There has been a troubling merger of celebrity and politician. Increasingly, politicians are gaining groupies and fans rather than supporters. We’ll talk about why this is dangerous. Also, a video of a big game hunter killing a sleeping lion is provoking outrage. We’ll discuss the ethics of hunting. Date: 03-21-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Today on the Matt Wall Show, we'll talk about this merging of celebrity and politician that we've seen going on. | |
| It's a very disturbing trend. | |
| More and more politicians are attracting fans rather than supporters. | |
| And I'll explain why, in my opinion, we should never be fans of politicians. | |
| We should always be skeptical of them, no matter who they are. | |
| Also today, a video of a hunter killing a sleeping lion in Africa is Provoking, as you can imagine, outrage online. | |
| We'll discuss the ethics of big game hunting. | |
| That and other topics today on The Matt Wall Show. | |
| Okay, so before we get started here, I thought it would be a good idea maybe to begin the | |
| show with a little bit of motivation. | |
| Because, you know, things can get kind of heavy here on the show sometimes. | |
| We get into some difficult topics. | |
| And so I thought we could begin with a little pep talk, some inspiration. | |
| So I'm going to play this for you briefly, and I hope that you find it as inspiring as I did. | |
| She just shoots up that big spirit or presence or soul or whatever word you like to use for it. | |
| Foreground zero planet Earth just squeezes up and out. | |
| I'm moving her up so it doesn't get stuck in all the astral currents. | |
| It doesn't get tangled. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So there's that. | |
| There's that, anyway. | |
| That's all. | |
| I can't. | |
| Moving on. | |
| I wrote an article yesterday making a point that I've made before on the show, but I think it bears repeating. | |
| I was thinking initially about the cultish support that Beto O'Rourke is inspiring. | |
| And you can't really call it support, actually, because support is conditional. | |
| When you support A politician, that usually means that you like what they stand for and the policies that they propose. | |
| But if they betray those principles, then you'll stop supporting. | |
| That's what usually support means. | |
| So what Beto has are groupies who create You know, if you go online on YouTube, you'll find people have written songs about Beto O'Rourke. | |
| These are groupies. | |
| And this is how you know, as I've said before, this is how you know that Beto will be the Democratic nominee, just because he gets that out of people. | |
| He doesn't have any policy proposals to speak of, no discernible vision for America, no qualifications, really. | |
| But he makes people swoon for whatever reason and they climb over each other to get autographs and things like that. | |
| And that's all you need these days in America. | |
| It's why, you know, Drake or Bradley Cooper or Tom Brady, any of them could be president if they wanted to be. | |
| The only thing saving us from a Cardi B presidency is that she's not old enough and she could probably make more money in rap music. | |
| We really are at a point, I believe, where any pop star, any famous athlete could be president. | |
| And you might say, well, it's always been that way. | |
| I don't think it necessarily has always been that way. | |
| I think it's that way now, where if you have someone who's just, it really, the qualifications really don't matter at all anymore now, I think, is where we are. | |
| It's great for politicians if they can provoke that sort of reaction, but it's terrible for America, and it's deadly to democracy. | |
| No American And I will keep beating this drum because someone needs to, I think. | |
| No American should ever be a fan of a politician. | |
| Politicians should never have fans. | |
| Conditional, skeptical, critical support is the most that these people should ever get from us, ever. | |
| Fandom is something that's meant for sports, it's meant for Hollywood, but it's not meant for DC. | |
| It's not meant for politics. | |
| And this is not, I'm not just talking about Democrats here. | |
| Trump also, Donald Trump has many fans of his own, obviously, as you know. | |
| And when I say fans of Trump, I'm talking about the sicko fans who, when it comes to the president, they lose all capacity for critical thought. | |
| Sorry, I'm not talking about the president. | |
| I'm saying, uh, no, they don't call it, you know, the people that they don't say, oh, the president, Donald Trump. | |
| No, they say, um, they say my president. | |
| Have you noticed that? | |
