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March 13, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
47:24
Ep. 217 - The "Higher Education" Scam Exposed

A college admissions scandal proves yet again that higher education has become a massive scam. Are people finally waking up to it? Also, we’ll discuss why the feminist movement has become utterly worthless — worse than that, harmful — in modern America. Finally, some incredibly controversial footage of Mitt Romney has surfaced. We'll discuss. Date: 03-13-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, we're going to talk about the big news of the college admissions scandal that is rocking the nation, I suppose, right now.
Yet, it proves something that we should have known for a long time, which is that higher education is a massive scam.
And now that we can see that, what are we going to do about it is the question.
Also, we'll discuss the feminist movement in modern America and why it is, I believe, not only worthless, but harmful, very harmful to the country.
And finally, there is some controversial and even, according to some people, scandalous video footage of Mitt Romney that we're going to play for you and talk about as well today over on the Matt Wall Show.
So I just, I watched last night, finally, that Peter Jackson documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.
And it is just stunning.
Remarkable.
It's an achievement.
You can't say that about very many films, but it really is an achievement.
It's like, it's the closest thing you'll ever experience to going in a time machine.
Presumably.
Unless someone actually invents one.
So if you're not familiar, the documentary is about World War I.
And it follows a group of British soldiers as they starting at home and then they enlist and go to basic and then hit the trenches.
And the entire film consists of, there's no narration, it consists of interviews with veterans of the war, obviously interviews that were conducted decades ago, and then also archival footage.
But this is, you know, 100 years ago, they didn't have, you couldn't record sound or color, everything was sped up, grainy, black and white, silent.
And so what Jackson and his team did was they colorized it, They slowed it down and then they put sound with it, including hiring lip readers to tell what these men were saying, and then they hired voice actors to dub the original dialogue back in.
And the effect is, it's like you're watching I mean, you're watching actual footage from a hundred years ago, but it's like you're watching a Hollywood film, except it's real, and so it's staggering.
I demand that you go watch it, alright?
I demand it.
Alright, I won't take no for an answer.
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Alright, big news out of academia today.
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All right, big news out of academia today.
50 very rich people have been charged in a bribery scheme wherein they paid to have their children admitted
into college basically, which everyone pays to have their kids admitted into college,
but they paid in illegal ways.
They paid under false pretenses.
These parents paid an admissions consultant who then bribed administrators and coaches
and testing officials and so on to get the kids in.
They had their kids admitted into school in various different ways by claiming
that they were gonna join, for instance, the crew team, even if the kids had no experience in the sport
and were not actually planning on playing.
Let me just, I'll read a bit from the AP article on this.
It says, at least nine athletic coaches and 33 parents, many of them prominent in law,
finance or business, were among those charged.
Dozens, including Huffman, an actress, were arrested by midday.
The coaches worked at such schools as Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, Wake Forest, University
of Texas, University of Southern California, and the University of California, Los Angeles.
A former Yale soccer coach pleaded guilty and helped build the case against others.
Prosecutors said Perrins paid an admissions consultant from 2011 through last month to to bribe coaches and administrators to falsely make their children look like star athletes to boost their chances of getting into college.
The consultant also hired ringers to take college entrance exams for the students and paid off insiders at testing centers to alter students' scores.
Parents spent anywhere from $200,000 to $6.5 million to guarantee their children's admission,
officials said. U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said, for every student admitted through fraud,
an honest and genuinely talented student was rejected.
Several defendants, including Felicity Huffman, the actress, were charged with conspiracy to
commit fraud, punishable by up to 20 years in prison and...
The case is ongoing.
Other parents charged were Gordon Kaplan of Greenwich, Connecticut, co-chairman of an international law firm based in New York, Jane Buckingham, CEO of a boutique marketing company, Gregory Abbott, founder and chairman of a packaging company, Manuel Henriquez, CEO of a finance company.
So, a bunch of really rich people to sum it up.
We're doing this.
Now, this is an interesting item.
This is an interesting news story because, in a way, it brings the left and the right together.
It's a very rare news story where both sides at least are furious about it and are outspoken about it and care about it, right?
Because it seems like with most news stories these days, you can't even get an agreement on the two sides that this issue is important. But this is
one where both sides agree and that's largely because it gives both sides an opportunity to go on
their favorite tangents.
So for the left, this is about privilege.
