Ep. 208 - In Quest To Destroy Trump, Democrats Are Setting A Dangerous Precedent
The Left went fishing during the Cohen hearing and came up empty. But they will keep trying until they find a way to rid themselves of President Trump. This is a very dangerous precedent they are setting. We'll talk about where it might lead. Also, a Democratic presidential candidate is accused of being abusive to her staff. But feminists say she’s only being criticized because she’s a woman. That's absurd, of course, and we'll discuss why. Date: 02-28-2019
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, the left went fishing during the Cohen hearing yesterday, and they came up empty.
So we're going to talk about that, and we're also going to talk about the fact that they're going to keep trying, obviously, until they find a way to rid themselves of President Trump, and that's what they've been intent on from the very beginning because they hate him so much.
This is a very dangerous precedent that they are setting, and I want to talk about where it may lead.
Also, a Democratic presidential candidate is accused of being horribly abusive to her staff, but her feminist defenders are saying that she's only being criticized for this because she's a woman.
It's sexism.
I think that's absurd, and we'll talk about that, and we'll also answer some of your emails today on The Matt Walsh Show.
I gotta tell you, something really, really terrible happened to me last night.
I'm still recovering from it.
Some leftists on Twitter decided that they wanted to hurt my feelings and damage my self-esteem by starting this hashtag, whoismattwalsh.
Hashtag whoismattwalsh.
Uh, and I was so devastated by this hashtag.
I guess the point of the hashtag is they don't know who I, nobody knows who I am.
So it's, you know, it's insulting.
It's like.
How, you know, it makes me feel obscure or something, I guess that was the point.
So, but I was so devastated by the prospect of having my name trend nationwide on Twitter that I myself kept tweeting and pleading with people, please do not tweet hashtag whoismattwalsh.
The last thing I want you to do is tweet hashtag whoismattwalsh.
And I kept saying this over and over again and pleading with everyone to stop, but it didn't work.
And so in the end, they got their way.
And my name was trending nationwide on Twitter.
But it was, as I said, it was devastating.
I mean, I was outraged.
I was offended.
It's the worst attack I've ever suffered.
But seriously, that really did happen.
Some liberals tried to hurt my feelings by making my name trend on social media.
It was the weirdest form of attack I think I've ever suffered.
I kind of liked it, though.
I don't know if that makes me a masochist, but I kind of liked the attack.
Next, I'm wondering if maybe they'll attack me by washing my car or making me some cookies or something.
I mean, you know, who knows what's in store for me next?
All right.
Michael Cohen wrapped up his public testimony before a House committee yesterday.
And the big bombshells, according to the media, and I'm going to read now directly from a USA Today article which lists what they call the biggest bombshells, and they are, according to USA Today, That Trump knew in advance that WikiLeaks planned to release stolen emails damaging to Hillary Clinton and that Trump confidant Roger Stone confirmed it with WikiLeaks founder.
As we discussed yesterday, this is not a crime.
That's not anything.
It's just Trump heard a rumor that these emails were going to come out and he said, oh, OK, well, that's good.
So there's nothing there.
It's not a crime.
He didn't even do anything ethically wrong or morally wrong.
If you're running against someone and you find out there's going to be embarrassing information about them, it's OK to be happy about that.
And it's OK to not run to the phone to get on the horn with their camp and let them know, hey guys, listen.
That would be a very sportsmanlike thing to do, I guess.
The best sportsman doesn't win elected office in America anymore.
So, that's not much of a bombshell.
The other bombshell, the president personally reimbursed Cohen for an illegal hush money payment to a porn star.
Well, we already knew about these claims, so to call that a bombshell is not much of anything.
And it's also not at all a slam dunk as to whether it would constitute a campaign finance violation.
So, not much of a bombshell there.
Trump indirectly encouraged Cohen to lie to Congress about his pursuit of a Trump Tower development in Moscow.
Well, indirectly means that he never actually said, I want you to lie.
Cohen thought that he was picking up hints that Trump was dropping with facial expressions and that sort of thing.
I will say that I don't think anyone has ever been brought up on obstruction of justice or perjury charges because of facial expression.
So I think Trump is fine there.
And then the other bombshell, Cohen brought documents that appeared to back up some of his claims, including a $35,000 check signed by Trump that Cohen called a hush money reimbursement, which doesn't prove anything, of course.