| This is something that you see, you see it from Trump fans, even more than you saw it from Obama fans. | |
| But Trump's most loyal fans, when they refer to him, they'll say something like, they'll say something like, you know, the establishment is always attacking my president. | |
| My president deserves support. | |
| My God, it's disgusting. | |
| You talk about him like he's literally your boyfriend or something. | |
| Yeah, he is, in a sense, your president, in the sense that you're an American citizen, but my president. | |
| See, the thing is, you would never, when Obama was president, you never said that. | |
| You never said, my President Obama. | |
| You reserve it for Trump because of this weird affection you have for him. | |
| It's really just gross, nauseating. | |
| But this kind of support, By the way, it's just as bad on the other side when you've got people saying, oh, he's not my president. | |
| Right? | |
| Well, he is. | |
| He's all of our president. | |
| He's not your president. | |
| He's not not your president. | |
| He's just the president. | |
| He's the president of the United States. | |
| He doesn't belong to you. | |
| You can't disown him either. | |
| He's just the guy who's the president. | |
| That's all. | |
| This is the kind of support, though, the kind of fandom that Trump provokes in some people. | |
| Whatever they do, he supports. | |
| Whatever he says, they agree with. | |
| Whoever he villainizes, they hate. | |
| Whoever he promotes, they love. | |
| It really is as simple as that. | |
| They would quite literally drink the Kool-Aid, Jim Jones-style, if he asked them to. | |
| I really believe that. | |
| They are not conservative. | |
| They're not right-wing. | |
| It would be inaccurate to classify them that way. | |
| They are Trumpists who subscribe to Trumpism, and the doctrines of Trumpism can change from moment to moment depending on what the president, or what my president, happens to be tweeting at the moment. | |
| I remember last week, just as an example, whenever, I think it was last week, maybe the week before, when Trump randomly started criticizing the airline industry, right? | |
| Trump came out and said that planes are too complicated and we need to go back to old and simple planes. | |
| Because, right, that's what you want. | |
| When you sit down, you know, for a flight and the captain comes on, the speaker, what you want to hear him say is, all right, folks, thanks for joining us. | |
| I hope you'll enjoy this flight on this old and simple plane. | |
| But Trump says we need old and simple planes, right? | |
| And so, All of his fans, though, decided in that moment, they said, oh, you know what? | |
| Yeah, we do. | |
| Actually, yeah, I think we do need older. | |
| There's a huge problem. | |
| Now that you mention it, there is a huge problem of planes being too complex. | |
| We need older, simpler planes. | |
| These are people, they never thought that before. | |
| None of them ever said that before. | |
| This was never an issue they ever thought about. | |
| But now they have adopted that position. | |
| Wholeheartedly, and they will defend it passionately just because Trump said it. | |
| If Trump had said the opposite, if Trump came out the next day and said, you know what we need? | |
| More complicated planes. | |
| These same people would say, yes, this is what I've been saying all along. | |
| We need more complicated planes. | |
| Many of these same people spent eight years criticizing this mentality among Obama's most dedicated admirers, and for good reason. | |
| Obama was worshipped with religious fervor. | |
| I'm sure you remember that. | |
| The religious devotion that Obama had was horrifying to witness. | |
| And it did enormous damage to our country, and it prevented Obama from ever being held accountable for anything he did. | |
| But the celebrityification of DC, if we can call it that, if I can coin a word, it didn't end when Obama rode his white steed out of town into the sunrise. | |
| Or the sunset, I suppose. | |
| It didn't end there. | |
| Because those who had been busy decrying the celebrity presidency, a lot of those very same people It is all very sickening. | |
| It is a disorder in the human mind that causes us to venerate politicians in this way. | |
| It is all very sickening. | |
| It is a disorder in the human mind that causes us to venerate politicians in this way. | |
| We should identify this disorder within ourselves and do our best to set it into proper order. | |
| If we recognize within ourselves this instinct, this desire, this inclination to worship a politician, to see them as more than just a politician, to have excessive admiration. | |
