Today on the show, Michael Cohen testifies to a House committee. But his testimony does more to exonerate Trump than implicate him. I’ll explain why. Also, ADHD was the big topic of conversation on social media yesterday. I will share my unpopular opinion on that subject. Date: 02-27-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Today on the Matt Wall Show, Michael Cohen testifies to a House committee today. | |
| The media tells us that his testimony is damning for Trump, but I actually think that he says a few things that do more to exonerate Trump than implicate him, and we'll talk about that. | |
| Also, ADHD was the topic of conversation on social media yesterday. | |
| I have an unpopular opinion, which may surprise you. | |
| But I have an unpopular opinion about something. | |
| I have an unpopular opinion on that subject, and we'll talk about that today. | |
| Plus, I'll get to your emails as well today on The Matt Wall Show. | |
| So the circus continues. | |
| Apparently, attorney-client privilege is just... | |
| Not a thing anymore, at all, it seems. | |
| So, Michael Cohen, President Trump's former lawyer, is on Capitol Hill today testifying at a House hearing, testifying against the President. | |
| Now, Cohen, of course, is a known liar, and he's going to jail for lying. | |
| So, to any thinking person, his credibility is, shall we say, a little bit compromised. | |
| But nonetheless, he supposedly comes with evidence of illegal activity on the part of the president. | |
| But in fact, it seems that he succeeds more in exonerating President Trump than he does in implicating him in any kind of actual criminal conduct. | |
| And most of his testimony revolves around allegations of non-criminal conduct anyway. | |
| So, looking at his opening statement, Just to give you an example, he says stuff like this. | |
| He says, Mr. Trump is an enigma. | |
| He is complicated, as am I. He has both good and bad, as do we all. | |
| But the bad far outweighs the good, and since taking office he has become the worst version of himself. | |
| He is capable of behaving kindly, but he is not kind. | |
| He is capable of committing acts of generosity, but he is not generous. | |
| He is capable of being loyal, but he is fundamentally disloyal. | |
| Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great. | |
| He had no desire or intention to lead this nation, only to market himself and to build his wealth and his power. | |
| Mr. Trump would often say this campaign was going to be the greatest infomercial in political history. | |
| He had never expected to win the primary. | |
| He never expected to win the general election. | |
| The campaign for him was always a marketing opportunity. | |
| Now, That last part there about he didn't expect to win, it was just marketing. | |
| We'll get to this in a minute, but that's actually significant, I think. | |
| That's a very significant point in favor of Trump, at least in favor of Trump's innocence in regards to any criminal conduct. | |
| Now, it's not in favor of Trump's integrity, if it's true, but when it comes to criminal conduct, I think that that's actually going to be a point in his favor. | |
| We'll get to that in a minute, but most of what you heard there, and there's a lot of this kind of stuff in his opening statement, it's the kind of thing that you put in an attack ad when you're running against him in 2020, which of course is the point of this whole hearing. | |
| It's just to get fodder for attack ads, it's to get this stuff. | |
| It's just video clips, little bits of footage that you can then put into a montage when you're running against him and to show, oh, what a bad guy he is. | |
| Just as long, and that's obvious, of course, but just as long, you just wanna make sure we're all on the same page and we realize what this is about. | |
| Because even if it's true that Trump is an enigma who's more focused on his brand, that is not a criminal allegation. | |
| And if these hearings meant anything, which they don't, But if they did, they wouldn't provide a forum for people to make subjective statements like that. | |
| Cohen also, Cohen gets into talking about Trump, ran a campaign based on division and hatred. | |
| Again, this is fine. | |
| I mean, that's the kind of thing that you say about a politician if you're trying to damage them politically. | |
| Fine. | |
| That's not what this hearing should be about. | |
| Cohen also alleges racism. | |
| He says, he says, while we were once driving through a struggling neighborhood in Chicago, he commented that only black people could live that way. | |
| And he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid. | |
| I have no idea if that's true or not. | |
| Obviously, he has no evidence of it. | |
| This is coming from someone, again, who's going to jail for lying. | |
| It strikes me as made up. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know Trump personally. | |
| I have no clue what he says behind closed doors. | |
| But it strikes me as the kind of thing that somebody would make up. | |
| But who knows? | |
| And then he alleges dishonest and self-serving conduct from years before Trump was elected. | |
| He says, Mr. Trump directed me to find a straw bidder to purchase a portrait of him that was being auctioned at an Art Hamptons event. | |
