Ep. 281 - After 50 Years, Democrats Have Decided That Joe Biden Is Racist
The Democrats have decided that Joe Biden is racist. If that’s true, why are they just noticing? Also, I want to talk about the danger of misleading headlines and how we can guard ourselves against it. And are we putting teachers in an impossible situation by sending them legions of poorly parented, out of control, neglected kids? Yes, it seems so. Date: 06-21-2019
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today on The Matt Walsh Show, the Democrats have decided that Joe Biden is racist.
Now, if this is true, which I don't think it is, but if it is, why are they just now noticing it after all these years?
Also, I want to talk about the danger of misleading headlines and how we can guard ourselves against them.
And finally, are we putting teachers in an impossible situation by sending them legions of poorly-parented, out-of-control kids to educate?
I would say, yes, we are.
We'll talk about that today, also on The Matt Walsh Show.
All right, so I think Joe Biden is the Democrats' best chance of winning in 2020, which is not exactly brilliant political analysis on my part.
It's what most people think.
But except that the Democrats are in the process of chewing him up right now and spitting him out, they are eating their best candidate alive right now.
We're going to talk about that in a second, but before we get into that, I want to give you a word from our friends over at Duke Cannon.
Now, Duke Cannon is great because it's pretty much the manliest possible name for a company that you can imagine.
The only thing manlier would be maybe something like Rifle Whiskey Bacon, which actually would just be a great name.
Flavor of whiskey, now that I think about it.
But anyway, speaking of manliness and rifles, actually Duke Cannon's superior quality grooming goods for hardworking men are tested by soldiers.
So Duke Cannon partners with active duty military and they develop these ideas and they review products.
And anything that doesn't meet the standards and expectations of our soldiers then just isn't going to happen.
It's thrown on the thrown on the cutting room floor.
Duke Cannon sells basically everything you need, nothing you don't.
My favorite Duke Cannon product personally is the beard wash and also the beard balm,
which you always got to carry your beard balm around with you.
If you're a beardsman like I am, you got to have your balm.
Smells like arm wrestling and lumberjacks.
It's just, it's a wonderful product.
Your beard is a precious thing and so you need to take care of it.
They also have shaving cream if you're into that kind of thing.
They have deodorant.
They have cologne.
I wore the cologne the other day and I went to the store and I was walking by a guy and the guy stops for a minute and goes, what's that smell?
It smells like America.
And I said, you're damn right.
It's a real conversation, folks.
That really happened.
Visit Duke Cannon right now, if you want to smell like lumberjacks and America, and get 15% off your first order with the promo code WALSH.
It's 15% off the first order.
Promo code WALSH at dukecannon.com.
Free shipping on orders over $35.
dukecannon.com.
Go there now.
Okay.
So the media is...
Is now discovering that Joe Biden is racist, allegedly, supposedly.
A discovery that seems sort of odd, given the timing.
You know, the guy has been in politics for, I think it's, I think it's about 673 years, I think is the exact, he's been in politics since, you know, way into the Middle Ages.
And none of this stuff came up for all those centuries.
Nobody brought up anything about Joe Biden being racist.
But now that he's threatening to take the nomination away from more liberal candidates like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, whoever, now it's all coming to light.
Kind of interesting, right?
Just a coincidence, I'm sure, right?
It's not like the media is acting as an oppo team for the far left.
For far-left Democratic candidates.
I mean, of course they would never do that.
There's no possible way.
So they've been digging up supposedly racist dirt on Joe Biden.
And you've heard about a lot of it already, I'm sure.
Here's the latest.
The headlines yesterday.
Well, here's just one headline in Mediaite.
Headline said, Joe Biden once referred to Jesse Jackson as that boy in unearthed report.
He called Jesse Jackson that boy.
That sounds bad, right?
Obviously, for a white man to call a black man boy, especially saying that boy, that boy over there, Jesse Jackson, that sounds really racist and terrible, right?
But the headline is total BS, of course.
It's true that he did call Jesse Jackson that boy, but if you listen to the context, here is the context.
