Ep. 291 - People Who've Never Used A Screwdriver Are Boycotting Home Depot
Today on the show, there is now a movement to boycott Home Depot because one of the founders gave some money to Trump. This boycott is even dumber than most, and I’ll explain why. Also, Bill Clinton gets caught up in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. And, some police officers were kicked out of a Starbucks because their presence was upsetting to a customer. Date: 07-09-2019
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, there is now a movement to boycott Home Depot because one of the founders gave some money to Donald Trump.
But this boycott is even dumber than most, and there are a lot of dumb boycotts.
I'll explain why.
Also, is Jeffrey Epstein about to take down Bill Clinton?
We know Epstein's probably going to jail for being a scumbag sex trafficker, allegedly.
There are a lot of powerful people that are getting mixed up into that.
It is Bill Clinton, one of them.
We'll talk about it.
And some police officers were kicked out of a Starbucks because their presence was upsetting to a customer.
This, of course, is completely insane.
We'll talk about that incident as well today on The Matt Walsh Show.
Okay, welcome to the show, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
I'm doing well, personally.
I'm doing very well, because I got the cast off my leg yesterday.
It's been on my leg after the Achilles surgery.
It'd been on for four weeks, a month, and it finally came off, and that was great.
The only problem is that my calf muscle, where the cast was, has been unused for a month,
and it's also gotten no sun, while the other calf muscle's gotten all the work, plus all
the sun.
So when the cast came off, it basically looks now like I have the legs of two different
people.
I got this shriveled, pale leg, and then the leg of a normal person.
So it looks like I went and stole two different people's legs.
Because I wouldn't steal two legs from one person.
That'd be kind of rude.
So I took a normal guy's leg, and then I also took the leg of an adolescent shut-in and stapled them together.
I basically, I look like a Ripley's Believe It or Not exhibit now.
And the only reason I tell you that is just very, I give you this graphic description of my legs only because there are some people who would try to claim that now that I don't have my cast anymore, I lose all my victim points.
And my point is, that's not true.
Because number one, I still can't walk.
So I'm still a cripple.
And number two, I have weird legs.
And so that's got to count for something.
That's that's social stigma.
Okay, do you know how often I go to a place, and there's a sign outside saying, normal legs only allowed?
No weird legs?
It happens all the time.
So it is a social stigma.
So I have, I have really now two sources of victimhood, instead of just the one that I had before.
Let's be very clear about that.
All right.
Let me A bunch we're going to talk about today that there's we're going to start with a movement.
Now, there's a movement to boycott something and I know that that's pretty surprising.
It's surprising that people are boycotting because it had been probably what almost 14 minutes since the last boycott.
I personally was starting to Jones.
I was jonesing for another boycott.
I'm sure you were too.
And so we have another one.
We'll talk about it.
This one is I mean, there are so many dumb boycotts, but this one is even stands out for its dumbness, even amidst all the other dumb ones.
And we'll talk about that in a second.
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Okay, so this shows just how absurd the boycott culture is now.
There, as I said, have been a lot of stupid boycotts.
This one is definitely up there on the stupid scale.
Bernie Marcus is the retired 90-year-old co-founder of Home Depot.
And he said it recently in an interview, That he's going to be donating part of his fortune to Donald Trump's re-election campaign.
Uh-oh.
Okay, we know what happens next.
He said this in the same interview where he also said he's going to be giving away up to 90% of his wealth, and the vast majority of it is going not to Donald Trump, but to help veterans with disabilities, to help autistic children, to help with medical research, to fund medical research.
That's where almost all of his wealth is going, is in those areas.
Plus, a little slice of it is going to political causes that he believes in.
Now, this news, of course, has had predictable results.
A boycott Home Depot hashtag started with a bunch of leftists swearing that they'll never shop there again.
Never mind the fact that most of these people have never used a screwdriver before, don't even know what a hammer looks like, and now they're boycotting a hardware store, which is a little bit like if I boycotted a yoga studio.