They're talking about, well, this is a proof of privilege.
This is what happens when you have privilege.
And for the right, it's about corruption and academia.
Now, both sides are right, although the right is more right about this.
As far as privilege, yeah, this is indeed about privilege, but it's the privilege of wealth, not race.
Manuel Henriquez was one of the people charged, as I mentioned, That doesn't sound like the name of a white guy.
I could be wrong, but it doesn't sound like it.
So this is just about money.
That's all this is about.
If you're rich, you buy your way in.
The people getting bribed, they don't care what race you are.
The only color they care about is green.
If you have the money, then you can do it.
That's all that matters.
This is a case, actually, that I think undermines The left's general narrative about privilege because it shows that money talks.
And that's how privilege works.
It's not race.
It's just money.
If you're rich, then you can do what you want.
Which we already knew that, right?
Now, I don't want to get off on my own irrelevant rant here, but this is what frustrates me about the left's whole narrative about privilege.
Because we could have a worthwhile discussion about privilege, and about what it means, and all that kind of stuff, and about the ways that sometimes wealthy people are able to game the system and so on.
I mean, that's a worthwhile thing to talk about, but we have to let go of the idea that it's automatically tied to race, because it isn't.
A black kid in the inner city in Baltimore has no privilege to speak of.
We know that, but I can tell you this.
A white kid growing up in a trailer park, in a meth-infested trailer park in eastern Kentucky, he doesn't have any privilege either.
And there's a very striking clue that the kid in the trailer park has no privilege.
You know how you know he has no privilege?
Aside from the fact that he has no money, and there's drugs all around, and his dad's gone, and his mother's addicted to drugs.
Aside from that, it's the fact that society would call him and his family and his entire community white trash.
We literally call these people garbage.
And it's okay to do that.
Nobody bats an eye.
No one bats an eye at the phrase white trash, right?
Now, if you were to put any other race in front of the word trash, That would be unspeakable racism.
But with white people, you could say, yeah, white trash.
Think about that phrase, white trash.
We're calling them garbage simply because of where they live and how much money they have or don't have.
And yet, while we call them garbage, we still say that they are the beneficiaries of some kind of invisible privilege.
I don't know what kind of privilege there is in being considered garbage by society, but that is privilege that I certainly wouldn't want myself.
So, if society sees you as actual trash and calls you that, then you ain't got privilege.
We just put it that way.
That's a good rule of thumb.
But I think the problem is that the people who talk about white privilege have simply never seen white poverty.
They don't know what it looks like.
They've never seen a trailer park, you know, and they haven't seen the hopeless third world conditions
that some white kids grow up in, and they assume that all white families
And even more so, though, it shows the true nature of modern academia.
simply not the case. So anyway, this scandal shows the true nature of privilege, which as I said, is about is about
money, not about race. And even more so, though, it shows the true
nature of modern academia. It shows what I've been saying all
along, which is that higher education has turned into a massive scam.
Academia is intellectually and morally corrupt, from top to bottom.
That's a fact.
Academia is a business.
And they are in the business of making money, as any business is.
That's what they care about.
Not educating your kids, but making money off of your kids.
Of course you're going to have problems.
Once The art of education becomes a billion dollar business.
When that happens, you're going to have corruption and scandal and all of this stuff.
And that's just, there's no way around it.
And that's where we are.
It's where we've been for a long time.
And we can see that fact evidenced, not just by the manner in which these kids got into these schools, but also by what happened Once they got in.
Namely, nothing happened.
Nothing unusual.
I mean, these kids apparently, they just went along and did fine.
You're not reading from what I've read.
These kids didn't fail out.
They're not going to flunk out of school because that would defeat the whole purpose.
So, think about that for a second.
They lied their way in, or at least their parents lied for them.
I think it's very likely that these kids didn't, had no idea that they were, that their parents were doing that.
So, and I do feel badly for these kids as well, that although they're rich and privileged at the same time, they're probably now, just now discovering that that's how they got into school.
And they thought that they earned their way in and apparently no.
So, they got in without any qualification.
And the system, if it's really about education, and if it's really about a sort of rigorous academic program, then it should be able to filter out kids like that.
It should be able to guard itself against this kind of thing, because if you got in without the academic qualifications, then you should fail out.
You shouldn't be able to make it.
But these kids got in, and they did fine.
Which shows you that it's not about rigorous academic study.