Um, reading from the article says Jackson Jackson is one of the brightest guys around, Biden said in remarks made after a speech.
That boy ain't no dummy, just like Gary Hart.
That boy ain't no dummy either.
Gary Hart, by the way, is white.
So he referred to a white guy as that boy in the very same sentence that he referred to a black guy as that boy, which means that it's not racist.
There's nothing racial going on here.
That boy is—it's a colloquialism.
It's like if you referred to a woman and he said, you know, you go, girl, or something to a woman.
And then, of course, it would be ridiculous for the woman to say, oh, did you just call me a girl?
I'm not a girl.
I'm a grown woman.
No, it's an expression.
It's meant to be a supportive, kind of funny, just colloquial expression.
I think we all understand that.
So in that context, oh, that boy ain't no dummy, I'll tell you that.
Not racist.
But the media knows that, but they're going with it anyway because they're trying to destroy Joe Biden.
Plenty of conservatives as well, you know, kind of a The enemy of my enemy sort of thing going on.
So conservatives usually complain about fake news and media bias and misleading headlines and everything.
But a lot of conservatives are spreading this stuff too and going along with it saying, oh, look at this, Joe Biden called Jesse Jackson, boy, that's so racist.
Now, they all know better, of course.
They know that it's bogus, but they're doing it anyway.
And that's why I hate politics.
I hate the bad faith arguing.
Everybody argues in bad faith.
And I get it, okay?
Strategically, I understand.
I'm not stupid.
I get why conservatives are pretending to think that Joe Biden is racist.
He's not racist.
He's a lot of things, many of them not good.
There's no reason to think that he's actually racist.
And if you're a conservative, especially, you know that he's not racist.
You never were saying that about him before.
You don't actually think he's racist.
You're just saying that now because he's probably the biggest threat to President Trump.
And so you figure, well, we can get rid of him in the primaries.
We don't have to worry about him in the general election.
Strategically, I get it.
So that's why you're going up to the liberals and saying, hey, you know, Joe Biden over there, he's kind of a racist, isn't he?
I don't know.
That guy over there seems kind of racist.
I mean, it's not my problem.
I'm just letting you guys know.
You might want to do something about Uncle Racist over there.
I understand strategically, but I... Personally, I can't... I just... I can't get myself to the point where integrity means nothing to me.
And I don't mean... I'm not putting myself on a pedestal.
This isn't a holier-than-thou thing.
I just...
I can't get there.
I think a lot of conservatives have gotten there, where ends justify the means, honesty means nothing, the truth means nothing, we're just trying to win.
But you see, the problem with that is, well, number one, it's morally wrong, so I mean, that should matter.
It should matter to conservatives, when something is morally wrong.
But number two, strategically, it's actually very stupid.
Because the whole thing we're trying to fight against in our culture is this morally relativistic, truth-doesn't-matter, ends-justify-the-means mentality.
That's the philosophy, the worldview, that the left is trying to establish.
And it's what we're trying to fight against.
So if we become that also, if we adopt that also, then we lose.
They win.
Even if we get a Republican in there, if we have adopted their worldview, if we have become essentially leftist ourselves, then there's nothing but leftists all around.
Leftist to the right of me, leftist to the left of me.
And they win.
They have won.
It doesn't matter at that point if you get a Republican in there.
If they have completely won the culture because we've given up, And thrown in the towel and said, yeah, we might as well just, yeah, sure, whatever.
We'll just go along with you.
And who cares?
It doesn't matter.
Don't you see that?
That's the point that some conservatives have been trying to make for a long time now.
And what's frustrating for us, because it seems so obvious, But there is a school of thought among some conservatives that the only thing that matters is winning, and so forget about truth, forget about honesty, forget about all that.
It doesn't matter.
The left doesn't play by those rules.
Why should we?
Well, no, those of us on the other side of that fence, it's not like we're squeamish or something, like we're afraid to mix it up and fight for our cause.
I think you know that about me by now.
I'm not afraid to say anything.
I'll have these arguments.
I'm not squeamish about any of this stuff.