You know, it's not likely to have much financial impact on the target of my outrage.
And I think the same is here.
The same is the case here.
Not to mention, Marcus is retired.
He doesn't work for the company anymore.
And besides, the other retired co-founder, Arthur Blank, who owns the Atlanta Falcons, he donates mostly to Democratic causes, so at most it's a wash, right?
One billionaire gives to Democrats, the other gives to Republicans.
Who cares?
The boycott, if it had any effect, which it won't, but if it did, it would only hurt the current employees of the company who have nothing to do with what the 90-year-old billionaire co-founder is doing with his money.
That's the only people who could be hurt by this.
You're not going to hurt, if you succeeded in hurting anyone, you're not going to hurt the billionaire 90-year-old who's giving away all of his money anyway.
You're just going to hurt the average workers at these places.
Now, which is one of the reasons why, um, I mean, there are a lot of reasons why I have an issue with the boycott culture.
And one is that it's just so frivolous now.
It doesn't, it doesn't mean anything.
It's just, it's, it's a temporary, um, temper tantrum that people put on, but it amounts to nothing.
It doesn't mean anything.
I mean, it used to be that every few years there would be a boycott movement.
And now you have one every, you know, three times a day and it just doesn't amount to anything.
And oftentimes, of course, as I said, it's people who aren't even customers or patrons of the thing that they're boycotting.
That's why I think it's funny when you have, like with the Nike thing last week,
where Nike got rid of the American flag shoe.
And so this time conservatives were saying, oh, we're gonna boycott Nike.
Which if you don't wanna buy Nike products because of that, I understand.
But as I'm reading even the hashtag for that, there are a lot of conservatives saying,
oh, well, Nike's trash anyway.
Listing all the reasons they hate Nike.
Well, okay, well, that just means the part where you're saying you're gonna boycott,
that doesn't mean anything because you're saying you never were a customer
to begin with because you think their products are trash.
Which, fine.
But again, that just means that the boycott doesn't amount to anything.
The other problem is that so often with these boycotts, they're done in such a way that they're really only going to hurt the average employees who work at these places.
They're the main ones who are going to be affected.
The rich CEOs and the wealthy people, they're not going to feel much of a hit.
Now, especially with this, if these people, these boycotting leftists, had any principles, if they actually had authentic convictions, they would be applauding right now.
Because they would put the political donation issue to the side, and they would celebrate the fact that this billionaire is choosing to give almost all of his money to the poor and the disabled.
I mean, if your worldview is defined by something other than just hating Trump, you would applaud this.
Because if that's one of the things, people on the left, this is something they talk about all the time, income inequality, poverty, and those are serious.
I agree that poverty is something we should be focused on.
We should be trying to help the poor.
But here you have someone giving billions of dollars to the poor and to the disadvantaged.
But you're gonna throw all that to the side because, oh, he's also giving a little bit to Donald Trump.
It's just, uh, you reveal yourself to be a hypocrite with no principles.
All right, I have to, um...
Talk about this for a minute.
The Epstein thing.
Jeffrey Epstein is the billionaire financier.
Well, that's supposedly what he is, although it's sort of unclear how he made all his money.
Well, I guess it's becoming clear now how he made it.
Allegedly he's a financier, whatever that's supposed to mean.
A rich guy, a sex offender, alleged pedophile, alleged sex trafficker, now arrested on sex trafficking charges.
Epstein allegedly ran a giant sex trafficking ring where he would shuttle underage girls, children, between his various estates and houses and force them to have sex.
Offer them up to be raped, in other words.
By a bunch of his rich and powerful friends.
I do think, you know, the way that this is being reported by the media, the phrases being used most of the time would be, well, rich men having sex with underage girls.
Another way of putting that, probably a more accurate way of putting it, is these are men raping children.
Epstein is a criminal pervert, degenerate scumbag, and if this was a healthy society, he would be frog-marched to the scaffold and hung in public.