| The objective was to ensure that his portrait, which was going to be auctioned last, would go for the highest price of any portrait that afternoon. | |
| The portrait was purchased by the fake bidder for $60,000. | |
| Mr. Trump directed the Trump Foundation, which is supposed to be a charitable organization, to repay the fake bidder despite keeping the art for himself. | |
| Please see exhibit. | |
| Uh, then he gives his, he gives his, uh, his evidence of, of this. | |
| Um, and it should come as no surprise that one of my common responsibilities was that Mr. Trump directed me to call business owners, many of whom were small businesses that were owed money for their services and told them no payment or reduced payment will be coming. | |
| When I advised Mr. Trump of my success, he actually reveled in it. | |
| Uh, so this is stuff from before he was president, misleading, inappropriate. | |
| The idea that Trump would buy his own portrait, that I do find perfectly believable, but it's | |
| not exactly grounds for impeachment, is it? | |
| What are the grounds for impeachment? | |
| I mean, that's supposed to be the point here, right? | |
| This is supposed to be, you've got the guy's lawyer, okay? | |
| You've got the, this is Trump's fixer. | |
| This is his personal lawyer. | |
| The media keeps telling us, well, that he knows where the bodies are buried. | |
| Okay, I mean, yeah. | |
| This is quite a coup on the part of the Democrats. | |
| You've got this, the president that you hate, you have his lawyer now spilling the beans. | |
| How often do you have an opportunity like that? | |
| To get all the dirt on your, On your political opponent. | |
| And so he should have some really good stuff. | |
| Right? | |
| If Trump is guilty of breaking laws, if Trump is a criminal, this is the guy who will know it. | |
| And he should be able to give you some really good dirt. | |
| So what's the good dirt? | |
| Good for the Democrats anyway. | |
| Here are the big, the supposed bombs that Cohen drops. | |
| First, we have this. | |
| He says, you need to know that Mr. Trump's personal lawyers reviewed and edited my statement to Congress about the timing of the Moscow Tower negotiations before I gave it. | |
| To be clear, Mr. Trump knew of and directed the Trump-Moscow negotiations throughout the campaign and lied about it. | |
| He lied about it because he never expected to win the election. | |
| He also lied about it because he stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars in the Moscow real estate project. | |
| And so I lied about it too because Mr. Trump had made clear to me through his personal statements to me that we both knew were false and through his lies to the country that he wanted me to lie. | |
| And we made it clear and he made it clear to me because his personal attorneys reviewed my statement before I gave it to Congress. | |
| Now this is interesting. | |
| The bit there at the end about how Trump wanted him to lie. | |
| We'll get back to that in a minute. | |
| But what did he just reveal here? | |
| I mean, think about this for a minute. | |
| He revealed that Trump was directing the Moscow negotiations. | |
| That is, he was trying to get a Trump Tower built in Moscow. | |
| Which, nothing criminal about that. | |
| When you're a real estate developer, you're trying to get buildings built across the world. | |
| Okay. | |
| Now Cohen says, this is what he says right here, and he mentioned it before too. | |
| He didn't think, Trump did not think that he would become president. | |
| He didn't think he was going to win. | |
| What does that tell us? | |
| It tells us that Trump was not trying to leverage the presidency for financial gain. | |
| He wasn't trying to get a deal going with Russia on the basis of him becoming president. | |
| So it wasn't like he was saying, hey guys, let us build, he wasn't saying to Russia, let us build this, this thing, you know, in Moscow. | |
| And then when I'm in the Oval Office, I'll scratch your back too. | |
| Now that would be illegal. | |
| That would be corruption. | |
| That would be impeachable. | |
| If Trump was using the power of his office to enrich himself, Uh, and enrich his business. | |
| And if this was all him running for president was just some kind of ploy, not for him to, you know, get attention to himself, which I mean, that's, that's part of the reason why anyone runs for president. | |
| But if the ploy was, I want to become president so that I can then, you know, make these business deals and enrich myself. | |
| Well then, okay, now you got something. | |
| You would need evidence of it, but now at least there's an accusation that is quite serious. | |
| But that's exactly what Cohen is not alleging. | |
| He says that Trump didn't think he was going to win. | |
| So he was just trying to keep his options open and his business going until, inevitably, in his mind, he lost. | |
| That is very significant. | |
| This one little bit here, this one line about Trump thinking he wouldn't win, is a game changer, I think. | |
| Because if that's true, and I believe that it is true. | |
| In fact, I said, I'm not just saying that now, I said many times, this was, it's not a secret. | |
| I was not a supporter of the president during the primary, to put it mildly. | |
