Ep. 343 - Media Pushes Yet Another Hate Crime Hoax
A girl claimed she was the victim of a racist attack. Now she admits she made it all up. Her story was absurd and outlandish from the start, but that didn't stop the media from amplifying it uncritically. Also, in the most important news of the day, people keep voting Sean Spicer through on Dancing With The Stars. We need to talk about this. And in less important news, some people think we're headed for a civil war. Are we? Date: 10-01-2019
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I'm not sure if you guys heard about this yet, but I thought it's important for you to hear if you haven't, in case you missed it.
The second coming happened.
I don't know if you saw it, but the second coming did happen.
Not a huge deal or anything, but the second coming did in fact happen.
A pretty highly anticipated event.
Almost as anticipated as the Joker movie, which is coming out this weekend, which I'm looking forward to.
The Church of Sweden, as it turns out, has said that climate change alarmist Greta Thunberg is the successor of Jesus Christ.
They have appointed her as successor of Jesus Christ, which means, like I said, that her birth, I guess, was in effect the second coming.
I don't remember Reading that, that wasn't my interpretation of the book of Genesis.
In fact, I kind of was, well, I was kind of expecting more.
I was thinking, you know, multi-headed dragons and horsemen coming out of the sky, and that's sort of how the whole apocalypse thing would happen, but all kinds of mystical stuff.
But instead, we get a teenager yelling at us for not recycling.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit disappointed.
2,000 years of waiting, and the new Jesus comes on a mission to reduce carbon emissions.
Not exactly what we were anticipating, but what can you do?
Plenty to discuss today, beginning with another hate crime hoax that the media fell for as usual, hook, line, and sinker, and also as usual, one that Put people's lives in jeopardy, and we're going to talk about that in a second.
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All right.
Here's an interesting question to ponder as we get into the first topic of the day.
What does it tell you about a country if the members of the supposedly oppressed segments
of its population are constantly inventing instances of oppression?
What does it tell you about a systematically racist country if examples of systemic racism have to be fabricated out of whole cloth constantly?
I think maybe it tells you that the oppressed populations aren't actually oppressed.
Which is a good thing, right?
That's good news.
That's something to celebrate.
When the demand for oppression has exceeded the supply, that is a very good indication that you don't really have an oppression problem in your country.
You do have other problems.
The fact that people want to be oppressed is a cultural problem, but the problem is not systemic oppression.
That's something to think about as we continue along today.
You may remember the story of Amari Allen, the sixth grade girl who claimed that a bunch of racist white boys at a Christian school that she attends staged a brutal, racist, horrific attack against her.
And rather than me recounting her claim, let's take a trip down memory lane and look at the CBS report about this alleged incident.
This is from about a week ago, and this is how CNN reported it.
Where were anybody to protect her from this heinous crime?
Cynthia Allen is overwhelmed with frustration after learning what her 12-year-old granddaughter Amari went through on this school playground Monday.
Amari is a sixth grader at the private Emanuel Christian School in Springfield, Virginia, the place where Second Lady Karen Pence teaches.
Amari tells WUSA9 she's been bullied for weeks.
Sometimes I think that I don't deserve to be there at a Christian school and everything.
I'm ugly.
She says three sixth grade boys won't let up, taking her school lunches, calling her names, and more recently, an attack on the school playground.
Like all three were around me, and then one of them put my hands behind my back, one of them covered my mouth.
All while she says a third student pulled out scissors, then cut her hair.
Her lengthy dreadlocks now hanging unevenly.
Like took like big chunks of my hair and just cut.
So that was the report.
And there was, it's CBS, but every major news outlet had a story like that.
They were all over this story.
We should mention, might as well mention, because the media mentioned it many times, although I don't believe it was mentioned in that report, at least I didn't notice it, Karen Pence, Mike Pence's wife, works at this school.
Which is a fact that many left-wing sites were only too eager to point out when this story first broke.
Just one example here, the left-wing rag Raw story had this headline.
Their headline was, uh, white boys attack classmate and cut off her dreadlocks at school where Mike Pence's wife teaches.
And here's a headline from another obscure left-wing rag called Newsweek.
Sixth graders hold down classmate, cut her dreadlocks at private Christian school where Karen Pence teaches.
Why is it necessary to tie Mike Pence to this?
That's the question.
Now, it isn't, obviously.