| If we see that within ourselves, we should try to get rid of it. | |
| We should try to kill it because it's not healthy. | |
| Our first reaction to every politician, always, no matter their party, should be suspicion. | |
| We should be suspicious of all of them. | |
| I think a good American is always suspicious of any man or any woman who seeks to gain power over him. | |
| Because when someone is running for president, or they're running for any political office, what they're saying is, I want to have control over you. | |
| I want power over you. | |
| Now, they might not say it in terms quite that direct, although I would almost respect them more if they did. | |
| But that is really what they're saying implicitly. | |
| What they're saying is, I want control and power over you. | |
| Now, anyone who says that, anyone, we should stop and say, hey, whoa, okay, but hold on. | |
| And immediately we should be giving them the side eye. | |
| It's possible that a person might seek this power for benevolent reasons. | |
| It's possible, but it's extremely unlikely. | |
| There have perhaps been a few benevolent rulers in American history. | |
| Maybe there have been a few. | |
| There are none today in Washington. | |
| Not a single one. | |
| The best we can usually hope for, and the best we have available on the current scene, are vain, self-serving politicians whose vanity and self-interest are regulated by certain useful qualities and some correct ideas about laws and policies. | |
| That's the best we can usually hope for. | |
| And that's the best we're gonna get right now, is that. | |
| Now, most politicians have the first base covered. | |
| So they've got the vanity and they've got the self-interest. | |
| The problem is they don't have any of the rest of the stuff. | |
| They don't have any positive qualities to speak of, and they don't have any correct ideas really | |
| to compensate for all of the vanity and the self-interest. | |
| So that's most politicians. | |
| A few of them have a somewhat acceptable but tenuous balance of the two. | |
| Where, yeah, they're definitely vain as hell. | |
| They definitely are self-interested. | |
| They certainly are primarily concerned about their own power, but they do also have some some positive qualities and they do have correct ideas about this. | |
| So there are a few politicians that we can say who we could say that for. | |
| I might be. | |
| Maybe I'm being slightly unfair. | |
| There might be like two or three who are even a little better than that. | |
| And maybe, you know, maybe there are a few who are slightly better than that. | |
| But this is generally the case. | |
| So. | |
| These people. | |
| can earn our support. | |
| I'm not saying that we can never support a politician. | |
| That would be ridiculous. | |
| They can earn our support. | |
| But if we're wise, and if we have the good of the country always in mind, then our support will only ever be shaky and cautious. | |
| And we will remain ever ready to scold them like untrained puppies if they go wrong. | |
| And we should be prepared to abandon our support for them completely, to drop them, to kick them to the curb. | |
| We should be prepared to do that if they reveal themselves to be vacuous idiots or morally corrupt scumbags without even a hint of the positive qualities that we imagined we originally detected. | |
| So that's the approach we should have. | |
| There's a great J.R.R. | |
| Tolkien quote, and this was a guy who obviously knew something about the way that power corrupts because he wrote a whole book series about it, but this is what Tolkien said. | |
| He said, the most improper job of any man, even saints, who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on, is bossing other men. | |
| Not one in a million is fit for it and least of all those who seek the opportunity. | |
| So, There's an important truth here. | |
| Almost nobody is really fit to lord over other people, to rule them, to have the sort of control over them that our politicians in modern America have over us. | |
| Almost nobody is fit for that. | |
| Very, very, very, very few people have the moral character and the integrity and even the wit or the intelligence Competent skill to be fit for that kind of job and that kind of responsibility and that kind of power. | |
| And the problem is that if they go seeking the job, that's a pretty good sign that they aren't fit for it. | |
| So that's the paradox here that, that, uh, you know, the, the number one way you could tell that someone isn't fit to have that kind of power is if they want it. | |
| And almost everyone in Washington today, they're there because they wanted it. | |
