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Aug. 15, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
41:49
Ep. 318 - The Suicide Conspiracy Theory

With "coincidences" piling up, the suicide theory in the Epstein case is becoming less and less credible. Also, a gay news site celebrates the story of a 49 year old man "dating" a 16 year old boy. And another Christian leader falls away from the faith. Why does this keep happening? Date: 08-15-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Well, curiouser and curiouser, we get more and more strange details about the Epstein case every day, it seems.
And here's the latest, reading now from the Daily Wire's report.
It says, an autopsy of convicted pedophile and alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein reportedly found that the wealthy financier had multiple broken bones in his neck.
Which deepens the speculation surrounding his death last Saturday.
Among the bones, this is the Washington Post now being quoted, among the bones broken in Epstein's neck was the hyoid bone, which in men is near the Adam's apple.
Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they're older, according to forensic experts and studies on the subject.
But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the expert said.
The New York Post reported on Monday that Epstein was found hanging in his lower Manhattan jail cell with a bed sheet wrapped around his neck and secured to the top of a bunk bed and apparently killed himself by kneeling toward the floor and strangling himself.
The revelation about the broken bones that were found in Epstein's neck followed the revelation on Tuesday night that the two guards who were supposed to be monitoring him fell asleep for three hours and allegedly falsified prison records to cover up their actions.
Okay.
Now, I don't want to get too graphic here, but let's imagine this for a moment.
Let's try to wrap our heads around it.
The official preliminary story is that Epstein hung himself by, as I just read there, tying a bedsheet around his neck, tying the other end to a bunk bed, and then leaning forward on his knees.
So he was about six feet tall, 200 pounds.
He obviously couldn't have jumped from the bunk bed to hang himself, but they're not claiming that.
They're telling us that he leaned forward.
This is already hard to imagine.
I mean, just really try to imagine for a second a 200 pound man trying to hang himself by leaning forward with a bed sheet around his neck.
The body's natural reflex is to save itself.
No matter how much you, in your mind, want to kill yourself, your body does not want that.
And so your body is a natural reflex there.
That's one of the reasons why you can't kill yourself by just literally strangling yourself with your own bare hands.
And this is why people usually hang themselves by jumping from a chair or something so that they're, you know, dangling there.
Again, not to be gratuitous about it, but they won't be able to do anything to regain control of themselves and save themselves.
The point is, to successfully kill yourself the way Epstein supposedly did would require just, I think, an immense amount of determination and effort for lack of a better term.
But then you throw the broken bones in there.
Bones, plural, not just one bone.
There's been a lot of focus today on the one bone underneath the Adam's apple that's mentioned in the report.
But it's not just that, but there are multiple bones broken in his neck.
Now, you heard that this happens in a small minority of cases.
I didn't read that part, actually.
The Washington Post noted that varying studies of those who have committed suicide have found that 6-25% of them break the hyoid bone, which is one of the broken bones in Epstein's neck.
So 6-25%.
Well, that's just the one bone.
It would be an even smaller percentage that break multiple bones.
And keep in mind that most of those hangings presumably involve someone who was dangling, someone who jumped from something.
But even in most of those cases, there aren't any broken bones.
In this case though, leaning forward with a bedsheet around his neck, I just, I don't see how that's possible.
I just, I don't see it.
I suppose I can't say it's impossible, but that's a really hard thing to imagine.
Now, let's take this and review all of the alleged information as we currently know it.
And let's see what explanation, as it stands right now, seems to be the most reasonable.
And we'll do that.
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All right, so Epstein.
So we have these mysterious broken bones in his neck.
You add this revelation to reports that Epstein was taken off a suicide watch, as we already knew.
His cellmate was transferred out of his cell.
The prison guards both simultaneously fell asleep, supposedly.
The records were falsified.
And according to some reports, there was shrieking heard from Epstein's cell, although it didn't specify when the shrieking was heard in relation to when the suicide happened, the alleged suicide happened.
And in fact, if we're tabulating strange details here in this case, I think the very fact that he killed himself is itself arguably strange.
Now, as I said earlier in the week, you could easily see why somebody would kill themselves in this situation, facing a life behind bars as a child rapist, especially in comparison to the life he was leading before with private jets and private islands and everything else.