| And one of the things that I said about Trump during the primary is I don't think he wants to win. | |
| I don't think he thinks he's going to win. | |
| I don't think he's in this to win. | |
| And according to Cohen, that's exactly correct. | |
| And if that's the case, then it would seem to insulate Trump from any accusation that he had | |
| some scheme to leverage the presidency. Now, it's not good. | |
| It's not good to run for president when you don't even want to win. And you're just doing it for | |
| some, you know, for, for, to, you know, expand your, your, you know, reach. And you're doing that | |
| for the sake of your profile and all Now, again, that's very common. | |
| Why do you think Bernie Sanders is running for president? | |
| Bernie Sanders ran for president. | |
| He was basically unknown for the most part. | |
| He was just some wacky, crazy senator up there in Vermont. | |
| He runs for president. | |
| Now he's known across the country. | |
| And what do you know? | |
| He puts out a book a couple of years ago, becomes a bestseller, and now he's a millionaire. | |
| This is what people do. | |
| This is one of the reasons. | |
| If you ever wonder, when you see these people running for president who have no chance of winning, and they're polling like number 17 or whatever, and they stay in, if you're wondering why are they doing this, it's because of their profile. | |
| It's because they plan to write a book, and they're gonna make millions. | |
| So if that's what Trump did, it's not illegal, it's not even unusual, I don't like it. | |
| But it would seem to protect him from the more serious potential charge that he was using the presidency and trying to leverage it. | |
| So now compare this for a moment. | |
| To Hillary Clinton. | |
| Okay, and this is not whataboutism. | |
| It's not what I'm doing. | |
| I'm just trying to give you an example of what it looks like when business interests and political interests really do collide to create actual corruption. | |
| Okay, I want to give you an example of the kind of thing Trump apparently did not do, even according to his now enemy. | |
| So when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, She did leverage her authority in that position to enrich the Clinton Foundation, her own charitable organization. | |
| And we all understand, by the way. | |
| Trump Foundation, it's not about charity. | |
| The Clinton Foundation, not about charity. | |
| All these politicians and business people, they have their foundations, supposed to be non-profit or charitable. | |
| It's not what it's really about. | |
| We all know that. | |
| She did use that power to enrich the Clinton Foundation and to provide benefits to its biggest donors. | |
| So just for a quick overview, I'm going to read two paragraphs from an article in National Review back in 2016 written by Andrew McCarthy. | |
| And this is what it says. | |
| Hillary and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, operated the Clinton Foundation, ostensibly a charity. | |
| The foundation was a de facto fraud scheme to monetize Hillary's power as Secretary of State, among other aspects of the Clinton's political influence. | |
| The scheme involved A. The exchange of political favors, access, and influence for millions of dollars in donations. | |
| B. The circumvention of campaign finance laws that prohibit political donations by foreign sources. | |
| C. A vehicle for Mrs. Clinton to shield her State Department email communications from public and congressional scrutiny while she and her husband exploited the fundraising potential of her position. | |
| And D, a means for Clinton insiders to receive private sector compensation and explore lucrative employment opportunities while drawing taxpayer-funded government salaries. | |
| While the foundation did perform some charitable work, this camouflaged the fact that contributions were substantially diverted to pay lavish salaries and underwrite luxury travel for Clinton insiders. | |
| Contributions skyrocketed to $126 million in 2009, the year that Mrs. Clinton arrived at Foggy Bottom. | |
| Breathtaking sums were donated by high rollers and foreign governments that had crucial business before the State Department. | |
| Along with those staggering donations came a spike in speaking opportunities and fees for Bill Clinton. | |
| Of course, disproportionate payments and gifts to a spouse are common ways of bribing public officials, which is why, for example, high-ranking government officeholders must reveal their spouse's income and other asset information on their financial disclosure forms. | |
| While there are other egregious transactions, the most notorious corruption episode of Secretary Clinton's tenure involves the State Department's approval of a deal that surrendered fully one-fifth of the United States' uranium mining capacity to Vladimir Putin's anti-American thugocracy in Russia. | |
| This is just to give you an example. | |
| This is what corruption looks like. | |
| This is classic. | |
| This is just classic corruption. | |
| If you look up corruption in the dictionary, it's basically what you get. | |
| It's classic stuff here. | |
| Grade A corruption. | |
| The accusations about Trump don't look like that. | |
