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July 11, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
53:05
Ep. 293 - Beto Says America Is A Racist Hellscape

Beto goes down to the border to talk to immigrants and proceeds to trash America. Also, AOC implies that Nancy Pelosi is racist. This is both hilarious and disgusting. And we'll talk about the common modern practice of filming troubled people so we can laugh at them online. Perhaps it's time to reevaluate this practice. Date: 07-11-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on the Matt Wall Show, Beto O'Rourke went down to the border to meet with immigrants and refugees, and he proceeded to trash America.
He's just a great guy, but we'll talk about that.
Also, AOC implies that Nancy Pelosi is racist, which is kind of hilarious, but also on the other hand, disgusting.
And I want to talk about the very common modern practice of filming troubled people So that we can laugh at them online.
I think that maybe we should stop doing that.
We'll talk about the latest example today on The Matt Wall Show.
So Beto O'Rourke, poor fella.
There was a time when he was getting a lot of hype.
He was considered a real contender, but now he's lost somewhere in the middle of the pack with Nary a table to stand on.
And I think mainly because he's dealing with probably a fatal flaw for a Democrat in 2019, and that is that he's a white male.
The problem with being a white male is that, number one, White males are toxic scum and should all die.
So that's problem number one.
Number two, related to number one, is that if you're a white male, then you're automatically going to be under suspicion of being un-woke.
Okay, so unwokeness is a condition that plagues most white males.
So if you are a white male, people are going to suspect that you lack wokeness, which means that if you want to run for president as a Democrat, you're going to have to do quite a lot to prove your innocence, to prove that you are in fact woke, that you are not guilty of the crime of being unwoke.
So it is a guilty until proven innocent sort of situation.
And Beto, along with his other white male candidate compatriots, has been trying very hard to quell the suspicions that he may, in fact, be un-woke.
And that is why he went to a group of immigrants yesterday and trashed America, talked about how bad America is, which is a very woke thing to do.
But will it pay off?
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All right, so Beto in pursuit of wokeness.
Maybe that should be the, you know, sort of pursuit of happiness.
Maybe that should be the name of his Memoirs, Pursuit of Wokeness.
He went to speak to a group of immigrants and refugees yesterday and he said this, watch.
This country was founded on white supremacy and every single institution and structure that we have in our country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and suppression, even in our democracy.
Okay, a few things here.
First, and This is the part I don't get.
If it's true that America is a racist, sexist, bigoted hellscape founded on white supremacy, and to this day, institutionally oppresses minorities, a country where the legacy of slavery still lives on, is still alive and well, and affecting minorities even today, then why the hell would you encourage immigrants to come here?
It seems like a very cruel and hateful thing to do.
I mean, wouldn't it be an act of compassion, an act of concern and sympathy, to prevent them from coming?
Shouldn't you yourself, then, if you hold this position, if you hold this view, shouldn't you, shouldn't Beto O'Rourke be standing at the border, yourself, saying, no, don't come here!
Save yourself!
Anywhere but here!
No, but that's not what happens.
See, the people that hold this view, These are the same people flinging open the doors and saying, hey, come on in, encouraging people to come.
It's like giving a restaurant a scathing review on Yelp and then turning around and recommending the place to all of your family and friends.
So if you do that, it means that either your review was untrue and you really liked the place more than you said, or you hate your friends and family even more than you hate the restaurant, that you're trying to inflict that on them.
Uh, so it just does.
It doesn't make sense to, oh, you know, this place is terrible.
I got salmonella poisoning.
And then the next day, hey, you know, that joint down the street, you should really check that out.
You'll love it.
Um, you're like a biological terrorist in that case.
And, and, and so it's a similar thing here.
You're, you're saying that it's a racist place.
It's a horrible, and then you're, what, what's going to happen to all these people that you're encouraging to come here?
Not only that, but you're saying we're running concentration camps down on the border and you're still encouraging people to come.
What's wrong?
How evil can you be?
But it's worse than that because Democrats will not only encourage minorities to come here, where they're going to allegedly be oppressed and discriminated against and locked in concentration camps, but they'll even say that America is their hope.
It's the fulfillment of a dreamer's dream.
It's their only chance at a better life, etc.
Well, fine, but if that's the case, then you can't also say that America is a handmaid's tale.
It's got to be one or the other.
You have to choose one narrative or the other.
It can't be that we have to fling open the doors for immigrants because this country is their only hope and their only dream, but then also it is a dystopian, racist, nightmare land of horrors for minorities.
You really got to choose.
Second thing, these white male Democratic candidates have a problem.
If it's really as bad as they say, then it's hard to justify staying in the race at all as a white male.
I mean, shouldn't a minority or a woman or both be in charge in that case?
Of course, all the white males in the race have said, oh yeah, you know, I'll have a female vice president.
But that's even worse.