So you could see that.
But then on the other hand, he had all the leverage in the world, really.
I mean, there are people more powerful and important than him who he could have flipped on.
Leverage that for something.
Plus, he'd spent decades of his life compiling blackmail on people just for this very reason.
As an insurance policy.
For just this occasion.
Then the occasion arises and he kills himself?
I don't know.
Yeah, you could say, well, it's hard to know what prison would do to a man.
You know, if you've never been to prison, it's hard to imagine how it changes you.
Not that I've been.
You know, I sound like Morgan Freeman in Shawshank Redemption.
You can't imagine what prison would do to a man.
But, I mean, really, you can't.
So there's that also.
But still, all of these things, it's a cumulative effect now when you look at all these factors together.
You look at the totality of things.
It's beginning to seem to me that the suicide explanation is still possible, obviously, but it's beginning to look like the most implausible conspiracy theory.
You know, I originally said that the idea that someone offed him was perfectly reasonable and plausible, but originally, at the beginning of the week anyway, based on what we knew at the time, it seemed like the most plausible explanation was the more banal one, which is that he really just killed himself and was enabled to do that by the incompetence of the government.
But that was before we knew about the shrieking, about the guard supposedly falling asleep, about the falsification of records, and now the broken bones in the neck.
And this, to me, the broken bones in the neck, to me, is very, very significant.
And if we're following Occam's Razor, which says that the explanation which requires the fewest number of strange coincidences, really the explanation that requires It requires the fewest number of additional explanations is probably correct.
You have an explanation where there are a lot of other elements in that explanation that you also have to explain.
And then you have another explanation that has fewer of those.
Well, then that other one is probably correct.
That's kind of how Occam's razor works.
And according to that, it seems that not suicide, something other than suicide, Is beginning to appear to be the most plausible option.
Because the suicide explanation at this point requires a whole lot of coincidences.
You know, it requires us to believe that a lot of different factors just sort of coincidentally all lined up with each other.
Possible, but hard to believe.
You know, in fact, if you had told me when this story came out that both the prison guards fell asleep for three hours, both of them, that was a big red flag to me.
If you had told me that, well, no, they were there and they were checking every 30 minutes like they're supposed to, but Epstein hung himself in between that 30-minute stretch, I would have found that a lot more plausible.
It doesn't take 30 minutes to hang yourself.
I don't know how long it takes.
A couple minutes?
Right, so if you had told me that, then I would say, oh, you know, okay.
But no, now you're saying they both fell asleep for three hours, both of them?
That's, you know, that's tough.
And then they falsified the records.
I don't know, but, you know, my fear is that whatever happened, we're never gonna find out for sure.
Especially with our illustrious media, which seems to be losing interest in this story.
I mean, this to me is definitely the biggest story going on, happening right now, in America anyway, when you consider the implications.
This should still be headline news.
I mean, this should be leading the news broadcasts, it would seem, but it's not.
The media is already trying to move on from it.
And I think we all know why that is, when you consider the political leanings of some of the people potentially, who could have potentially been implicated by Epstein.
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Okay, the website Pink News is a prominent gay news site based in the UK, I believe.
They had an article in a video up yesterday celebrating the story of Mark and Caleb.
Mark is 55 and Caleb is 22.
And they've been in a quote-unquote relationship for six years and now they're getting married.
Now, I'll let you do the math on that.
Caleb is 22.
Mark is 55.
They've been dating for six years.
Dating, again, quotes.
Just imagine the scare quotes around many of the words I'm saying here.
Dating, relationship.
Because this discourse is not relationship and it's not dating.
This is grooming and sexual abuse.
This means that they started this Now, Pink News has since taken down the video and the news article, but here's a screenshot for you.
I'll show you.
I'm sorry to subject you to this, but there you go.
There it is.
Totally normal, right?
Totally normal for a man in his 50s to be dating a boy who was in high school at the time when they met.
A guy who even now looks to be about 12 and wears makeup.
Totally normal, you know, for a grown man to be, right?
Completely normal, nothing we can say about that.
Well, no, it's not normal.
And it's not okay.
But the goal is to make this normal.
And I've been warning about this for years.
I keep, and I'll keep warning about it.