Except for the—before we even get to the fact that this whole story is BS, which it is, by the way, that's the twist ending here.
Um, but, but, you know, except for the fact, there's no reason to bring Mike Pence into this as they did, just because his wife works there, except for the fact that the left has a Mike Pence obsession.
They have a Mike Pence fever, and the only prescription is more Mike Pence.
They just can't stop talking about the guy.
They are obsessed with him, and so they bring everything back to Mike Pence if they can, and certainly they weren't going to let this opportunity to drag his name through the mud go to waste.
Now, and of course, reporting that a racist attack happened at a school where Mike Pence's wife teaches, that would be like saying that there was an armed robbery at a store where Barack Obama's wife shops.
It's just, it's irrelevant.
Unless there's a reason to think that there's some connection.
But of course there wasn't.
Anyway, getting, as I said, to the surprise, twist, shock ending.
This was all bogus.
Untrue.
The girl made it up.
After the media reported this story uncritically, amplifying the claims with zero skepticism.
You heard that, and I'll give you some more examples in a moment, but that Newsweek headline.
There were two problems with it.
One is it tied Mike Pence's wife, Karen Pence, to it.
But also, there was no allegedly, no claims, nothing like that.
Just said sixth graders hold down classmate and cutter dreadlocks.
They reported that as a fact.
But it was not a fact.
It was made up.
Amari Allen, the girl, admits now that she made it up.
Her grandparents issued a statement yesterday.
They said partly, to those young boys and their parents, we sincerely apologize for
the pain and anxiety these allegations have caused.
To the administrators and families of Emanuel Christian School, we are sorry for the damage
this incident has done to trust within the school family and the undue scorn it has brought
to the school.
To the broader community who rallied in support for our daughter, we apologize for betraying
your trust.
Now I don't necessarily blame the grandparents for this.
As far as I know, they had nothing to do with making this story up.
They were told this by their granddaughter and they believed it.
And I guess you can't really blame them for believing it.
And, you know, the thing is, I don't really blame the girl either.
Because she's a kid and she made up a story.
And that's what kids do.
She should be punished, for sure, because it's a very bad thing to do.
But I think the lion's share of the blame should go to the adults in the situation who should have known better.
Adults who, for instance, work in the media.
So we've gone over how these media vultures tried to tie Karen Pence to this, tied her to this without verifying A, that it happened, and B, that she had any knowledge of it or any way to prevent it or had any association with this event whatsoever, this event that didn't actually happen as it turns out.
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Just think about some of these other headlines reporting on this story originally.
Like this from the BBC.
Here's the BBC's headline last week.
White students cut off black girls dreadlocks in Virginia.
They put cut off in quotes there, but there is no allegedly, no words like claims or says or reports.
Just the allegation, unconfirmed, reported as objective fact right in the headline.
Or this from the New York Daily News.
Girls dreadlocks shorn off by three sixth grade boy classmates who held her down, colon family.
So you see what they did there.
They put colon family at the end as a way to pretend that they're being skeptical when really they weren't.
Because all people are going to notice is they're going to notice the girls dreadlocks shorn off by white boys.
That's all they're going to notice.
When a media outlet, it's just a good rule of thumb.
Oftentimes when a media outlet wants to report an unsubstantiated allegation as fact, But they want to do it in a way that gives them plausible deniability.
So that if it turns out, so if it's exposed as unsubstantiated or false, they can always say, hey, you know, we, we never said it really happened.
What they'll do is they'll, they'll put the allegation in the headline.
And at the very end of the headline, they'll put a colon report or colon family or something like that.
Or even like a comma report says.
So it would be like, man abducted by alien squids from Neptune, report says.
Or how about the website Essence, says 12-year-old girl gets her beautiful locks cut off in school hate crime.
But even the headlines that have appropriate qualifiers are bad.
Like this from an NBC affiliate says, So you've got the says in there, at least.
So that's good.
But here's the real issue.
No matter how you report it, it's going to be a problem.
And the real problem is that you're reporting it in the first place.
Because we've seen this movie before.
We've seen this movie many times.
We've been through this.
We know that people make stuff like this up all the time.
Which means that the absence of real evidence, if all we have is he said, she said, then a responsible journalist, a responsible media outlet that actually cares about the truth and wants to do the right thing, wouldn't report the story at all.
So they always can find cover for themselves by saying, hey, we didn't know it was a fake story.