It's just a place where you go, and you coast through, and you get your degree, and you do all this for social status and for credentials, not for actual intellectual enrichment.
College is just one big credentialing, credentialing, there we go, I can't even say the word, mechanism.
It's a mechanism for giving kids credentials and social status, and that's what it is.
Lori Loughlin, Aunt Becky from Full House, was indicted as well in this scandal, and she allegedly paid several hundred thousand dollars to get her kids into college.
One of those kids, her daughter, got into, I think it was USC, this way. And that daughter then proceeded to spend her
time at college becoming apparently a YouTube star. She has a YouTube channel where she tries on makeup
and stuff and it's she's got like two million subscribers that watch her try on clothes and
different and makeup and that sort of thing.
Which, by the way, has given me the idea that maybe I should start, maybe I need to start wearing makeup on this show and finally it'll really take off, the numbers will skyrocket.
But let me show you, just because it's, I think it kind of demonstrates what I'm talking about.
Let me show you a little clip of this girl.
This is Lori and Becky's daughter.
Let me show you a little clip of this girl recording one of her YouTube videos.
I don't know how much of school I'm going to attend, but I'm going to go in and talk to my deans and everyone and hope that I can try and balance it all.
But I do want the experience of like game days, partying.
I don't really care about school as you guys.
OK, so she she's not sure if she's going to go to classes at all.
She doesn't really like school.
She's thinking about maybe she'll go to class, maybe she won't, but she wants the experience of like game day and parties and stuff.
That's what she says.
And listen, I'm not trying to single her out for that attitude because that is precisely the attitude that many, probably most kids have when they go to college.
For them, for kids, this is the way it works.
For the kids, college is about the experience of partying.
That's what the kids care about.
They want the experience.
For their parents, it's about social status and credentials.
For the school administrators, it's about money.
For many of the professors, it's about ideological indoctrination.
The one thing that we're missing here, with all these groups, is an actual concern for education itself.
Few people in any of these groups are worried about education.
They all have their different things that they're worried about and that they want out of it, but education has little to do with it.
And that's why it's perfectly possible, even commonplace, for kids to go to college and graduate with a degree and learn absolutely nothing the whole time.
Why do you think?
Why is it so easy?
For anyone with a YouTube channel and a camera and a microphone to go to pretty much any college campus and do one of those man-on-the-street interview things where they quiz random people with these very easy questions and then no one knows the answers and then they can prove how stupid everybody is.
Well, you see a million of those things on YouTube and so often they're on college campuses.
And why is it so easy to do that?
If you want to get a million hits on YouTube, you know that all you need to do is get like a third grade civics exam and grab your camera and a microphone and go to any college campus and ask these kids any of these questions and people won't be able to answer it.
It shouldn't be that easy.
It shouldn't be that easy to find absolute clueless morons on a college campus.
But you can, because You don't need to be intelligent to get in, you don't need to be hardworking, and you don't need to be intelligent or hardworking to graduate.
That's the reality.
So, when are we gonna wake up to this?
When are we gonna... I've said it a million times, but when are we going to stop playing this game?
And realize that academia has become a scam, it's corrupt, and so, The only way to change anything is, like we've been talking about, money talks, right?
So if we stop giving these people our money, and more importantly, if we stop feeding our children into this system, then maybe there will be some changes.
But if we're not willing to do that, if we're not willing to make that change, then it's just going to go on like this.
And it's never going to get any better.
All right, what else?
Let's see.
There was this headline on the Daily Wire.
Mothers team up to create a porn film they want their children to watch.
Yeah, I'm not going to even go there.
It's just too disturbing.
All right, here's one.
Here's one other thing.
I talked yesterday about The case of the man who's suing an abortion clinic because his child was aborted against his wishes.
And I wanted to go back to that for a second to highlight a point, an important point.
The whole reason why this man had to sue in the first place is that his girlfriend was able to kill his child without his consent, right?
And so now he's suing and he's so far been able to go forward suing In the place of the aborted child.
But the reason it got to this point is that, as we talked about yesterday, men have no reproductive rights.
We hear about this thing of reproductive rights, and this is a whole category of rights that men don't have.
Now think about that for a second.
Human reproduction As much as the left would like to change this fact, it still remains the fact that in every case of human reproduction in human history, in the billions of instances of human reproduction, it has always involved a man and a woman.