Because I truly believe that the normalization of pedophilia is the next frontier for the left.
We're already there.
They're doing it right now.
That's what this is.
Not in those words.
Okay, they're never going to get to a point, there will never be a point where the left is saying, yeah, pedophilia is okay.
They're going to use different words.
That's what they always do.
But these kinds of stories here, they're the perfect tool for the normalizers of this kind of thing.
Because technically, and I was informed of this when I was posting about it yesterday on Twitter, some people say, well, you know, technically this is legal.
But, I mean, you put up the picture again.
Let's look at that picture one more time.
Technically, you see this right here, technically is legal.
Technically, apparently, they started, quote, dating when Caleb had reached the age of consent.
Technically legal.
Now, we all know, though, that even if that's technically legal, it's still sick and gross and morally deranged and evil and just awful.
We know that.
We also know that If you're a 49-year-old man sexually attracted to 16-year-old boys who look about 10, that probably means that your attractions, well, it's unlikely that your sexual attraction just automatically happens to cut off at the age of, at the legal age of consent.
You know, if you're a 49-year-old man attracted to 16-year-old boys, it's pretty unlikely that, oh, 15, 14-year-old boys, oh, no way.
13, no.
If your attractions go in that direction and that young, it probably extends further than the legal age of consent is what I'm saying.
So this kind of story, the reason why Pink News presented it to us in such a happy and cheerful way is that it moves society in the direction of seeing these kinds of things as normal and okay.
Of course, Pink News is not gonna show us a story You know, about a 50-year-old man in a quote-unquote relationship with an 8-year-old boy.
They're not going to do that.
Even if the people who run that site would personally have no problem with that, they're still not going to show us that.
But they're going to do something like this, where they could say, eh, it's legal.
It's just like the video I played earlier in the week of a drag queen at a drag queen story hour teaching kids how to twerk.
Technically legal, I guess.
Or the thing a few weeks ago of little kids at a story hour who were crawling on a drag queen while he laid on the ground, and little children were crawling on him.
Or the thing where the 11-year-old drag queen danced at a gay bar while grown men threw money at him.
All of that?
Technically legal.
It shouldn't be, by the way.
It definitely should not be legal for a child to dance at a gay bar.
I don't think it should be legal for a drag queen to go to a bunch of kids and start twerking for them.
I think that's sexual harassment of children.
That should be illegal too, but it's not, apparently.
So the normalizers can always hide behind that and say, it's legal, man.
Yeah, so what?
It doesn't change the fact that it's evil.
And that doesn't change what they're trying to condition us for.
When we talk about normalizing of pedophilia and child sexual abuse, the biggest example, which I haven't even mentioned, is the very fact that we're told that three-year-old children can choose their own gender.
The fact that we have eight-year-old, quote-unquote, transgenders, that's part of this, too.
Because what are we saying?
We're saying, oh, well, kids are old enough to make these kinds of decisions for themselves.
If an eight-year-old boy is old enough to decide his own gender, then the next thing we're going to be told, eventually, is that eight-year-old boys are also old enough to consent to sexual relationships.
The main thing, I think, that has hampered the conservative movement for years now is an inability among so many of us to see where things are headed.
Which isn't to say that we all need to be prophets, I'm certainly not.
And we don't need to see the future.
But we should have a sense, we should be able to look at where we are now.
And we should have an intuition of where, what's going to happen next.
And I think for a long time, many conservatives, especially the so-called thought leaders at the head of the conservative movement, have not been very good at that.
And so we're constantly being blindsided by things like this.
The whole transgender thing kind of blindsided the conservative movement where it seemed like all of a sudden they're saying that, you know, everyone's lost their sense of what a man or a woman is and people can choose their own gender.
And I think for a long time conservatives were kind of fumbling around like, what's going on?
How did this happen?
Well, if you've been paying attention, that shouldn't have surprised you.
So 10 years from now, You know, ten years from now, I don't want to hear conservatives throwing their hands up, saying, what's happening?
How did this happen?
Now that pedophilia is totally normal and okay, and you even have Democrats openly arguing to legalize it.
No, don't be surprised.
Especially if you're not saying anything about it now.
Don't act surprised when it actually happens.