She said it happened, and so we reported what she said.
And hey, if it did happen, it would have been a big deal.
Okay, until there is real evidence to report the outlandish story told by a child without doing any kind of due diligence or any kind of verification Is malpractice.
See, this really isn't hard.
When I first heard this story, you probably had the same reaction as me, because you're a thinking person, unlike our folks in media.
When I first heard this story a week ago, or whenever it was, and I saw the headlines, my immediate reaction was, yeah, right.
My immediate reaction was a kind of sideways glance, eh, no, I don't think so.
What I immediately thought.
Now, I didn't say that publicly because I didn't have evidence.
And so, just like you can't report unsubstantiated allegations as fact without evidence, you also can't come out and say, oh, I know for a fact that didn't happen unless you have evidence, so I'm not going to come out.
And that's one of the things the media knows this, right?
Um, they can report this unsubstantiated stuff and you've got a, you've got a, uh, you know, a young, a child saying that she was brutally attacked.
Well, nobody's going to want to come out against a child and say, no, I think the girl's lying.
No one's going to say that, especially if we don't have any, if, if the only reason why we think it is just gut instinct, which is what it was for me, that's not going to be enough.
That's not enough for me to come out publicly and say, I think she's lying.
Even though I thought she was, um, So, the responsible thing, what most of us did, what I did, what most people did, I just didn't say anything about it.
I didn't say anything one way or another.
Just wait a minute.
Because once the cops get involved, which they did here, the cops are going to figure it out.
You give cops credit for this.
They really have no trouble sniffing out these fake hate crimes.
They can kind of tell right away.
Because with something like this, if it really happened, there should be a lot of evidence that it happened.
And, uh, and they're so it doesn't take them long to sort it out like they did here.
So when, when we see things like this, um, from the beginning, what we should say to ourselves is, hmm, okay, here's the claim.
It's certainly a, dramatic claim, and if this did happen it's a horrible thing, but there are two explanations that could account for why this claim is being made.
One explanation is a group of racist children at a Christian school really did stage a brutal premeditated hate crime in the middle of the school day Involving a deadly weapon, which would be the scissors, which no teachers apparently noticed.
So there's that explanation.
Or, a child made up a story.
Which is more likely?
All things being equal.
If you have no evidence either way, which is more likely?
Which is more likely to happen?
In one scenario, you need several children to have done something extraordinarily evil, And on the other scenario, you need one kid to have done something bad, but something that kids do all the time, which is make up stories.
Obviously, the more likely scenario is the latter scenario, which doesn't mean that the former isn't possible.
It just means that the latter is more likely.
But why am I even bothering to explain this?
Because we know that the media knows exactly what it's doing.
We know that the media, it's not like they don't know how to look into a story or they don't know how to look into the background of something and verify and do their due diligence.
They know how to do it.
They're just selective about when they do it.
So when a black girl tells a wild story about white boys holding her down and cutting her hair off, The media will report it without doing any background or making any attempt to verify any aspect of the story whatsoever.
But when, for example, a white guy raises money for sick kids, then the media digs into his past to find out what he tweeted in high school.
Now, all of a sudden, they're skeptical.
Now, all of a sudden, they want to know what's really going on.
So they see that.
They see a white guy donating money.
They go, what's really going on here?
Hey, find out what's going on with this guy.
That's when they're interested in their due diligence.
Just vultures.
This is not a victimless crime, by the way.
What the media has done here, in this case, is not victimless.
Just like it never is victimless.
It wasn't victimless with the Covington Catholic.
It wasn't even victimless in the case of the Justice Millette hoax.
Because what you're doing is you're fanning the flames of hatred.
You're causing division.
And especially with this school.
I've talked to some of the parents who have kids at this school.
I've gotten messages and emails from them telling me what's been going on at this school.
And it has been chaos for the last week.
It's torn the school apart.
It's brought all this negative attention on the school.
There are people online saying horrible things about the school, the people that teach there, the kids that go to school there.
And I put this all on the media.
I really do.
I put it 100% at their feet.
To be honest, in a way, I feel sorry for the girl, too.
Because...
I kind of doubt that she thought it would get to this level.
I don't know what exactly led her to making up this story, but I'm sure part of it was she wanted attention, which as I said, kids make up stories for attention all the time.
My kids do that.
They don't do it on this level, but kids do that.