| Even if you believe everything that Cohen says, which you can't, but even if you did, you come away with the impression that Trump is kind of a huge jerk, and a bit of a bumbling idiot, and extremely conceited, and he lies a lot to the media, to the public, and so on. | |
| And that's if you take everything that Cohen says as gospel. | |
| Even if you did that, that's the most you can draw from it. | |
| Now here's the other supposed blockbuster revelation. | |
| It says, and this is back to Cohen's statement, It says, in July 2016, days before the Democratic convention, I was in Mr. Trump's office when his secretary announced that Roger Stone was on the phone. | |
| Mr. Trump put Mr. Stone on the speakerphone. | |
| Mr. Stone told Mr. Trump that he had just gotten off the phone with Julian Assange and that Mr. Assange told Mr. Stone that within a couple of days there would be a massive dump of emails that would damage Hillary Clinton's campaign. | |
| Mr. Trump responded by stating to the effect of, wouldn't that be great? | |
| All right. | |
| Um, so he doesn't say that Trump directed anyone to hack the emails, uh, or that he asked anyone to leak the emails or that he had any hand in it at all. | |
| Which, again, now that would be a crime. | |
| If Trump somehow organized the hacking of Clinton's emails, now you've got a serious crime on your hands. | |
| But that's not even what Cohen says. | |
| He says that someone called him and told him that in a few days this was all going to be coming out. | |
| And Trump was happy about that. | |
| Okay. | |
| Honestly, I don't even understand how am I supposed to react to that? | |
| So someone completely separate from Trump hacked the emails, and then some other third party completely separate from Trump, WikiLeaks, was going to put them out, and Trump was happy. | |
| So? | |
| Of course he was happy. | |
| You're running against someone and you find out that there's going to be embarrassing information coming out about them. | |
| What do you expect them to say? | |
| Oh no, we need to alert them right away. | |
| We need to alert the Clinton campaign so they can be prepared for this. | |
| This isn't fair. | |
| Well, certainly I want to beat her in the election, but I don't want her to be embarrassed. | |
| That's not what I want. | |
| Is that really what I was expecting? | |
| That's exactly what anyone would say. | |
| When you're running for office and you find out that, oh, there's going to be something, there's something coming out about your opponent. | |
| Okay, good. | |
| Great. | |
| Awesome. | |
| That's what I would say if I was running against somebody. | |
| It's just, that is such a weak, and the media is taking this and they're plastering it everywhere, making headlines out of it. | |
| Trump says that would be great when he finds out about WikiLeaks. | |
| Okay. | |
| Um, And in the end, when it comes time for the rubber to meet the road and for Cohen to really get to the meat of things and talk about actual criminal behavior, he does the opposite. | |
| For one, he admits that Trump never told him to lie to Congress. | |
| He says, and I quote, Mr. Trump did not directly tell me to lie to Congress. | |
| That's not how he operates. | |
| He says that Trump implied That he wanted him to lie with facial expressions and with indirect comments and that sort of thing. | |
| So he says that Trump, you know, gave the impression. | |
| He didn't say it, but he just gave the impression that that's what he wanted Cohen to do. | |
| And so Cohen did. | |
| But that is, that's pretty weak sauce. | |
| That's not enough to justify any kind of impeachment or anything. | |
| And then there's this. | |
| Cohen says, questions have been raised about whether I know of direct evidence that Mr. Trump or his campaign colluded with Russia. | |
| I do not. | |
| I want to be clear, but I have my suspicions. | |
| And then he goes on to talk about his suspicions. | |
| But he has no evidence or knowledge of collusion. | |
| And that's what this was all originally supposed to be about, right? | |
| Isn't it? | |
| I mean, that's what this was all supposed to be about. | |
| That Trump colluded with Russia. | |
| And now you've got the guy. | |
| I mean, this is the guy who know, the media says he knows where all the bodies are buried. | |
| He knows, um, he knows all the bad stuff. | |
| He's got all the dirt. | |
| He's got nothing left to lose. | |
| He's going to jail. | |
| So if anyone with direct knowledge, if anyone would have direct knowledge of something like this and be willing to say it, it would be him. | |
| And yet he says, no, I don't know anything about that. | |
| I have no direct knowledge. | |
| So, I mean, if Russian collusion was supposed to be the big crime, the big scandal, then the headline of his testimony is that, according to this testimony, he has no knowledge of Russian collusion. | |
| So, what do we do with all this? | |
| I suspect that we do nothing with it. | |
| If you already hated Trump going into this, then you're still going to hate him, and you're going to see this as vindication of your hatred for him. | |
| If you loved him, then you'll still love him, and you'll just dismiss all this because, hey, this is a liar, and a lot of what he's saying is not criminal, and so on. | |