That's what should happen.
But this case is bigger than Epstein.
He has, as I said, a lot of rich and powerful friends, and one of them is Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton flew all around the world with Epstein, the alleged sex trafficker, but Clinton just put out a statement saying that he knows nothing about any of Epstein's crimes, disavowing and saying, oh, I had nothing to do with that.
The problem is, I'm trying to pull up the statement from Clinton here.
I guess it doesn't really matter.
The statement is, President Clinton knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or to those with which he has been recently charged in New York.
In 2002-2003, President Clinton took a total of four trips on Jeffrey Epstein's airplane.
One to Europe, one to Asia, two to Africa, which includes stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation.
Staff, supporters of the Foundation, and a Secret Service detail traveled on every leg of every trip.
He had one meeting with Epstein in his Harlem office in 2002, and around the same time he made one brief visit to Epstein's New York apartment with a staff member and a security detail.
He's not spoken to Epstein in well over a decade, and he's never been to Little St.
James Island, Epstein's ranch in New Mexico, or his residence in Florida.
Okay, so this statement He's saying, oh look, Bill Clinton had very little to do with Epstein.
He just flew to, what, four different continents with Epstein?
And he went to his apartment, and he flew all around the world, but he doesn't know anything about this.
Right.
If you have to put out a statement, Saying that you know nothing about the sex trafficking of your friend who you traveled around the world with.
The fact that you need to put out that statement is not a good sign.
The fact that Bill Clinton was the first person to put out a statement saying, oh, I don't know anything about this.
That's also not a good sign for Clinton.
And we should remember that Clinton is also an alleged rapist himself.
Credibly accused rapist.
Very credibly accused, in my opinion.
So you don't need to be a detective to start putting these pieces together.
And I think this is why the story about Epstein is probably going to fall out of the headlines very quickly.
Epstein almost certainly has dirt on a lot of powerful people, many of them Democrats.
Republicans, too, no doubt.
But the media won't be able to focus this just on Republicans as much as they might like to, and they're already trying.
Like, you're hearing a lot in the media about the comments that Donald Trump has made about Jeffrey Epstein in the past.
Back in 2002, Donald Trump said that — I don't have the exact quote in front of me — Trump said that Epstein's a good guy and a good friend and he loves beautiful women, many of them on the younger side.
Now, that's not good to have that quote out there.
It doesn't look good.
When this is allegedly, apparently, a sex trafficker of underage girls, and you're on record saying, oh, he's a great guy, yeah, loves girls on the younger side.
It's not a good thing.
But we should also note that Donald Trump, and this is a point in his favor, he apparently kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club down in Florida for assaulting or harassing a girl at the club down there.
So now the media is focusing a lot on the Trump angle.
But It's going to become increasingly difficult to make this just about Republicans, and they know that, which is why my prediction is they're just going to stop talking about it altogether.
It's been thought, it's been assumed for a long time that Epstein must have reams of blackmail of very powerful and influential people, and that's how he's avoided serious legal consequence for so long.
And it looks like the cops may have found some of that blackmail.
In a safe, they found tapes, um, some of them with labels, like there was one tape, uh, DVD with a label that said, young name and name.
Now the names were redacted.
There were, of course it actually had names down.
We don't know what the names were, but that sounds an awful lot like it's a tape of a young woman, whatever her name is.
And someone else who Epstein felt the need to record that rendezvous and then lock it in a safe with a label like that.
Who knows, but it sounds like that could be the blackmail that is now coming out.
As far as I'm concerned, anybody associated with this Anybody involved with it.
I hope they're all taken down.
I hope they all go to prison and rot.
I hope they're all exposed and destroyed.
And I don't care.
Republican Democrat doesn't make a difference to me.
All right, there was a I wanted to mention this yesterday.
There was reportedly an incident at a Starbucks in Arizona.
Oh, I guess last week, some police officers say that They were asked to leave or to move to a different table because they were sitting next to a customer who was uncomfortable being around police officers.