| But someone has to do it, right? | |
| And we do need a government, unfortunately, otherwise we would have anarchy. | |
| But this is just all the more reason to have skepticism and caution when it comes to these people. | |
| Yeah, if a political candidate is asked in a softball question, if they're asked like, you know, why are you running? | |
| What attracted you to public service or whatever? | |
| The kind of question that a Democrat would be asked on CNN or a Republican would be asked on Fox. | |
| And when they're asked that question, they'll always say something like, well, I've always wanted to help others. | |
| I just have a passion for helping. | |
| Or they'll say something like, well, there are a lot of problems in America, and I want to get in there and help fix those problems. | |
| I'm running because I love my country, and I want to do what's best for my country, and blah, blah, blah. | |
| You can tell the real fans, the real sycophants, if they actually believe that nonsense when their favorite politician says it. | |
| The ones who actually believe that. | |
| The ones who say, oh yeah, Beto's running because he just, he really wants to solve our problems. | |
| Or when Trump fans, I hear from Trump fans who will say that, well, you know, Trump ran because of his deep abiding love for America and his self-sacrifice, and he just loves America and American people so much, and that's why he ran. | |
| Oh please, I mean, good, good, Lord, you can't be that naive. | |
| It's embarrassing. | |
| No, that is not why either of those guys ran for office. | |
| And we need to understand that or we will lose our republic. | |
| We will lose our freedom unless we have some healthy skepticism about these people. | |
| We need to understand human nature. | |
| That is not why the vast majority of people seek power. | |
| It is not because they love you and they really want to help you. | |
| It's not what it's about. | |
| In almost every case. | |
| So, am I being cynical? | |
| Yes, absolutely I am cynical. | |
| But if you are not cynical at this point, All right. | |
| So let's take a look at something a little different here. | |
| I'm going to play a video for you with warnings ahead of time that you might find it a little bit upsetting. | |
| It's not graphic or bloody or anything like that, but it does show an animal getting killed. | |
| So this is a video that's been going viral on social media. | |
| Not sure how it ended up on the internet going viral, but it's, um, well, presumably the hunter put it on the internet, but it's a, it's a video of a big game hunt in Africa. | |
| And this hunter, I'm not going to give his name. | |
| His name has been put out there now, but I'm not going to do that. | |
| Um, but he flew over from Illinois to do this. | |
| So you want to be behind that shadow of his front leg coming down. | |
| Watch it. | |
| That was too low. | |
| That was too low. Okay, okay. | |
| Bye! | |
| Don't do any more. | |
| That, Mr. Gunny, is a very nice lion. | |
| Well done. | |
| Very nice lion. | |
| Well done, sir. | |
| Very nice lion. | |
| Beautiful. | |
| That is an exceptional lion. | |
| Okay, so he kills a sleeping lion. | |
| And he seems to be rather impressed with himself after killing the sleeping animal. | |
| This video, as you might expect, has provoked a strong reaction from people. | |
| And listen, I'm not much of an animal rights activist. | |
| I'm really not. | |
| PETA is not going to be accepting me into their ranks anytime soon. | |
| I have no problem with hunting. | |
| I don't really hunt myself. | |
| I don't have anything against it. | |
| I just don't do it. | |
| I do fish. | |
| I like to fish, as I've mentioned before. | |
| Where I live, there's a lot of hunting, a lot of fishing. | |
| And so it's not like I'm some sheltered urban dweller scandalized by the whole concept of outdoor activities. | |
| I have also made the point in the past, just to say this up front, that people seem to get more outraged about a video like that, of a lion being killed, than they do about the 60 million babies who have been slaughtered by abortion since Roe. | |
| And that is a deep sickness in our culture, a sign of a deep sickness, that we care more about the lion than we do about the babies. | |
| So those are two sort of preliminary disclaimers. | |
| With that said, however, the idea of flying all the way to Africa to kill a lion while it sleeps is just completely bizarre and weird. | |
| And it does seem awfully cowardly. | |
| The worst part is that if you kill a sleeping animal, then for you, the thrill of it must simply be killing. | |
| Right? | |
