Today on the show: The Left now claims that the Attorney General committed obstruction of justice for Trump. The only problem is that the exact opposite is the case. Also, does the President's love for tweeting help or hurt his reelection chances? And schools in Virginia claim that there are thousands of transgender students enrolled. If that’s true, what does it tell us? Finally, the worst movie trailer in history has been released. We'll watch it together. Date: 05-01-2019
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I mean, there are so many words that are not in the Constitution.
I mean, seriously, like I said, the word parmesan is not in there.
We have spaghetti once a week.
In my family, and we have spaghetti night, you know, and I always use Parmesan.
Millions of Americans use Parmesan, yet this is not acknowledged in the Constitution, which is despicable.
Despicable, I say.
So, very good point.
Actually, I take it back.
Eric Swalwell's not a moron.
An excellent point, I think, that he made.
All right.
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All right.
Okay, speaking of tweeting, I did want to mention that the President of the United States tweeted like 65 times this morning.
Not hyperbole, he tweeted 65 times.
I mean, a number of those were retweets, but still.
He went on a tear because some people claim that firefighters are going to vote for Joe
Biden and Trump believes that firefighters are going to vote for him.
So he went through and retweeted about 50 different random people who say that, no,
actually firefighters like Donald Trump, not Joe Biden.
Now look, this is what I always say.
Okay.
I'm a broken record.
I'll say it again.
If you're a diehard Trump supporter, I think you need to try to see this through the lens
of someone who is not a diehard Trump supporter because most people aren't, which isn't a
I mean, most people are not diehard supporters of any particular politician.
Right?
The diehard supporters of any politician are always going to be in the minority.
No politician has ever had 51% of the population as diehard fans of theirs.
It doesn't happen.
So, what that means is there aren't enough diehard fans of Trump to get him elected again.
The diehard fans are not the ones who got him elected the first time.
It's because he attracted a lot of people who are kind of in the middle.
So you're going to need the non-diehards too, and the non-diehards are not nearly as excited about all the tweeting as you might be if you're a diehard.
In fact, the non-diehards get the impression that the president cares more about trolling on Twitter than he does about governing.
The non-diehards also believe that you, as a diehard, Would definitely criticize literally any other politician who spent all day tweeting, especially if it was like Barack Obama or someone like that.
So if Trump is going to win in 2020, and I hope he does, he's going to need to start operating in a way that does not just appeal to the diehard fans while repulsing everybody else.
He's going to need to broaden his appeal just a little bit.
I mean, that's my advice.
I know it won't be followed.
By the way, I looked it up right before I went on the air just to see what the polling says on this, and it turns out that I'm, what do you know, exactly right.
From Politico, it says nearly half of voters, 46% in a Politico slash Morning Consult poll, say that yes, Trump's Twitter use hurts his re-election campaign.
More than twice the number who say his direct-to-voters Twitter account is an asset.
7 in 10 voters say Trump uses Twitter too much, while 14% say he uses it the right amount.
1% say that he doesn't tweet enough, okay?
But again, a small minority.
Now, this does matter, okay?
I know you're going to say, it doesn't matter.
It does matter, because it's the kind of thing that helps to form a visceral impression of a person.
And the visceral impression matters a lot.
And the visceral impression that a lot of people have of Trump is negative.
That's just the fact.
Whether or not you like it doesn't matter.
It's a fact.
And I think when you encourage the president to do more of the thing that helps to generate that viscerally negative impression, you're encouraging him to lose, which isn't good.
All right.
Attorney General William Barr will testify today Before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
And this is great because it's been, you know, a couple of days since someone testified in front of a committee.
And I've really been jonesing for another fix.
I don't know about you.
I need to get these Senate committees.
I need to see more of them.
This is what I live for, right?
Don't we all?
But in the lead up to that testimony, I was being sarcastic.
I feel like I need to clarify these days.
In the lead up to that testimony, the Washington Post published a report claiming that Robert Mueller complained to Barr about Barr's summary of his report.
A summary that, as you remember, Barr released weeks before the full report was actually released.
Now, of course, the media and the left, they've gone crazy over this, claiming that, you know, Barr is in on it, Barr is a cover-up artist, Barr has to be impeached too now, Barr has to be arrested, he's obstructing justice, he's blah blah blah, he's a criminal, so on and so forth.