This customer felt unsafe, apparently.
And the unsafe-feeling customer reported those feelings to the staff at Starbucks, and the staff, rather than responding by laughing in the customer's face, as they should have done, actually went up and asked the cops to get up and leave.
The local police union put out a statement about the incident describing what happened and here's their description of it.
It says, yesterday on Independence Day, six police officers stopped by the Starbucks at Scottsdale Road and McKellips for coffee.
The officers paid for their drinks and stood together having a cup of coffee before their long 4th of July shift.
They were approached by a barista who knew one of the officers by name because he's a regular at the location.
The barista said that the customer did not feel safe because of the police presence.
The barista asked the officers to move out of the customer's line of sight or to leave.
Disappointed, the officers did in fact leave.
The treatment of public safety workers could not be more disheartening.
While the barista was polite, making such a request at all was offensive.
Unfortunately, such treatment has become all too common in 2019.
All right.
Now, Starbucks has apologized and pledged to do better and yada yada, so on.
But that's not enough to stave off, though.
Well, speaking of boycotts, so there was a boycott of Starbucks over this.
There was a boycott Starbucks campaign.
So there's boycott Starbucks, boycott Nike, boycott Home Depot.
This is all in a week.
All these boycotts are happening.
And that's not to say that it's not without cause.
I mean, this is This incident, I mean, this is crazy.
The fact that the idea, the claim that police officers will be asked to leave because one customer felt unsafe with police officers.
In fact, if, let's just think about this for a minute.
If you're the cashier at a restaurant, and there are a bunch of police officers in the place, and then another customer walks in and asks you to kick out the police officers, There are a lot of reasons to ignore that request, like it's crazy and unreasonable and just, of course, I'm going to ignore it.
But also, I would be pretty concerned about why does this person not want police officers around?
Certainly, as someone working behind a register, I would feel a lot safer with the cops.
So it's just a general rule of thumb.
If you work behind a register and there are cops in there and then some other person walks in and says, hey, can you get rid of those cops?
Yeah, I mean, we'll worry about my transaction in a minute, but if you could just kick those cops out first.
And hey, by the way, you see those security cameras?
They make me feel unsafe too.
I just, I feel, you know, it's voyeuristic.
I feel watched.
If you could just cut those off, I think that'd be great too.
And the register, when it's locked like that, it makes me feel, it feels like you don't trust me.
So if you could just open the register and go wait in the back for 10 minutes.
Yeah, that's, see, I'd be worried about that personally.
So it's obviously completely ludicrous, These cops were paying customers.
They weren't, by any accounts, in there threatening anybody.
They were just sitting there drinking coffee.
And that is an important point.
Because when this controversy was happening last week, there were a lot of people, in this case defending Starbucks, or at least saying that we shouldn't be outraged about it.
And they were drawing comparisons to the incident that happened a couple of years ago at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, which you may remember, where there was a huge blow up because a couple of black men were asked to leave the establishment.
And then when they refused to, the cops were called on them.
Now, I defended Starbucks in that case.
I don't defend them here.
And there were plenty of liberals online last week saying, well, you're a hypocrite, if you would, or you're a racist.
I mean, why else would you say you're fine with them kicking out black men but not officers?
You must be racist.
What other explanation could there be?
Well, I'll tell you the other explanation, because there's a very clear difference.
In the case a couple of years ago, Those people who happen to be black, their race really is not relevant.
The fact is, these were individuals who were sitting in a busy Starbucks restaurant, taking up tables, and not buying anything.
Now, if you've ever been to a busy Starbucks, you know that table space can be hard to come by.
There are plenty of times when I go to a Starbucks and I want to sit down with my laptop and do some work, and I can't because there are people sitting at the tables.
Which, fine.
I mean, they got there first.
But if I came into a Starbucks and I bought something, and I saw someone taking up a table who hadn't bought anything and was just sitting there, yeah, I'd be annoyed by that.