The fact that he has a, that he, who was Trump's lawyer, has a check from Trump, that doesn't prove anything.
Rich men will often write big checks to their lawyers, and the fact that the check exists does not prove at all what the check was meant for.
Now, there were other claims that were made.
Trump is a racist, Trump's a liar, he's a fraud, he's a bad guy, he's divisive, and all these things.
You can decide, Whether you think those claims are true or not, but those are not new claims, first of all, and they don't have anything to do with criminal conduct, and there's no reason why we need a House committee to investigate them.
So I think the real bombshells...
can be found in the things that Cohen denied.
So he denied, for instance, that Trump ever explicitly told him to lie.
He denied that he had any evidence at all that Trump was colluding with Russia.
Well, that's a pretty big one.
He denied claims about there being, remember the p-tape story?
Well, Cohen denied that.
There's apparently some other rumor going around about another tape of Trump doing something bad in an elevator or something.
Cohen denied that.
He shot down a lot of these rumors.
And he said that he never went to Prague to meet with Russian officials, which was a claim that was made in that famous dossier.
So, that really is the, those are the bombshells.
It's what Cohen shot down.
He undermined the Russian collusion case.
He undermined the obstruction of justice case.
He undermined all these things.
And this was supposed to be the Democrats' star witness.
Now, just reflect on this for a moment.
The Democrats have their worst enemy's lawyer in their pocket.
They have the guy who's been putting out fires for Trump for the last 10 years.
The guy who, they say, knows where all the bodies are buried.
Whatever dirt there might be, whatever skeletons lay hidden in whatever closets, this is the guy who would know about it, and this hearing Which exonerated Trump more than it implicated him, is the best they could do with that secret weapon.
That is quite incredible when you think about it.
And I think it's incredibly favorable to Trump, really.
Now, it's true that it's hard to argue that politically, or from a PR perspective, that Trump comes out looking better because of something like this.
Because some of the claims that were made about them are, you know, they're not illegal, but they are embarrassing.
They don't make them look good.
And I found some of them to be quite believable.
Like Cohen told a story about Trump.
There was some auction where a portrait of Trump was being auctioned off and Trump wanted to make sure that his portrait was the highest priced item.
So he arranged to bid through anonymously to bid on his own portrait so that it would be the highest priced item.
Now, I personally find that totally believable.
I absolutely think that Donald Trump would do something like that.
But it's not illegal, and it doesn't really matter.
And yeah, it's embarrassing, but I don't think it's going to sway anyone one way or another, because we already know that about Trump.
We know that he would do something like that.
But the Democrats will continue.
We have crossed some kind of Rubicon now, and we're in a place where the opposition party is just going to keep investigating until they find a way to get rid of this guy that they don't like, to get rid of this president.
And this is a very dangerous place to be.
Keep in mind that the left has had this attitude about Trump from the very beginning, before there was any, not because they suspected him of any crimes or anything, but just from the very beginning, they despised everything about him, and they just cannot accept, they cannot emotionally accept that he's president, and still to this day, two years later, more than two years later, they still can't accept it.
And I can tell you, when we reach the point where the opposition party will not accept the results of an election, you are teetering very close to the edge of democratic collapse.
And that's where we are.
That's what this is all about.
There's all the hearings and everything.
They cannot accept it.
They just can't.
They can't allow this guy to actually serve out at least four years.
They can't allow it to happen.
And that's why they're just throwing everything they can against the wall, because it's really got nothing to do with, okay, so we'll try Russian collusion, there was no Russian collusion, we'll look for something else.
They don't really care about any of this stuff.
All the hand-wringing about, oh no, our election was interfered with by Russia, and Trump is a secret Russian agent.
They don't actually think that.
Or care about it.
It's just that was, well, that's one avenue we can explore to get rid of him.
That doesn't work.
Let's go over here.
Well, there's the Trump Tower thing.
Okay, that's not really working out.
Let's go over here.
Maybe we'll get a, maybe there's an obstruction of justice.
Okay.
Well, no, not really.
So they're just looking for anything they can to, to rid themselves of, of this man.
And no matter how you feel about Trump, that is, it's got nothing to do with Trump specifically.
It's just, it's a dangerous place to be.
And you can't—there's the whataboutism thing that liberals are doing now where they're saying, yeah, but that's what Republicans did with— With Obama, what about the Benghazi hearings that went on forever?