Because now you're saying, yeah, I mean, we should definitely have women in power,
but they shouldn't be in charge.
I mean, there's still gotta be a man above the woman, just making sure everything's squared away.
So yeah, we definitely need to have a woman in the White House, but no, no, not in charge.
Hold on a second.
I mean, these are women we're talking about here, okay?
That's what it sounds like when you start doing, oh yeah, well, we definitely need to have a woman in there.
No, not there, not sitting behind the Oval Office, but with a smaller desk, but still, with a desk.
It just doesn't work. That's the problem you run into. And that's why as a white male,
you will always lose the identity politics game. You just, you can't, it's a lose-lose for you.
There's no way to win. So you have to just not play it or completely submit to it and withdraw
from public life entirely because you are, as I said, toxic scum who should die as a white male.
And so am I, let's be clear.
Third, maybe this is the most important thing to discuss.
Is it true, is what Beto said true?
Was America founded on white supremacy?
Well, no, of course it wasn't.
Founded on white supremacy implies that white supremacy was sort of the point.
Like the founders were looking primarily to establish a country where whites would be supreme, where they would be in charge.
But the thing is, they already had a country like that.
The country they broke away from.
That was already the case.
And so that wasn't the point.
America was founded on principles of liberty and limited government.
That's what it was founded on.
I mean, read the Declaration of Independence.
Were those principles consistently and fully applied?
Well, no, of course they weren't.
But those were still the principles.
Is it true that, as Beto says, to get the exact quote, every single institution and structure we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery?
Well, no, of course it's not true.
And if it were true, then what will—here's my question—if it's true that America is still institutionally racist and that the legacy of slavery lives on and so on, what will make it so that that isn't true anymore?
Will it take more time?
Well, it's already been 150 years since slavery, and you're still saying that the legacy of slavery is there, so apparently time doesn't matter.
Do we need to have more minorities in charge?
Well, we had a black president for eight years, and that apparently didn't even make a dent in institutional racism.
We had a black person running the whole system, the whole institution.
And if you thought that that meant that institutional racism was gone, well, it would seem to mean that.
That would be a logical conclusion.
If a black man can successfully become the most powerful person in the country, it would seem to indicate that we don't have a very serious problem.
With institutional discrimination against black men, or it means that the institutional discrimination is so incompetent and ineffective that a black person can still become the president of the country.
Either way, but see that would be a logical conclusion.
But leftists will say, oh, no, no, that's not.
Not only will they disagree with that conclusion, but they will heap scorn on you if you even suggest it.
Oh, you mean that just because we had a black president, there's not a problem with institutional racism?
Well, yeah, I guess I am saying that.
I think it probably does mean that.
That seems to be a logic.
But no, they'll say.
It's kind of like when, you know, leftists, they make these racism charges And they accuse everyone of being racist and everything of being racist.
And they set it up so that it is an accusation that simply cannot be disproven.
Because any evidence that would seem to indicate otherwise, they immediately discard as invalid, without explaining why it is invalid.
So they'll say that America is institutionally racist.
Evidence against that view would seem to be, we had a black president.
They say, no, that doesn't count.
I don't know why, it just doesn't count.
It's a similar thing to if, you know, it's a sort of classic faux pas that if you're accused of racism, you're not allowed to point out that you have close friends who are black.
What we're told is that actually that makes you even more racist if you use that as evidence that you're not racist.
If you try to say, oh, well, I can't be racist, I have black friends, that's a, well, you're even, that's even more, well, hold on a second.
Isn't that, in fact, evidence that someone isn't racist?
Now, if they're claiming they have black friends and they don't, then obviously it's not evidence of anything.
But if they really do have black friends, isn't that evidence that... I mean, it's at least an indication that they probably aren't racist.
Because if you're racist against a particular race, you're not going to be friends with people in that race.
It just seems like that's part of the whole racism thing.
I don't know.
To me, it seems like a good, like a solid piece of evidence in somebody's favor.
But no, that's not evidence.
Because there can, there's just no, if you are accused of being racist, you're not allowed to present any evidence to clear you of the charge.
You're just racist.
That's all.
Doesn't matter.
You have black friends, doesn't matter.
You can be married to a black person.
You have black family members.
It doesn't matter.
You're racist.
Doesn't matter.
Whatever you say, doesn't matter.
You're still racist.
So, okay, there's that.
Last question.
Is it true that our founders were racist?
Is it true that they supported slavery?
Is it true that they were bigots and sexists by our modern standards?
Well, the answer to those questions, finally, is yes.
Okay, that is true.
That is all certainly true.
But, and don't take this the wrong way, but, what's your point? See, this is why this conversation, if
your point is simply to observe that fact and say, well, that's wrong, they should
have been racist.