It's something all kids do sometimes.
Kids are going to act like kids.
And that's why the adults have to be adults.
To protect them from themselves.
So it's not even just for the sake of the other kids at that school, particularly the white kids, who have been framed as racist.
They're the primary victims.
But even this girl.
Responsible adults would protect her from herself.
And when she comes telling this story, rather than putting her all over TV and setting her up for this failure, which is going to haunt her now for the rest of her life, rather than that, they could have been responsible if they really cared about her.
So they can't even claim that, uh, that, oh, well, we're, you know, we're just so against racism and we cared so much for this girl that we, we, we had to, uh, we couldn't help ourselves, but to come to her defense.
If you really cared about her, You would use your brain and say, okay, there's a good chance she's making this up.
It doesn't make sense.
It's a crazy story.
And so we're not going to put her all out there and set her up for public humiliation, which is exactly what they did.
Uh, it's, it's, it's detestable.
And it's not just the media either.
We can't just put it on the medias.
Put this at the feet of the media.
It goes, it's 100% their fault, but then it's also the fault of the average people on social media who see stories like this.
In a way, you know, they call it social media for a reason, right?
In a way, we're all part of the media now.
If you have a social media account, you now participate in amplifying, spreading, in effect, reporting these kinds of stories.
And so I think we, that's a responsibility we have to take seriously.
And when you, it doesn't take a lot of effort just to hit retweet on Twitter, or to hit share on Facebook, but when you do that with a story, without doing any due diligence on your own part, I think when we do that, there's responsibility on us too.
We should also be saying, we hear a story like that, we should say, eh, hold on a second.
I don't know about this.
I can wait a little bit.
It's not like I don't need to retweet it right now.
Everyone else is already doing it.
I don't need to retweet it.
I don't need to share it.
I don't need to say anything about it.
If it really happened, well, then I can wait for the facts to come out.
I can talk about it next week if I really feel the need.
I don't need to do it right now.
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A few other things here.
Okay, we need to talk about something else here.
Speaking of public humiliation.
So I don't usually follow the action on Dancing with the Stars.
I've always been more of an America's Got Talent kind of guy myself, to be honest, personally.
But Sean Spicer, former White House spokesman, back when the White House had spokesmen and actually did things like press conferences, which they don't do anymore.
But he left the White House, obviously, and he's been on Dancing with the Stars.
And he keeps getting voted through.
So they had another episode last night, I think.
And then they're going to do the results show tonight, I guess.
And he keeps getting voted through because a bunch of Trump fans keep voting for him, even though he's a terrible dancer.
And don't take my word for it.
Here he is.
I think this was his performance last night.
Dancing.
I don't know what kind of dance this is supposed to be but watch this.
I'm I mean, come on.
I'm no dancer myself, but Sean Spicer, he's not even doing anything.
First of all, he stands there while other people dance around him, and then every once in a while, on occasion, he'll wiggle his body out of rhythm with everybody else, and then he starts standing there again.
You know who's a better dancer?
The guy from the Trudeau blackface video yesterday.
He's a better dancer.
In fact, the other guy from the Trudeau blackface video is a better dancer, too.
This guy, remember him?
This guy's actually very talented, I think.
That's a great impression of an ostrich.
But Spicer, he turns me into a dance snob.
And I can barely walk to the kitchen without tripping over the couch.
Okay, that's how uncoordinated and clumsy I am.
And you know how I dance?
This is how I dance.
This is how most awkward white people, when you're at a wedding or something and you're in a position where people are dancing, this is me.
I'll show you.
I'll show you my dance moves.
This is my dance move.
I'll show you right now.
This is me.
This is how I dance.
And sometimes what I'll even do is if I really want to get, if I'm really getting into it and I'm feeling the rhythm, then I'll add this move into it.
Watch this move.
You see the thumb?
So I'm doing a little thumb, a little head, little thumb.
So that's my, that's my, this is me dancing.
At every wedding I've ever been to, this is me dancing.
And if people look over and they want, and they're trying to usher me to the dance floor, I just, yeah, good.
So that's me.
What I just did there, that's better.
I should be on Dancing with the Stars.
I should be on Dancing with the Stars.
Give me a desk or a table and I'll just sit there and vote me through.
Because if you're voting Sean Spicer through, then I should get through on that.
I get the joke.
You're voting him through because he's bad.
I understand that.