The headline on CNN says, William Barr is in deep trouble.
The Huffington Post said, uh, Barr spin too much for Mueller.
Then Joe Scarborough, uh, you can always count on him to have the most nuanced and thoughtful take on a subject.
He said, breaking the attorney general actively engaged in a coverup was called on it and continued to cover up the truth about Trump's obstruction of justice.
Now, the problem with all this is that it isn't True.
Which I know for the media, they don't really consider that to be a problem when they're reporting something, but I think it is.
Because the same report in the Washington Post report, that very same one, clarifies that Mueller did not think that Barr lied or mischaracterized or misrepresented anything.
So ironically, it's, you know, the media is mischaracterizing this by saying that Mueller claimed that he was mischaracterized.
Mueller, in fact, admitted that Barr did not say anything that was inaccurate.
He was upset, rather, by the media coverage.
He did take issue with the summary itself, but not in a way that he was accusing him of lying.
Here's, in part, what Mueller said.
He said, the summary letter the department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24th Did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office's work and conclusions.
There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation.
This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the department appointed the special counsel to ensure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.
He then requested that the full report be released and he suggested that, you know, he suggested a few redactions that should be made.
And then guess what?
The full report was released, and you can go and read it right now.
It's out there.
You can go read it.
The idea that this is a cover-up when the report is out there for anyone to read is, of course, ridiculous.
So the left is, once again, way, way, way, way overstating the case.
And they're hurting themselves in the process, because they could say, You know, they could just say, well, looks like Mueller, you know, would have preferred that the whole report was released.
He didn't like a few of the aspects of it.
He thought it was, you know, it didn't get the full context.
And that's true.
Okay, so you could just say that.
But that isn't a bombshell.
And everything has to be a bombshell these days.
Everything has to be huge breaking news!
Oh my God, we're all gonna die!
Right?
That's what everything has to be.
There are no boring news stories anymore.
I don't know if you've noticed that.
Nothing is allowed to be boring.
Everything has to be dramatic and catastrophic.
And I think we have to understand that about the media.
It's important to understand the media's motivations.
That it's not for them just about hating Trump.
I mean, they do hate Trump, obviously, but that's not all that this is about.
It's also, and I would say primarily, it's about news as entertainment.
It's about getting people to watch the news like they're watching House of Cards.
And it's, you know, they want people to follow along with the news like they're binging something on Netflix.
And that's why I'm not really at all convinced that these media people really do want Trump to lose in 2020.
In fact, I'm pretty convinced they don't, because he's been great for them.
They've got this whole fantasy narrative going about him, this whole storyline, and it's great for ratings.
They lose if he loses.
So I don't think they want him to be voted out.
Which is why it's probably not a coincidence that everything they're doing is only helping him.
When they try to make—they take something like this, they misrepresent it, they make it into a whole big bombshell story, embarrass themselves over and over and over again, it only makes Trump look better by comparison.
And it makes people arrive at the conclusion that, oh, okay, well, obviously, there's no smoke or fire here.
And then, if the media ever does get their hands on an actual scandal or evidence of actual malfeasance of some kind, it's gonna be the boy who cried wolf.
No one's gonna believe it.
Now, I'm not saying that they're conspiring to get him elected.
I just think that If the media really wanted to work hard to make sure that Trump didn't get re-elected, I think they'd be doing things a little bit differently.
But for them, it's all about ratings.
And Trump still is a bonanza for them for ratings.
I mean, just look at MSNBC's ratings in the Obama years compared to what it's been in the Trump years.
It's been great for them.
So it's their need for ratings combined with their hatred of Trump and all of that together
leads to this.
All right, this is interesting from CBN.
Reading from CBN right now, it says, four schools in Northern Virginia claim that there are, quote, thousands of students in Virginia public schools who identify as transgender, and they should be allowed to use whatever bathroom they choose.
The Washington Post reports that the Alexandra Arlington Falls Church in Fairfax County school boards filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of Gavin Grimm, a biological girl who sued her school board in Virginia in 2015 after being denied access to the boys' restroom.
Grimm claimed that the school violated Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.
And the case made it to the Supreme Court, but was returned to a lower court after the Trump administration abandoned the Obama-era rule on transgender students.
And then it goes on from there.
The thing that I'm latching onto here, the thing that jumps out at me, is it says thousands of transgenders.