I'm just saying, in my mind, this is exactly what we're opposing.
If we become what we oppose, then there's no point anymore.
My mission is not to get Republicans elected.
That's not what I'm all about.
All right.
Also, of course, the problem is that when you take people out of context and you try to paint them as racist, even though you know better, you can't really act outraged and offended when the same is done to your side.
I mean, you can, but why would anyone take you seriously?
And that's why nothing matters anymore.
Nothing gets done.
No conversation goes anywhere.
Arguments lead to nothing.
Neither side has any credibility on anything anymore.
And that's the problem.
We've all just punted our integrity a hundred miles away.
We're pretending to be offended by the exact sorts of things that we do and say ourselves.
So we play the game and accuse the other side of being the only one that plays it when we know that's not true.
And everyone knows that everyone else is full of it.
We're all looking at each other, knowing that the person across the table is full of it, and they know that we're full of it, and so it doesn't matter.
I say this, by the way, as someone who strongly dislikes Joe Biden.
I think that he'd be a terrible president.
I think that he's a bad politician.
I don't like him as a person.
I think he's a coward, among other things.
I mean, this is the guy that abandoned—for 50 years, he held a position against taxpayer funding for abortion, and now he's become a radical feminist pro-abortion militant just because he's trying to appease his base.
That's cowardly.
And so I have no respect for that.
But racist?
There's no evidence of that.
Just because I don't like him and I oppose him, that doesn't mean that every insult and every accusation lobbed against him is automatically true.
There's no evidence that he's racist.
Oh, he said that he worked with segregationists.
So what?
It wasn't, he didn't, it clearly was not meant in a, he wasn't saying, oh yeah, you know, I, because I agreed with segregation.
You think he'd be coming out saying he agrees with segregation?
Even if that was true, why in the world would he say it?
That wasn't the point he was making.
In fact, he was insulting Republicans.
The way that I read it is that he was saying, yeah, you know, we got to work with Republicans now.
And hey, I don't like it, but I can do it.
I mean, I had to work with segregationists back in the day, which, yeah, if you were in Congress in the early 70s, you had to work with segregationists.
That doesn't mean that you're racist.
It just means that you're old.
And so he was really smearing Republicans in a dishonest way himself, and we should oppose that, but we shouldn't oppose it by pretending that we think that what he said was racist and he was really coming out in favor of segregation or something, when we know that isn't true.
So much of the political discourse, you know, have you ever been talking to somebody who's lying to you?
And you know that they're lying to you, and they know that you know that they're lying, but they're continuing the lie, and you're just looking them in the eyes, and you both know what the score is?
So, parents go through this a lot, actually.
If you're a parent, it happens a lot with kids, and they think they're pulling something over on you, but then you've got them caught, and then they start to realize that, oh, they're caught, but they stick with the story, and, you know, so that happens.
I think that our political discourse is a lot like that, where we're both just lying and pretending to think things we don't think, and pretending to be offended by things we aren't really offended by.
Spewing talking points that we don't really believe.
And we're saying this to each other and looking each other in the eyes, but we both know that the other person is full of it.
And they don't really mean it.
And so there's this mutual understanding, unspoken, that we're both just really lying.
And I don't know, at a certain point you just get tired of it.
You say, I don't know, why am I even going to have this conversation?
It's pointless.
It's all a game.
It doesn't mean anything.
Speaking of dishonesty, here's a headline from The Hill.
The headline is, Laura Ingram dismisses reparations for slave descendants.
We won, you lost.
So the headline is, that's quoting her, that she said, we won, you lost.
So based on the headline, it sounds like, well, it sounds pretty bad.
It sounds like Laura Ingram is referring to slavery and saying, we won, you lost.
She's referring to slave descendants.
She's saying, sorry, too bad, we won, you lost.
Sorry about the slavery.
That's what they're making it sound like she said, which is incredibly racist.
You think, did this woman lose her mind?
Again, even if she is that racist, why would she say that publicly?
So that's what you think if you just read the headline, that this is an incredibly racist woman who said something monstrous.