Okay, yeah, I agree, they shouldn't have been. But this conversation is so pointless and fruitless,
this sort of moral re-litigation of the past, where we go back and we observe the sins and
and foibles of our ancestors.
I think that probably regardless, that would be a fruitless endeavor, a pointless endeavor.
I'm not really sure what the point could possibly be.
But it's even more fruitless and pointless because we are so determined to re-litigate the past through a very narrow lens.
A lens that pretends that these white racists existed in a vacuum.
A lens that looks not at the historical context, not at the whole picture, but just focuses in on white people and pretends that there was something unique and especially terrible about their racism.
But if we were to widen the scope a bit, we would see That everyone, everywhere in the world, in every country, was a racist and a sexist by our standards today.
If you go back 200 years or earlier, so any time up to 200 years ago, you will find that every country on the planet is filled with tribalistic bigots by our standards.
Some countries still are.
Now, Does that excuse bigotry?
Does that fact excuse the individual bigotry of any particular person who lived back then?
No.
Doesn't excuse it.
Does it... I'm blanking on the word that I want here.
Mitigate.
There we go.
Does it mitigate, to some extent, their own personal moral guilt for being racist?
Yes, it does.
And this is a concept I think people struggle with.
There's a difference between the objective moral, you know, quality of something and the moral guilt of the person who engages in that activity or has that thought or whatever it is.
So racism has always been wrong all throughout history.
It's always been just as wrong as it is now.
It's just, it's just wrong.
Period.
Right?
However, A racist 200 years ago or 500 years ago probably does not have the same moral guilt for that racism as a racist today.
And the reason is that, yeah, it's a taken for granted.
Now, we may look at it today and we say, well, it should be obvious to you that you shouldn't be racist.
That should be obvious.
It's obvious to us.
Well, maybe it should have been, but it wasn't.
It's very clear that for thousands of years of human history, it was not obvious that racism was wrong.
Because almost everybody was.
And for a long time it wasn't even questioned.
The idea that all people in the world are equal, no matter what they look like, no matter what language they speak, that is a very modern concept.
That just didn't occur to people for thousands of years.
It just didn't occur to them.
So we could say, oh, it should have.
But it didn't.
It just didn't.
To anybody.
And so we are left with the choice between condemning everybody in history, pretty much, as just utterly bigoted, horrible, worthless scumbags, or we can start to look at them in a historical context, understand that they had some blind spots, some serious blind spots, try to understand those blind spots, why they had those blind spots, And, um, and kind of leave it there.
And then we can try to, you know, rather than staying focused on that, we could say, well, what are our blinds?
It seems though, as though people in every era have moral blind spots, just immoral things that they take for granted.
We know for our ancestors, that moral blind spot was racism and for a long time, slavery too.
Well, maybe we should look and think, well, what are our blind spots?
Do we really have none?
Or is it possible that there are things that we take for granted that are actually horrible?
I think maybe that would be a more worthwhile endeavor. All right, speaking of racism or alleged racism,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just essentially called Nancy Pelosi a racist. And this is
incredible. She was interviewed by the Washington Post, and this is what she said. She said,
talking about Nancy Pelosi and the comments that Nancy Pelosi has been making about
her, supposedly.
She said, when these comments first started, I kind of thought that she was keeping the progressive flank at more of an arm's distance in order to protect more moderate members, which I understood.
But the persistent singling out, it got to a point where it was just outright disrespectful.
The explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.
She just accused Nancy Pelosi of singling out women of color.
Now, is there any evidence at all that Nancy Pelosi is singling out women of color?
Is there any reason to believe that Nancy Pelosi has an issue with AOC because of her color and not because of her harebrained policy ideas and her general attention-seeking behavior?
No, obviously not.
And I understand the conservatives who laugh about this and say, hey, let them eat their own.
They're even conservatives who kind of encourage it and try to, oh yeah, Nancy Pelosi, she is a racist.
You're right about that.
Try to keep the internal strife going.
I understand the strategy there.
It's a smart strategy.
But I just... I hate this race-baiting garbage so much that I have to take Nancy Pelosi's side.
The race-baiting...
I really just despise it because there are enough real problems in the world and there's enough real bigotry still.
What we were talking about a few minutes ago, I don't mean to suggest there's no bigotry left in the world.
There's plenty of plenty of it still left, especially in other countries where people who are in ethnic minorities can be killed and stoned to death and so on.
But so there's so much of it really out there that to try to invent it for your own purposes, to try to exploit it, you're exploiting racism.
And I just detest that so much.
I find it so morally abominable.
These people who have made racism into a game, into a tool for them to use.
Into a hammer they can beat over the heads of their opponents and do it, you know, sort of indiscriminately.
Or just, I mean, with AOC, it's just anyone that opposes her is a racist and a sexist.
It doesn't matter who, even if it's Nancy Pelosi, it's a racism, it doesn't matter whatever it is.