Thousands.
Now, what do we do with a number like that?
What does that mean?
It seems to me that it must mean one of two things.
Either the number is completely bogus, which of course is possible, or it means that transgenderism is a fad and kids identify as gender fluid or transgender because that's what their friends are doing and that's what society encourages and it's the fashionable trendy thing.
Now it could really mean, you know, it could mean both of those things, but it has to mean one or one or both.
Because if transgenderism is a real thing, If it's naturally occurring, then there's no reason why there should be a spike in transgenderism, which happens to coincidentally coincide with media attention to transgenderism.
Like, if there was a rash of media coverage about people with red hair, if all of a sudden we were all talking about gingers all the time, then, you know what, you would not see a spike in red-haired people being born.
The percentage of red-haired people has, I would imagine, remained basically static throughout human history because it's not affected by society.
That's not the case with transgenderism.
In fact, there was a study done on this a couple of years ago.
The CNN report says, a team examined data from a 2016 survey of almost 81,000 Minnesota students in the 9th and 11th grades.
Nearly 2,200 of those students, about 2.7%, answered yes to the question, do you consider yourself transgender, genderqueer, genderfluid, or unsure of your gender identification?
That's a big jump from a UCLA study, which was published in January 2017, and estimated that 0.7% of American teens aged 13 to 17 identify as transgender.
That study was based on government data.
on adults collected by 27 U.S.
states in 2014 to 2015.
So, according to that, the number of gender-fluid teens has nearly tripled in a couple of years.
Tripled?
I mean, why is that?
Again, if this is a naturally occurring thing, If you can actually be transgender because of, you know, your physiology, because of how you were born, if you're born that way, well, then why would you happen to see this spike?
Of course, it doesn't make any sense.
And the reason why we see it is because it has become fashionable in the meantime.
And so kids are, and by the way, fashionable, Not just for the kids, but for parents too.
So you've got high school kids, impressionable high school kids, who are looking around and seeing that this is the new popular trendy thing.
And then you've got parents also who are seeing the same thing and they decide that, oh, we're going to raise our kid to be transgender.
That's what's happening here.
You know, the leftists like to laugh and say that, you know, when we criticize all of this Transgender hysteria.
They'll say, oh, what do you think?
We're trying to turn your kid into a transgender?
Well, yeah, actually, that is what I think.
That is basically what you're trying to do.
And that is what you have succeeded in doing for apparently thousands of kids.
All right.
The United Methodist Church is being protested in Nebraska because it affirmed biblical views on sexuality.
A group of teens now will not be taking part in the Omaha First United Methodist Church confirmation ritual because the church considers the homosexual act to be sinful and they reaffirmed that view recently. So in a letter this group of teenagers they
wrote in part, we are concerned that if we join at this time we will be
sending a message that we approve of this decision, the decision to affirm biblical sexual morality.
We want to be clear that while we love our congregation we believe the United Methodist policies
on LGBTQ plus clergy and same-sex marriage are immoral.
We are not standing just for ourselves, we are standing for every single member of the LGBTQ plus community who is hurting right now because we were raised in this church, we believe that if we all stand together as a whole, we can make a difference.
So you notice that, as usual, those who are advocating for LGBT inclusion or, you know, whatever, They don't bother making a theological argument.
Have you noticed that?
The argument is always based around their personal beliefs and convictions.
They always frame the argument as, oh, this is hateful, this is bigoted.
They don't bother trying to cite chapter and verse or to make any argument on a theological basis at all.
And that, of course, is a problem because the Bible does clearly condemn the homosexual act, whether you like it or not, repeatedly.
It does also define marriage as between a man and a woman.
It does so At the very beginning in Genesis, and then Jesus reaffirms and reasserts that definition in the Gospels.
Matthew 19, 4.
Go check it out for yourself.
Now, if you're going to say that there should be gay marriage in the church, and there should be gay clergy, and there should be gay acceptance, and all of that, well, you have to do something with those verses, because the verses are there.
The teachings are there.
And you have to address them.
You need to have some kind of answer for them, right?
You can't just pretend they don't exist.
I mean, if you're an atheist, then sure, you can wave them off and say, well, who cares?
But if you're retaining your Christian identity or trying to retain it, then that option is not available to you.
You can't wave it off.