But that, of course, is not actually what happened.
If you read the article, you discover that this headline is flatly dishonest and lying.
That is not what she said.
Let's read the article.
that the hill provides.
Says Fox News' Laura Ingram dismissed the idea of reparations for the descendants of slaves on her podcast Thursday as do-overs.
Ingram played a clip Thursday of author Ta-Nehisi Coates blasting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Ingram's guest, Kentucky State Professor Wilford Riley, said reparations would open the door to Native Americans calling for the same.
Riley said, I mean obviously both white and black soldiers frankly took this country from the Indians, the first people.
Ingram responded, people would argue that the whole world, and I would, the whole world has
been reshaped by people taking other people's land. It's called conquest. There was an argument
sometime, I think it was in the 1980s, there was a quote describing world politics, we won,
you lost, that's that. And that's just the way it is, she added. Okay, so the we won, you lost,
was not in reference to slavery.
It was not in reference to reparations.
It was not in reference to the slave descendants.
It was in reference to conquest.
And she was paraphrasing a quote in reference to conquest.
And basically saying, this was the way of the world for thousands of years.
And she's right about that.
That was the way of the world, conquest.
Everyone did it.
Doesn't make it right.
But there's a point I've made before, that for us to sit back and bemoan Europeans and whites stealing land and so on, okay, fine, you can do that, but then you have to also say the same about literally everybody, every other culture and country and society on the planet for thousands of years.
That's what everybody did.
It's the way humanity worked.
It's the way that societies grew through war and conquest.
Doesn't make it good, doesn't make it okay, but you have to look at it in a historical context.
That's what she's saying.
She is not talking about slavery and saying, you lost.
So this headline is not just misleading, it's libelous.
Because the people who write the headlines They know, okay, they know that most people are not going to bother to actually read the article, right?
Most people aren't going to bother to read the article.
What most people do is they just, uh, they just, they, they read the headline and, uh, they think and they react to it and they say, oh, that's terrible.
How could Laura Ingraham say it?
And then, and then rather than moving on, they actually still share, even though they haven't read it, they share it.
Not taking any time to actually investigate it for themselves, they'll still share it and then pass on the misleading information.
And of course the media knows that that's the way that it works.
And so they know that they can put whatever they want into a headline, and they can put it in the headline and then admit in the article, essentially, that they were lying in the headline, and it doesn't matter.
Because 90% of people will not actually read the article.
All right, which is why I would strongly recommend that if you're going to, it's a really basic thing, but if you're going to share something on social media, maybe take the time to read it.
Just take a couple of minutes.
It probably isn't very long.
They don't write long articles these days because they know that we all have the attention spans of squirrels.
Take a couple of minutes and read it if you're going to share it.
If you're going to take the time to share it, at least know what it is you're sharing.
We always complain about politicians who pass bills without reading it.
They're going to pass it without knowing what's in it.
Well, we do the same thing.
We share news articles and headlines and we spread rumors and lies and stuff, oftentimes unknowingly, because we're sharing stuff without actually knowing what it is we're sharing, which is kind of mind-boggling.
And I don't really get it.
What's the motivation?
I mean, if you're so interested in it that you feel like you have to Let your 500 Facebook friends know about it.
If it's that interesting to you, then why wouldn't you read it?
And you can't claim, you can't say, I don't have time to read it, I'm so busy.
You're not busy, that's why you're on Facebook.
Busy people aren't on Facebook sharing news articles.
If you're doing that, it means you're not busy.
In fact, we're all a lot less busy than we pretend.
We always try to use busyness as a justification for our laziness.
Meanwhile, we're all day.
We're watching TV, watching Netflix.
We're so busy, yet Stranger Things season three is gonna come out on July 4th, and we're all gonna watch the whole season in two days.
But we're so busy.
I'm so busy, oh my gosh, I have no time for anything.
I'm such a busy person.
I don't sleep, I don't eat, I'm so busy.
But, oh yeah, I watched literally 10 hours of TV in the last two days.
But I'm so busy, right?