| There's no sport, there's no pursuit, there's no challenge. | |
| Anyone can kill a sleeping animal. | |
| Any idiot can do that. | |
| It's not difficult to do. | |
| It would be like, as I said, I like fishing, so it would be like if I were walking down to the lake to go fishing and I happened to see a big ol' eight pound bass flapping around on the bank that somehow got itself stranded. | |
| And it would be as if I walked up to that bass and I just stabbed it in the head. | |
| Now, if I was starving or if I was, even if I was, I don't know, Out in the woods or something, I didn't have anything to eat, and I needed to eat, and I saw the bass there, I would certainly kill it, and I would eat it. | |
| And I would be thankful for that, for it being so easy. | |
| But if I'm just going out to fish for fun, I'm not going to randomly kill the thing. | |
| What I'll do is I'll throw it back, and then I'll go and try to catch it again, because that's the whole fun of it. | |
| And if I catch it, I'll throw it back again, because I'm not actually going to kill it. | |
| Um, for me, the point of fishing is not to kill fish. | |
| It's just, it's for me, the, uh, with fishing, it's fun to be outside in the water, in nature, um, trying to find where the fish are. | |
| So there's kind of the game, the gamesmanship there. | |
| Um, the, the challenge of actually catching them. | |
| There's the thrill of getting the pull on the line and everything. | |
| And so I just find all that really fun. | |
| And yeah, the bragging rights of catching a really big fish, but, but what I'll do is I catch a really big fish. | |
| I'll take a picture of it. | |
| Um, And then I'll have the picture and that's the bragging rights. | |
| I almost always throw it back, because for me, it's the enjoyment is just in catching it and all the things I just said. | |
| It's not in killing something, even if it is just a fish. | |
| But as I said, I have no problem with hunting, as long as the meat is used for something. | |
| Killing a deer and eating it is perfectly ethical, I think. | |
| And helpful. | |
| There's definitely a problem of overpopulation of deer, especially in some parts of the country like where I live. | |
| You know, you get deer all over the place and there are danger too. | |
| People run into them, people are killed, driving down the street. | |
| So, but even with a deer, you know, I would think that if you were going hunting for deer and you saw one sleeping, You're not gonna kill a sleeping deer, are you? | |
| Unless, again, unless you really need the meat and you gotta feed your family, in which case, yeah, you'll take whatever you can get however you can get it. | |
| That makes total sense. | |
| But if it's about the sport of it, it would be completely lame and unethical and wrong to just kill a sleeping deer. | |
| So, tell me that you love hunting because you're out in the woods, and you're pursuing it, and you're tracking, and you're dealing with all the challenges and so on. | |
| I understand that. | |
| That makes sense. | |
| But if you like hunting because you really just want to kill something, well, then that's disturbing. | |
| I think in that case, you have psychological problems. | |
| Yes, killing is part of hunting, inevitably, but it shouldn't be the point. | |
| It shouldn't be an end in itself, is the point. | |
| And besides, I think there is a difference. | |
| Between a lion and a deer, right? | |
| Just like we see a difference between a deer and a dog. | |
| There's a difference between these animals. | |
| So if you go out killing dogs for sport, people will think that you're a sick maniac. | |
| And in that case, you would be a sick maniac. | |
| We have a kind of hierarchy of animals that we've established. | |
| I don't fully understand the hierarchy. | |
| Nobody really does. | |
| But it's there. | |
| Certain animals we form a closer bond with, like dogs. | |
| Other animals we see as being more beautiful, more majestic, like lions and elephants. | |
| Are these subjective judgments? | |
| Yeah, I suppose they are. | |
| But that doesn't make them completely arbitrary or meaningless either. | |
| And the thing is, the lion hunter obviously shares that feeling. | |
| He obviously also thinks that the lion is especially majestic and beautiful. | |
| That's why he goes all that way and pays all that money to kill it. | |
| It's just that most of us, when we see an animal and we think, wow, that's a majestic, beautiful animal, we just want to look at it and maybe take a picture and tell our friends about it. | |
| Whereas this, you know, these people, what they say is, oh, that's a majestic, beautiful animal. | |
| I would love to shoot it in the head. | |
