A Democratic candidate has upped the ante and called for a 22 dollar minimum wage. Why not 30? Why not 100? Also, leaked Bloomberg audio has everyone including conservatives calling him "racist." But is he? And Andrew Yang says that abortion shouldn't be celebrated. Then he learned a lesson about leftism in modern America.
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According to some reports, he's been running for president since December, and he was having a campaign block party over the weekend, a campaign party that was attended by some of his most high-profile supporters, like his mom and his cousin.
And during this campaign event, he announced, apparently, that he wants to raise minimum wage, just like every other Democrat.
But most Democrats want to raise it to 15.
What he's saying is, Forget about a measly $15 an hour.
I'm going to raise it to $22.
He wants to raise the minimum wage to $22 an hour.
If you're keeping track at home, that works out to about $42,000 a year at a minimum.
That's the starting guaranteed minimum amount you can make for full-time work.
Now, if you're a small business that can't afford to pay full-time employees that amount of money, well, too bad.
Guess you don't get to have any full-time employees in that case.
And if you can't have a business without employees, well, then you don't get a business.
Your business goes out of business.
And that's just the way it is.
You see, we're going to make sure that everybody has a living wage by shutting down businesses.
We're going to make sure everyone has a living wage by making sure that lots of people don't have any wage at all.
It makes sense when you think about it.
Actually, when you think about it, it doesn't make sense.
So don't think about it at all.
That's the key.
Why am I talking about the campaign pledges of a man who will get fewer votes for the Democratic nomination than I will?
Well, because his plan proves a point.
Not the point that he wants to make.
That if we had a real news media, which we don't, but if we did, with real journalists, all the Democratic candidates would be asked if they support Steyer's plan.
And if not, Why not?
See, if they say, no, that's too much.
I don't support that.
Then they're admitting that you can't just shout living wage and demand that employers pay a certain amount to their employees.
It's not that simple.
They'd be admitting that it's not that simple.
They don't want to admit that.
After all, $22 an hour is a much better living wage than $15 an hour.
So if this is just about making sure people have a living wage, which is all the Democrats want to talk about when it comes to things like minimum wage.
They want to talk about all the benefits, all the good things they want to do.
They don't want to talk about the cost.
They don't want to talk about the practical implications, the logistics, or any of that.
This would force them to talk about that.
If it's all about the living wage, then they would have to support Steyer's plan.
But if there are other practical economic concerns to take into account here, then they're admitting that there are other practical economic concerns to take into account.
And now we're having the minimum wage discussion on that playing field, which is on a field they don't want to be on.
Because if they admit Look, if you force employers to pay $22 an hour, lots of them won't be able to do it, jobs will be lost, positions will be automated.
If they admit that, then the obvious rejoinder is, yes, and that will happen with $15 an hour, and it is happening, so what about that?
So it brings the minimum wage discussion into a realm where the Democrats don't want it to be, which is the realm of reality.
But, then what if they say, okay, sure, 22 an hour, let's do it.
First of all, the question is, why didn't you propose 22 an hour to begin with?
Does Steyer care about low-wage employees more than you do?
Second, well, if we can do 15, nay, 22, then why not 25?
Why not 30?
Why not 45?
Then why not 25, why not 30, why not 45, why not 50?
All of a sudden it becomes like an auctioneer thing where you just keep going up and up and up.
The price keeps going up.
Why not?
Most small businesses are just as able to do $50 an hour as they are $15 an hour.
Which is to say, not at all.
They aren't able at all.
So, why not?
Why not keep raising it?
It's all very uncomfortable for the Democrats.
It's an uncomfortable position for them to be in, which is why the media won't put them in that position.
by asking them the question.
But I do appreciate Steyer doing his part anyway.
Speaking of uncomfortable positions, I'm sure you've heard the Bloomberg audio already,
but I'll play it again for you if you haven't.
There's leaked audio of Bloomberg that's making the rounds online, going massively viral,
talking about stop and frisk and violent crime and all these things, and here's what Bloomberg said.
95% of your murderers and murder victims fit one M.O.