All right, before we go to emails, at mattwalshow at gmail.com is the email address.
Before we do that, I wanted to make mention of this as well.
And I've had this on deck to talk about for a few days now.
Marty Sampson, who is, well, was, I guess, a songwriter for the Christian band Hillsong United.
Very popular Christian band.
Recently announced that he's losing his faith.
He's questioning things.
He's beginning to suspect, it seems, that Christianity is false, that Jesus is not the Messiah, that, I guess, God doesn't exist.
And this is just the latest prominent Christian to leave the faith or to consider leaving the faith in the last few months.
That's why this is sort of, you know, to have one guy who comes out and says this is not terribly shocking, but this is part of the pattern now.
It's really becoming a trend where you've got prominent pastors.
There was the guy who wrote the Why I Kissed Dating Goodbye.
What was his name?
Joshua Harris, I believe.
He left the faith.
So there have been a number in the last few months, and now we have Marty Sampson.
Let me read part of what he said.
He posted this to Instagram.
He deleted the post, which I am somewhat surprised he deleted it because You said it.
We all know it.
I don't know what deleting it's going to do.
But, um, so he said, in part, he said, time for some real talk.
I'm genuinely, I'm genuinely losing my faith and it doesn't bother me.
Like what bothers me now is nothing.
I am so happy now.
So at peace with the world, it's crazy.
This is a soapbox box moment.
So here I go.
Uh, the grammar's here a little bad.
So little, the grammar here is a little tough.
So I'm, uh, I'm going to, How many preachers fall?
Many.
No one talks about it.
How many miracles happen?
Not many.
No one talks about it.
Why is the Bible full of contradictions?
No one talks about it.
How can God be loved, yet send 4 billion people to a place all because they don't believe?
A place, I assume he's talking about hell.
No one talks about it.
Christians can be the most judgmental people on the planet.
They can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people.
But it's not for me.
I am not in anymore.
I want genuine truth, not the I-just-believe-it kind of truth.
Science keeps piercing the truth of every religion.
Lots of things help people change their lives, not just one version of God.
Got so much more to say, but for me, I'm keeping it real.
Unfollow if you want.
I've never been about living my life for others.
Okay, now, a lot of what he says, and I think since that post he's posted other things saying that, you know, he hasn't left the faith, but he's struggling and he's looking into various apologists and so on.
Now, a lot of what he says no one talks about.
In fact, we do talk about those things.
I know I do and I have on this show.
The failure of pastors was the first thing they mentioned.
Pastors fall.
I assume he means all these various scandals involving pastors and priests and other Christian leaders.
That is a regular topic of conversation among many Christians.
It's something I've talked about many times.
So I think that's just not true that we don't talk about those things.
Alleged Bible contradictions?
Well, with that, I think I actually agree with him, that I think there isn't a lot of talk about that.
It's not something that pastors generally address from the pulpit.
It's not something that Christians generally will talk about, in my experience.
If you're into apologetics and you like reading apologetics and listening to theologians and apologists as they talk about these things, well then, sure, then you've heard those kinds of matters discussed and addressed and explained, but not on a popular level.
And most Christians, even though I think they should, most Christians aren't really reading apologetics, and they're not really into theology.
And so their helping of Christianity is going to come from their church, from their pastor, from the people around them, on the more popular sort of level.
And on that level, I think that there is a failure to address some of this stuff, including the issues with the Bible.
For example, why aren't pastors getting up on the pulpit?
And I'm sure I'll get emails from people saying, oh, my pastor does talk about it.
Okay, but I think your pastor is an exception.
For the most part, why aren't pastors getting up on the pulpit and talking through, say, the infancy narratives and talking about the differences and challenges there and how to reconcile them?
Because if you don't talk about it... Now, I know the infancy narratives in the Bible are talked about from the pulpit quite a bit, especially around Christmas time.
But usually what happens is that the pastor or priest is up there, and he's just giving you the sort of standard story of Jesus that we're all familiar with, which is a harmonization of Luke and Matthew.
What you don't usually hear is a pastor get up and say, okay, this is what Luke says, here's what Matthew says, here are the differences, let's talk through this.
The fact is, Matthew and Luke seem to tell wildly divergent stories.