And it's also, it's so intellectually cowardly.
There's so much intellectual cowardice in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She is such a coward.
She refuses to engage with anyone in an honest way.
She refuses to engage any argument, honestly.
Instead, it's just, if you oppose her, you're a sexist and racist, period.
I really can't stand that.
So, yeah, you know what?
I actually have to take Nancy Pelosi's side in this, which is a very bizarre sensation, and I don't like it.
Um, okay, let's see, a couple other things.
Are, let's see, are you ready to cringe?
I hope you're ready to cringe because I have a very cringey thing to show you.
Watch this video.
What do you have to say?
What do you deserve?
I deserve this.
You deserve all of it.
Everything.
You deserve this.
Okay, so that's Megan Rapinoe, or Rapinoe.
I actually, I think I've been saying her name wrong this whole time.
Well, I'd never heard of her until, you know, a few weeks ago.
And now I find her to be one of the most insufferable people on the planet.
Because of videos like that, holding the trophy, saying, I deserve this.
She even said it in an annoying way.
I mean, just the statement itself, I deserve this is annoying, but she even said it in a way that's extra annoying.
Now, a lot of people have said that the criticism of Rapinoe, Rapinoe, Rapinoe, is it Rapinoe?
I think it's Rapinoe.
The criticism is unfair and, you know, male athletes never get criticized this way and so on.
Well, first of all, male athletes get criticized all the time.
It's a very common occurrence, constantly criticized, especially male athletes who are perceived, whether rightly or wrongly, as being egotistical, attention-seeking sorts of people.
Those kinds of athletes, those sorts of people in general, no matter what they do for a living, are going to be criticized traditionally.
So that's the first thing.
Second, male athletes don't usually do some of the stuff that Rapido is out there
doing.
Like hoisting the trophy that you just won as a team and shouting,
I deserve this.
I mean, most male athletes have the concept of teamwork just hammered
into their heads from a very young age.
So almost reflexively, when they're interviewed or when they achieve
something, they're almost always going to bring it back to the team.
It's not about me, it's about the team, whatever's good for the team, the team did this, the team did that.
Which is good, it's a good thing.
That's one of the great things about team sports for kids, is that it has this humbling effect.
So if Tom Brady ever hoisted up the Lombardi Trophy and shouted, I deserve this, he would be roasted for that by everyone.
And there would be no one defending it.
But see, the thing is, Tom Brady, even though I think he is a narcissist, and maybe with good reason, considering he's the greatest quarterback in the history of the league, and he's won approximately 65 Super Bowls, but if he were to ever hoist the Lombardi Trophy and say, I deserve this, he would be roasted by everyone, rightfully so.
But he wouldn't do that.
Whether or not he would like to do that, or he has those thoughts, I don't know, but he would never actually do that.
When he hoists the Lombardi Trophy, which he's done several times, he's always about the team.
He's talking about the team.
But again, if any male athlete were ever to do something like that, they would be criticized by everyone.
In fact, this is where female athletes have the privilege.
Because a female athlete does that, and yeah, she's going to be criticized by some people like myself, who are consistent, because I would criticize anyone who did that, male or female.
But then she's also going to have a chorus of defenders that the male athlete won't have.
For the male athlete, no one's going to defend that.
Everyone's going to say, oh, come on, man.
That's disgusting.
It wasn't just you.
It was your team, OK?
What do you mean, you deserve this?
Your team deserves it.
What is this I stuff?
There is no I in team, right?
But there is a me, right?
OK.
That's what would happen.
But with female athletes, there's going to be that chorus, the feminists who'd say, oh.
In fact, I saw that video online yesterday with a caption from someone Saying, I forget what the exact words they used, but they said, this is empowering.
It's basically making it about empowerment.
I don't remember the exact words they used, but they were saying that this is empowering for women.
It's a declaration of female strength and so on.
And that's just, again, that is not something you would ever hear for a male athlete.
If a male athlete acts like an insufferable, blowhard, narcissistic, attention-seeking jerk, nobody is going to say, oh, it's male empowerment.
No one is going to say that.
It's only women.
Who can partially get away with being jerks on the basis of its female empowerment.
Women are the only ones.
Sorry, if you're a woman, you're the only one who could potentially dress up your jerky behavior as empowerment.
Men can't do that.
They're not going to get away with it.
Nor should they.
Meanwhile, though, as a nice palate cleanser.
So that was kind of sports at its worst.
And let's look at it at its best.
This is a video of an unidentified hockey coach talking to his players, and his message, while colorful, is, I think, truly good and empowering.
Watch this.
Hey guys, listen up for a second.
First day of camp.
Something really important.
Okay, we're not women's soccer.
We're not the NFL.
If there's anybody here that's going to be disrespectful to either the American or the Canadian National Anthem, grab your gear and get the f*** out now, because you'll never see the ice in this arena.