All right, let's see what else here.
I wanted to play this for you quickly.
This is a video I'm not sure where it's from exactly, speaking of sharing things without knowing what's in them.
Well, that's because in this case, it doesn't actually matter.
This is obviously from some preschool or kindergarten graduation ceremony.
And this was shared on Twitter by a verified Twitter user named Antiana.
It's what she goes by on Twitter, anyway, who's a news editor for The Root, and she shared this video while apparently laughing hysterically.
She shared it, and the caption that accompanied the video was, I cannot stop laughing.
So that was her caption.
She thinks it's hilarious.
I'm not so sure that it is very funny.
You tell me what you think.
Take care of this.
Good afternoon, boys and girls!
Shut the f*** up!
Hey!
Not nice!
No, thank you.
No, thank you.
You need to leave?
No!
Okay.
Oh, he's out.
Yeah, he's out.
So the young boy looks to be, uh, I don't know, four, maybe, maybe five years old.
And, uh, he shouts, shut the F up to his teacher and then calls her the B word.
And as I said, some people find this funny.
Um, it is not, it's not even a little bit funny.
There's nothing funny about it.
This, and this is something that.
I see videos like that and it takes me back, not nostalgically, it takes me back to memories I don't like to recall of my experience in public school.
And I used to see this thing all the time in public school.
And I went to a school that was supposedly in the top 5% in the country academically, I believe, yet this, for 13 years, K through 12, This kind of thing was common, where you would have kids that would cuss out teachers, shut the F up, call them the B word, verbally assault them, sometimes physically assault them.
It's common.
It was common for me, again, in a supposedly good high school.
You can only imagine what goes on in schools that are, let's say, in the bottom 5% academically.
And this is what teachers deal with.
And they deal with it.
Now, I watched that video, and my anger that I feel is, number one, directed at the people who think it's funny.
Number two, my anger is not directed at the kid at all.
If that kid was 17 years old, then yeah, I'd have anger at the kid, because you're old enough at that point where you should know better, even if you weren't raised to know better.
At a certain point, you've got to start figuring it out as an almost adult.
But as a 4 or 5 year old kid, you only know what you've been told by the adults around you.
You do and say what you see and hear them doing and saying so that you're you're you are a walking reflection of what you see the adults and other people around you doing that's that's the case for any for any four or five year old so if they're acting with if they're acting horrifically like that then it is 100 percent a reflection of how they're raised so that kid
Um, now my, so I have a, I have five.
Well, now they just turned six.
I've got six year old kids.
I've had, we've got a, an almost three year old.
They, they have their moments, believe me, of acting out and being disrespectful.
And we, we work with them about that.
We, we discipline them.
Um, no kid is perfect.
I am a hundred percent certain that my kids would never ever talk to an adult that way.
They wouldn't even know how to talk to an adult that way.
If they ever did talk to an adult that way, the consequences would be severe.
But they never would.
I'm 100% certain they never would.
Because they just don't have that in them.
Because we don't treat them that way, and we don't treat each other that way.
They don't see it.
They're not around it.
They wouldn't know to act that way.
So if a kid is acting like that, it's because that's how he sees the adults in his house acting, and that's probably how they act towards him.
If a kid is saying, shut the F up to an adult, I guarantee you that he has been told shut the F up by adults many times in his life.
And that's why he's acting that way.
So if you laugh at that, in other words, this is a victim Of neglect and abuse.
100%.
Laughing at that is no different than if that kid came in with welts and bruises all over his face and you laughed.
Because that is, welts and bruises on the face, that's a sign of abuse.
A kid acting like that is a sign of abuse.
You are laughing at a sign of abuse.
You are laughing at this kid's abuse.
And I can't imagine.
I just can't.
This is what teachers have to deal with.
I am not shy about criticizing the public school system.
I'm not shy about criticizing teachers when they deserve it.
And oftentimes they do.
But we also have to acknowledge that teachers are put in an impossible situation when they have kids like that.
These are broken children who have been broken by their home environments, and now they're coming in and there's no control.