Yeah, well, yeah, you know what?
But that's a little bit different because in Benghazi, Americans died.
People died in Benghazi.
People were left to die.
So something really bad happened.
And not only that, but we know that the Obama administration lied about it after the fact.
They're on tape.
They went out in front of the American people, lied about it, said it was because of a YouTube video or whatever.
So when you've got something that happened While this person was in office, people died because of it.
Well, then obviously you need to investigate that.
But the stuff that Democrats are searching for does not rise to that level.
All right.
Now, the other big political news story today, or at least geopolitical in this case, is Trump and Kim Jong-un in North Korea.
And now that I've just defended Trump, I'm going to pivot to criticism.
The summit is coming to an end.
He was in, he was in Vietnam with Kim Jong-un and they were supposed to be working out a deal and working out a deal for North Korea to denuclearize.
But it's coming to an end and then no deal has been reached.
Kim Jong-un is not agreeing to anything.
Now this, I wouldn't blame Trump for that specifically, but This comes after Trump did his whole normal routine now of heaping lavish praise on Kim Jong-un, a man who runs literal concentration camps.
To compare him to Hitler, in this case, to compare Un to Hitler, is not an exaggeration.
He actually has concentration camps where he sends innocent people to die.
And Trump praised him, as he has been doing over the last year or so.
He praised him, I thought, In an especially bizarre way, he praised Kim Jong Un, and he said this kind of thing before, where he praised him for turning out so well, even though he comes from a rich family.
And a lot of kids grow up in rich families and they end up screwed up, but not Kim Jong Un.
Now, Kim Jong Un killed his family members to retain power, by the way, so I don't know if that compliment really applies.
And right before Trump walked away from the meeting, Trump covered for Un and said that Un didn't know anything about the imprisonment and torture of Otto Warmbier.
Remember, this was the American who was taken by the North Koreans and tortured to death.
He was finally let go when he was on death's door.
And Trump covered for him and said, well, he didn't know about that.
He says he didn't do it.
Now, what do we get from all this?
Nothing but international embarrassment and shame, really.
Nothing else came of it.
And this has been Trump's tact towards North Korea for a while now, and nothing is coming of it other than we're just embarrassing ourselves.
Now, Trump's reflexive defenders will say that this is a brilliant diplomacy strategy, and he knows what he's doing.
But then again, see, the problem is Trump's reflexive defenders said it was brilliant diplomacy when Trump was on Twitter trolling Kim Jong-un at the beginning of his presidency, calling him Little Rocket Man and stuff.
So he's trolling the guy on Twitter.
That's brilliant.
And then he switches strategies drastically and then goes over there and kisses his feet.
And we say, well, that's brilliant, too.
They call it brilliant literally no matter what he does.
If he's sucking up to him, it's brilliant.
If he's mocking him, it's brilliant.
If he stands on his head and yodels the theme song to Happy Days, that's brilliant too.
Well, that actually would be brilliant, to be honest.
So no matter what he does, it's brilliant.
And they know that, right?
I'm not breaking any new ground here.
We know that there's a certain segment of conservatives who will just, doesn't matter what, literally, it does not matter what he does.
They're going to say it was the smartest thing ever.
Meanwhile, of course, again, this doesn't need to be said either, but it goes without saying that if Obama had publicly covered for a dictator who tortured an American citizen to death, every conservative in the country would explode with outrage and would not stop exploding for probably about 15 years over it.
And rightly so.
So it's all a game.
It doesn't mean anything.
The people who defend this performance from Trump They very well know that they're only doing it because it is Trump.
And if Trump radically changes course, they'll defend that too.
And just back and forth.
I say this to everyone.
I would say about Trump and his approach to Kim Jong-un, maybe there's a middle ground between trolling Un on Twitter and mocking him and kissing his feet.
Maybe there's in between somewhere you could settle.
And then in regards to Trump, for everyone else, it does seem like there are a lot of
people who will criticize him no matter what he does and a lot of people who would defend
him no matter what he does.
Is it so difficult to just look at each thing on a case-by-case basis and actually assess
whether or not you think it was the right thing?
It's just, it's very unlikely that a human being will always do something that you really disagree with or that they'll always do something that you agree with.
It's just, it's not just unlikely, it's impossible.
No human being is like that.
No human being is going to line up with you like that.