We don't have that problem in hockey.
We're better than that, but there was no sense in wasting anybody's time if that s*** was going to happen.
I don't believe it would happen here.
We're the most patriotic sport that they have out there, so just keep that in mind.
Thank you.
So that's good stuff.
And that reminds me of, I didn't play hockey, but that reminds me of some of the coaches I had growing up.
I mean, everything.
The way he looks, the way he speaks, the cussing and everything.
It's part of the coach.
It's part of the male coach thing.
And the message, which is, hey, this isn't about you.
Don't go out there trying to disrespect the country, trying to make it about yourself.
We're not doing that here.
Just that kind of really frank, getting down to it.
If you don't like it, get the F out.
That kind of stuff.
I really think that Boys especially, especially teenage boys, need a voice like that in their life.
And hopefully they have it at home.
Hopefully they have a father who's, you know, even if he doesn't drop the F-bomb, he's still gonna say, still gonna have a message similar to that.
Like, hey, you know, you're not doing that here.
Cut it out.
Cut out the crap.
It's not happening here.
You need, I think children need it.
Boys especially need that.
Um, but unfortunately there are a lot of boys growing up in this country who don't have that, who don't have that kind of, um, disciplined, take no crap, male voice and guidance in their home.
And that's where sports even more become important.
And that's why I think coaches do such an important thing.
Um, because they can, they provide something to a lot of these boys that they aren't getting anywhere else and that they need.
I mean, you just, you need someone in your life as a kid to say, cut it out.
Um, so I think that was, that was great.
Good stuff.
Well done coach.
Well done.
I wanted to talk about one other thing here before we get to emails.
Yeah, I guess we'll talk about this.
Um, it would be easier to discuss if I played the video for you, but I'm not going to do that because it would seem hypocritical for me to play it.
So I'll just describe it.
Maybe you've seen it.
There's a viral video, which went viral I think yesterday, millions of views, showing a man in a bagel shop, I think in New York, I'm not sure where, probably New York, having a complete meltdown.
There's no context provided.
The video cuts on and he's screaming at pretty much everyone in the establishment, customers, employees. And he's screaming, he screams at some women in
the store at one point and starts talking about all the women on dating sites who make fun of him and
reject him. And then he yells at some guys who are standing there. One of the guys proceeds to
essentially tackle the guy, knock him on his butt. And then I think after that in a second
video, he's screaming at the employees.
He's still talking about women on the dating sites who reject him.
Um, and the guy is very short, which is important context to understand the video.
He's a very short, it looks like he's, I don't know, five foot two or something.
He's a very short guy.
Um, very short for a grown man.
And he says that women on the dating sites make fun of him for being short.
Uh, and anyway, he's, he's having a total meltdown breakdown, um, acting like a jerk to everybody in the store.
Well, this was secretly filmed, of course, and put online, and now the guy has been humiliated across the country, along with being humiliated at the store when he was humiliating himself.
Millions of people now have taken part in the public shaming, and many have left comments adding additional scorn and mockery and talking about how short he is and everything else.
First of all, obviously his behavior is unacceptable.
If you saw the video, you know, I mean, it's unacceptable behavior, wrong, atrocious behavior.
He deserved to get his butt kicked in the moment, I believe.
He had that coming.
Nothing can justify the way he was acting.
And if you start mouthing off to the wrong person in public, you might get knocked on your butt.
And I'm an advocate of that.
I'm fine with that.
I mean, I think that's the way it should work in society.
Sometimes you can't go around just screaming at anyone, acting like a jerk to anyone you want.
If you choose the wrong person, he's going to knock you on your butt.
All right.
But here's my thing.
Did this incident really need to be broadcast to the entire world?
Did his mental breakdown need to become an episode of reality TV for us all to watch and gawk at?
Was the butt-kicking in the moment enough, or did he really need massive public shaming on top of it?
Is the public shaming proportionate to the infraction?
When I watched this video, honestly, my first reaction was, I felt bad for the guy.
And I'm not saying that this is because I'm so compassionate and I'm so much better than you if you watched it and laughed.
Look, I've watched videos like that plenty of times in the past and probably laughed and even shared it myself and taken part in the gawking festival.
But I'm trying to get away from that.
I think we should all try to get away from that.
And when it came to this video, my first reaction was, I just felt bad for the guy.
Uh, even though there's no excuse for his behavior, even though he was acting like a jerk, it seemed obvious to me that this was, is a lonely, sad, broken man.
Um, for him to be shouting about being rejected on dating sites, that may seem funny to us, but it seems clear that, yeah, this is a guy who's, I mean, in his, I don't know, 40s or 50s, still alone, uh, probably has been rejected by women his whole life because he's very short.
It is difficult for guys who are really short, sometimes, to find, uh, you know, to find a woman.