It's like, you're not a customer.
I earned the right to that table by buying this coffee.
You didn't do that.
You should leave.
So that was the issue with The Starbucks in Philly that these people were sitting at a table not buying anything and you don't have a right to take up space at a table if you don't buy something.
You have to be a paying customer.
Very simple policy.
So the manager who was thrown under the bus by the CEO of Starbucks and was slandered as a racist.
The manager, who was simply trying to enforce company policy and a reasonable company policy, went over to the people and said, hey, you got to buy something if you want to take the table.
That's fine.
What do you want?
I'll get you a coffee.
I'll get you a bottle of water.
She offered to serve them like she was a waitress.
Actually bring the stuff to the table for them.
She was so desperate to just get them to buy anything at all.
Just buy anything.
And you are a paying customer.
You could take the table.
They categorically refused to buy something.
They refused.
And that's when she had no choice but to call the police, because at that point, they're trespassing.
When you come into a restaurant and say, I'm going to take up a table, I refuse.
No, I'm not going to buy anything.
I don't feel like that.
Get out of my face.
I'm not buying anything.
Well, you deserve to be taken out in handcuffs.
I mean, you're such a jerk.
You couldn't just buy a bottle of water just to follow the policy and earn your right to a table?
That's what happened there.
In this case, these officers had all bought coffees.
They were paying customers.
Sitting at, not only paying customers, but apparently, at least one of them, a regular paying customer.
Sitting there, enjoying a coffee, and they were asked to leave.
Not because of company policy, but because one other customer felt unsafe.
Totally different scenarios, and one is completely justified, the other is completely unjustified.
I think that's pretty obvious.
All right, one other thing that we're going to talk about briefly before we get to emails.
There's apparently now, maybe you've heard about this, some kind of internet trend where people do this.
this.
Which to me, even that is one of the most nauseating videos.
Especially as a germaphobe.
I feel nauseated.
I feel like I might throw up.
That was a video of a woman.
Licking a carton of ice cream at a store and then putting it back in the freezer and walking away.
You'll be happy to know that the psycho was found and she faces 20 years in prison.
Now, she's clearly not going to actually be sentenced to anything close to 20 years, though in my opinion she would deserve it if she did.
But now you've got this trend with other people apparently going and licking ice creams or otherwise dispensing their saliva into various food items at grocery stores and then putting the item back and walking away.
I saw one where a guy spit into a jug of iced tea and then put it back and walked away.
Now, if I were dictator of the country, When I am dictator, I should say,
I will have armed guards in every grocery store in the country, and they will shoot you on sight.
If it even looks like you might be thinking of licking an ice cream.
And also if you squeeze produce items to check for ripeness and then put them back,
you'll be shot on sight.
If you leave your shopping carts, obviously, without putting them away in the parking lot,
you'll be shot on sight.
If you take too long at the self-checkout, you'll be shot on sight.
If you take more than 10 items to the 10 item or less lane, you'll be shot on sight.
I.
Basically, it's gonna be a bloodbath at grocery stores when I'm dictator, but civility will finally reign supreme at the end of it.
There will be some growing pains under my dictatorship, but ultimately, you all, those of you who survive, which will be probably not many of you, will thank me for these policies that I will put in place.
Right now, though, as for this licking thing, I just can't wrap my head around not just how psychotic you have to be to do that in the first place, but how stupid you have to be to do something illegal on camera and then put it online.
Like, you're going to be arrested for that.
We have your face.
You are providing evidence of your own crime to the public.
And this, of course, is very common.
It's what people do now.
It's one of the reasons why, you know, I really do thank God every day that YouTube and social media was You know, didn't exist certainly when I was in middle school.
And by the time I was in late teens, it was first starting to kind of take, it wasn't anything like it is now.
And I do, I feel bad for kids that are growing up in a culture where this is just everywhere.
It permeates everything and you live your life online because, and not to make excuses for it.