You have to have some answer for it.
And the people in this camp, they have no answer.
They don't bother answering it.
Now, Uh, the most...
On the rare occasion that someone who's advocating for LGBT inclusion in the church and gay marriage from a Christian perspective, on the rare occasion that someone like that does try a theological argument, well, they don't make a positive theological argument, like saying, well, the Bible actually promotes homosexuality and gay marriage.
They don't do that because they know they can't.
You just can't make a case for it.
But instead, they'll try to look at individual verses that seem to condemn the homosexual act, and they'll say, well, no, that's not really about homosexual generally, that's about prostitution, or that's about, you know, any sex outside of marriage, or it's about paganism, and so on.
And there are a few verses in the Bible where you can maybe make that argument.
But you certainly can't do it with all the verses.
And what you definitely cannot qualify out of existence would be these very clear passages right at the beginning of the Old Testament and right in the Gospels that define marriage.
There's just no getting around that.
It's right there.
If you believe that God is omniscient, then you can't say, well, yeah, it says marriage between a man and a woman, but, you know, it doesn't say anything about gay marriage, and so maybe, what, God didn't know that this would be an issue, so He didn't think to mention it?
That, of course, makes no sense.
So, it seems to me that The only way to kind of diffuse those verses is to diffuse the entire Bible and say that, well, you know, it's not really the Word of God at all.
So we don't have to abide by it.
And as I said, as an atheist, you can do that.
But as a Christian, you can't.
So if you want to be a Christian, you have to accept that.
Whether you like it or not, it's right there.
All right, before we get to emails, I need to play this for you.
There's a There's a Sonic the Hedgehog movie coming out, apparently.
Coming to theaters soon, for some reason.
And the trailer was released, and it's maybe the worst trailer I've ever seen.
It might really be the worst movie trailer of all time.
It's so cataclysmically bad that I think you just have to see it if you haven't yet.
So watch this.
What the?
Gotta go fast.
I'm gonna get you.
Gotta go fast.
20 minutes ago, an energy surge knocked out power across the entire Pacific Northwest.
This needs someone who can figure out exactly what we're dealing with.
You're not suggesting... No, I think you're suggesting... We have no choice.
What the... Are you in charge here?
Yes, I am.
Nope!
Wrong!
I'm in charge!
Allow me to clarify.
In a sequentially ranked hierarchy based on level of critical importance, the disparity between us is too vast to quantify.
Agent Stone?
The doctor thinks you're basic.
Listen, pal.
I don't know if you realize who- I'm sorry, Major.
What was your name?
Benny?
Nobody cares!
SFPD!
Uh... Meow?
Oh, come on.
Okay, pal, I want answers.
Basically, it looks like I'm gonna have to save your planet.
Oh, is that all you got?
Okay, we'll just cut it off there.
I... You don't need to watch the entire... It goes on for another two minutes.
There are so many questions I have.
Like, for instance, why?
Why?
Why are we doing this?
What is it about Sonic the Hedgehog, I mean, what is it about Sonic, the video game Sonic, that made a screenwriter say, oh, well, that's a great story.
We need to mine that story for all we can.
Also, is there a man standing off set pointing a gun at Jim Carrey?
Or was a family member kidnapped or something, and the kidnapper demanded that he star in Sonic the Hedgehog or he'll never see his family member again?
There's got to be an explanation, because I don't understand.
I mean, Jim Carrey, yeah, he's fallen off recently, but he could still probably star in any movie he wanted to.
And he chooses Sonic the Hedgehog.
Although I guess, of course, Jim Carrey hasn't been in a good movie in like 20 years.
20 years ago, it seems that he decided, he pledged 20 years ago that he's only going to star in crap movies from then on out, and he has admirably remained loyal to that pledge.
We gotta give him credit for that, so.
Wow.
Sonic the Hedgehog, which, you know, it may be so bad that it's actually good.
There's a chance.
So it might be worth watching when it comes out.
All right, let's go to emails, mattwalshow at gmail.com, mattwalshow at gmail.com.
This one is from Matt, says, would you apply the same moral culpability argument, which I made yesterday on the show, backward as you do forward?
For example, biblical immodesty slash gluttony are immoral, but in today's society, these sins are generally considered less serious than they were in the past.
Would you consider gluttons or teases less morally culpable today than in the past?