In every single case.
So, men are just as essential to the reproductive act as are women.
Yet, We have invented this whole category that we call reproductive rights, and men don't have any.
Can you think of one reproductive right that a man has?
He has none.
A whole category of rights that men are excluded from.
They have no rights as parents until the child is born, and even after the child is born, the fathers still are treated by the law as essentially expendable and replaceable.
We all know how it goes in family court.
It is a lot, a lot easier for, in the case of a divorce or something, it's a lot easier for the woman to be awarded custody of the children than it is for the man.
And there are just a million examples of this, and this is the way it goes.
Which only affirms, yet again, an important point, which is that women in the United States do not suffer any form of systematic legal oppression.
And that only, now that might sound like a bold statement, it only sounds like a bold statement if you've been brainwashed by feminist rhetoric.
And you might kind of instinctively, viscerally be taken aback by that.
But to anyone else, that's incredibly obvious.
That you cannot provide one example of systematic legal inequalities that women are subjected to or women suffer from.
You cannot come up with an example of Legal inequality for women.
Now I already gave you, there are several examples, I already gave you one of legal inequalities where men are on the losing end of it, where men are legally unequal to women.
So I've given you one example of that.
It's a pretty profound example where women have the legal right to murder a man's child.
So that's one example.
But you can't come up with one example on the other end.
In fact, the only example, and I put this challenge out on Twitter last night, and there were a lot of people reacting to it, saying, oh, that's crazy.
But nobody could come up with an example.
Except the only example that one person came up with was that, well, men are allowed to walk around topless, and women can't.
So, OK.
Now, in many places in the country, that's not the case anymore.
And in fact, in, you know, In most places you go, everyone is expected to keep their shirts on.
But it is true that there are some, you know, counties and towns where, especially if you go to the beach or something, men cannot have their shirts on and women are supposed to wear a shirt.
So, fine, there you go.
That's the one thing left, right?
That's the one example of legal inequalities that women are expected to keep their shirts on in many places still in America.
So you got that, but that is just so incredibly outweighed by the fact that, yes, well, women are supposed to keep their shirts on legally, but they also have the power to kill human beings.
So I think that outweighs it so much that it doesn't even count.
Still, the fact remains that, at the very least, we would have to agree that the deck is stacked heavily in favor of women.
Didn't used to be that way.
Of course.
It was only a hundred years ago that women couldn't vote.
But that has all changed.
And it has been changed for a long time now.
Which is why the feminist movement is utterly, completely worthless.
And I think it's crucial for us to understand this Because you still hear sometimes from conservatives who say that, uh, say, well, you know, yeah, the, the feminist movement now has gone off the rails and everything, but they're still fighting for something important.
And so we need to reclaim feminism or whatever.
Um, no, we don't need to reclaim it.
It is a worthless movement because it has nothing left to fight for.
And this is just one of the It's so true that it's become a cliche that after a movement has achieved what it set out to achieve, if it sticks around, if it doesn't go away, if it sticks around, then it will become, right?
It becomes a racket.
It becomes a scam.
And that's what's happened with feminism.
A hundred years ago, they were fighting for real legal equality.
Now they have it.
And now there's just nothing, there's nothing left.
And so they're marching around with genitalia on their head, and they're doing this and that, and maybe they make a big deal out of something like, oh, men are allowed to have their shirts off, you know, that kind of thing, because they've got no other battles left to fight.
Which is why the feminist movement, I think, from rational people, the feminist movement at this point is owed nothing but contempt.
And primarily, because when I say it's worthless, it's much worse than worthless.
Because actually, what is the primary thing that the feminist movement now fights for?
And that is to protect its right to kill human beings.
Which makes it worse than worthless, it is actually an evil movement.
Finally, this is very important.
I want you to watch something.
Mitt Romney had a birthday yesterday.
So, happy birthday to Mitt Romney.
I don't know how old he turned.
And there is footage from his birthday celebration that has confused and disturbed the nation.
And so first of all, watch this.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday dear Senator Ron Pierce.
Happy birthday to you!
Oh my goodness!
What I've always wanted!
Look at that!
Holy cow!
That's fantastic!
Wow!
What are you guys going to have?
Look at this!
It's never going to work, is it?
Don't burn yourself.
These are all wishes I'm getting.
All these wishes.
Paige made it.
Paige designed it.