What do you do with a kid like that?
He's not your kid.
You only see him for a few hours a day.
What do you do with him?
You can't control him.
At the age of five, he does not care.
He has absolutely no respect for authority.
At all.
Doesn't care.
What do you do as a teacher?
There's nothing you can do.
And this is the situation that the teachers are being put in because of horrible parents.
There are a lot of, I know this is not a newsflash to you, but there are a lot of really, really, really bad parents out there.
And they're sending their kids to public school, hoping that the schools will do the parenting for them.
And, but schools can't do that.
School is just a building where you send your kid for a few hours a day.
It's a system.
It's a bureaucracy, essentially.
It cannot be a parent.
And so if you're not going to do it, if you're not going to do the job of parenting your kid, then that's a job that just isn't getting done.
Because no one else can do it, unless you put them up for adoption.
There's not anyone else who can step in and do it.
It's either you or nobody.
All right, very sad, very sad video.
So you gotta pray for that kid.
I need something to lighten the mood.
How about this?
Representative Jerry Nadler, who's a Democrat, was questioning Hope Hicks in a Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, and he kept calling Hope Hicks Miss Lewandowski, referring to Corey Lewandowski.
Now, some people think that it was disrespectful and sexist.
He was doing it on purpose, disrespecting her by calling her Miss Lewandowski.
Something that he's just losing his mind and he has no idea what's going on.
I tend to maybe side with the latter because of this.
Look at this picture here.
So, look, I don't mean to laugh.
I just, I can't.
That's the most amazing picture I've ever seen.
This is Jerry Nadler.
I have never seen that much pants on one person.
That's the most pants I've ever seen on a person.
Ever.
And where do you even buy pants like that?
I don't know.
Where do you go?
If I wanted to get those pants, do I go to the maternity section?
I guess.
I've just never seen anything like it.
I'm sorry to laugh.
That's amazing.
These guys have pants up to his neck.
How is that even?
Now, I put this on Twitter and I had some people Uh, lecturing me, saying that I'm, you know, it's mean and I'm mocking him and I'm mocking the elderly.
First of all, it's not about him being elderly.
I, you know, I know that older people tend to wear their pants up higher.
Nothing wrong with that.
And, uh, but, but look, I've never, I've seen a lot of old people.
I've never seen pants like that.
I've never seen that.
That looks physically impossible and I'm not mocking him.
It's, I, but it's, it's, it's a remarkable picture that I just have to share.
Yes, I'm making fun of him a little bit, but it is hilarious.
You have to admit.
Really, though, my point is compassion.
Yes, that's what it is.
I'm being compassionate.
What I'm trying to say is, yeah, he called Hope Hicks Miss Lewandowski three times.
It seems like he's being disrespectful.
But then think about those pants.
If a person really knows what's going on, do they wear pants like that?
Probably not.
So have some patience with him, is all I'm trying to say.
Um, I think he made, he made pants out of a, it's like a, it's like you took a blimp or something and cut up a blimp and made pants out of it.
I, I can't, it's incredible.
All right, let's move on to, to emails.
Um, Matt Walshow at gmail.com.
Matt Walshow at gmail.com.
And I was, I keep thinking about the pants.
It's hilarious.
Sorry.
This is from Thomas.
says, Hi Matt, I was talking to a friend a while ago when we somehow got on the topic of music.
She and I have relatively the same taste in music, classic rock, except for one thing,
she actually enjoys the band Nickelback. I absolutely cannot wrap my mind around how
somebody could like a band that makes multiple songs that sound so alike and aren't even that good.
I came to you to settle this debate that has lasted for months.
So, with the world and leftists destroying knowledge, please tell me, is Nickelback a good band?
Well, of course, Thomas, you're right.
You are correct.
They are not a good band.
They're a terrible band.
They're very bad.
However, I will say that I think they're not nearly as bad As they're made out to be.
And I don't mean that as—they're bad, don't get me wrong.
I just mean that they have been the punching bag of the music scene for the last ten years.
And they endorse so much ridicule, I almost have to respect them.