Great thought exercise either way.
Keep up the good work.
Yeah, we were talking about the moral culpability yesterday on the show of people in the past for things like racism, even slavery, which were both totally accepted and taken for granted as facts of life for much of human history across the entire world.
And so I would argue that For our ancestors, they have less moral culpability for being racist than we do today.
So would that apply today as well?
Well, I would say it does.
I mean, the point is that every society has certain sins, certain moral foibles that are taken for granted, that are just a given.
And not seen as being immoral, even though they are.
It's not that they're not immoral because people don't see it as immoral.
It still is immoral, but people don't see it.
And so a person can accept that behavior and they can adopt that behavior more out of a sort of intellectual laziness than out of abject evil on their part.
They're just going with the flow, you know?
And that's not an excuse.
And it doesn't mitigate the guilt down to nothing, certainly.
There still is guilt.
But it does mitigate it to some extent, I would think.
I think the fact is this, and it's a sad fact, that there are few people at any given moment in history who really have the wherewithal and the insight and the wisdom Um, and, uh, the intelligence, moral intelligence to see beyond their own time and to see evil as evil.
Um, just because it is, even if everyone else accepts it, that it would seem is a relatively rare quality, which is why, I mean, it is a, a fascinating thing to think about that for thousands of years.
Basically, everyone in the world was racist.
And nobody thought not to be.
I mean, the idea of not being racist, which is not, it didn't come into anyone's head.
They just took it for granted.
It was like tribalism.
They saw people that looked different from them, that lived in different places, had a different culture.
And they said, yeah, those people are inferior to us.
Of course they are.
Now, nowadays, we can't even, most of us anyway, at least in the West, we can't even understand that, because we can't wrap our head around it, right?
Because we take it absolutely for granted that all people are equal in dignity and worth, and that the color of your skin has no bearing on your worth as a person.
We just take that for granted, as well we should.
But that is a very new thing.
In human history, it only recently became obvious that racism is bad.
Like, really recently.
Up until, you know, the last 60 or 70 years, it was not so obvious.
Which, I think, when we recognize that fact, it should cause us to stop and think, now wait a second, Okay, so this is a moral evil that everybody in the world took for granted for thousands of years.
I wonder what moral evils we're taking for granted today.
And then we can go and do an inventory of all the things that we take for granted and we think are normal and just re-evaluate them.
And think, is that actually okay?
I think that's a self-assessment that we all should perform.
Let's see, this is from Kaia, says, Matt, I'm listening to Monday's show as you discuss this controversy over Robert E. Lee.
I won't drone on and on about it, but I'm wondering if there's hope that people will ever stop being so stupid.
Why can't people see that we can call Lee one of the greatest generals and also discuss his downfalls of of morality.
Why is that so hard to understand?
Thank you for helping my sanity on a daily basis.
Kaya, I am plagued by this question myself.
Why are people so stupid?
It's a good question.
It's an important question.
It really is.
I mean, you could write volumes trying to dissect this question.
There's no easy answer for it.
There are many culprits.
I think there are many stupidifying forces at work.
And if I had to sum it up, I would say that people are getting stupid.
People are stupid and getting stupider.
And that is definitely happening.
Because I think our brains are atrophying from lack of use.
I think that's kind of what's happening.
Intellectual laziness leads to stupidity.
Intellectual laziness is not itself stupidity.
You can be intellectually lazy and also a genius.
Just like you could be physically lazy and also physically fit at the same time.
But the two conditions cannot coexist forever or probably won't.
Eventually the lack of activity will translate into obesity in the one case and idiocy in the other.
The problem is that we don't really have to think in modern culture.
Like you can get away with not thinking.
You can get away with Living your whole life, basically, on a day-to-day basis and not really thinking about anything.
Because there are so many things that can do your thinking for you.
You can always ask Siri or Alexa if you have any question.
You can Google whatever.
If you want to learn about something, you just Google it.
You can look at Wikipedia.
But you're not really learning.
You're just getting random bits of information and stocking them in your head so that you can spit them out whenever the subject comes out.
But you haven't actually learned anything.
You've just memorized a few key points.
That's not learning.
That's not thinking.
And as far as thinking about issues and controversies and politics and so on, well, there's a whole army of pundits, like me, who will happily think for you and tell you what to think.