| If you, like me, take a more balanced approach, Then you'll probably look at this testimony and you'll say, OK, he alleges some things that, if true, are morally reprehensible, but particularly the racist comments. | |
| But we don't know if they're true. | |
| They're almost certainly not completely true, given the source. | |
| And they're probably not completely false, because this is coming from a guy who would know the dirt. | |
| And Trump probably has some dirt on him, so probably not everything he said was false. | |
| So what was true, what was false, who knows? | |
| A lot of what he alleges is not criminal, so there's not much we can do with this on balance. | |
| I think that's what, if you take a more balanced approach, that's kind of where you'll end with it. | |
| And here's the other thing. | |
| It's the Democrat Party. | |
| That is obviously trying to destroy Trump here, right? | |
| They're the ones organizing this whole campaign, obviously. | |
| So anyone with a moral compass has to take that into account. | |
| We have to take into account the fact that the Democrat Party is an evil institution, an institution full of people who support infanticide, people who support socialism. | |
| People who support the legal persecution of Christians. | |
| People who have no qualms about organizing smear campaigns and trying to destroy their political opponents with blatant falsehoods and lies, as was the case with Kavanaugh. | |
| So, we have to factor that in. | |
| You know, there are a lot of Republicans, there are a lot of conservatives, I should say, a lot of conservatives who are disillusioned with the Republican Party and have been for a long time. | |
| And a lot of those same conservatives don't like Trump or even actively really dislike him. | |
| But they cannot align themselves with the Democrats. | |
| And they feel morally obligated to support the opposition, to support whoever opposes the Democrats, which in this case would be Trump and his administration, because the Democrats are just so evil. | |
| Because especially the Democrats support, fund, facilitate the slaughter of millions of babies. | |
| You know, someone asked me today, when I was giving my impressions of Cohen's opening statement on Twitter, And making all the points that I've made here, and somebody said, well, you're just, you know, you're just taking Trump's side because you're pro-life and the Democrats are pro-abortion. | |
| Well, that's not true. | |
| You know, I'm giving my honest analysis of what Cohen had to say, so that's not true. | |
| But does that factor in to my approach to Trump? | |
| Yeah, of course it does. | |
| How could it not? | |
| I don't, I don't pretend otherwise. | |
| I'm not ashamed to say that. | |
| Of course, I have to keep in mind here that the people who are trying to destroy Trump are not only blatant liars and have shown themselves to be that, but these are really evil people. | |
| Who? | |
| And there are other things besides the abortion issue, but I don't even need to get beyond that. | |
| I mean, these are people who if they had it their way and if they controlled everything, abortion would be legal through every stage of presence through every stage of pregnancy and beyond. | |
| These are people who facilitate, fund, support the mass slaughter of millions of babies. | |
| Just evil, evil stuff. | |
| And so that means that I will, I'll never take their side on anything. | |
| That doesn't mean that I'm always going to defend Trump on it. | |
| I've criticized Trump plenty of times. | |
| If I think Trump is wrong about something, I'm going to criticize him. | |
| And I'll even criticize him very harshly, as I have done plenty of times over the last two years and before that. | |
| But I'll never align myself with the Democrats. | |
| I'll stake out a third position where you've got Trump, the Democrats, and I'll be over here. | |
| I'll do that sometimes, but I'm never going to go over here with them. | |
| Never, ever. | |
| I could never do that. | |
| I think any moral person has an obligation to not do that because of how evil these people are and because of what their intentions are and what they want to do. | |
| All right, what else? | |
| I wanted to mention this briefly just because it's a subject that's near and dear to my heart, as you know, because I've talked about it many times on the show and I've written about it. | |
| So I have to say something when this is a subject people are talking about. | |
| A writer for New York Magazine, Yashar Ali, wrote a long Twitter thread about ADHD yesterday, describing his own experiences with the so-called disorder, and the thread went massively viral. | |
| ADHD was the top trending topic on Twitter yesterday across the country, I believe. | |
| As everybody was talking about, ADHD and describing their own experiences with this alleged affliction. | |
| Although I did kind of find it sort of ironic that Yashar wrote this. | |
| He wrote such a long Twitter thread about ADHD. | |
| And so those of us with ADHD, you know, we're like, well, I can't read all that. | |
| That's too much. | |
| Now, as I've shared plenty of times in the past, I myself definitely, without question, have what is described as ADHD. | |
| That is, if I went to a doctor and I described my symptoms to the doctor, I would certainly be diagnosed with it and they would give me whatever drugs I asked for relating to this disorder. | |