| And that just, I find it bizarre. | |
| Look, I can't completely explain why a dolphin is necessarily more valuable or more precious or whatever than a bass. | |
| It has something to do with the dolphin's intelligence, it's assumed capacity for pain and so on, but there is more to it than that, isn't there? | |
| And I can't explain it exactly, yet I'm not going to go out and kill a dolphin. | |
| Because even if I can't explain why we have this ingrained priority system, that doesn't make it okay, necessarily, to just toss it out the window and go kill whatever we want. | |
| I don't think that justifies it. | |
| Now, I know people will say, oh, but lions are a problem in Africa, and they kill people, they're dangerous, and besides, these rich white dudes, they go and they pay big money, and they help the economy, and they give the meat to the villagers, and all that. | |
| Alright, fine. | |
| That's noted. | |
| But first of all, Africans are perfectly capable of killing dangerous animals themselves. | |
| They've been doing it for thousands of years. | |
| The idea that they need to have a rich white dude come and kill the lion for them is paternalistic in the extreme, and it's frankly just ridiculous. | |
| You think a couple of Africans can't figure out how to kill a sleeping lion? | |
| You think they need, well, they needed to call, you know, whoever this guy was in Illinois. | |
| Hey, get over here. | |
| We got a sleeping lion. | |
| Get over here quick. | |
| We need someone to kill. | |
| We don't know how to do it. | |
| We need you. | |
| No, I don't think so. | |
| Okay, but the white dude is paying. | |
| Fine. | |
| I get it. | |
| He's paying. | |
| He's paying a lot of money. | |
| Financially, it's helpful. | |
| But that doesn't really explain why the white dude wants to go all that way and kill a lion. | |
| And it doesn't necessarily make it ethical either. | |
| So think of it this way. | |
| What if your friend had to put down his dog, right? | |
| The dog is sick, in pain, suffering, got to be put down. | |
| That makes sense. | |
| Totally ethical. | |
| But then imagine that you offer to pay your friend $10,000 so that you can be the one to shoot it in the head. | |
| Well, then all of a sudden, this ethical mercy killing goes from ethical mercy killing to snuff fetish. | |
| Even if the dog needs to be killed, even if the 10 grand will help your friend, that's all great. | |
| But the fact that you're so desperate to kill something and that you would find pleasure in killing this dog, that says something really disturbing about you. | |
| And then it is unethical. | |
| Now, it wouldn't be unethical to take the pet to the vet to do, but for you to do it all of a sudden is unethical because of your motivation. | |
| For you, it's just that you're killing for the sake of killing, and that is always. | |
| Killing for the sake of killing is always unethical. | |
| Always. | |
| No matter what you're killing. | |
| I mean, if you saw an ant crawling across the ground, and you just stepped on it for the sake of it, that would be unethical. | |
| Whereas, if you have an ant infestation in your house, and you bring an exterminator, and you kill thousands of ants, that's not unethical at all. | |
| The point is, just killing to kill, no matter what it is, is wrong. | |
| I mean, you'd be walking by and, you know, pulling up a flower just because, just to kill it. | |
| That would also be wrong. | |
| There's varying degrees of immoral, certainly, and not all the same, but the point is killing for killing is wrong. | |
| And in this case, killing, it's killing for killing and also killing because what you're killing is majestic and beautiful and exotic. | |
| And I think that that just makes it even more wrong because, you know, Whereas, if it were the African villagers doing it, no problem. | |
| Because they're the ones threatened by the lion. | |
| For them, it's not just about killing the thing. | |
| It's a totally different situation. | |
| So, I don't know. | |
| It does seem to me to be problematic. | |
| I guess there's a larger conversation that could be had about big game killing. | |
| And I'm not saying that it's wrong in every context, but definitely killing a sleeping animal. | |
| It's just... All right, let's see here. | |
| Maybe we'll say... Okay, here's one more thing to play for you, also disturbing. | |
| This is from something called NowThis News. | |
| And it's a news organization that clearly, as you'll be able to tell, approves of what you're about to witness. | |
| So watch this. | |
| Okay, so we've got a drag brunch. | |
| Thank you very much. | |