You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it up all the time.
They are male, minorities, 15 to 25.
That's true in New York, it's true in virtually every city in the United States.
And that's where the real crime is.
You've got to get the guns out of the hands of those people who get you killed.
So you've got to be willing to spend the money for a lot of cops in the street,
put those cops where the crime is, in the minority neighborhoods.
So this is one of the unintended consequences is people say, oh my God,
you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.
Yes, that's true.
Why?
Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods.
Yes, that's true.
Why do we do it?
Because that's where all the crime is.
And the way you get the guns out of the kids' hands is to throw them against the wall.
against the wall at Christmas weekend.
And they start, they'd say, oh, I don't want that.
I don't want to get caught.
So they don't bring the gun.
May still have a gun, but they leave it at home.
Now this is of course, trending on Twitter with the hashtag Bloomberg is racist.
And that is not the kind of hashtag you want to see as a candidate.
There's my searing political insight.
That's why I should be a professional political analyst because of analysis like this.
Thank you.
You don't want to have a hashtag calling you racist as a political candidate.
That's all I'm saying.
Bold suggestion.
And Bloomberg has spent a ton of money cultivating a brand online and it has now been undone almost completely in one fell swoop by this.
Is it actually racist though?
Is Bloomberg really a racist because of what he said there?
Of course not.
Of course not.
He's saying that violent crime disproportionately happens in minority neighborhoods.
And that's true.
That's an accurate statement.
You could argue that stop-and-frisk is—you could argue against that.
You could say it's unconstitutional.
You could certainly argue against the general tone that Bloomberg is displaying there.
But the basic point he's making Can't be racist if it's based in statistical realities.
Now, he says 95%.
I don't know if it's that high in New York, but it's certainly disproportionate in terms of the violent crime and which neighborhoods that happens in.
He probably could have gotten away with all of this if he just had not brought up the racial element of it.
If he kept it just speaking in geographic terms, then probably it would have been fine.
But he said the other part out loud, and that's where the problem comes from.
And it's obviously not going to fly in the Democratic Party in 2020.
And Bloomberg decided to try and win the Democratic nomination in 2020, and that was his choice.
And so, here's the thing.
It's not like I'm going to go to the mat for him to defend Bloomberg and defend his honor.
No, Bloomberg is a wonderful man!
He's a wonderful man!
You people!
Leave him alone!
I'm not going to do that, because I don't think he is a wonderful man.
I think he's an awful person, and would be an awful president.
I think he's a megalomaniac, billionaire, nanny-statist, and I have really nothing good to say about him.
However, I'm not going to jump into the fray and say this is racist, because I don't think it is.
And there's been a lot of conservatives who are taking part in the Bloomberg is racist hashtag and have jumped on that bandwagon.
And I understand why they're doing it strategically, because they're trying to take Bloomberg out.
Okay, I get that.
But in the process of trying to take out this particular guy, who was never going to win anyway, In the process of taking him out, you're agreeing with the left that it is racist to talk about the statistical realities of violent crime.
So you're giving up the argument in order to beat one guy.
That is not a good strategy.
And this has been my gripe with a lot of conservatives for a while now.
Where in order to, when they get a chance to score a point against somebody, they'll forfeit their entire position.
They'll completely agree with the left in order to win this one little battle here.
But you're giving up the greater war in order for the sake of winning this battle.
That's not a good strategy.
See, when you give up the argument For the sake of taking down a person, then fine, you've taken down the person, but you've lost the argument.
And the thing that separates the left from the right, and oftentimes the separation is not always obvious, especially these days, but if anything separates those, if these two sides mean anything, it comes down to the arguments.
We're making different arguments, we believe different things.
Well, if you give up the argument, And get rid of the people you don't like, then what happens in the end is that you've replaced the people you didn't like with people you do, but it's all leftism anyway.
And I don't think that's a good strategy.
So what do we say about Mike Bloomberg?
Well, I don't think we have to say anything.
As I said, I don't think we have to come out stridently to defend him at all.