And not because we ourselves are great thinkers, no.
We are part of a hive mind, a pundit class.
And we just say whatever our hive happens to be saying, we unthinkingly repeat talking points, and then you unthinkingly absorb them, and nobody is thinking about anything.
And if at night you ever feel, you know, if you're sitting there at night, and you're a little bored or something, and you feel, oh my gosh, a thought coming on, you know, you actually, you start to feel yourself thinking about something, Well, and you feel like you're teetering dangerously close to developing an original thought on a subject?
Well, then you can always turn on Netflix and binge for six hours until your brain is leaking out of your ears and you could put a stop to it that way.
You never really have to have a quiet moment of contemplation.
You never have to have silence or stillness in your life.
You never, will by necessity find yourself in an environment that is conducive to thinking.
And of course, we don't read anymore either.
We read memes and we read tweets and we read Wikipedia articles, but we don't read entire books.
And not reading books, but trying to be smart is like trying to get in shape, but never going for a jog.
It's just, it probably won't.
You could try it, but it probably won't work.
So we don't read, we stare at screens, we have all the answers spoon-fed to us, we have no silence, no contemplation, and then we turn into morons, I think.
Enormous morons.
It really, it's, you know, if you go and, we've been talking about the Civil War on
the show over the past few days.
So speaking of the Civil War, and as I have mentioned, I am interested in it.
I won't call myself a Civil War buff.
I'm not quite at that level.
I would say I'm an enthusiast, which that's the rung below before you get to buff.
And then from buff, you get to expert.
So I've got a while to go before I get to expert.
But anyway, I am interested in it.
And one thing that I find fascinating is All of these guys, you know, these generals and even the infantry soldiers, they didn't have phones back then or emails, so they would write letters back home to their wives and their mothers and fathers and everything.
And so if you read the letters that these guys would write, And these were, you know, I mean, the generals were most of them well-educated, but these weren't scholars we're talking about.
And certainly the, you know, just average soldier, many of them were not really educated at all.
But what strikes me when I read these letters are these really kind of average men.
Intellectually for their time very eloquent.
They just they very thoughtful very eloquent.
They would they would be they would be sharing these these really penetrating insights into the nature of war and battle and and they would just write it in a letter and ship it off to their send it off to their to their wife or whatever.
And so I think it gives you an idea of how deeply people used to think about things.
And how eloquent they were, kind of naturally.
And how good they were at using language and describing things.
And we can't do any of that anymore.
Like, if we want to describe our emotions these days, what do we do?
We use an emoji.
We use, like, a smiley face.
We have devolved back into cavemen writing hieroglyphics on the cave wall.
You know, if we want to say we're happy, instead of describing our happiness, like a man writing his letter back to his wife after a big battle, he would describe his elation in these eloquent terms.
But what we do is we just send a smiley face, which is basically saying, Me happy!
Smiley face!
Me happy!
Every time you send an emoji, that's what you're doing.
Me sad!
Tears!
Me sad!
That's how we communicate now.
And part of the problem is if you think about it, people that lived in the 19th century or the 17th century, the 15th century, there was a lot of quiet in their life.
They couldn't just fill every waking moment with noise because they didn't have TVs and the internet and all that.
So they would have many moments in their life of just quiet.
Like at night, what do you think an average person did in 1840 when it was 7 o'clock at night and they were back from work in the fields or whatever and dinner had been served?
What did they do?
There was a lot of just kind of like sitting around, they'd read a book, they'd talk, they, you know, and they just had that moment, those moments of reflection that we don't have anymore.
All right.
So that was a 20 minute answer.
You probably weren't expecting that.
Let's see.
I'll read one more.
Okay.
I had a short one, but now I can't find it now.
This is from Patrick.
I don't think I've done this one before.
It says, future supreme overlord and ruthless dictator of the world, I, your humble and future servant, have a question for you.
I listen to your show every day and notice you speak about the importance of religion.
I understand the importance of community and morals, but you don't need religion to have those things.
Did I answer this question?
I think I did.
This is professionalism, folks.
All right, we'll do this.
I didn't answer this one.
From Rebecca.
Hi, Matt, I really enjoy your show.
I want to say thank you for doing what you do.
I have a question for you.
On today's show, you talked about your stance on the death penalty and mentioned that you have questions about whether or not society should ask someone to put someone else to death.