| A brunch where people brought their kids So that cross-dressing men with stage names like Cummings could dance for them. | |
| Did you notice that that boy's father? | |
| You know, boy appeared to be sitting on his dad's lap. | |
| And his dad was filming the whole thing. | |
| And that's the most tragic thing about that video clip is that Boys need and deserve real fathers. | |
| And instead, it appears that this young boy, unfortunately, has not a real father, but an effeminate, emasculated coward as his father. | |
| I mean, there are a lot of other ways I could describe this guy. | |
| The kind of man that would bring his son to something like that. | |
| And then be delighted when this cross-dressing person is dancing in front of him. | |
| I just, I can't wrap my head around it. | |
| But what you find there again is this insistence in combining drag queens and kids. | |
| It's like everywhere. | |
| We talked about it earlier this week. | |
| They had a cross-dresser come into a kindergarten classroom and read a book about transgenders. | |
| And then they've got the drag queen story hours. | |
| And they've got, I mean, and now this, they're constantly, the left is trying to combine kids and drag queens as much as possible. | |
| Why do you think that is? | |
| Well, we know what it is. | |
| It's about brainwashing them while they're young. | |
| And what you saw in that video there, these are kids who are being groomed. | |
| This is the grooming of children happening right in front of our eyes. | |
| All right, let's go to some emails. | |
| MattWalshow at gmail.com. | |
| MattWalshow at gmail.com. | |
| This is from Lisa, says, hey Matt, I appreciate how you approach topics, so I thought I would ask your take on a topic Allie Beth Stuckey, the conservative millennial, mentioned on her podcast on Monday. | |
| Allie believes the left is trying to change the narrative of the pro-life movement. | |
| The left is trying to convince pro-lifers that abortion is just merely one facet of pro-life, that if you were really pro-life, you would fight for the babies in cages at the borders, the immigrants, transgender, the women who need the abortion, et cetera. | |
| What about their lives? | |
| Don't they matter too? | |
| I tend to agree with her opinion in that the more I look around my social circles, I find this to be true. | |
| My philosophy on that though is, if you compromise on the killing of innocent children, Where else can you go from there? | |
| Abortion has to matter more because there will be literally nothing left if it doesn't. | |
| Of course, I would love your take on this idea of expanding the definition of pro-life and possibly some ways to combat this way of thinking. | |
| Yeah, Ali is right about that. | |
| Now, it's true that the pro-life movement, and it's important to stipulate, I think the pro-life movement is not necessarily a movement limited only to abortion. | |
| Though abortion is the central fight, it's the most important fight, but there is a pro-life ethic That extends beyond abortion. | |
| The point is that life is sacred and valuable. | |
| That's our message as pro-lifers. | |
| That's what we're saying. | |
| Life is sacred and valuable. | |
| Which life? | |
| Any life. | |
| All life. | |
| All human life is sacred and valuable. | |
| And it's never okay to kill a human being. | |
| It's never okay to kill an innocent human being. | |
| Never okay. | |
| That's our principle. | |
| That's the banner that we wave, right? | |
| The problem is that the left is trying to, it's not even that they're just trying to expand what pro-life means, it's that they're trying to misapply That ethic to misappropriate it and claim that, for instance, if you oppose illegal immigration, then you're doing something that is in opposition to the pro-life ethic. | |
| But that, of course, is absurd. | |
| It's absurd for many reasons. | |
| First of all, nobody is advocating killing immigrants. | |
| No one is saying we should murder them. | |
| So this is not a life or death thing. | |
| All we're saying is that if you want to come to this country, you should come legally. | |
| And in fact, if we can apply the pro-life ethic to the immigration debate at all, I think we apply it on the side of immigration enforcement. | |
| Because when you don't enforce the borders, and when you've got porous borders, then you've got, as President Trump has pointed out many times, you've got drug dealers coming across, human traffickers. | |
| Illegal immigration is Deadly to human beings. | |
| Many people have been killed, not just by illegal immigrants, but in the process of immigrating illegally. | |
| So it is about protecting law and order, and it's also about preserving human life. | |