Do they still make music?
Are there still Nickelback songs out there?
If they do, I really respect that.
They've been a punching bag and a punchline for ten years, and they're still cracking, they're still making music, they're still going at it.
So I respect that.
I just think they're a very bad band.
They make bad music.
But there are a lot of bands and musical acts that are worse than them.
I'd put them in the bottom 40%.
So there are a whole bunch.
Of bands that are worse, that don't endure anywhere close to the same amount of ridicule, and that to me is simply unfair.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, let's spread our ridicule around.
Spread the ridicule around.
Be more egalitarian.
We need to be equal in our dispensing of ridicule to bad bands, and not foist it all on Nickelback.
Alright, let's see what else we got here.
This is from Nick says, Hey, hello, Mr. Walsh.
I've recently become a listener and huge fan of your show.
This is in spite of the fact that I'm blind, thus I cannot even cast my eyes upon your stunning appearance and your famed beard.
My dad is an atheist and I have been a Christian for about four years.
We were discussing an argument that Objective morality could not exist without the existence of God.
He thinks that the ideas of right and wrong could have come about through evolution and what was most beneficial to the survival of the human species.
As evidence, he cited the most intelligent monkey-slash-ape species, who seem to live in a fairly ordered social structure, yet do not have the rational capacities that humans do.
He thinks they still have some sense that killing, stealing, etc.
is wrong.
What do you think about the idea that morality could come about through evolution alone?
Why would we evolve to do what's best for the species as a whole rather than looking out for ourselves only in a Hobbesian state of nature?
Any good authors you know of on the subject?
So I think there are a few problems, Nick, with the theory that morality evolved.
First of all, yes, your dad mentioned some apes who seem to have some rudimentary moral sense.
I'm not sure I agree with that.
I think we tend to anthropomorphize animals, and sometimes we'll see animals doing something or acting in a certain way.
And we'll kind of imbue human qualities into it where I think it's not really appropriate.
For instance, you'll see a picture of an animal kind of standing over a dead animal.
And we'll think, oh, isn't that so sweet?
He's weeping over the animal.
He's mourning the loss of his fellow fox or dog or whatever.
Maybe there's something like that going on.
Maybe not.
Maybe he's just about to eat the thing's body.
I mean, that's probably more what's happening there.
But in any case, what we certainly know is that no other species has the capacity to formulate the kind of sophisticated moral system that we have.
We are the only species with a sophisticated moral system.
We're the only species that's capable of real benevolence.
And also the only species capable of real cruelty.
And that's why, for all that your dad says about, well, look at apes and monkeys, well, I would ask your dad, does he think that if an ape kills another ape, we should put the ape in jail?
What about it when an ape has sex with another ape without getting consent first?
Should we put him in jail for rape?
Should we start trying animals?
I'm thinking your dad would say, no, that's ridiculous.
And why would he say no?
He would, I assume, say, well, no, you can't put a monkey or an ape in jail for murder.
They don't know what they're doing.
They don't have the same sense that we do.
They don't have the same awareness.
They don't have the same culpability.
Well, yes, exactly.
We're the only ones with that culpability.
But that's kind of weird from an evolutionary perspective.
Because if this kind of thing just evolves by chance, It would seem mathematically certain that other species would evolve it too, yet none have.
Millions of species on Earth were the only ones who evolved this rather peculiar ability to see right and wrong.
Or I guess to, from an evolutionary standpoint, if there's no God, to invent the concepts of right and wrong.
It seems odd that we're the only ones who did that.
Also, from a purely evolutionary standpoint, remember the only point of life is to reproduce and sustain the species.
And the idea behind evolution is that those qualities which help towards the propagation of the species and the survival of the species, those qualities are going to be passed on.
While qualities that interfere with propagation and survival will die away, and that's because, as the theory goes, if a certain member of a species has certain qualities due to whatever genetic mutations or whatever that cause
him to act in a way that's more advantageous for survival and propagation, well then he's
going to survive and he's going to reproduce.