I have to ask, isn't that exactly what we ask of our military every day?
Someone on death row has at least been convicted of a horrible crime against society, whereas someone fighting on the side of our enemy may never have committed any crime at all.
How is it acceptable to ask so many to take the lives of people who usually have not done them any harm, and yet give pause to the idea of someone being asked to end the life of a person who has been convicted of committing a horrible crime against society?
It is true that war does take its toll on those who are asked to fight it, but as the wife of a retired Green Beret, I can assure you that not all of our soldiers are returning home irreparably damaged.
I mention this only as a point that being asked to take the life of another person does not mean the destruction of one's spiritual, mental, and emotional well-being.
I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts on this.
Yeah, I talked, I think, last week about the death penalty.
I said I'm in favor of the death penalty, but The one hang-up I have, the one reservation is, and this is something that I don't hear people address often when it comes to this subject, I'm concerned about the psychological damage and spiritual damage that's done to the people who are tasked with carrying out the execution.
I think it, and maybe you could argue that that is a job That nobody is equipped to do or handle.
And thus, it's a job that society should not ask anyone to do.
And if we can't ask anyone to do that job, then that means that it's a job that can't be done, so we shouldn't be executing people.
I'm not entirely convinced by that argument myself.
Like I said, I'm in favor of the death penalty, but it is something that does trouble me.
So that's what Rebecca's responding to.
And you make a good point, Rebecca.
Certainly, war does have a profound impact on those who are tasked with fighting it.
But as you say, I don't think it's guaranteed to do irreparable damage.
And I don't think that it's the kind of job that society can't ask anyone to do.
Clearly, we need some people to do this job, just as we need people to deal with death and misery in other contexts, as policemen, or shock trauma doctors, or EMTs, or whatever else.
But I would argue that there's a fundamental difference between all of these jobs and the job of an executioner on death row.
The difference is, first of all, the aim of the job.
So doctors and EMTs and police officers, they are supposed to be preserving life.
In that capacity, they deal with death.
But they don't deal death.
They aren't dealers of death.
Well, abortionists are, but they don't count as doctors.
For the most part, they aren't.
Now, even in the military, and police officers also do sometimes have to shoot people, right?
And in the military, obviously, that involves in combat shooting people.
But, and the shooting is done with the intent of killing the enemy, obviously, but the overall point of combat is, or should be, to defend something.
So you're defending your country, you're defending freedom, you're defending the innocent in a just war.
Now, a lot of wars have been conducted that have nothing to do with defending anything, and those are bad wars, but in a just war, in a good war, the aim is to preserve life, and so that's what Soldiers are doing just like that's what police officers are doing.
Now, you could argue that the executioner in some roundabout way is defending society or preserving life, but it's a very roundabout way because at the end of the day, the person being strapped to the gurney is no longer a threat to anyone.
With the way that executions are done these days, he's probably been sitting in a cage for 15 or 20 years.
He hasn't been a threat to anyone for decades.
He is now basically a neutered dog who's just in a cage and being fed a few times a day, and that's what he is.
He is not, in that moment, a threat to anybody.
So the point of the execution is just to kill him, to get rid of him.
The executioner deals death in a way that seems much more direct and much less obscured and much less self-defensive than the soldier or the police officer or any other Similar job that you could name.
So it does, it does seem different to me.
It's, it's just not the same.
Uh, and I say this as someone who's never killed anybody.
I, you know, I've, I've never been an executioner.
I've never been a soldier, but it seems to me that there is a difference between shooting somebody often from a distance on a battlefield in the midst of combat, someone who is shooting at you as well.
Uh, there's a difference between that.
And taking an unarmed, neutered, caged person, strapping them to a gurney and injecting poison into their veins.
And so I think that probably the people who are doing that, the latter thing, I think they are going to be harmed by it psychologically in ways that Maybe these other people would not be.
And so that is, again, it doesn't convince me to be against the death penalty, but it is a consideration that I find troubling.
All right, we'll leave it there.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
Venezuela descends into further chaos as people starve and tanks crush protesters.
But socialists in the U.S., like Bernie Sanders and AOC, won't admit that Venezuela is their utopia.
We will examine that.
We'll talk about Bill Barr before the Senate, and we'll talk about how professors are trying to turn pedophilia into a normal activity.