Women, a lot of times, don't want to be with a guy that's a lot shorter than them.
If you don't suffer from that problem, and I don't, I'm six foot, I say six foot one, that's what I say, that's my, that's unofficially six foot one, I think really six foot, but anyway, so I don't have that, that's not a particular problem that I have, but it is, it can be an issue for some guys, and if it leads to you being alone for 40 years, it's a pretty serious freaking issue, right?
Um, and so it seems like this guy was at the end of his rope, the rope snapped, and he essentially had a psychotic breakdown.
Um, we have no idea what prompted it or what led to it, and that's another problem I have with these out-of-context videos.
Again, not that any context could make that behavior right, but we don't even know, like, what, were they, was someone in there needling this guy and trying to get him rallied up?
I don't know.
We don't know.
Maybe not.
Maybe he just ran in and started shouting for no reason.
We have no idea.
That part isn't shown.
Either way, he's having a breakdown.
Seems to me, a breakdown partially from a life of disappointment and loneliness, it seems.
So, is it really funny?
I mean, can we not Should we be laughing at that?
Should we be laughing at broken, troubled people?
What does that say about us?
If you say, oh yeah, it's hilarious.
Well, what does that say about you though?
Do you think it says anything good about you?
This is one of the reasons why, remember that video of the quote-unquote trans, the quote-unquote trans woman in the, I think it was a GameStop.
Really a biological man in the GameStop shouting, uh, you know, because he was addressed as, as, uh, sir.
And he's saying, you know, call me ma'am.
I'm sure you've seen that video or at least heard about it.
Now I, I believe, uh, I never played that video on this show and the reason I didn't play it is because it's a similar sort of thing.
Now, you know, how I feel about the transgender thing.
I, you know, I, I think that if you're a man, you're a man.
So this guy's a man period.
Uh, but, It's pretty clear to me that this was a very troubled person who was having a breakdown in public, a meltdown.
And it's not funny to me.
I don't really think that's funny.
This is real life.
This is a real troubled person having a meltdown, living a life that clearly is filled with misery and despair for them and confusion.
I don't know.
I guess I just don't see the humor, honestly, in it.
I have in the past, as I said, this is not a holier than thou, I have in the past seen the humor in some of these kinds of things.
I think we all have.
But what I'm saying is maybe we should all together...
Try to pull back from this and realize that what we're seeing on the internet, these are real people.
This isn't actually reality TV.
Reality TV is fake.
Most of the time these are actually just actors pretending.
So you want to laugh at them?
Fine, go ahead.
I mean, that's what they're there for and they signed up for it, literally.
And they enjoy, obviously, being spectacles.
These people that just end up, their viral videos and everything, even if they're having meltdowns in public, they weren't looking to be celebrities or be stars.
They weren't looking for their 15 minutes of fame.
And I always think, what if, and I'm sure this has already happened, and we wouldn't necessarily know about it, but one of these days, what if we find out one of these days that one of these people who had their meltdown filmed for our amusement Then proceeded to kill themselves.
Is it far-fetched to think that that could happen and maybe has happened?
Not at all.
As someone who's already troubled, already feeling persecuted, whether rightly or wrongly, and then you add on top of that the scorn and mockery of millions of people, literally?
Now, if you've never experienced scorn and mockery from millions of people, even if it is just on the internet, that doesn't matter.
These are still people that are saying this about you.
If you've never experienced that level of mockery and scorn, maybe it's hard to understand, but it's a very overwhelming thing, even for a mentally stable person.
But if you're unstable, if you're having an episode of some kind, and then you add on top of it, I mean, it's not hard to see how someone could be driven to suicide.
Are we going to say then that it was still worth it for the laugh?
Or, oh, he had it coming to him.
I, you know, and I'm not, look, I'm not taking an issue in principle with public shaming.
I have, I have, I'm on the record as an advocate of public shaming.
In principle.
But that doesn't mean that every person should be publicly shamed.
I'm just saying that public shaming can be an appropriate response sometimes.
I don't think that public shaming of someone who has a mental breakdown for the purposes of our amusement If it's public shaming so that we can amuse ourselves at the expense of someone who's troubled and having a breakdown, that's bad public shaming.
That is not good.
Now, if we're talking about—remember that video a few months ago of the man who kicked an elderly woman in the face while she was sitting on the subway?
And that video went out there and I put it on the show and that's the fact that the video went viral is part of the reason why this guy eventually was apprehended.
Now that's good public shaming, okay?
That's someone who's dangerous, who committed a violent crime, who did something that is so horrifically horrible.
That it just, the punishment fits the crime.
So it should be public shaming, get this guy's face out there everywhere so everyone knows that this guy's an elderly, abusing scumbag, and then put him in jail.
I think that's totally, the punishment fits the crime there.
But in this case, the crime is the guy was a jerk at a bagel shop.