No, really?
It's beautiful.
Are you kidding?
Paige, did you do this?
You are sick.
That's the first time I've heard that.
Goodness gracious.
Look at this.
Wow.
That's the first time I've heard that.
Gracious. Look at this.
Wow.
Glad I haven't had breakfast yet.
Now let's leave aside the fact that he's eating a Twinkie cake.
Twinkies are, of course, completely revolting.
They're like moldy sponges injected with...
Off-brand ready whip or something, but the thing that most people are focusing on is the fact that he that he the way that he blew out the candles He took each candle off the cake right and he blew it out individually Which I've never seen anyone do that before and he's being attacked across the nation for this for the way that he blew out the candles I saw on Twitter someone said that he he blows out candles like a serial killer now I Maybe he does.
I don't really know how serial killers typically deal with birthday candles.
Maybe that's how they do it, but I will say this.
Serial killer or not, I think that Mitt Romney, by blowing the candles out that way, has proven that he is a visionary and a humanitarian.
It is about time that people stop blowing their rancid, disgusting spittle all over perfectly good cakes.
It is the year 2019, and we are still doing this.
Think about the whole concept of blowing on a pastry item before you share it with a whole group of people.
You're saying like, hang on a second, I'm going to distribute some of my mouth particles on this cake.
Here, I put some extra flu virus on this slice of cake.
Have some of that.
This is how you spread disease.
This is how people get the plague, is through this kind of thing.
How would you react if you were going to Outback Steakhouse and your waiter brought out your steak And before he handed it to you, he said, hey, hold on a second.
It's disgusting.
And it's the worst with kids.
Have you ever been to a... Have you ever seen, like, a three-year-old blow out candles on a cake?
My son, when he blows out candles on a cake, he essentially just hocks a loogie on the cake.
That's what he does.
He puts out the candles by spitting on it, and people still eat the cake.
Like, no one's bothered by this.
Have you ever been to a toddler's birthday party?
And the worst thing there is that all the kids want to blow out the candles, so it ends up being this free-for-all, and all the kids are blowing their mucus.
They're basically frosting the cake with their mucus, and then everyone eats it!
And no one is to stop!
I'm the only one!
Everyone is like, oh yeah, give me some of that, and I'm standing in the back like, oh my...
So, of course, at every birthday party now, I bring a CSI kit with a blacklight, and I take it out, and I, you know, say, everyone back up, I inspect the cake, and I say, give me that, and I notice there's one little corner without any mucus.
Give me that corner right there.
So that's what I do.
And sometimes I'll bring, if that's not good enough, I'll also bring a backup cake that I keep in the trunk.
And worse comes to worse, I'll go out and eat the cake in the trunk.
Because, of course, I'm not going to give up the cake.
I'm not crazy.
I'm just saying I'm not going to eat someone's spit.
So, you know what?
Maybe Mitt Romney is setting an example for all of us to follow.
And I want you to think about this.
Everyone says, well, you gotta blow out all the candles in one breath for good luck or whatever.
No, well, it might be good luck for you.
Okay, and that's fine.
But you just gave everybody else bronchitis.
So congratulations, you sociopath.
Happy birthday.
All right, let's check some emails.
mattwalshow at gmail.com, mattwalshow at gmail.com.
Some interesting ones today.
We'll go first to Joel, who says, Hi Matt, really enjoyed the show.
I was recently in a discussion with someone about the accuracy of the Bible, and they made a point that I... Did I answer this one yesterday?
No, I don't think I did.
They made a point that I thought I'd like your opinion on.
He said that the Bible stories, we were talking specifically about the Gospels, were transmitted orally before they were written down.
He said that the transmission of stories orally is like the telephone game.
The story changes over time.
There's no way for us to know if the story written down in the Gospels is the same as the first time it was told.
How would you respond to that?
Thank you for the question, Joel.
This is a pretty common meme, common argument, often from atheists.
Bart Ehrman, the atheist New Testament scholar, uses this analogy a lot.
That probably might be where your atheist friend got it.
Ehrman says that That the stories about Jesus were told, they were passed down through spoken word for decades, and they necessarily would have changed with the telling, much like the telephone game.
Now, I'm kind of surprised when smart guys like Ehrman use this analogy of the telephone game, because it's completely without basis.
And I'll explain why.