| There's no question about that. | |
| Yet, I do not believe that ADHD exists. | |
| And I want to explain what I mean by that. | |
| Because I think that there's a there's kind of a false paradigm that goes on with this discussion. | |
| When I say that, that I don't think ADHD exists. | |
| What I mean by that is I don't think it's a disorder. | |
| I fully believe that ADHD-type personalities exist. | |
| I know that firsthand. | |
| I live with it every day. | |
| But the word disorder is embedded into ADHD. | |
| It's right there in the acronym. | |
| And that's what I take issue with. | |
| So, the ADH part, I don't have a problem with that. | |
| Attention deficit, hyperactivity, whatever. | |
| Yes. | |
| It's when you tack that D onto it that I have a problem. | |
| Now, if we were to change that D to something else, if we were to say, attention deficit hyperactivity disposition, then all of a sudden I would say, sure, yeah, that exists, that's a thing. | |
| But disorder, I have a problem with that. | |
| As I've tried to argue over the years, I think we've committed, and I think it's such an important point, so I go back to it whenever I can. | |
| We have committed a category error with regards to this issue, and we commit the same error, in my opinion, with many other alleged mental disorders. | |
| And the error is philosophical. | |
| This is a philosophical question. | |
| It's not a medical one. | |
| So, anytime I talk about something like this, and someone says, you're not a doctor! | |
| You can't say that! | |
| What do you know? | |
| Where did you get your medical degree there, Matt? | |
| Well, first of all, where's your medical degree? | |
| 99% of the people, when you try to share an opinion about a topic like this, 99% of the people who shout at you, you're not a doctor, your opinion doesn't count, 99% of them are not doctors either. | |
| Yet they have no problem sharing their own opinion, which is not based on any kind of medical degree. | |
| So what they really mean to say is, If you're not a doctor, you're not allowed to share your opinion about this unless you agree with me, in which case you can, in which case your opinion is totally fine. | |
| It is completely credible and based on research and logic and all of that. | |
| So that's what they mean. | |
| And that's a pet peeve of mine. | |
| It's kind of a separate issue. | |
| But this thing people do where they pretend not to take your opinion seriously if you don't have the right credentials. | |
| And the problem with that is most of the time they do it hypocritically because they don't really care about the credentials. | |
| What they really care about is the fact that you disagree with them. | |
| If you didn't disagree, they wouldn't care about the credentials. | |
| But even aside from that, the credentials aren't important. | |
| If someone is saying something that's true, it doesn't matter what credentials they have for saying it. | |
| It's true. | |
| If somebody is making a logical argument, then you as a thinking person should engage with the logic of their argument. | |
| Regardless of their credentials. | |
| They could be an illiterate person who's never read a book in their life. | |
| But if they make a logical argument, you should be able to engage with it. | |
| And if there are logical problems with it, point out the logical problems. | |
| If you can't point to any specific problem, then falling back on, hey, you don't have the right credentials for this, that's just intellectual cowardice. | |
| And it's obfuscation, it's deflection. | |
| But the bigger point here is that this is not a medical question. | |
| Nobody denies that people exist who are easily distracted, who have trouble focusing, who have trouble staying on task, who have minds that go in a million directions at once. | |
| Okay, I know what that's like, you know, and no one denies that. | |
| The question is whether that is a disordered way to be. | |
| In other words, the philosophical question is, should people be that way? | |
| And the next question, or the question before that is, how is a person supposed to be? | |
| What is a normal person? | |
| So we say, well, that's abnormal. | |
| Okay, well, number one, what is normal? | |
| What is the normal mind? | |
| Who is the normal person? | |
| What is the ideal that we're all supposed to be striving for? | |
| And even if you could prove that there is such a thing as a normal person and a normal brain and a normal mind, which you can't because that doesn't exist, but even if it does, who says that there's anything wrong with being abnormal? | |
| Now, What I would say is that is that hundreds of millions of people have an ADHD disposition, including millions of people in school. | |
| And it is but it is not a disorder. | |
| And the fact that hundreds of millions of people have it is kind of an indication that it's actually not that abnormal at all. | |
| Now obviously if hundreds of millions of people, if there's some sort of flu epidemic going around and hundreds of millions of people are dying from it, then the fact that hundreds of millions of people have it and it's normal in that sense, that doesn't mean that it's not an illness. | |
