work?
	Why would that even happen?
	Like, why would your soul slip away for a minute?
	Like you're falling out of your shoes or something, and then your soul just wanders back.
	And it really kind of just doesn't make any sense to me.
	And the third thing is that near-death experiences are, they're just that, okay?
	They're near death.
	So the people who say, oh, I died for 10 minutes on the operating table because their heart stopped or they stopped breathing.
	Well, that's not actually true.
	They did not die.
	They were still alive, although barely, which again is a problem with them saying that their soul went away and flew around the hospital because they're not actually dead.
	So how does that work?
	Did their soul split in two?
	Or were they living?
	When they were living, they were just a soulless husk for that period of time and their soul was off somewhere else?
	That seems to raise all kinds of problems.
	Because no, they did not die.
	When somebody says, oh, I died for five minutes, I went to heaven, I came back.
	No, you didn't.
	You didn't die.
	I mean, I'm not discounting The severity of your medical emergency at all, I'm just saying that you did not die.
	You were not actually medically dead.
	Because to be dead is when all brain activity ceases.
	There is no more brain activity.
	There was nothing.
	You are just a husk, a corpse laying there.
	That's dead.
	You are dead when you are a corpse.
	And the thing is, if you're a corpse and you go to heaven and you come back, that's not a near-death experience.
	You're claiming that you were resurrected.
	That is a resurrection.
	You are claiming to have been resurrected from the dead like Jesus.
	And I'm not saying that's impossible.
	We know what happened to Jesus.
	And we know Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.
	But I'm just saying that is a very different kind of claim.
	And it's one that I am skeptical of, because according to these stories, it seems like people are being resurrected left and right.
	Like, it's not even a big deal to be resurrected.
	And then the fourth thing, and this is kind of a more minor objection, but, you know, I can't help but notice that all of these people who go to heaven and then come back, They never seem to have anything really urgent or startling or insightful or surprising to say, right?
	I mean, it seems like if God's going to send you back from heaven, which actually is—I mean, that's kind of a bummer, right?
	You were in heaven.
	You're in eternal paradise, and now you have to come back?
	That's not really a positive thing.
	So it seems like if God's going to send you back from heaven, There would be a really good reason for it.
	Like, you've got a really important message to share, but nobody ever comes back from heaven with a cure for cancer.
	Nobody ever even really comes back with any sort of penetrating, profound insight.
	It's just—now, they come back with a beautiful story and very inspiring, but they come back and they write a book for—and they get three—you know, they sell three million copies and all of that, but is that why God sent them back?
	So they could write a best-selling book?
	Which will then enter into a whole genre now of I went to heaven.
	There's a whole genre of books now.
	The I went to heaven genre.
	So it's what?
	It's a routine occurrence now?
	God is just sending people back from heaven?
	Left and right?
	Just so they can share some pretty cliched message about make the most of life and all that, love your family.
	I mean, I'm not—yeah, it's true, we should make the most of life and we should love our families, but does God need to send anyone back from heaven to say that?
	So, I don't know.
	If somebody came back from heaven, supposedly, with something to say that was really so incredible and surprising and inexplicable, that it can't be explained any other way than, you know, they went to heaven and received a divine message.
	If that were to ever happen in modern day, then I would feel differently, but I'm not aware of any cases like that.
	The answer is no, unfortunately.
	You know, I know people, it's very comforting to think about near-death experiences.
	I know people that have had these experiences.
	There's nothing I can say to dissuade them.
	I'm not trying to dissuade them.
	I'm just giving my own personal opinion on the topic and that's what it is.
	Thank you for the question.
	Thanks everybody for listening.
	Thank you for being here.
	Godspeed.
	Here's a chilling little piece of information from the book Free to Choose by Milton Friedman.
	In 1928, the Socialist Party put forward an extremist platform.
	They never got more votes for presidency than 6%.
	And yet, and yet, within 50 years, every part of their platform had been enacted into law.
	Why?
	I'll explain why on The Andrew Klavan Show.

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