Whereas those that lack that quality will die off quicker and then that sort of strand
will fade away while his strand will continue.
And then that's how you have evolution through natural selection.
And without a god, then that's all that's going on.
There's no guiding force.
There's no intelligent design.
There's nothing like that.
It's just pure blind evolution and genes kind of doing what they do on their own.
Well, if that's the case, then we have to ask, what about something like rape?
Rape propagates the species.
Rape has evolutionary advantages, and that's why with many species of animals, rape is the only way, basically, now we don't call it rape again because they don't have the culpability that we do, but for sake of argument, for a lot of species of animals, rape is the only way that they reproduce.
You'll see in a lot of species, the male dominates the female, There's no consent or anything, whether the female wants to or not, dominates the female and reproduces.
Yet, in our species, we have developed this idea that it's wrong.
Now, it seems to me that it shouldn't have worked that way, if it's all about evolution.
Genghis Khan has 16 million descendants today.
0.5% of the population is descended from this one guy.
8% of the guys and of the men in the Mongolia area are related to him.
Why?
Because he went around raping and pillaging.
He raped hundreds if not thousands of women.
He propagated the species more than probably anyone else on earth.
So we see, again, the evolutionary advantages of sexual domination.
He was able to spread his seed, as it were, across the entire world.
He has 16 million descendants.
Yet, we still, as a society, have developed this idea.
We believe, or I would say we haven't developed the idea, we recognize the truth that rape is wrong.
Every society, every culture condemns it, even though it still happens in every culture.
But how is that?
By the evolutionary model, the pro-rape folks, like Genghis Khan, should have passed on their pro-rape genes and created a whole human race full of pro-rape people.
After all, again, these are the people who had the easiest time propagating, reproducing.
They're passing on those genes.
And that's all you have is just material, right?
Genes, genetics, and so that's where everything stems from, even morality.
And so that's how evolution is supposed to work.
It seems to me by the evolutionary model, we should now live in a society, much like many animal societies, where rape is completely commonplace and normal and nobody thinks anything of it.
But that's not the way it goes.
Why?
I think it's because there's a higher truth.
There's a guiding principle.
There's a guiding light that we recognize and see and follow.
There is something above our savage, animal, instinctive nature.
Something above it, which we are reaching for, striving for, aspiring to.
And I would call that something God.
So that's how I would respond to that.
Let's see if there's anything else.
This is from Jake, says, hi Matt, I've only recently picked up on your show and I'm kicking
myself for not doing it sooner.
Hearing Bernie Sanders' views on a socialist United States has me deeply scared of what would happen if he somehow got voted into office.
To me, it's reminiscent of how in Batman Begins Liam Neeson wants to see Gotham fall just because it's too great.
I would like to hear your opinion on what would happen if Bernie were voted in and started to implement socialist policies.
Would there be a violent resistance or would people protest?
How would the left or right respond?
Would the free market somehow survive or would America be in shambles?
I tend to, Jake, I want to believe in the resiliency of the American idea.
Of democracy and free markets, but I tend to think that we would be in shambles or we would be very close to it if we had an actual straight up socialist president in office.
And I think the problem is, and this is what the socialists know.
And the people that support the entitlement state, the nanny state, which these are all socialist ideas, what they know is that, yeah, conceptually people will protest it, people don't like it.
When you look at it just as an abstract idea, there are a lot of problems and people don't like it.
But if you can shove it down their throats anyway, and if you can just get it in there, if you can establish it anyway, Then people will quickly become dependent on it.
And once they're dependent on it, they're not going to want you to take it away.
And we've found this time and again with entitlement systems, whether it's social security or welfare, food stamps, Obamacare.
Once, yeah, you have an argument about it, people don't like it, they protest.
Once it's in though, once you've started it, you've gotten people on it, they're hooked, And now you have them.
And you can breed an entire country of dependent people.
We're already basically there.
So I think that having a socialist president would kind of be, I hate using this expression, but would kind of be the nail in the coffin.
And so I'm very worried about that as well.
I wish I could give you a more positive, optimistic view, but that's it.