That's trolling.
That's a tried and true American tradition now.
This goes back to who was the guy on American Idol?
He was the first person to ever be trolled through one of these talent competitions.
Who was the guy?
I forget his name.
Terrible singer, but he kept getting voted through because it was funny that he was bad and he was getting through.
So I get it, but There's something that I believe in more than trolling, and that I think is even more American than trolling, and that is rewarding excellence.
I don't believe in participation trophies.
Spicer is a terrible dancer, just like me, even though I'm better.
And in America, when people are terrible at things, we let them know it.
Not by rewarding them, okay?
No, we reward excellence.
So if you're good at something, We're going to applaud you, but if you're bad at it, we are going to heap scorn and ridicule on you, and that is the American way.
That's the American dream, the American way of life.
So when you vote Spicer through on Dancing with the Stars, you are destroying the American way and the American dream.
So I beg you to stop it.
Please stop.
It's not right.
It is immoral.
Immoral!
That's what I say.
But still kind of funny.
So let me, before we get to emails, let me chime in for just a minute on this Civil War thing.
I figured I wanted to talk about Dancing with the Stars first, and then we'll get to the less important matter of the potential for another American civil war.
I think, you know, talk about civil war, in fact, if Spicer gets through and wins Dancing with the Stars, I think there might be a civil war over that.
And for good reason.
But as you heard, there's been a lot of discussion and outrage over the last couple of days because Trump tweeted a quote.
From his lackey, Robert Jeffress, saying that impeachment will lead to civil war.
That's what Jeffress said.
And Trump retweeted it, quoted it, actually didn't retweet, quoted it and tweeted it.
And so now everyone's giving their thoughts on whether we are headed to a civil war.
I've talked about this before, but let me give my two cents on that.
I think there are two concepts here.
One is that sometimes get conflated.
One is civil war and the other is civil unrest.
Now, I think that the latter option of civil unrest, we're already seeing that.
We're already seeing the beginnings of that.
And we have been seeing that over the last several years.
We've seen riots in cities.
Now we've got Antifa.
That is an example of civil unrest.
I think we could be heading to a situation where that becomes far more common, and you see that across the country.
I think very easily we could be out of there.
And it's got nothing to do with impeachment.
Robert Jeffress said that because of impeachment, there's going to be a civil war.
I think that's silly.
That's not going to be it.
But I think in general, as a culture, we are moving in that direction.
We're not moving to a civil war for a number of reasons.
It's not going to be a war, mainly because, and the main reason is that nobody, we, yeah, we like to tweet and insult each other on Twitter, but a civil war is not fought through Twitter.
That means you're actually getting out there and putting your life on the line.
Okay, which people aren't going to do.
And I'm not saying that like I want them to, like it's a challenge.
That's not my point here.
I'm saying that actually, thankfully, our laziness and our preference for a sedentary lifestyle where we live our life through screens and on the couch That has had a lot of negative effects, but the one positive is that it will save us from fighting a civil war, because that's what it comes down to.
Most people just are going to have no interest.
If you know anything about the first civil war, the first American civil war, if we have to call it that, you'll know that that was fought during a time when men were willing to sacrifice everything.
And endure unimaginable hardship and walk into a situation where death was very, very likely, whether they died on the battlefield or in most cases died of disease or whatever else, bad hygiene, everything.
That was something that men were willing to do back then.
And that's part of the reason why we had a civil war.
Or that's one of the things anyway that made a civil war possible.
That's just not the case anymore.
And I do think it's kind of funny when you've got a bunch of people on Twitter saying, oh yeah, I'm ready to fight a civil war.
No, you're not.
You're just tweeting.
You're not doing anything.
Because at the end of the day, right, you know, you've got your shows coming on at eight o'clock tonight that you want to get home and watch.
And that's what we care about most.
Now, on the other hand, Going out and and you know going and and rioting and throwing some rocks through through a window and then going home Back to your mom's basement.
That's something that people are willing to do doesn't take a lot of energy doesn't take a lot of effort There's not a lot of risk involved especially because the police don't really do much to stop it and don't arrest very many people So that people are willing to do and I think we're gonna see more of that But not a civil war thankfully Well, the primary reason why we are headed in this direction and why we are fracturing as a country, it's not impeachment or any specific thing that has anything to do with Trump, really.
It's that we just, as a people, have nothing in common anymore.