But I also don't think we agree with the left on things like this, on points where they're wrong.
And we know that there are terms of service that come with trying to win the Democratic nomination.
And according to those terms, when audio like this comes out, you're branded a racist and that's it.
Bloomberg played the game and lost.
He knew the fine print.
He knew what was in it.
And that's it, and he loses.
Okay, fine.
I'm not crying any tears for him.
All I'm saying is, I'm not gonna come out now for the sake of getting my shot on Bloomberg and say, oh yeah, that's totally racist.
To say that kind of stuff, totally, totally racist.
Oh, I'm so offended.
I'm offended by this racism.
And the problem is, especially as a Trump supporter, Um, it gets kind of awkward because if, if Trump's, they're coming here, they're bringing drugs, they're rapists line, you know, they was kicked off his campaign in 2016.
If that line was not racist, and I don't think it was, but if that line wasn't racist, then there's no way this is.
And I know that as, you know, a lot of times when it comes to Trump, we've gotten used to this notion that he exists in this kind of bubble where he's immune to everything.
And so you can have a double standard with him and it's okay, but I don't think you want to get too comfortable with that.
It's not going to last forever.
And it's not hard for people to say, if you come out as a conservative and say, yeah, Bloomberg is a racist for this, well, it's not a hard connection for people to make.
They're going to say, now wait a second, okay, that's racist?
Then, okay, let's look at the stuff that Trump said.
So now you're saying that's racist too?
And your response is, oh, no, no, no, no, that's different.
That's totally different.
How's it different?
It just is.
I don't know.
It just is.
Not a compelling argument.
All right.
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Okay, so we're talking about things that aren't going to fly in the modern Democratic Party.
Here's another example of such a thing.
Coming from Andrew Yang this time.
Over the weekend, Yang was at an event talking about so-called reproductive justice, so-called reproductive rights, and this is what he had to say.
Listen.
I think we have to get back to the point where no one is suggesting that we be celebrating an abortion at any point in the pregnancy.
That there was a time in democratic circles where we used to talk about it being something that, like, you don't like to see, but that should be within the freedoms of the woman and the mother to decide.
And so, to me, I think there is a really important tone to set on this, where you don't just say, like, we're absolutists about it, though I have to say I am relatively Absolutist on this like I think that it should be completely up to the woman and her doctor and the state should not be intervening all the way through pregnancy, but It's a tragedy to me if Someone decides that they don't want to have a child and they're on the fence and that maybe at some point later I mean, it's a very very difficult personal decision and it should be something that we're very very sensitive to I think that
Celebrating children, family, like, these are universal human values.
And if we manage to lead on that, and then say, but we also stand for women's reproductive rights, I believe we can bring Americans closer together on a really, really important personal issue.
Yang is, unsurprisingly, getting a lot of grief for that from the left.
And The response from the left seems to be there are two responses, as always, when this kind of thing is brought up.
One is to say, nobody celebrates abortion.
What are you talking about?
That's crazy.
Saying we shouldn't celebrate abortion.
Nobody does.
So this is a right-wing talking point that you're engaging in.
Nobody celebrates it.
That's one strategy.
The other strategy is to say, yes, we should celebrate it.
This is horrible for you to say we shouldn't celebrate it.
Of course we should celebrate it.
And so if you go on Twitter, where this video, this clip has gone viral, it's pretty funny, actually, in a very irritating sort of way.
To look at the comment thread under the video clip, because it's kind of this rotating, it rotates between the two talking points, where you have one person saying, no one's celebrating it, and then right below them, you have someone saying, yes, we should celebrate it!
The left can't get their talking point straight when it comes to abortion.
And they don't, they feel like they don't need to, because it's not really about making a rational argument.
It's all about emotion.
And deception, so it's not about being reasonable, rational, consistent.
That doesn't matter.
Of course, the reality is that people do celebrate abortion.
That's what this shout your abortion hashtag is all about.
It's about people celebrating it.
But there was a time, as Yang points out, there was a time when the motto on the left with respect to abortion was safe, legal, and rare.