The punishment of massive public shaming, I don't think it fits.
All right.
Let's go to, very quickly, we'll get to a couple emails here.
This is from Matt Walshow at gmail.com, his email address.
This is from Joe, says, hello Matt.
When you are dictator of the universe, which temperature will you mandate every building to be set at?
Give a winter temp and a summer temp.
I will abide by these temps in preparation for your impending rule.
Also, I'm so glad that feminists have brought this subject up because it needs to be addressed.
There are many men out there who are victims of females and their affinity to warm temperatures.
I am a victim, Matt, and now I must become an SJW for the victims of temperature abuse.
Temperature abuse.
I like that.
I'm surprised feminists haven't come up with that term.
Maybe they have.
I am a socialist in only one subject, I must admit.
That subject is room temperature.
The women who have somehow tricked men into forfeiting the room temperature need to be forced by the government to distribute a few degrees to the fellas.
Maybe somewhere in the mid-70s will be enough for the fellas to survive the summer.
We live in Arizona.
My wife prefers 78 to 80 degrees.
It's excruciating.
Please help.
Your wife prefers it to be seven inside?
Look, Joe, I would never advocate divorce, but no, I'm kidding.
Of course, it's a joke.
All right, but your wife needs to, I mean, 80 degrees, that's crazy.
Maybe public shaming here.
Maybe you should probably shame your wife for this one.
This punishment does fit the crime.
80 degrees inside is crazy.
I mean, we're civilized people here, okay?
We live in modern civilization.
You don't need to live in 80 degree temperatures inside.
You want 80 degrees inside?
Go to a sauna.
Okay, your living room is not supposed to be a sauna, Joe's wife.
You're gonna kill this man!
He's going to literally melt into a puddle.
How dare you?
As for the appropriate temperature, well, I'm glad you asked that question.
Of course, I do have a very specific Demands as far as that goes.
So the appropriate temperature inside in the summer is 68 degrees.
Period.
That's the appropriate.
You want to go down to 66 or 67?
I will allow it.
You want to go up to 70?
I might allow it.
Maybe.
If you have a lot of fans in there.
But 68 is the ideal.
That's where it should be set.
68.
As for the summer, I mean, the winter inside, you know, 70 to 71.
I wouldn't go above that.
So, really, you're in that 68 to 70 range regardless.
That's just what temperature should be inside all the time.
But thanks for the email.
This is from James, says, Hi Matt, I am a fourth year medical student in the middle of my psychiatry clerkship and I just wanted to hop in briefly on the discussion about psychiatric disorders.
You asked why people get upset when you question the legitimacy and medical significance of psychiatric disorders.
The reason is because psychiatry is the only field of medicine where we face constant accusations of inappropriate medicalization because of disease symptoms that occur on a continuum of normal experience.
A perfect example of this is when people resist viewing psychiatric conditions as disabling disorders because we all feel anxious sometimes and we all get distracted.
Many common non-psychiatric conditions such as type 2 diabetes, asthma, hypertension, and obesity exist on a spectrum of normality, and every field uses somewhat arbitrary guidelines to distinguish between normal and abnormal.
The reason we use a hemoglobin A1c level of 6.5% to diagnose type 2 diabetes is simply because the American Diabetes Association decided that 6.5% is the point where it's severe enough to call a disease.
Up until recently, hypertension was defined as a blood pressure greater than 140 over 90.
Two years ago, the American Heart Association changed their guidelines, and now anything higher than 130 over 80 is called hypertension.
These kinds of conditions that exist on spectra are increasingly becoming the norm across all of medicine as a result of Western lifestyles leading to chronic disease, and yet the lay press constantly paints continuum disorders as something unique to psychiatry.
We have a growing body of research clearly delineating ADHD and major depression as distinct syndromes, and the American Psychiatric Association establishes thresholds for diseases, just like every other professional organization does.
I've never heard any conservative medical traditionalist question whether or not type 2 diabetes is a real disease.
I never hear any anti-medicine groups ask if doctors are over-diagnosing hypertension so that the pharmaceutical industry can make money putting everyone on ACE inhibitors.
This kind of skepticism and conspiracism seems to be almost exclusively reserved for the fields of psychiatry, and it gets very tiresome.
Thanks for reading.
Okay, I wish I had saved that email for tomorrow because I don't have a lot of time and there's a lot there to address.
Maybe I'll get back to it tomorrow, but I will say, first of all, just for the record, I think that all fields of medicine are subject to this criticism of over-diagnosis, over-prescribing, and I think for a good reason.
I think that many things are over-diagnosed, and there is a problem with people being put on prescription drugs too readily, and that's why we have a nation of prescription drug addicts.
I mean, prescription drug addiction is a huge problem in this country, as I'm sure you're aware.
And many of those drugs are, you know, psychiatric drugs, but not all of them.
I mean, think about painkillers.