If you have your own brain in your head and your own opinions and your own perspective, it's just you're not going to find anyone on earth who always does something you agree with or always does something you disagree with.
So if you find, when it comes to Trump, that you're always against him, all the time, always, well that probably is a hint that you're not applying your brain.
You're not thinking.
You're just being reflexive.
But on the other end of it, if you find that you're always defending him, and that over the last two years of him being in office, and the last, I don't know, four years of him being on the political scene, you have never met an occasion where you think he deserves criticism, then again, that's probably an indication that you're not thinking.
You're not using your head.
You've just attached yourself to him like a barnacle and you'll go wherever he goes.
And that's not right either.
That's not even human.
As human beings, we're not meant to just surrender our critical capacities for the sake of Always defending some other dude.
He's just a guy.
He's a guy, right?
I mean, he's a president, but he's not Jesus Christ.
He's not, he's just, he's just a guy.
And it's okay to criticize him sometimes.
And I think pretty clearly, look, when you've got an American president who is covering for a A dictator who we all know tortured an American to death.
And we all know that, obviously, the idea that Kim Jong-un didn't know... Oh, he didn't know?
Kim Jong-un, the dictator of the country, didn't know that there was an American citizen in a concentration camp?
Nobody didn't know that?
Come on.
Come on, we all know that's not true.
So this, to me, seems like something that pretty obviously is not the right approach.
So we should all be able to criticize that.
No matter if conservative, liberal, doesn't matter where you stand.
You could love most of what Trump does, but I think that's one thing that we all should be able to criticize.
And if you find that you can't even criticize that, well, I think that's an indication that you're just not thinking critically.
All right, let's move on.
So, Amy Klobuchar, Never could figure out how to pronounce her last name.
She's a senator from Minnesota.
She's running for president.
She's been in the news recently because former staff members of hers have come out, many of them, not just one or two, but many of them have come out and have said that she's an abusive, unhinged tyrant to her staff.
And according to these reports, she berates them, she throws things at them, she cuts them down, insults them, screams at them, so on and so on.
I won't get into reading the specific details.
If you've ever had a boss like this, then you can kind of imagine what we're talking about here.
Now, I think there are many reasons not to vote for this woman.
She's a Democrat, first of all, is one reason.
But If she were conservative, I still wouldn't support her because of these stories.
And I'll tell you why.
Because I have noticed in my life that you can really tell everything you need to know about a person's character and what they're all about based on how they treat their subordinates.
That will tell you everything you need to know about a person.
Because if you treat people who have more power than you well, well then that's just self-interest.
You're just protecting yourself.
And if you're generally fair to those who are on your same sort of level, then that also is kind of self-interest.
That's just networking.
That's being diplomatic.
The only people that you really can potentially get away with abusing are those under you.
So we have to see how you treat those people to know what you're really all about.
And if it happens that as soon as you have someone under you, you become this abusive tyrant, then that just tells us that you always were that way.
You just never had an outlet for it.
And now that you have an outlet, well, you can let this part of you shine.
And it just shows that you're not a very good person.
Klobuchar has tried to explain away these reports by saying, well, I'm a taskmaster.
I demand a lot.
I demand perfection.
I'm a hard worker.
I want my team to be hard workers.
You know, trying to cloak it in this sort of positive perfectionist type hue.
But people who really demand perfection, leaders who are really perfectionist, they aren't going around throwing temper tantrums.
Because they demand perfection of themselves as well.
That's what we're missing here.
And to act this way, it means you're not being a good leader or a good person.
And good leaders have dignity, they have restraint, they have patience.
That's good leadership.
Any five-year-old can lead by screaming and crying constantly.
Anyone can do that.
That's not leadership.
But the thing that really bothers me is... So there's that deflection from her camp.
Which is ridiculous.
But the thing that really bothers me is this deflection that I've seen from many of her defenders claiming that, well, turning it into a man-woman thing.
And claiming that she's only getting this criticism because she's a woman.
It's sexist, you see?
If a woman acts this way, then she's crazy and she's terrible.
But if a man does this, then we just say he's a go-getter and he's a tough guy, etc.
That's the line that I'm hearing from some of Klobuchar's defenders.
I find this line to be amazingly off-base and completely disconnected from any reality that I've experienced.
This idea, and you hear this from feminists a lot, this idea that women get more criticism for character defects?