That's the problem.
And what people don't understand is that Trump and everything associated with him, that is a symptom of the underlying issue.
So the more that we split apart as a country, culturally speaking, it's not because of Trump.
He is a symptom of that fracturing that has been happening now for decades, where we just don't have anything in common.
There's nothing that ties us together as a people, as a country.
America is a country that was founded on an idea.
of inalienable human rights endowed by a creator, freedom, liberty, all those, that was the idea, the founding idea, which at the founding of our country was not perfectly expressed, and there were whole swaths of people that were excluded from it, which was bad.
But that was supposed to anyway be the idea that brought us together, and these days, not everybody believes in that idea.
There isn't one value or belief or priority that we all share as a people.
You get a hundred random Americans into a room, you're not going to be able to get a majority agreement on anything, no matter how fundamental the issue is.
And so that's where it's coming from, is that we just don't... Countries have to be built on some kind of commonality.
And if it's not going to be things like language, a lot of countries, their commonality is language or other more basic things like that.
If it's not going to be that for us, then it has to at least be ideas, values, beliefs.
But we don't even have that.
So we don't have a common language.
We don't have a common heritage.
We don't have a common sort of cultural experience.
We don't have common values.
We don't have common beliefs.
We don't have common priorities.
What do we have in common?
Generally speaking, I think nothing.
We're living... You've got the different sides living in different universes, almost.
I mean, it's got to the point now where we can't even agree on things like What is a man?
What is a woman?
The biological facts of life.
We can't even agree on that!
A really basic question.
Get a hundred Americans in a room, ask them a really basic question.
Do men have penises?
How about that?
Now, even if we could all agree that the answer is yes, I don't think you could build a country on that agreement.
But the fact that we can't even agree on that just shows you how bad the fracture, the split is.
So it's bad news.
It's not going to be a civil war for the reason that I said.
And also another reason why there's not a civil war is that you don't have You don't have quite the same defined geological boundaries that you did in the Civil War of 1861.
Now, there are geological boundaries, obviously.
People in California tend to be liberal as opposed to people in other states, but we don't have that north-south direct split that they did, which is another thing that's going to stop a civil war.
What we see, some of the chaos in the streets and everything, I think we are going to see more of that as time progresses.
Unfortunately.
I just don't see any way around it.
It's easy.
We could all sit around and say, we need to have unity.
We need to get along.
That's fine to say.
I agree.
It would be great if we had it, but unify around what is the question.
Until you can answer that question, what are we unifying around?
Until you can answer that question, I think there's just no hope of there being any unity.
All right, let's go to emails.
Matt Walshow at gmail.com.
Matt Walshow at gmail.com.
This is from Scott, says, if natural selection is real, why do custard filled donuts still
exist?
That's, we've been talking about evolution the last several days.
That's maybe the best argument against evolution anyone has ever put forward, so I give you that.
I agree.
And there is no reason for custard-filled donuts to exist or for jelly donuts to exist.
Now, you've touched, Scott, on an issue that is very important to me, I've been talking about it for a long time, and I don't understand why people struggle with this.
If you're getting a box of donuts for a group of people, at the office or whatever, don't waste precious real estate
on jelly and cream filled donuts.
Don't do that. Because you know what? Because those are always the last ones left. If you're
getting into the break room and somebody brought a box of donuts 45 minutes ago,
Well, you know that when you open that box, there's going to be one stale donut left, and you know what it's going to be.
It's going to be a jelly donut.
It is every single time, because that's not the donut anybody wants.
So, if you're getting a box of donuts, why get donuts?
You only get 12!
12 precious spots!
This is an important decision!
And you're gonna waste one of those spots on a jelly donut?
A donut with jelly in it?
Let me tell you what a perfect box of donuts consists of.
Here it is.
This is the correct box of donuts.
Three glazed.
Three chocolate, three chocolate frosted, and then now, so now that's nine donuts, okay?
You got three left.
With those final three spots, you can get a little creative.
You can throw something else in.
You can throw a curveball, but it should be stuff that everybody likes.
It should be the kind of donut where someone says, oh wow, you put one of those in there.
It should be that kind of reaction.
They weren't expecting it.
It's coming out of left field, but really there's going to be a fight over that donut because everybody wants one of those.
So what I'm saying is with those final three spots, maybe you put a French cruller.
You put a blueberry glazed.