Luke has the Holy Family going to Bethlehem for a census.
Matthew has them already living there to begin the narrative.
Luke has them returning home after a visit from the shepherds and then going to present Jesus in the temple.
Then they go home.
And so on and so on.
Matthew makes room for a years-long flight to Egypt to escape the slaughter of the innocents
in Bethlehem, an event that Luke never mentions.
And then Matthew says that they were going to go back to Bethlehem, implying that that
was their home originally, but then they decided to go instead to Nazareth when Joseph was
warned in a dream that it wouldn't be safe to go back there.
And so on and so on.
Now, I think there are ways of dealing with this, ways of understanding it, but the point
is I had to go on my own and first discover these difficulties and then hunt down answers
to them.
And it had, you know, when I've struggled with some of the stuff or looked at it, looked into it, I've had the experience of trying to talk to other Christians about it and either they have no idea because they've never studied this.
I can't tell you how many Christians don't actually know the story of Jesus's birth.
And they couldn't tell you what Luke says as opposed to what Matthew says.
That's, I mean, that's pitiful.
And I admit that I was in that camp for a long time.
Because I hadn't actually sat down myself and said, let me study this myself.
Rather than just taking whatever version is given to me by someone else.
It's pathetic.
So, there are ways of going through this, but I think that these are issues that should be addressed head-on from the pulpit.
These are not issues that we should be afraid of.
So, what Samson is saying here, I think we should take it more seriously than a lot of Christians seem to be.
Also, I'll just say this.
I've been watching the reaction among Christians to this latest Christian leader questioning his faith, and the reaction among some Christians—unfortunately very loud ones, not all of them, probably not the majority, but some—has been, in my opinion, horrible.
Screaming at the guy that he was never a true Christian, that he's an apostate, etc., etc.
That's not the right response here.
All you're going to do is scare him away forever when you react to him.
I mean, what do you think?
When someone says, look, I'm really struggling, you know, I'm questioning these things, and you say, ah, then you were never a real Christian to begin with!
Get out of here!
Like, what do you think that's going to accomplish?
It makes you feel better because he had a temper tantrum, but is that going to help save his soul?
Especially because he didn't say exactly that he's leaving Christianity.
He said he was having doubts, serious doubts.
He was struggling, his faith is dwindling, and he claimed that he was at peace and happy, but I don't really believe that.
You know, to have your whole world upside down and questioning the fundamental truths that you were raised on.
There's no way you're happy with that.
You don't get happiness out of that.
This is obviously someone who's in a lot of emotional turmoil.
The guy opened up.
He was honest about his struggles.
And our response to that is what?
To accuse him?
To yell at him?
To get angry?
Try to invalidate everything he's saying as if there's no validity to it at all?
As if he's just imagining it?
Which is what some... I've read a few more lengthy responses to this Marty Samson thing from some supposed Christian leaders and apologists, and some of it has been, Bible contradictions?
What are you talking about?
That's ridiculous.
If you knew the Bible, you would know that there are no contradictions, you idiot.
I mean, paraphrasing, but that's kind of been the reaction.
That's not right.
And what he's saying, you know, some of these issues here in the Bible, it's not crazy to notice them.
There are some real serious issues that are very difficult to understand.
And it's not as simple as, oh yeah, well, you know, you can't just wave it off.
I mean, you, and there have been, you could spend your whole life studying just these issues with the infancy narratives, which some people have.
You could write, I mean, whole volumes have been written about it.
That's how complex the issue is.
So, when someone says, you know, man, I'm struggling with this, I really, to wave it off and say, what are you talking about?
You can't see how it fits together, you idiot?
That's not the right response.
I think when someone opens up like this and is honest about their thought process, our response should be, okay, thank you for being honest, let's talk about it, let's talk through this.
Because, I'll tell you this, if people are shouted at, For opening up about their doubts and their issues.
They're going to stop opening up.
And instead, they're just going to drift away.
If that's the reaction they get, I mean, I think that's probably why he took down the Instagram post, because the reaction was so hostile.
But then what's going to happen?
He's just going to say, you know what?
Screw these people, in that case.
I can't talk to them.
I can't be honest with them.
I think as Christians, our religion You cannot function like a cult.