Now, the medical community... Why has... I talked about this on the show, I think, that I, you know, tore my Achilles...
Go to the doctor with a torn Achilles.
My calf muscle feels like it's on fire.
It's the most painful thing I've ever experienced.
And at no point while I had the torn Achilles was I ever prescribed painkillers.
They said just take Tylenol.
I was given prescription narcotics for, you know, like five days worth after my surgery.
I only used it for two days because I really don't like that stuff.
Point is, why were they being so tight-fisted with the prescription narcotics?
And that's because it had become a huge problem with people getting addicted to this stuff.
The medical community had come under fire for it, rightly so, and so they pulled back.
So your claim that this is exclusive to psychiatry, I think, is not true.
Second thing, you know, ADHD.
Let's just focus on that for a moment.
You, I don't think you've really addressed my point on just ADHD for a second here.
Thank you.
My point is, yeah, ADH exists.
That is, people who have struggled to paying attention and are hyperactive.
Now, I think the term attention deficit is kind of strange.
Because that seems to suggest that there is some ideal amount of attention that you're supposed to be able to give, and if you can't give that amount, then you have a deficiency in attention.
To talk about a deficiency in attention is a very weird concept to me.
And again, it is arbitrary, it seems.
But regardless, not to split hairs, there are obviously people who struggle to pay attention Raise my hand for that.
And struggle to sit still.
Raise my hand for that one.
And struggle to keep their thoughts on one track and their thoughts tend to go in a million directions at once.
I raise my hand for that too.
So I'm guilty on all three counts.
My point is that maybe that's just how some people are.
Maybe that's just a personality type.
Maybe that is simply a type of person.
Maybe that is a way of being.
Who is to say that it's a disorder?
Because when you say it's a disorder, what you're saying is, people shouldn't be that way.
And so my question to you as the medical student is, how do you know people shouldn't be that way?
Especially when we know that if you have, quote, ADHD, Yeah, it's difficult in school.
It's difficult if you work in a cubicle and you sit at an office desk for eight to nine hours a day.
But if you do other things, if you have a creative job, like I do, if you work outside, if you're more hands-on, then it becomes actually a benefit.
It's an asset.
For me, with the job that I do, I've got to think of a million different topics a day, and I'm writing, I'm doing the show, and I'm constantly in my head.
For me to have this condition, while it made me feel totally deficient and crazy when I was in public school, now it makes me feel like, okay, I need to be this way in order to do this.
It may seem like an easy job.
In some ways, it is.
In some ways, it's not even a job at all.
But actually, to think of, you know, to come up with commentary for several different topics every single day and then deliver it in two different forms, writing and speaking, you know, there are some challenges with that, okay?
And so I find that having my mind work the way it does, while again it made it very difficult in math class, it actually works well here.
So given that fact, my question again to you is, who are you to say it's a disorder?
Who are you to say I'm not supposed to be this way?
Maybe this is just how I am.
I think with physical diseases, it's a little bit easier to say, well, yeah, people aren't supposed to be that way.
With something like diabetes, as you know, a diabetic, if they don't get that treated, they could die.
So that's a pretty good indication that you're not supposed to be that way.
And so you need to get that treated.
ADHD is not going to kill you.
It's not going to make your brain deteriorate.
It's not going to give you cancer.
It won't.
It makes it hard in some context, but then it also helps in other contexts.
So for the third time, and really for the millionth time, I say, maybe this is just how I am.
Maybe this is a valid personality type.
That is my assertion.
And I think you need to come up with some kind of evidence That it is not a valid personality type.
That it is, in fact, an invalid, disordered type that shouldn't exist.
I think you're going to struggle to come up with evidence for that.
And quoting the American Psychiatric Association, I don't think that's really going to help much, because this is actually, in many ways, a philosophical question.
Because the underlying question is... Now, there's nothing really philosophical about diabetes.
I take your point about it exists on a spectrum.
Okay, good point.
But it's not philosophical.
I don't think there's really any philosophical discussion about whether or not diabetes is a disease.
There is a philosophical discussion with something like ADHD, because the philosophical question is, how should a person be?
It's a very deeply philosophical question, actually.
And when you say, well, a person shouldn't be like that, you are making a profoundly philosophical claim that I happen to disagree with.
All right.
And as I said yesterday, there are other mental conditions like schizophrenia, where someone is hallucinating or has no grip on reality.
I think it's clear to me there that people shouldn't be that way.
Because that just... In that case, you cannot really function at all as a human person.
At all.
In any context.
So, you know, there you have a clear-cut case.
I think with ADHD, it is not nearly so clear-cut.
Alright, we will leave it there.
Thanks everybody for watching.
Thanks for watching. Godspeed.
Meanwhile, star Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls Nancy Pelosi a racist.
We ask the important question, has politics ever been this fun?
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