You put a strawberry frosted.
You know those aren't going to be left behind.
Someone's going to grab those.
And now you have a perfect box of donuts.
This, I feel very strongly about.
It's the same thing if you're getting pizza, okay?
Let's say you're getting three large pizzas for a group of people.
Again, you stick with the staples.
If you get a little bit creative, you do it in a way that everyone's going to agree on.
You put pineapple, if you get three large pizzas and you put pineapple on one of them, there's going to be maybe one person in the whole group that wants it.
And so at the end, you're gonna have all this pineapple left over.
Why would you waste real estate on that?
It's mind-boggling.
Let's go to email from Santiago, says, Hi Matt, first of all, if you read this on the air, could you please refer to me by the pseudonym Santiago?
I have to say, if you're going to choose a pseudonym, you can't do better than Santiago, so well done.
I'm a biologist and I studied evolution for years.
I was pleasantly surprised by your solid knowledge on evolution, despite not being a trained biologist yourself.
The way you answered the questions you got last week reflects that you've actually done a good amount of studying on this topic.
I particularly loved your response to an email about the Cambrian explosion and about complex structures such as the eye.
The theological aspects of it were also interesting, and you seem to know more about it than I do.
As a fellow Catholic, I'm disappointed by how many Christians think that the theory of evolution is at odds with God or Christianity.
This is what atheist preachers like Richard Dawkins would like to think, but it is not true.
I worry that this tendency for many fellow Christians to deny valid scientific knowledge because of a wrong interpretation of Genesis is one of the many reasons why Christianity is in decline.
God gave us our senses and reasons to discover the world he created.
Our ability to question and understand creation is unique to us as humans, among animals.
It makes no sense for God to give it to us, but expect us not to believe the logical conclusions that we get from exploring the universe through science.
To make this point, here is a quote I've seen attributed to Saint Augustine, which properly synthesizes my opinion.
It is a bit long, so feel free to exclude it if you read my email on the show.
I'm not going to exclude it because this is a great quote.
How could I exclude St.
Augustine?
What do you think I am, some kind of heretic?
So, Augustine says, Usually even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars, and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics.
And we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our scriptures are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, How are they going to believe these books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?
Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books.
Great quote.
I think I've shared that before in relation to other topics on this show from St.
Augustine.
They will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think
support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the
things about which they make assertion."
Great quote. I think I've shared that before in relation to other topics on this show from St. Augustine.
I could not agree more with it.
And that's not to say, by the way, I've gotten plenty of emails over the last several days from Christians who
have issues with the theory of evolution and can provide intelligent reasons to maintain some level of skepticism.
I disagree, but I won't deny the intelligence of it.
So I'm not going to take the—I personally, I don't know how Santiago meant it, but I personally would not take that quote and apply it wholesale to every Christian who doubts evolution, for example.
But Christians who—this is where I think the quote applies.
And this, I think, is a big problem.
And I agree with Santiago that this, I think, has something to do with the decline of Christianity in America.
When you have Christians who seem to reject modern science wholesale, almost in its entirety, rejecting almost the entirety of geology, paleontology, cosmology, physics, Which, unfortunately, a large number of Christians in this country do, where they hold beliefs that require them to not only reject the findings of all of these fields of study without any scientific reason to do so, but to even suggest that science is basically some kind of conspiracy among atheists to disprove God.
These are the kinds of claims that some Christians will make.
I know that because I've been fielding these claims now for days.
Longer than that, actually.
And that's a real problem.
I'm not saying it's a salvation issue, where if you're wrong about the science, you're going to go to hell.
I'm not saying that.
I am saying, though, that non-believers, when they see Christians rejecting science, And creating this false competition between science and religion.
Non-believers are going to say, this is some kind of crazy cult.
I don't want any part of that.
What, you're telling me if I want to be a Christian, I have to reject science?
I'm not going to do that.
You're telling me if I want to be a Christian, I have to reject almost everything I'm told by cosmology, physics, paleontology, archaeology, geology.
You're telling me, no, no, I can't do that.
And so I agree with Santiago.
I think that a lot of people are scared away, and it does contribute to the decline.
Because they have this notion that science and Christianity are at odds.
And I think that's a mistaken notion, but they get that notion not just from what they're told by guys like Richard Dawkins, but they get it even from some Christians who affirm that, confirm it, by essentially making the same argument Richard Dawkins does.