Safe, legal, rare.
Well, they still talk about the mythical safe abortion, which doesn't exist because there's no such thing as a safe abortion.
In every abortion, at least one person is killed, and the other person, the mother, is damaged, sometimes physically, in obvious ways, oftentimes physically, but every time, emotionally, psychologically, even if she doesn't experience that damage or realize it or she's able to suppress it for a time, So, but they still say we need a safe abortion.
They still obviously want abortions to be legal.
They want all abortions to be legal.
But the rare part, you don't hear that anymore.
Now, if the left is to say that, well, we never celebrate abortion, if they're right that it isn't celebrated, then why don't you hear most Democrats or most abortion advocates on the national stage?
Why don't they talk about it?
Rare abortions, reducing the number of... They don't talk about it.
And the reason is that they're saying, this is nothing to be ashamed of.
This is something to celebrate.
This is an expression of a woman's autonomy.
This is an expression of a woman's power over her own body and her own life and her own reproduction.
And so, Should there be fewer abortions?
No, if anything, there should be more abortions.
This should happen more often, because it is this glorious, beautiful expression of a woman's liberty and freedom.
That's the attitude now.
So, Andrew Yang is discovering, and it always shocks me when Democrats, when you see Democrats learn this, like they didn't know it already, especially when it's a Democrat running for the Democratic nomination.
But he's just now learning that this attempt to be somewhat reasonable as a pro-abortion person, which isn't really possible because the pro-abortion position is inherently unreasonable, But he's trying to inject a little bit of reason and sanity into it, even as he advocates for killing babies legally.
So he wants to do that, but he also wants to say, okay guys, all right, fine, I'm with you on that, but let's not take it too far now.
He's trying to do that, and what he's discovering is that doesn't work anymore.
It may have worked back in the 90s, okay, but times have changed, and it just doesn't fly.
That's what Andrew Yang is discovering.
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So Beto, Beto O'Rourke, if you remember him, He said the other day that, this is what he said, though this is the darkest of times for our country, we cannot give in to despair.
We must be honest about the unprecedented threat we face and then do everything within our power to overcome it.
I wanted to mention this because this kind of rhetoric, we're in the darkest times.
Darkest times.
The worst times.
It's never been worse.
Unprecedented.
This kind of rhetoric is obviously very common, but I really wish that we could develop some perspective.
I understand the inclination to want to say that we're living in the worst time ever, everything is the worst it's ever been, etc.
and so forth.
And no doubt, I've been guilty of that myself on plenty of occasions.
And I think that you can legitimately look at certain individual facets of modern life and say about that particular thing that it's unprecedented, for better or worse.
The internet is an example of that, certainly.
Nothing like the internet has ever existed before, and society has been reshaped around this technology.
Many volumes could be written, and will be written, and some have been written, analyzing the effects that it's had on us, and I think that those effects in the end proved to be a net negative, in a pretty profound Net negative.
But that's not the same as saying that, generally speaking, these are our darkest times as a country.
Yet this is what people want to do.
People want to always be living in the worst times.
The end times.
The end of all things.
The apocalypse is upon us.
This is an impulse, not just among religious people, but among non-religious people too, as the climate doomsayers clearly show.
People want The time that they're living in to be the worst and in fact be the end, be the, with Armageddon around the corner.
Why is that?
Well, I think partly, of course, there's a political motivation.
The opposing party always wants things to be terrible under the president they're trying to get rid of.
Republicans do this too, obviously.
Trump did this, you know, the way he described America sometimes under Obama, although things weren't great, but the way he described it made it sound like a post-apocalyptic hellscape, like The Road or something, Cormac McCarthy.
And this is what?
So part of it's just standard politics.
Okay, fine.
But there's an even baser impulse, something underneath that, and I think a lot of it is a simple kind of Vanity, where we don't want to look at things, take things into perspective, into historical context, and say, eh, we're living in moderately bad times.
Things have been much worse than this.
They've also been better, but we're sort of in the middle.
No one's going to remember our struggles, really, because there's nothing to write home about.