Women get more criticism for being abusive in the workplace?
Really?
Women get more criticism for that?
Isn't the opposite the case?
If a man is a jerk, nobody has any problem calling him a jerk.
And the other thing is, you can call a man a jerk without anyone calling you sexist.
Nobody, no one is ever going to call you sexist for criticizing a man, calling him a jerk, or calling him something worse.
There are other, there are worse.
Labels we might use other than jerk that I can't use here.
And if you do that, probably people will agree with you and no one's going to call you sexist.
No one's going to make it a gender thing.
So only a woman can potentially cloak her jerkiness in this whole girl power routine.
Only a woman can dress up her character flaws as some kind of feminist statement.
Only a woman can be potentially celebrated for being a jerk, and only a woman can use the, you're only attacking me because I'm a woman, excuse.
So if anything, it seems to go the other way.
And it seems to me that when we talk about abusive and inappropriate behavior in the workplace, Generally speaking, we're almost always focusing on men.
We're just giving, we're letting women off the hook entirely when we have this conversation.
Usually, even though anyone who's been in a working environment, in an office environment or whatever, anyone in that knows that there are plenty of women who are also inappropriate, who engage in harassment, who are abusive.
We all know that.
Yet these conversations in this particular case, yes, we happen to be talking about a woman, but usually we're talking about men.
So it seems to me that women are more likely to get off the hook with these kinds of things because they at least have the potential of turning it into a feminist, into an expression of their feminism, which is a potential that obviously a man, a man simply doesn't have.
And by the way, another example of this, not exactly the same thing, but talk to a guy who's been through family court sometime to see how this works.
To see how behavior that is condemned in men can oftentimes, especially in a family court situation, be excused in women.
So there are plenty of situations where men are held to a higher standard and where excuses are made for women that would never be made for a man.
That's just a simple fact of the matter.
All right, before we get to emails, I wanted to quickly mention this.
Elizabeth Warren has rolled out a plan for universal child care.
Reading now from Vox for some reason, Senator Elizabeth Warren has rolled out a sweeping plan to provide all Americans with affordable child care paid for with a new tax on multi-millionaires.
This is the key part.
Warren envisions a network of child care facilities subsidized and regulated by the government for all children too young to attend school.
Facilities would charge families based on their ability to pay.
There are many ways of criticizing this idea.
The fact that it would be prohibitively expensive is, I think, what most people will point to.
And that's true.
But the other thing with this idea is You know, people, we already, many Americans, millions of Americans, they already send their kids away to government institutions, starting at the age of like five or younger, because now you've got pre-K, and I think now you even have pre-pre-K, pre-K2 and pre-K3, whatever they call it.
So, at a very young age, a lot of Americans are sending their kids away to government institutions to essentially be raised by the government.
Um, and now with this universal government subsidized and regulated childcare idea, and Elizabeth Warren is hardly the first person to come up with this, but with this idea, well, now we're going to take kids away even sooner.
So the objective seems to be, let's get kids out of their Parents' arms as quickly, as soon as possible, and put them into the system.
That's what this is really about.
It's about getting kids away from the family, tearing them away from the family, and plucking them into the system as soon as possible.
That's the whole idea here.
And that's the thing that disturbs me the most about it, even if it wasn't prohibitively expensive, even putting that aside.
I mean, can we give a family, you know, a few years to exist?
Can we give the children a few years to be with their parents, to be in the home?
Do we have to move them into the government system right away?
Well, yeah, that's what the left wants to do.
Because the left has, for a very long time, seen the family as a threat.
And it is, actually.
The family is a threat to their agenda.
Because as parents, we can teach our kids what we want.
We can instill in them the values that we want to instill.
And the left has no control over that.
And they don't like not having control.
All right, let's go check out your emails.
MattWalshShow at gmail.com.
MattWalshShow at gmail.com.
You can email with questions, comments, concerns, death wishes, whatever you got.
Some interesting emails today.
This is from Michael.
He says, Matt, just wondering your opinion on women being eligible for the draft.
Personally, as someone who served two combat tours in Iraq, I think this is a huge mistake.
I can't remember a worse day than when we lost women during one of my tours.
It was horrible when we lost brothers, but when we lost a sister, there are no words for what, uh, for when that happened.
It would be interesting to hear your opinion on the matter.
Hi, Michael.