Which is that, you know, you can't accept science and Christianity.
You have to choose one.
That's the atheist argument.
And it really troubles me when I see Christians that seem to agree with it, essentially.
All right, this is from Adam, says, How do you prefer to have your steak cooked?
Well, the only acceptable answers are medium rare or rare, obviously.
If someone puts a steak with no pink in front of me, I will take my steak knife and jam it into their foot.
And I have done nine stints in prison because of that.
Well worth it.
Finally from KP says, hi Matt, please just call me KP if you read this on the air.
Everyone's doing the pseudonym thing today.
With you looking forward to your fourth kid, I had a question that I hope you won't judge me for asking.
My wife gave birth to our first child four weeks ago.
It's been a challenge so far, but we are thrilled to have our baby with us as we have been trying for a long time with no success.
Congratulations.
Here's my problem.
I find that as the dad, I don't feel myself bonding with him as much as I thought I would.
I love him, of course, but I thought it would be a much stronger and more immediate attachment.
Instead, it feels almost like it's my wife's kid and I'm the hired help.
I'm worried that this means I'm a horrible person.
Am I?
Well, KP, let me put your mind at ease.
No, you're not a horrible person.
Well, not for this reason anyway.
If you're someone who, for example, leaves your shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot or gets the wrong donuts, then you'd be a horrible person for different reasons, but not for this.
What you're feeling in relation to your kid I think is perfectly natural.
I found with all three of my born children so far that in the early going, at the very young infant stage, the babies are literally attached to my wife most of the time.
And the babies therefore don't have the same kind of innate biological need for me as they do for her.
Which isn't to say that I'm not needed or that I have nothing to do, it's just that, you're right, as the dads, we're more in a support role, especially early on, and that's inevitable, and especially if the baby is nursing.
Because so much of the time is spent doing that, and you can't do that, despite what we're told these days.
Men, in fact, cannot nurse.
And so, um, That just puts you even more in the supporting role.
And you know, it's also a little weird because you got to think the mother has been carrying the child for nine months and so there's a bond that happens through that.
They have been literally attached in that case for that entire time.
But for you as the dad, the transition is much more sudden where Yeah, you knew your wife was pregnant, but you weren't carrying the child, so you didn't have a kid, and now all of a sudden, you do.
And it's just like that.
So it's a very sudden change.
But I guarantee that you'll find yourself bonding with your child over time as he grows.
Your role in his life will also grow.
I have no problem saying that I personally am not a huge fan of the baby stage.
I love my kids, obviously, when they're babies, but I'm weird, I guess, because I love the two and three stage, what they call the terrible twos.
I love that.
I think kids at that stage are awesome and hilarious, so I'm a big fan of that stage.
Everyone has their preferences, I suppose.
We're always beating ourselves up.
We're always wondering, is this normal?
Am I doing this right?
Am I feeling the right way?
Am I loving my child enough?
Am I ruining their life forever because I'm doing this or that?
These are always questions that we have.
But I think those questions just mean that you care.
They mean you want the best for your child.
Your desire to be bonded with your kid, is all that matters at this point.
And unfortunately, sadly, as we know, a lot of kids are born into families where the father has no desire to be bonded to them.
The fact that you have that desire, even if you don't feel the actual bond itself quite to the intensity that you want, but that's still a good news, the fact that you have it.
Because love isn't a feeling anyway.
Of course, as we know, it's a choice, it's a sacrifice, It's an act of giving which you are already doing.
Especially with the first kid.
Especially with the first kid, especially in the first few months.
There's no way to be prepared for it, and all kinds of weird things are happening in your mind, and there's a lot of anxiety, and you don't know what to think or how to feel, and you're not sleeping anyway, and so it's a rough time.
You get through it, you'll be fine, really.
It'll be fine in the end, I promise you that.
And that's my parenting sermon for the day, coming from someone who is absolutely not fit to be giving them, but I just did.
And speaking of that, I'm gonna wrap this up now because I actually have to take my wife to the hospital.
She's scheduled to deliver our child tonight.
So I would ask for your prayers for that.
And by the time I talk to you again, I'm gonna take a few days off.
By the time I talk to you again, we will have four kids in this house.
Dear God.
Dear God.
All right, but in all seriousness, thank you for all your prayers and well wishes, and I'll see you on the other side.
Godspeed.
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