It's just, they're not great, but eh, not the worst.
Nobody wants to think that.
Nobody wants to think that we're going to get like a C-plus on our suffering report card.
We want our plight to be one of deep, earth-shattering importance.
We want our experiences to be unprecedented in a bad way.
And we can't settle for the aspects of our experience that actually are unprecedented.
We want the whole thing.
We want all of it to be unprecedented.
You see this on a personal level too.
It's like when You see it even in really petty ways.
I'm sure you've had the experience before where you're in a group of people and you happen to mention, just as an aside, you say something like, oh man, I didn't get any sleep last night.
I didn't sleep much last night.
I'm pretty tired.
And then what happens?
It immediately becomes a contest to see who has slept the least.
So the next person goes, tell me about it.
I haven't slept.
I haven't slept in two days.
Someone else, I haven't slept since last Wednesday.
Funny story, I haven't slept since the Carter administration.
Oh yeah, well, I'm a vampire, okay?
I turned into one back in 1783.
I've been up every night since then, sucking blood.
It's pretty exhausting.
For some people, people have this, they can't stomach even admitting that they get enough sleep.
They want it, they get, they don't get any sleep, they're so busy, they're so stressed, everything's the worst, it's so terrible.
It's this competitive martyrdom that we all do.
It's the weirdest thing.
And at the same time, we hate suffering, we do everything in our power to avoid it, but we also crave it, and we envy it.
We see something sexy in suffering, something enticing.
We figure it's a personality enhancer, it's a resume builder.
And then of course, the thing is, you meet someone, or you read about someone who has really suffered, I mean, really, really suffered.
Been through the worst sort of thing a person can experience.
You read, like, Knight or a man's search for meaning about concentration camps.
Or you talk to someone who's lost a child to cancer or something like that.
Unimaginable suffering.
And you see very quickly that it's not what we make it out to be when we trivialize it with our martyrdom act.
Real suffering is bleak and dreary and it can break you.
It's not true that this idea that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, if you suffer you'll come out stronger at the end of it.
It's not true.
There are people that come out, probably most people who really suffer come out worse in the end because of it.
It breaks them.
It wears them down.
They come out as a shell of themselves.
Real suffering is the kind of thing that, at the end of it, you're probably not going to say, it was super hard, but I'm glad I went through it because I'm a stronger person now.
Concentration camp survivors aren't saying that.
People who lose children certainly aren't saying that.
Now you do hear this from cancer survivors themselves sometimes, and having advanced stage cancer obviously qualifies as real serious suffering, some of the worst suffering I imagine a person can experience.
But then I've also heard from some cancer survivors who say, in their opinion, that the way that we talk about cancer, the sort of rosy tint that we put on it, and we say things like, he's fighting, he's a fighter, he'll kick cancer's butt.
Is wrong that I've heard from some cancer survivors who say that that that cancer You know, they'll they'll point out the cancer is something that that happens to you and it's miserable and it's horrible and it's not necessarily a matter of fighting and I was actually I was talking to somebody recently about this and they were saying this to me and I thought Yeah, you know I have always felt a little bit uncomfortable with people saying stuff like he beat cancer and You know, he fought it.
He kicked cancer's butt.
Because what about the millions of people who die from it?
Were they weak?
Were they not fighting hard enough?
Is it their fault?
In fact, we do often put it like that.
We say, and you read it in the headlines after a famous person dies of cancer, it'll say, so-and-so lost his battle with cancer.
Putting this oddly Oddly victim-blaming sort of spin on it.
No, he didn't lose.
He just, he died.
Like we all will.
He wasn't bested on the field of battle.
He is mortal and he died because he had no choice.
Anyway.
I'd be interested to know how cancer survivors feel about this kind of rhetoric because I've heard different, I've heard both sides of it and I've never been through it myself so I can't speak to it.
In any case, the point is That maybe we, collectively, in modern culture, don't need to win the Suffering Olympics all the time.