But first, we have to say that we can't The easy answer for Christians is to say, well, no, because first of all, the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses, and second, they had the Holy Spirit telling them what happened, helping to keep it accurate, right?
And so that's the easy answer that probably most Christians would go with.
And it's true.
Well, two of the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses.
The other two, Mark and Luke, were not.
It's also true that we don't know exactly what the process of inspiration looked like, or what it consisted of.
And it's probably not as straightforward as God literally speaking the words audibly into the ears of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and then them sort of just being typists for God, transcribing what he said.
It seems that inspiration worked through a more human process, which is not surprising because that's the way that God, in our own experience in life, right?
That's how God seems to always work, is through a human process.
And what I mean is that if you read the gospel side by side, especially if you read a parallel
gospel translation, which I would recommend going out and getting one of those, very interesting,
where it gives you the, usually it'd be the synoptics, it gives you each passage, you know,
side by side with all with the other three.
And you see, rather inescapably, that one of these Gospels, probably Mark, was written first, and the others used it as a source.
In fact, Luke even says in the preamble to his gospel that he used sources.
He doesn't say he used Mark's gospel, but he does say that he interviewed people and he collected all the best information, and that's how he's writing his gospel.
So we already know that that's how—it says it right there in the text.
And we know that because there are whole sections of Matthew and Mark and Luke that are verbatim the same.
And then there are sections that are very different.
Which is what you would expect if Matthew was using Mark, and then also using other sources, and also using his own recollections.
Matthew looks exactly as you would expect it to look if that was the process for writing the Gospel of Matthew.
with the Holy Spirit guiding the process, but not in such a way as to make Matthew basically a puppet who, almost against his will, is just moving his hand across the papyrus, right?
So, the point is, it's perfectly possible, even likely, that the Gospel writers, especially Mark and Luke, did use, for some of their stories, oral tradition.
To me, that seems almost certain, that that's part of what happened.
Um, but this doesn't mean that the oral tradition was changed or mutated.
And the telephone game is an absurd comparison, and I think the people who use this comparison, at least the scholarly, educated ones who use it, they know that it's a bad comparison, because they know that the whole point of the telephone game is to change the message, right?
The rules of the game are set in such a way as to make it so that the message changes.
The game wouldn't be any fun if you transmitted the message accurately.
In fact, I will fully admit that I wouldn't have admitted this at the time, but when I was a kid and we played the telephone game, when the message got to me, I would intentionally change it to make it funnier.
Basically, no matter what the message was, I would always hear something involving poop.
And then I would transmit that, because everything is funnier when you put poop into it, obviously.
So that's the way the telephone game works.
Oral tradition, especially in an oral culture, does not work that way.
It's not like you're only allowed to say it once and you have to whisper it to one person and then they can only whisper it to... That's not the way it works.
It would be, there would be, you know, it was done in such a way as to try to maximize accuracy, not minimize it.
And you tried not to change the story.
And also, most historians who've looked at this know that People in these cultures of oral tradition, they had methods, they had strategies for how they memorized these things.
And they also just had better memories for it than we do.
We don't have to have great memories because we have everything written down.
Because we're a literate culture.
So everything is written down, so you don't need to remember it.
But that wasn't the way it was for them.
So if you wanted to know your history, you had to remember it.
It was something like 98% of the people back in that time and in that part of the world couldn't read and write.
So if they wanted to know anything and be informed about their own culture and their own history, they had to remember it.
So I just think that that comparison is a little ridiculous.
Let's see, from Jerry says, Matt, I'm sorry, but I have to tell you that your show is definitely, caps lock, the worst show on the Daily Wire.
I don't know how you still have a job.
It's a mystery to both of us, Jerry.
I don't know how either, honestly.
If you can even call this a job, which really it isn't.
From Aaron says, hello, I was listening to your show today and it reminded me once again that I have an amazing husband.
You were discussing the selfishness of a man that wrote that he regretted having his son.
I already knew that my husband was awesome, but this discussion brought it to the front of my thoughts.
When I met my husband, I was a single mom of three kids.
Shortly after he and I were married, we had a set of twins.
My husband went from zero kids to five in less than a year.
You know, I was bragging about going from zero kids to two with our twins, but I can't compete with that.
Even though three of the kids are not biologically his, he supports them spiritually, emotionally, and financially as if they were his own.
He and I now have six children and feel very blessed.