Well, first of all, thank you for your service.
I think your opinion on the subject is much more interesting and important than mine.
Um, so in a lot of ways I could just leave it there.
You know, you've already given your opinion.
Um, As someone who's been in the thick of it, for what it's worth, I completely agree with you.
And when I say I agree with you, it's more like what you're saying to me now, this is what I've heard from all, from, I want to say every, but that probably isn't true.
So let's just say almost every person, every veteran, every combat veteran I have spoken to about this, and I've spoken to a lot of them.
Almost every single one has said the exact same thing as you, that they do not think this is a good idea.
They don't want women drafted.
They don't want women on the front lines of combat.
It is the only reason I want to say every single one I've talked to, um, has had that opinion, but maybe there've been a few here that, but vast majority of, of combat veterans seem to agree with you.
Um, and so, For one thing, who am I to disagree?
If this is the people that have been in that position, if this is their opinion, then I think we should defer to it.
So, on the other hand, I understand.
There are some conservatives who say, you know what?
Yeah, let's draft women.
Feminists, they want to be like men.
They say they're just like us in every respect.
Well, let's hold them to it then.
So yeah, go ahead.
Send them out to the front lines.
All these feminists who say, I can do anything a man does.
Okay, yeah, well, go ahead.
Send them out.
And I get that instinct, right?
Fair is fair.
But you know what?
My daughter isn't a crazy feminist.
And I don't want her to pay the price for the sake of, you know, hoisting feminists on their own petard, giving feminists a dose of their own medicine or whatever.
I don't want my daughter to get caught up in that.
That's not fair to my daughter.
That's not fair to all the other women and girls who are not feminists and don't go around claiming this.
And even aside from that, more importantly, the objective here, you know, is not to make some sort of point.
And we can't make the same mistake that the left is making.
For feminists and the left, if they would support something like this, then they support it to make a point, to make sort of an ideological point.
And we don't want to make the same mistake on the other end.
This is not about making a point.
This is about what's best, right?
Just what's the best thing morally?
What's the best thing from a perspective of military strategy?
And from those two perspectives, obviously drafting women is not the best thing.
So, thank you for your email.
This is from Heidi.
She 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?
All right, this is a fascinating question.
And I've, at least to me, I've argued about this with people before.
Here's how I deal with it, I think.
I would say that, yes, it is objectively wrong, always wrong, to steal.
Stealing, by definition, is wrong.
Just like murder, by definition, is wrong.
However, killing, by definition, is not necessarily wrong.
All murder is killing, but not all killing is murder.
There are situations where it's morally okay, even morally laudable, to kill.
In defense of someone else, in defense of yourself.
So can the same distinction be made with stealing?
As in, are there times when taking someone's stuff without permission is not actually stealing?
And I would say, yes.
So, in a sense, I think you and your friend are both right.
Maybe I'm just inventing this distinction right now, but I think it's a necessary distinction.
So, let's look at an extreme example.
I recently watched a really depressing but powerful movie called First They Killed My Father.
And it's set during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, back when the communists were wiping out, you know, 2 million people.
And it follows one family, focusing especially on a young girl.
Like I said, it's a very depressing movie, so I don't even know if I can recommend it, but powerful.
So it focuses on this family who, like so many other Cambodians, were taken by the government, thrown in prison camps.
Eventually, her whole family was killed, and she was forced to be a child soldier.
But in the labor camps, The prisoners were forced to, among other things, they were forced to work the fields and harvest crops.
And they were being starved the whole time.
So you see these scenes where people, sometimes kids, are stealing vegetables and crops and trying to sneak them into their pockets or whatever so they can eat it or take it home to their family and share it so they don't starve to death.
And if they were caught, they'd be beaten or killed.
for stealing.
Now, it's true that the crops didn't belong to them, legally speaking.
But was it stealing?
Well, no, I would say of course it wasn't.
They have every moral right to eat.
Stealing in that case was not stealing.
Another way of looking at it is they're starving.
You have food.
You have no moral right Not to share your food, I think is the way of looking at it.
Your moral obligation is to share your food with someone who's starving.
And if you don't, they have a moral right to take it.
I mean, provided you're not starving also.
Now, this is a slippery slope, of course.
This principle can be abused, certainly.
Just like the principle that killing is, you know, there's a principle that killing can be acceptable sometimes.
Well, that's abused all the time.