| And some of these other issues they mentioned just, again, have nothing at all to do with the issue at all. | |
| It's just a separate issue entirely. | |
| Yeah, they'll throw in something. | |
| You mentioned transgenders. | |
| Well, I thought you're pro-life. | |
| Well, what does that have to do with... So, because I'm pro-life, that means I have to agree that a man can be a woman if he puts on a dress? | |
| It makes no sense whatsoever. | |
| So, yeah, that's the only thing I would add to that, is that it's not just expanding, but it is expanding. | |
| It is, in fact, taking the pro-life position and Sort of hijacking it for their own purposes. | |
| All right. | |
| This is from Wes. | |
| It says, Hey Matt. | |
| Firstly, thanks for being a rare and unbiased voice of reason. | |
| Your show keeps me sane in regards to current events. | |
| Quick question. | |
| The recent tragedy in Christchurch has seen the usual conspiracy theorists hard at work. | |
| This has been the case with most landmark events in recent history. | |
| I find it frustrating and genuinely generally disrespectful of the victims and their families. | |
| While I wouldn't consider myself a conspiracy theorist, I can often see the logic and how people might arrive at alternative conclusions given the evidence or lack thereof. | |
| I'd love to hear your thoughts on which recent events in fact tread uncomfortably close to conspiracy, i.e. | |
| Titanic vs. Olympic, jet fuel melting the World Trade Buildings, Benghazi cover-up, etc. | |
| Yeah, there are obviously people who look for conspiracies in every tragedy, every shooting, every mass casualty event, like you point out. | |
| Those people are fools. | |
| And as you say, they're disrespectful to the victims. | |
| I will just clarify that most of the time they have no logic on their side. | |
| I think you're being a little bit too generous to them. | |
| There is no logic to their position at all most of the time. | |
| They latch on to one or two talking points, one or two little holes that they think they find in the official narrative, which most of the time those holes can be explained if they were just willing to listen to the explanation, which they're not. | |
| And from there they build a mythology which is based entirely in their imagination. | |
| That said, conspiracies do sometimes happen. | |
| Benghazi, sure. | |
| I mean, that was a conspiracy in a certain sense. | |
| There were, you know, bad decisions, mistakes were made by the government that led to those people being killed at the consulate. | |
| The conspiracy, though, was afterwards, when certain members, high-ranking members of the government, got together and decided that their official narrative was going to be, we're going to blame this on a YouTube video. | |
| So, yeah, that was a conspiracy. | |
| It wasn't like a conspiracy that was cinematic in its scope or anything like that, but it was a conspiracy in the sense that they did conspire to blame this on something that it shouldn't have been blamed on. | |
| And yeah, I mean, we can imagine that they literally sat down and they met and they conspired and they said, what are we going to pin this on? | |
| Let's do the YouTube video. | |
| That was a conspiracy. | |
| The thing is, Conspiracies in real life oftentimes are not very complex, don't involve a lot of people. | |
| That's one of the problems with the extravagant conspiracy theories that the conspiracy theorists come up with, is that invariably they involve thousands of people across decades sometimes, like with the moon landing thing. | |
| And they're so complicated, and it would require so many people to be on the same page, and to keep the secret, and to not talk about it, and to be very competent in the way that they execute it. | |
| And that's not the way it works, especially in government, where you've got some of the most incompetent people on the planet in government, and they're simply not capable of something like that. | |
| Um, so the Benghazi conspiracy was, was, we know that it was real and it looked real because it was very incompetent, very clumsy. | |
| It involved, you know, relatively small number of people. | |
| And, um, at the end of the day, it was easy to detect. | |
| So I think that's how you can tell the real, um, so-called conspiracies. | |
| All right. | |
| I think we'll leave it there. | |
| And, uh, we'll reconvene tomorrow. | |
| Have a great day. | |
| Godspeed. | |
| Amherst College released an Orwellian Common Language Guide to police students' speech on campus. | |
| We'll examine the most perverse definitions and how the left became Alice in Wonderland. | |
| Plus the mailbag. |