And some of the people doing this, they don't look like kids at all.
They look like they're in their twenties.
Um, but in terms of just video, taking video of yourself committing crimes and putting that online, it's something kids do a lot.
And I think, um, it's, it's just, there are kids, they go through, kids go through a phase of a very stupid phase where we're very stupid, reckless phase.
And now they go through that phase publicly online.
And they're all carrying around phones with cameras on them so they can document all of it forever.
And I feel bad for them for that.
Though I don't feel bad for the people who go to jail for licking food products at the grocery store, because that is well-deserved.
A well-deserved punishment.
All right, mattwalshow at gmail.com, mattwalshow at gmail.com is the email address.
This is from Daniel, says, Hi Matt, just wanted to give you a little extra information on a point you brought up on yesterday's show.
While it is uncommon, sometimes attorneys are appointed against their will, even when they're not a part of the public defender system per se.
For example, here in Missouri, a few years back, the public defender system was underfunded to the point that I believe The Supreme Court here found that it could not provide a meaningful defense in compliance with the right to an attorney for the numbers that it was faced with.
Since attorneys are licensed by the Supreme Court, at least here in Missouri, we were obligated to be subject to appointments just by virtue of having a license to practice law.
Even attorneys that had no experience in criminal defense or litigation of any sort were subject to this requirement.
It didn't last long before emergency funding came through and stopped the practice, but it does happen.
I didn't personally get appointed under this situation, but my county Did start doing it briefly.
I think it was even pro bono, at least unless the funding came through subsequently.
Your point that the attorneys, a certain class of defendant has a right to are serving voluntary, voluntarily virtue of working for the public defender's office is correct.
Probably 99.9% of the time, but there are definitely exceptions.
Yeah, I got a few emails from lawyers making that correction that we were talking yesterday.
Someone emailed yesterday saying, you know, if we don't have the right to a doctor, So if universal health care is wrong, we don't have the right to a doctor, then how do we have the right to an attorney?
And I was talking about one of the reasons, one of the differences is that the attorneys who you have a right to are public defenders and they get into that line of work knowing that that's going to be their job.
So it's not really that they're forced.
It's not compelled labor.
It's not slave labor.
They go into that.
And some people corrected me saying that, well, sometimes people who are not public defenders can be forced.
Which, fine.
But... And wasn't that the premise of my cousin Vinny?
Or he ended up representing a murderer or something?
No, he was accused of... I don't remember.
I've already said enough wrong things on this subject.
I won't add on to it.
The main point, though, the main difference, as I said yesterday, is that your right to an attorney is, yes, it's a right that you have, but it's even more so a responsibility that the state has to provide you with an attorney, because the state, they're the ones who bring the case against you.
They're the ones trying to put you in jail.
And so to avoid many sorts of abuses, In our system, they also have the responsibility to at least give you the chance to defend yourself by providing you with an attorney.
And that's the difference there.
Okay, this is from Alyssa, says, Hi Matt, my name is Alyssa.
The question, this question may be random, but I'm curious to hear your opinion.
Also, sorry about the length of my, the lengthy intro to my question.
I have a best friend who claims to have severe anxiety.
The first time she brought this up, it kind of took me off guard because she's a happy and outgoing individual.
As we got to be closer friends, I noticed she would bring up her anxiety disorder very often, and the more I got to know her, the less I trusted that she actually had this disorder.
I also noticed how popular the subject of anxiety-slash-depression became outside of my best friend.
So many people also claim to have this disorder, and I couldn't help but find a common trend.
And then these are bullet points.
Majority of them being women.
They often come off as a misfit or underdog.
They all have different colored hair or piercings or weird tattoos.
They all constantly talk about it on social media or in regular conversation.
Lastly, they are often left-leaning SJW type people.
My best friend fits all of these commonalities.
I used to invite her out to the bar or parties, but I stopped because she would give the excuse of her anxiety, preventing her from going.