There have been millions of murders have occurred in the world throughout history by people who claim that they were killing for the right reason and they weren't.
So the principle can be abused.
But that doesn't mean that that doesn't negate the principle itself.
So I think the point here is really about ownership.
Those kids in the prison camp were within their moral rights to take some grain or some corn or whatever, because at the end of the day, the owner of those crops is not really the owner.
God owns everything, right?
We're just renting everything that we have.
And so if someone legitimately has a greater moral claim to something, then they have a divine claim to it, and they can take it in that case.
There was a saint who said that I'm paraphrasing, but there was a saint who said words to the effect of, if you have two coats in your closet, the second coat doesn't belong to you, because there's someone on the street freezing to death, and the coat belongs to, it's that person's coat, not yours, and you have to give it to them.
Now that's kind of an extreme way of looking at it, but there's some truth to it, isn't there?
Is this an argument for communism?
No, of course not.
Because communism is the government owns everything.
I'm not saying that.
That's communism.
That's not me.
My argument is God owns everything.
And God entrusts what we own to us.
And so that means that we do own it in a very real earthly kind of sense, but not in a totally absolute sense.
So if you're walking down the street and there's a guy freezing to death and you have an extra coat or something, yeah, you do have a moral obligation to give it to him.
God didn't give you the ability to buy multiple coats so that you could amass a collection while other of his children, you know, die of frostbite.
So I think that's the... Again, I mean, you know, it's just... There is this slippery slope and I think The extreme examples we talk about where stealing isn't really stealing, morally speaking, you're not going to find very many of those situations in the modern United States.
But they do exist.
They can happen.
So, interesting question.
All right.
Let's see, how much time do we have?
All right, we'll do this one.
I've I keep wanting to get to it and then I run out of time.
So this is from Delia, says, I'm a big fan of the show, been a fan of yours since your days on your own blog, Before the Blaze, back with the alpaca grooming tips.
Good times.
And I've been trying to get this question in front of you since then.
I'm a Christian woman, clearly pro-life.
What would your advice and thoughts be in those extremely rare cases where the pregnancy does in fact threaten the life of the mother?
In terms of law, sure, but more importantly from a moral, from a more personal level, like if you were advising a friend.
I'm not referring to the situations you've touched on already, such as an expectant mother who has cancer and treatments may harm or kill the child, but that is a tragic choice situation.
I'm referring to cases like an ectopic pregnancy where the egg implants in the fallopian tube.
I tend to think very far ahead.
And when I realized that there is even a tiny chance that I would find myself in that situation, I felt extremely torn up about it.
And I would like your thoughts on it.
All right.
So ectopic pregnancy.
That's a legitimately hard case.
Let me give some thoughts on it.
For those who aren't familiar, as she mentioned, an ectopic pregnancy is when a fertilized egg does not implant in the uterus, but implants somewhere else, and usually in the fallopian tube, although it could be, you know, there are other options.
Which is why an ectopic pregnancy is, you know, often also called a tubal pregnancy.
And in that situation, obviously, a pregnancy cannot go to term in the fallopian tube, obviously.
Tragically, the pregnancy is doomed at that point for certain.
There is not going to be a birth.
It will end on its own, one way or another, and soon.
So, and that's an important point, because when people try to justify late-term abortion based on life-of-the-mother scenarios, they can't use ectopic pregnancy, because you're not making it to 28 weeks with an ectopic pregnancy.
What will happen much earlier than that is that the tube will burst.
If you don't do something about it, the tube will burst, and it could very well kill the mother.
If she doesn't get to the hospital in time, she could bleed out.
Now, I've never spoken to anyone who thinks that the mother has a moral obligation to just wait for her tube to burst and potentially bleed to death.
I've maybe that opinion exists out there.
I've never encountered it myself.
Um, I think that such as such a course of action would be extremely imprudent and possibly actually immoral because it's just so in that case, the woman would be so reckless with her own life.
Uh, I mean, it would almost be suicide.
So then the question is, what do you do?
Um, how do you deal with it?
Well, I can tell you that the classic kind of answer that moral theologians and philosophers and so on, you know, the super smart Christians who spend their time thinking about these kinds of stuff, this kind of stuff, what they've come up with, the answer hinges on the principle of double effect.