I mean, that's the accusation you hear from atheists, is that we're a bunch of cultists.
Well, we're not.
I mean, by some definition of cult, then technically every religion is a cult by some definition.
But, you know, in the pejorative sense, when someone says, oh, you're a cult, what they mean is just a bunch of mindless drones, you're brainwashed, and all that kind of stuff.
And that, of course, is not true fundamentally about Christianity, but it is true that some Christians do operate that way, where questioning is not welcome.
If you have any doubts, then you're screamed at for them.
People who stray are treated like the enemy.
I mean, there is some of that.
And then also, the hesitancy of a lot of pastors to address some of these theological issues head-on, from the pulpit, like the Bible, like the difficulties with the Bible, and so on.
The problem is, if you don't address it, and you're not up front, and then so a lot of people just don't even know that these issues exist, well, when they go on their own and discover the issues, They're going to feel like they were lied to.
They're going to feel like you were keeping a secret.
And then they're going to start to feel like maybe someone from Scientology who wakes up one day and realizes this stuff is crazy.
That's how they're going to feel if you're not upfront about it.
He brings up the issue of a loving God sending people to hell.
Well, again, he's certainly not the first person to raise this issue.
Obviously, people talk about it.
But this is another one.
In my experience, that is not the kind of issue that pastors will generally talk about from the pulpit.
They're not going to talk about that.
They're not going to talk about things like, how could God allow children to die of cancer?
Things like that.
Yeah, it's discussed.
But I think sort of out on the peripherals, and if you want to engage in a discussion like that, or to get those answers, you have to really pursue them.
Because you're not going to get it on the mainstream level.
What you're going to get at a lot of churches is just shallow, surface-level talking points, self-help, life advice, that kind of thing.
You're not going to get these deeper, more complex discussions where these really difficult issues are faced head-on.
And I think that's a huge mistake.
And I think that's one of the reasons why people like Marty Sampson end up leaving.
So, we should all pray for him.
All right, mattwalshow at gmail.com, mattwalshow at gmail.com.
This is from Arthur, says, I've lost all my respect for you as a person.
Frodo from Lord of the Rings is a hobbit, not a dwarf, which you incorrectly identified on yesterday's show.
I demand that you apologize for your clear prejudice against hobbits, that you recant your pro-dwarf extremism, that you denounce elves for existing.
You know, Arthur, I've gotten so many emails from people scolding me because I incorrectly said that Frodo is a dwarf.
And of course, I know that Frodo is a hobbit.
I am an expert on Lord of the Rings.
Just because I misspoke doesn't mean I'm not an expert.
So you don't need to lecture me.
I mean, there are so many great scenes from Lord of the Rings, I couldn't even begin to tell you my favorite.
But one of my favorites, I really liked that scene when Frodo was fighting Voldemort in the Millennium Falcon.
But then Captain Kirk comes in and he has his lightsaber.
But then the Hulk is there and punches him and he knocks him into Batman.
That was a great scene.
One of the classics.
Just great, great stuff there.
All right, this is from Nicholas.
Hi Matt.
Nick B from Denver.
I understand the vegetarian argument.
However, it is absurd when you think about it.
Two weeks ago I was camping slash fly fishing on a remote mountain lake with my wife.
There were thousands of mosquitoes everywhere and more dragonflies than I've ever seen in one place eating them.
Each dragonfly can eat hundreds of mosquitoes per day.
While cleaning our fish, I checked their bellies and they had dozens of insects in them as well.
And when I removed my waders, I found hundreds of larvae around my boots.
The fish were eating them as well.
The point is, between fish, birds, and insects, the amount of life ended at this single remote mountain lake down to the microscopic level is on an unfathomable scale every day.
I thought of Buddhists who wouldn't harm a fly, probably only for that fly to get eaten 20 minutes later by a bird.
A single cow has 500 pounds of meat on it.
That's 2,000 quarter-pounders.
When they abstain from eating meat, it has virtually no impact on anything other than their own feeling of self-righteousness.
It has no impact on life or the environment or the planet.
Even if all humans gave up eating meat, it would not change the way life works.
One last point about bringing kids into the world being bad for the environment.
What is the purpose of the environment or the planet without sentient life?