I think sometimes women are busy mothering and taking our husbands for granted.
At least I know I'm guilty of this.
Thanks for all you do.
My husband and I are big fans.
I would appreciate a shout out to my awesome husband.
And father of my children, his name is Monty.
Shout out to, uh, to Monty.
I think that's great.
Real man.
You've found yourself there, Aaron.
And I also think it's great that you're showing gratitude to your husband.
This is, I've talked about it before, but I think, um, this is certainly one of the top three most important things in a marriage is, is gratitude from both parties towards the other, uh, and just recognizing their contributions.
And as you said, we get lost in the day-to-day stuff, and it's very easy to lose sight of what the other person is doing.
So I think it's great that you're remembering that and acknowledging it.
This is from Heath.
He says, Today my friend brought up a pretty good topic on if Christians are allowed to kill during wartime.
This came up when we were talking about the bombs dropped in Japan and how many civilians died.
I don't believe citizens should die during war, but I also don't think that an evil empire like Japan during World War II should have military control over other territories and mistreat its civilians.
My friend doesn't believe that we should kill anyone in war on the opposing side, but I disagree.
The topic reminded me of the movie Hacksaw Ridge.
Where the soldier during World War II was a conscientious objector and became a medic, but didn't kill anyone.
My question is, is it a sin to kill a soldier from the opposing side of war, especially when they are part of an evil regime?
I would say absolutely not.
The concept of the just war theory has been developed by Christians over the centuries and the millennia.
And it's been, with rare exceptions of, I think, you know, Hacksaw Ridge, great movie as well, but in that case the, and I'm blanking on his name, but a real man, a hero, that the movie was based around, but, and he was, I believe, a Quaker, I think, but so he was, you know, there have been some small subdivisions of Christianity that have been conscientious objectors, have been, you know, have I don't believe that all violence is wrong, but the predominant thought throughout Christian history has been that killing in self-defense is perfectly morally justified, and waging a war, as long as it's for just reasons, and I think that it would be very hard to argue that World War II, on the Allies' side, was waged for unjust reasons.
It was clearly waged Not just to stop the mass slaughter of innocent people, but also to stop this evil empire from literally taking over the world.
So I think that's pretty clearly a case of just killing.
Now, it sounds like you're lumping the nuclear strikes on Japan into that, and that is sort of a different Sort of a different topic entirely.
It's a different question.
You could certainly arrive at the conclusion that it's perfectly justified to wage war, but then also arrive at the conclusion that dropping a nuclear bomb on a city and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians is also wrong.
Those two things don't necessarily go together.
All right.
Let's see, from Jason.
Hi, Matt.
I have a very important question for you.
Do you listen to music?
If so, I'd like to ask, what are your all-time favorite songs?
I'd like to ask what your all-time favorite songs are, but I know that that could be a hard question.
Instead, it is a hard question, because it changes for me.
I mean, you'd have to add, it changes by the day, really.
Instead, I'll be more specific.
What are the five most recently played songs on your iTunes playlist, or Spotify slash Pandora, et cetera?
First of all, Jason, I do listen to music.
I am a human.
Contrary to popular belief, what kind of human doesn't, is there anyone who doesn't listen to music, just doesn't like any kind of music at all, period?
Uh, I, if there is that kind of human, I'm certainly not that.
Now, as most recently played songs, not most played songs is what you want.
Well, I actually can answer that because I was, I was, uh, over the weekend I was driving, I had a kind of a long drive through the country on Sunday and it was a beautiful day.
And so I was playing my, um, driving through the country on a Sunday playlist, which we all have a playlist like that.
So most recently played would have been Jolene by Ray LaMontagne, great song.
Angel from Montgomery, Old Crow Medicine Show, which is a cover of a John Prine, I believe.
Young Fathers by Typhoon, Rising Water by James Vincent McMorrow, and Red Eyes by the War on Drugs.
So kind of a weird That doesn't sound good.
That was my phone talking to me.
I think my phone heard me say the war on drugs and said that doesn't sound good.
My phone is a libertarian, I guess.
Anyway, weird collection of songs.
I'm kind of a weird guy, I guess.
We'll leave it there.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
Senators Mike Lee and Joni Ernst have unveiled a new conservative welfare program to address low birth rates.
It's called Paid Parental Leave.
We'll examine how the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Then AOC embarrasses herself again.
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