Maybe we can admit that things, generally speaking, and as, you know, on an individual basis, there certainly are people in this country that are going through the worst kind of suffering imaginable, but generally, as a culture, as a society, we can admit that things aren't nearly as bad as they could be.
And they've been a whole lot worse.
When people talk about how divisive our politics are, things are so divisive and hostile and the way people are to each other, there's just no dignity anymore.
Well, if these people would open a history book and skim through it for three seconds, you would see how completely, almost laughably tame things are in comparison to how they've been Throughout the entire course of human history, leading up to modern times.
It wasn't all that long ago when, as a matter of course, you would settle a dispute with someone by shooting at each other.
Having a duel.
It wasn't all that long ago that politicians would beat each other with canes.
In Congress, okay?
These days, a couple mean tweets are exchanged, or some mean gifs.
And we say, this is unprecedented!
This last lack of decorum!
The country's never seen this before!
Oh, come on.
It's actually not that bad at all.
But we don't want to say that.
It has to be the worst.
It always has to be the worst.
And I'm not saying we should be complacent or content and we shouldn't try to improve things.
We should.
But we could do it with some perspective, is my point.
All right.
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One other thing I wanted to mention.
Um...
Very important.
I had been thinking about this, dealing with it internally, praying about it, and I just need to talk about it with someone.
I have to tell you what I witnessed.
I was on a flight yesterday, flying home last night, on a prestigious Spirit Airlines flight.
And I'm in the exit row, window seat, Which I have paid a $6,000 upcharge for.
There's a woman about my age in the aisle seat.
There's nobody in the middle.
Okay, about 30 minutes into the flight, she suddenly gets out of her seat, and then she gets on her knees, okay, on the plane, facing her seat.
If you can imagine, picture this.
And so she's like in praying position.
On her knees, facing the sea, in sort of praying position, which I would never begrudge anyone praying, especially on a flight, but it did make me a little nervous.
It's like the time I was, not long ago, I was on a flight and the woman next to me was clutching a rosary and muttering all throughout the flight, Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Oh Jesus, like that.
And I got a little nervous because I thought, Do you know something?
I don't know.
Have you had a premonition or a vision or something?
Anyway, she wasn't praying, because she then rested her head directly on the seat.
On the butt of the seat.
Her head, on it, rested.
And she went to sleep.
And she slept like that for an hour.
Knees on the ground, head on the seat.
On the seat were literally thousands of butts, okay?
Thousands upon thousands of butts.
Just think of all the, of all the, of all the butts.
All of the many diverse and often quite large butts that have been pressed with a person's entire body weight against that seat.
And she is breathing that in.
She's inhaling that.
Think of the, excuse me, but butt fumes that have soaked into the cushion over the years.
You think they ever wash it?
You think after you get off the flight, the flight attendants come by with Clorox and clean all the seats?
No, they don't.
They never wash the seats.
There are things on planes that are never washed.
They're just for years.
The germs accumulate.
And there are other things that are washed sparingly every couple of months.
The tray tables, by the way, the tray tables that you eat on, they rarely wash those things.
Just so you know.
So she's got her head in the butt fumes, and the flight attendants are walking by and, you know, never say anything.
Seatbelt sign is on.
There's turbulence.
She's in the exit row, on her knees with her head in the seat.
Flight attendants are walking by, say nothing to her.
How is that allowed?
Could I stretch out in the aisle if I wanted to?
Could I get a pillow and a sleeping bag and maybe crack the door open a smidge just to let a breeze in?
Could I do that?
Make yourself at home, I guess.
Apparently the inmates are running the asylum and the asylum is 30,000 feet in the air going 500 miles an hour.
That's not concerning at all, is it?
I was of course horrified by this.
But then I also, this weird, this whole flight I was thinking about it.
And by the way, I also had the distinct urge, and I am steadfastly opposed to the thing that people do online where they take pictures of strangers.
Who are doing weird and awkward things and then post those pictures online to shame the person.
I'm steadfastly opposed to that.
I've never done it.
I was very tempted here to do it because I felt like there needed to be documentation of this.
Anthropologists in the future are going to want to see this and study it so they can understand our period of history.