| Of course in that case it is. | |
| But that's totally different because the flu actively physically harms you. | |
| No matter what context you're in, that's the thing. | |
| It's not like the flu is only harmful if you're in school and you're trying to complete a worksheet, or the flu is especially harmful at work. | |
| No, the flu is equally harmful no matter where you are, no matter what you do for a living, no matter how old you are. | |
| Well, it does depend on how old you are. | |
| But it's harmful no matter what context you're in. | |
| The thing about ADHD, and the same for legitimate brain diseases, like for instance, dementia. | |
| If you have dementia, they can look at a brain scan, they see you have it, and you're going to have it no matter where you are. | |
| You'll have it on a train, you'll have it on a plane, you'll have it in a school classroom, you'll have it on a job, you'll have it everywhere. | |
| Because that's the way that a disease works. | |
| ADHD is not like that. | |
| ADHD, a diagnosis of ADHD depends largely on context. | |
| It depends on does it interfere with your schooling if you're a kid? | |
| Does it interfere with your job? | |
| Does it make this and that thing in life more complicated or difficult? | |
| But Just because a certain disposition or personality makes it difficult to complete a certain task, that doesn't mean that it's a disease. | |
| That doesn't mean that it's a disorder. | |
| That doesn't mean that you're ill or that you have a mental problem. | |
| It could mean many other things. | |
| It could mean that there's something wrong with the context. | |
| In other words, we say that Uh, you know, all of these kids aren't able to focus in school, aren't able to, to, to, uh, achieve what they need to do in a, in a school environment. | |
| And so that means that they all have mental disorders and we got to put them on drugs. | |
| Well, I would suggest that it's no, the kids aren't the ones who are dis disordered. | |
| It's the school environment that is disordered. | |
| If the school system operates in such a way, That it can only operate if millions of kids are on drugs, then what that tells me is not that those kids have a disorder, it's that there's something wrong with the school system. | |
| There is something wrong with the system. | |
| So maybe we have decided that everybody, especially kids, everyone should be the sort of person who can sit At a desk for hours a day and complete busy work and read this and fill that out and just do that for hours a day with very little exercise, with very little physical activity. | |
| We've decided that everybody should be able to do that. | |
| Including kids. | |
| And what I'm saying is, maybe we're wrong. | |
| Maybe just some people aren't built for that. | |
| Maybe that's not natural. | |
| Maybe it's perfectly natural and normal for there to be millions of people, billions even, who really can't do that. | |
| Who just aren't made for it. | |
| Who just aren't those kinds of people. | |
| And that's the point. | |
| Again, this is a philosophical determination that we have made that everybody should be the kind of person Who can succeed in these sorts of confined, very calm kinds of environments where there's a lot of memorization and regurgitation. | |
| We've decided that everybody should be that kind of person. | |
| And I think, and that's a philosophical position that people have taken. | |
| I think that it's wrong. | |
| It is completely wrong. | |
| So maybe rather than, you know, treating everyone like they have a disorder, | |
| maybe we need, maybe there needs to be a whole, I hate to use the phrase, | |
| maybe there needs to be a whole paradigm shift. | |
| left. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Maybe we need to change these systems. | |
| We all like diversity, right? | |
| Maybe we need to allow for some diversity of personality, and in education, and in every other walk of life. | |
| Maybe we should allow for people to be all different kinds of ways and to have all kinds of different personalities. | |
| Maybe that's okay. | |
| All right. | |
| I want to move ahead to emails here. | |
| A lot of interesting ones. | |
| matwalshowatgmail.com. | |
| matwalshowatgmail.com is the email address. | |
| A couple emails reacting to our conversation yesterday we had. | |
| This is from Kate, says, Hi Matt, I'm a big fan, but I think you went too far in your podcast today by arguing that every Democrat is evil based on the born alive bill. | |
| I agree that voting no on the bill is evil, but I don't think you can know if people voting Democrat are evil based on that. | |
| I hate the articles that argue Republicans are evil because they're directly or indirectly supporting Trump. | |
| If you don't like being painted as evil on a single issue, then I don't think it's fair to call all Democrats evil either. | |
| After all, there were a few who voted yes. | |
| Well, Kate, I appreciate that you're being charitable, and I understand that. | |
| I did allow for the fact that there are, when it comes to just average, everyday Democrats, there are plenty who are extremely ignorant, and so they might not really know just how extreme their party has gotten on issues like abortion. | |
| They might not have even heard of this vote. | |