And the principle of double effect states that it can be morally permissible to engage in an otherwise legitimate act for the sake of some morally legitimate outcome, Even if that act will also have an unintended and otherwise undesirable and even tragic outcome.
Now this is not, really important point here, this is not ends justify the means.
That's not what this is.
Because ends justify the means is when you commit an objectively evil act in the hopes of a desirable outcome.
So ends justify the means.
That's like spreading rumors about some rival in the workplace to try to get them fired so that you can win the big promotion.
That's ends justify the means.
That's just evil.
That's wrong.
The promotion itself may be good, but what you did to achieve it was evil.
Double effect is not like that.
So how does this apply to an ectopic pregnancy situation?
Well, it's going to seem to be like splitting hairs at this point, and it is, but when you get to these really complex moral dilemmas, that's what you're left with.
You're left with this sort of moral hair splitting, and there's no way around it.
So, most Christian philosophers agree that double effect would apply if you were to remove the fallopian tube where the pregnancy has happened.
And the pregnancy obviously killed the life in the process, but your intent was to save the mother, and the act was removing the fallopian tube.
Which will inevitably kill the baby, but that is an unintended result.
It's a bad result, but unintended and you were not directly bringing about that death.
The thing is, though, a doctor probably is not going... If you're actually in... Now, what you were saying is, well, okay, what if you're actually in this situation?
Well, if you're actually in this situation, your doctor probably is not going to recommend removing a fallopian tube.
From a purely medical perspective, that would be an unnecessary step.
And that would be a step that will, for one thing, severely hinder your ability to get pregnant in the future.
That's kind of like a major surgery, which a doctor will say it's totally unnecessary.
We don't need to do that.
So what they'll what they'll want to do, what they'll suggest is that we'll give you a drug, which will, for lack of a better phrase, it will flush out the fallopian tube and, and the pregnancy and, you know, and that will be it.
But the drug is an abortion drug, and there's no way around it.
It's an abortion drug that they'll want to give you.
Which is why, from what I've read, most Christian thinkers have said that it would not be morally permissible to take the drug, because then, in that case, you are directly attacking that life.
And you can't do that.
So, double effect doesn't apply.
I actually disagree.
Or, I'm not sure that I do agree.
I'll put it that way.
I don't personally see why the principle of double effect wouldn't be able to kick in even if you were to take the drug in that situation because it seems to me that the intention is to save the mother and the act is to take a drug which clears out a blocked fallopian tube.
The fact that a human life is part of what is blocking the fallopian tube is, you know, and it too will be will be cleared out, that is an unintended consequence.
So it seems to me that that's morally, it's not very much different from just removing the fallopian tube entirely.
Again, splitting hairs, but that's what we have to do.
I just I don't see really a distinction between those two things.
Because either way, you're obviously doing something that will end that life.
And I think in both cases, you could argue that That obviously is not the intention, we know that.
And the ending of the life is not what you, you're not directly doing that.
It's not your, because it's not your direct intention.
So, I don't know, there you go.
It's a difficult case.
The point here is that pro-lifers, here's the really important point.
Pro-lifers do not have a cavalier attitude about these kinds of things.
We don't think that a woman has a responsibility to die for the sake of a doomed pregnancy.
But these kind of situations where a pregnancy has to be has to be ended in this way for the sake of the mother, they are extremely rare.
They're almost always very early on in pregnancy.
And as I've said, it would never be necessary in the later stages of pregnancy, in a late term situation, because in that case, if you got to get the baby out, there are plenty of situations where that might happen.
But then you just take the baby out, and there's a very good chance the baby will survive.
There's no reason to kill the baby at a time.
So it's only really with this ectopic pregnancy situation where you've got this kind of dilemma.
And there's simply, if you find yourself in that kind of position, there is simply no Easy answer.
And there's absolutely nothing you can do that's going to result in that baby being born and surviving.
Nothing.
So, you know, those are the choices that you're left with.
But it's a very difficult question.
Very, very interesting question.
So thank you for that email.
And I'll be interested to, you know, get to field your emails after the show to see what you all think about the atopic pregnancy situation.
And I'll leave it there.
I will, by the way, see you at CPAC today.
If you're going to be at CPAC, I'll be wandering around.
I'm not speaking or anything, but I'll be wandering around the hallways, maybe just shouting.
I'll be shouting a speech to random people as I walk, maybe.
So I'll see you there.
Godspeed.
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