But I resisted the urge.
Plus I also thought that what if I forgot to take, it was dark on the plane, what if I forgot to take the flash off and then it would be obvious I took a picture and you don't want to deal with that.
So anyway, I didn't take a picture but I had a lot of time to think about this and I was revolted, I was horrified, I was confused, I was scared, honestly.
But then I also had this weird admiration that I felt for this person.
And there are people in airports and planes, and this is the worst I've ever seen, but it's common that you see people who seem to have just given up on life.
They've given up on life, they've given up on society, they're sprawled out in the terminal, you know, sucking their thumbs, pajamas on, sleeping.
Hundreds of strangers are milling about.
And they're just camped out, you know.
And this is weird, emotionally stunted behavior, but it's also strangely confident.
These are people who have utterly disregarded the judgments and opinions of the public.
They do not care what anybody thinks.
So the woman next to me on the plane, with her face implanted in the rectal ejections of so many thousands of people, the statement she was making to me was, I could not possibly care less.
What your opinion of me is.
It is of no consequence to me.
I know that you're going to judge me for this.
I don't care.
And though I'm horrified and traumatized by it, I did have a strange respect for her too.
Because she's exactly right.
What I'm sure she knew was going to happen was definitely happening.
I was judging the hell out of her.
But, what does it matter?
And she was comfortable.
And she slept.
So joke's on me, I guess.
Let's go to emails.
Email address is mattwalshow at gmail.com.
mattwalshow at gmail.com.
This is from... Tyler says, Hey Matt, love the show.
What's your opinion on the morality of eating meat?
Or as some people like to put it, killing and devouring innocent animals.
Most people like myself say that it's okay to eat meat, given that God has granted us dominion over animals.
I believe God created animals for our work, our work-related uses, enjoyment, and consumption.
Some people on Twitter will argue that God gave certain commandments in the past that aren't applicable today, such as treating your slaves kindly, and the fact that God specifically told us not to eat bacon.
Pork.
They also point out that some animals are more emotionally complex than others.
The pig, for example, is just as mentally and emotionally aware as a dog, and yet we eat pigs but not dogs.
What would you say to someone that argues that it is more morally appropriate to go vegan than to eat meat?
Thanks again.
The way I see it, the only system of thought, the only belief system, the only worldview that really provides a foundation for claiming that eating meat is immoral, objectively, Would be some of the Eastern religions, like Hinduism.
Now, it depends on which Hindu you talk to, because there are different branches of it, like there are in Christianity.
But some Hindus are vegetarian, according to their faith, on the basis that, as I understand it, you know, there's kind of a life force, a life energy that pervades all, you know, man and animal alike, and so there's an equality that we have with them, and so it would be wrong for them, for us to kill them.
I may be wrong in my explanation of their belief, but that, but That's how I understand it.
My point is, in the West, where vegetarianism and veganism are gaining ground, there really isn't any available philosophical justification for it.
Now, if somebody wants to refrain from eating meat for health reasons or for personal reasons, that's fine with me.
I'm totally fine.
I have no problem with that, of course.
And I'm obviously not arguing that we have a moral obligation to eat meat.
But, The problem is that here in our country, in the West generally, most people are either going to be believers in the Judeo-Christian God, or they're going to be basically secular atheists.
That's the vast majority.
That's almost everybody, with some exceptions.
Judeo-Christian people have no foundation to claim that eating meat is objectively immoral, because, as you point out, Scripture clearly gives man dominion over the animal's authority to use them for meat and labor.
God even commands that animals be killed frequently in the Old Testament as sacrifices.
Now, we don't sacrifice animals anymore, but there's nothing in the Old or New Testament, or in the development of Christian thought generally, or as far as I understand it, Jewish thought, That would lead us to the conclusion that all meat is suddenly murder, whereas it wasn't before.
Now, obviously, Muslims and Jews have dietary restrictions, but that's got nothing to do with the rights of the animal.
Far from it.
That has to do with the animal not being, you know, not being clean.