| The media is trying to cover it up, as the media always runs cover for the Democrats' pro-abortion extremism. | |
| So, and I allow for that. | |
| There are plenty of ignorant people. | |
| My point, though, is that there is no excuse for that ignorance. | |
| If you are ignorant in the information age, you are without excuse. | |
| And if you're going to support a certain political party, it is your moral and intellectual obligation to become informed about that party and what it stands for and, you know, the positions that it takes, the policies that it supports. | |
| And your knowledge should encompass where the party is today, not where the party was 40 years ago, but where it is today. | |
| And so that is your obligation. | |
| And anyone who has failed to fulfill that obligation, they're not evil necessarily, but I do think that it is a moral flaw on their part as well as an intellectual one. | |
| But for everyone else, like if you know that this party supports infanticide, And this party supports, funds, facilitates the slaughter of millions of children, and yet you still support it, then I think you're just not a good person. | |
| And you could improve. | |
| You could get better. | |
| I hope you do. | |
| I'm not saying it's hopeless for you. | |
| But to intentionally and knowingly support the mass slaughter of children, I don't see how anyone could do that. | |
| And still be, in any sense, a good or decent person. | |
| To me, it's just that simple. | |
| As far as the, you know, there were three Democrats who voted against it, and I'm glad that they did. | |
| But again, they stay, they have a moral obligation. | |
| They should be, what is, you know, they should leave the party. | |
| It's not enough anymore to just disagree with the party on these issues, but then stay aligned with them. | |
| You need to leave. | |
| There is no moral excuse anymore for staying aligned with this party that supports the slaughter of millions of children a year. | |
| This is from Hope. | |
| He says she sorry. | |
| Well, I guess I hope I guess I should not presume to place a gender on you one way or another. | |
| Hey Matt, so somebody on your show brought up weed and you mentioned that you don't know how you don't know much about it. | |
| I'm a believer who is firmly against weed and know a lot about it due to personal experience. | |
| One hit can get you high. | |
| Many people claim, I smoke because it helps me sleep. | |
| You will get no REM sleep while high, therefore you will not process information, and it will remain in short-term memory until that gets too full and the information is then dumped. | |
| Also, weed may not be physically addicting, but it is very emotionally addicting. | |
| On a more biblical note, where the modern Bible says sorcery in many places, the Greek root is pharmakeia. | |
| So quite frequently, the scriptures list using drugs as bad. | |
| In Galatians 5, it is in the same list as drunkenness. | |
| Anyway, I have many unprovable theories as to why it's so bad, so I will just leave it at this. | |
| Thank you for taking the time, and please don't ever endorse smoking weed. | |
| The last thing we need is more Christian households letting that in. | |
| Oh, and last note, it's very easy to get contact high. | |
| So that's Hope's opinion. | |
| Now I'm going to go to another email. | |
| This is from someone who just signs their name, Listener. | |
| Listener says, To answer your question about marijuana, it is much safer than alcohol. | |
| It is not addictive. | |
| It won't destroy your liver. | |
| You can't die from marijuana poisoning. | |
| And yes, plenty of people smoke socially and don't get high. | |
| It just relaxes, as you said about alcohol. | |
| Marijuana occurs naturally. | |
| God made it. | |
| There must be a reason for that. | |
| And finally, this is an interesting, this is kind of a longer discussion, but all right, I wanted to, maybe I should save this for tomorrow. | |
| The question is, this is from Heidi, says, Hi Matt, I had an interesting argument with a friend recently. | |
| She was arguing that sometimes it can be morally acceptable for a person to steal. | |
| If someone is in a desperate situation, it can be morally okay for them to steal as long as they are not physically hurting someone else. | |
| What do you think? | |
| Is stealing objectively morally wrong or is it only wrong depending on the situation? | |
| So I think this is really interesting. | |
| I've thought about this before. | |
| I had an argument about this exact issue with some people in my family a couple of years ago. | |
| And it's an interesting question and it's also very relevant because it goes to this whole idea that wealth is immoral and, you know, touches on all that kind of stuff. | |
| And the more I thought about this question, I realized that my answer is going to be very long. | |
| So I think I will save that for tomorrow. | |
| So tomorrow, towards the end of the show, I'll try to tackle that subject. | |
| And we'll leave it there for today. | |
| Thanks, everybody, for watching. | |
| Thanks for listening. | |
| Godspeed. | |
| Disloyal dirtbag and convicted felonious lawyer Michael Cohen appeared on Capitol Hill to dance for the pleasure of Democrats today. | |
| We will analyze his pathetic showing. |