I never really brought the excuses or bought the excuses because I feel like it was very picky and choosy.
Also, she really likes to go out with one of her other best friends.
It could just be that she doesn't want to go out with me, which is fine.
I just don't care to be lied to.
My question is, is it wrong to feel like she doesn't actually have an anxiety disorder?
Do you also notice these trends when it comes to anxiety disorders?
If you do, what is your opinion?
P.S.
You're my favorite.
That's really why I read that whole email is just to get to the P.S.
No, actually, I read it because it is an interesting question.
So, Alyssa, I understand the type you're describing here, but of course, people of all type have anxiety.
So it's not just the type you describe.
And that's part of my issue.
And I kind of agree with some of what you're saying.
Anxiety is a very human condition.
It comes with being a human being, unfortunately.
Nobody likes it, but if you're a human, you have anxiety.
There's no way around it.
There is no person on Earth who has no anxiety.
So I have a big problem with turning something so normal so integral to the human condition into a mental disorder.
I have a problem with that.
Because in order to do that, we have to kind of arbitrarily say, well, this amount of anxiety is okay, but if you go over this imaginary anxiety line, then it's a disorder.
So you're only supposed to have X amount of anxiety, but if you have Y amount of anxiety, then you have a disorder.
Well, it's totally arbitrary.
I mean, who decides what the correct amount of anxiety is?
And how do you measure it?
And how do you quantify it?
It doesn't make any sense.
And these are basic questions that we never seem to ask when it comes to this subject, about mental disorders.
Like, who decided that this is the right amount of anxiety and how do you measure it?
I mean, in order for it to be a disorder, I mean, think about the word disorder, out of order.
Okay, well, if we agree that anxiety per se is a part of the natural order of things for human beings, in that all humans have anxiety, if we agree with that, Then we can't say that simply having anxiety is a disorder.
What you're doing is you are looking at someone and you are saying, okay, well, they have a reason.
So like this much of their anxiety is natural, but then there's this extra part where there's no natural reason for it.
And so that's the disorder part.
Again, it doesn't make sense.
It's completely arbitrary.
Now, the point you bring up about girls that have different color hair and all the tattoos and everything, and all the different piercings, and they claim they have anxiety.
Well, of course, plenty of people say they have anxiety.
Everyone does have anxiety, and there are plenty of people who say they have anxiety disorders who don't fit that physical description that you described.
However, When you look at someone, say a grown woman who has blue hair and a thousand piercings and a thousand tattoos, and I say this as someone with two tattoos myself, but someone who's like really into bodily body modification to the point of where it really becomes body mutilation and all the weird hair and everything.
I think that not in every case, but many times That's going to be someone who suffered some kind of abuse, some kind of trauma as a child at some point in their life.
And that's, you know, that's, I don't think that's a big secret, but someone who's really into body mutilation is someone who's got issues.
I mean, someone who, who, who I think oftentimes, if you were to look at their backstory, you're going to find that they suffered some real trauma at some point in their life.
And what they're doing to their body now is partly an expression of that.
Well, if you do have trauma, or if you did suffer in some way as a child, then there's a certain natural anxiety that comes with that.
Is it really disordered?
I keep going back to the word arbitrary, but that's what it is.
It's the same thing Oftentimes with depression, where we say that someone has, oh, well, they have the depression, it's a disease, they have a disease of depression.
Well, I think that very often, And depression is another thing that is, at least to a point, is a part of the natural human condition.
Everybody is depressed sometimes.
Everyone suffers despair.
I'm not just talking about sadness or being a little gloomy.
I'm talking about despair.
I mean, everyone at various points has been in despair.
But I think when you talk to someone who's been diagnosed as clinically depressed, And you actually talk to them, and you find out what's going on in their life.
Very often, you're going to discover that there are things happening in their life, things that did happen to them, are happening to them, that would naturally cause them to feel depressed.
So it's not a disease, it is an emotional reaction to things that they're going through.