Without human beings, there's only an endless circle of death on the planet, doomed to be consumed by the sun eventually.
And I agree with you there.
The idea that we shouldn't have kids because it's bad for the environment, there's nothing redeeming about that argument at all.
But the vegetarian argument, as I said yesterday when someone wrote in and was mad that I'm always so dismissive of the vegetarian argument, I said that I don't think it's a crazy argument, the idea that we shouldn't eat meat.
I don't agree with it.
And I made a similar point to the one that you just made, which is that this is part of the cycle of life and animals kill each other all the time.
And if you're saying that, you know, we are animals ourselves, that's what vegetarians often say.
They say, well, we have no right to go around killing animals.
We're not better than them.
Well, I happen to disagree with that.
I think we are better than them and superior to them.
But if it's true that we're not, then we're just part of that cycle and why shouldn't we engage in it?
To blame a human for eating a cow would be just as absurd as blaming a lion for eating a gazelle, right?
So I agree with you there.
And no matter if you're looking at it from an evolutionary, Darwinistic, materialistic perspective or, you know, theological, theist perspective, either way it seems like we were made or we evolved to eat meat and so that's fine.
But I think a vegetarian would respond And as I said, it's not a crazy response to say that, okay, but yeah, there's a difference between killing an insect or even a fish and killing, say, a cow or pig.
And it all comes down to the ability, an animal's ability to suffer.
And if these are beings that have some sort of internal life, some sort of consciousness,
and they're able to suffer, then we shouldn't kill them.
And I think that would be the vegetarian argument.
They would say, well, I think we all know that a mosquito is not capable of those kind of
thought processes.
However, a pig or a cow probably is.
And so how do you square that?
And I also think there's an inconsistency here, because most people who say it's OK to eat meat,
we would be horrified if someone went and shot a dog, unless the dog is being put down because it was suffering.
But to kill a dog, certainly to kill and eat a dog, if someone were to kill and eat their own dog, and they weren't starving, but they just felt like having it for dinner, because they were curious about how it tastes or something, we would all be horrified by that.
But what's really the difference between a dog and a cow?
I don't know.
I can't really... Why, really, objectively, is it wrong to kill a dog but not a cow?
I know subjectively we tend to bond more with dogs than cows, but as far as the dog and cow itself, their ability to suffer, their ability to feel things and so on, are we sure that the dog really... I don't know.
So that's what I'm saying.
I think there is sort of an inconsistency.
I haven't worked it out completely, but I guess it's not an issue that I care overly much about.
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.
And at the end of the day, I think, as I said, it's perfectly fine to eat animals.
Although...
As I said yesterday, when you talk about factory farming and when you talk about basically producing animals just so we can eat them and they spend their whole life basically on an assembly line, cooped up and cramped and everything.
I think some of the stuff you hear about factory farming is probably exaggerated, but it isn't all exaggerated.
And it does seem like rather a miserable life.
To be, you know, a pig living in a slaughterhouse, right?
So that becomes more difficult, I think, also to justify.
What you're talking about here, Nick, is, you know, you're out in nature, you're fishing, you're camping, you know, it's a very sort of natural, you're in nature, you're part of nature, right?
So that's, it's much easier to justify killing animals in that environment as you are sort of part of that circle of life.
But when you think of it more as, Where we are just producing animals to kill them, and that's the only point, and we have no concern for their suffering or anything, then, I don't know, it becomes harder to justify.
But I will continue to eat meat, because it tastes good.
That's my moral argument.
It's not good, but that's it.
Listen, we can't all... I try to be consistent, intellectually, but we all have inconsistencies, and this is one of mine.
I admit it.
You ask me to give up hamburgers, I just can't do it.
I can't.
It's as simple as that.
I'm sorry for the cows that they happen to be so delicious and so slow and so dumb.
I am sorry for them.
I'm glad that I'm not one, but what can I do?
All right.
We will, with that very intelligent argument on my part, we will leave it there.
Thanks everybody for watching and listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
So now we hear there was shrieking coming from Jeffrey Epstein's cell before he died, and sources say he suffered injuries more indicative of strangulation than suicide.
But we can trust our authorities and elites to get to the bottom of this, right?
Right?
We'll talk about it on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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