It doesn't mean that we should abandon them to their depression and say, Oh, well, you should feel depressed.
Forget about you.
No, not at all.
Not at all.
But just it's it's it's it's not a disease.
It's just it's it's a reaction to things in their life.
And if you really want to cure the depression, you have to look at those sources, which are which is it's not just chemicals that there are actual things in their life.
There's a reason, a deeper reason, and you can get to those reasons and deal with those.
So, yeah, I think that there are some issues with this whole subject, with the way that we approach mental disorders.
Now, it becomes a lot easier when somebody is having mental issues, psychological issues, that are not a part of the natural human experience at all?
Well, then clearly in that case, there's a disorder.
There's some kind of disease.
Like if someone is hallucinating, for instance.
Okay, well, hallucination is not a... We can't say, oh, well, everyone hallucinates sometimes.
No, I mean, most people don't hallucinate.
It's not a natural human thing.
If that is happening to you, then there's clearly a problem.
There's something wrong in your brain.
And you got to go get that looked at and probably get some kind of medical treatment, right?
So that is, there are things that can happen.
I mean, if you're hearing voices, if, I mean, there are plenty of, you look at someone who has dementia, well, that is a brain disease.
There's something happening to their brain.
It's not a natural thing.
It's a disease.
That's completely different from an emotional experience, which is a part of the Natural human state.
All right, uh...
I guess we will read one more.
This is from Noah, says, Hi Matt, my name is Noah.
I'm 18 years old from Colorado.
In your last episode, you said that science makes the creation account in Genesis irrelevant.
I don't agree with you on this subject.
I have a quick question, which is this.
Why would God purposely lie to us about the creation when nothing would have been wrong if he told the truth?
Thanks for taking the time to read this if you did.
Well, just I want to clarify, Noah, I didn't say the Genesis account is irrelevant.
I didn't say that at all.
I don't believe that.
That's not the point that I was trying to convey.
Maybe I didn't do a good job of conveying it.
My point is just, when trying to understand the Bible, trying to interpret it correctly, We have to understand what genre any particular passage or book belongs to.
And they don't all belong to the same genre, and I think everyone agrees with that.
Right?
Everyone knows that they're not all the same genre.
So that's the first point.
And then the second point, just related to that, is because we look at Genesis, we have to decide what genre is it.
If it is a more sort of metaphorical genre, that doesn't mean that God's lying to us.
It doesn't mean that it's irrelevant.
Any more than Revelation, which is obviously heavily metaphorical, but it's not a lie.
It's not irrelevant.
It's certainly not a lie.
It's just a different sort of thing.
It's not like the Gospels, which are biographical and which, in a pretty straightforward way, just communicate what happened.
Revelation is not that.
It's much more poetic, much more metaphorical.
And then I would say that Genesis is a similar sort of thing.
Although it's not apocalyptic literature like Revelation is.
One of the ways that we know that it is at least partly metaphorical is that we understand the science and we know that the literal interpretation just doesn't work with what we already know about reality.
That's one of the ways that we know that.
And as I pointed out, I think it's a very crucial point, and I've said this many times, but for a long time, people thought that the sun orbits the earth.
And because they thought that, they would interpret certain biblical passages as sort of literal descriptions of Celestial phenomena.
There are certain biblical passages which, if you read literally, would seem to say that the sun orbits the earth and the earth is the center of the universe.
Well, once we were able to actually look and see and see that, okay, well, that's not the case.
It simply is not true.
That's not how the world, that's not reality.
Then we had to go back and say, okay, well, we must have misinterpreted those passages.
And then we started to take some of that language and interpret it in more of a metaphorical way.
Which isn't to say those passages were lies.
It's to say that we misunderstood them.
And one of the reasons we misunderstood them is because we were ignorant of some things about the natural world.
And once those gaps in our knowledge were filled in, well now we were better able to go back and say, okay, well now I think I understand better what these passages are actually saying.