That has to do with the animal being unclean.
And then there's the atheist view.
And I'm stereotyping here, but I guess that most vegans are probably atheist.
Or at least a great number of them are.
But here it makes even less sense philosophically, because first of all, there's no basis to say that we are in any way intrinsically superior to other animals.
We all evolved out of the same soup.
And there hasn't been anything additional added to humans to make them better or superior.
You know, there's no immortal soul or anything like that.
Now, the fact that we evolved out of the same soup and we're essentially equal, I suppose, is exactly what atheist vegans would point to as a reason not to eat animals, except that the problem is other animals eat animals.
And if we're just like them intrinsically, why should we hold ourselves to a higher moral standard?
Or maybe, why aren't we holding them to a higher moral standard?
How can we say that it's arbitrarily wrong for us to do this thing that most other animals do?
Now, you could try to argue that we have the capacity to rise above these primitive ways and to do things a better way, but who's to say that this is a better way?
Better according to whom?
Seems to me that on atheism, we are products of evolution, nothing more, and the highest good, the only purpose really, is to propagate our own species.
That's the only thing that other animals are worried about, so why should we be any different?
How are we different?
We're not different, on the atheist view.
So, I don't see, you know, on the atheistic, Darwinistic view, this idea that we should not eat animals who we have the power to eat and subjugate, just as other animals do.
It just doesn't make any sense.
It seems to be entirely subjective.
Which, like I said, if you want to argue, it's not even really an argument.
If you're saying subjectively, I don't like it, fine, great.
But when you try to go from there to making an objective moral argument, well now I need to know what is the philosophical foundation, the basis for this objective moral claim.
And whether you're going Atheism or Judeo-Christian, I don't think there is a basis.
This is from Paul, says, as a retired dairy farmer who has artificially inseminated many thousands of dairy cows and stolen too many baby cows from their mothers to count over a long dairying career, I was mortified listening to Joaquin Phoenix's, is that his real name, Oscar speech last night.
In my defense, Can I tell you that I did what I did in ignorance?
I had no idea that my cows were suffering so appallingly.
And all this so that I could sip a latte each morning and pour milk all over my cornflakes.
Well, actually, so that you could enjoy a latte and pour milk over your cornflakes.
In my defense, can I tell you that I just didn't realize what I was doing to my cows because, you see, every cow I ever stole a calf from was distressed right up until she shoved her nose in the bucket of grain that I offered her as a trade for her loved one.
And every calf I ever stole from a cow happily adopted me as its new mother from the first feed I gave it.
Also because every cow I ever stole a calf from produced about seven times as much milk per day as her calf was capable of consuming anyway.
I thought she wouldn't miss the other 45 liters that her baby couldn't use.
Not fully realizing the anguish I was causing, I relentlessly pursued my objectives whilst consoling myself that to the extent that there may have been any anxiety experienced by my cows about their loss of babies, this was balanced by the knowledge that I was allowing you and your friends to enjoy a latte each morning.
So Matt, you are as much to blame for the suffering of my cows as I am.
Well not actually, well not you actually because I was an Australian dairy farmer and I don't think my cow's milk was finding its way to your breakfast table necessarily, but you know what I mean.
Funnily enough, all the cows I milked had four teats.
I found this interesting because apart from camels, cows are the only mammals with far more teats than the average number of offspring they produce and far more ability to produce milk than their offspring can use.
Because of this fact, I always assumed that God must have created cows to produce milk for more than just their own offspring, so I did not feel too badly about drinking lattes or milkshakes, eating cornflakes, ice creams, cheeses, or yogurt.
Why, putting cream on my peaches was a luxury I was, until last night, still happily enjoying too.
I will have to think deeply about Joachim's concerns and reassess my impact on my environment in the light of his heart-rending speech last night.
And when I think that I have only touched on but one of his well-articulated talking points in that speech, well, the mind simply boggles.
With renewed determination to make the world a happier, more equitable, cleaner, greener, rainbow-colored, accepting, tolerant, peaceful, victimless, and secure place for cows as well as people, I undertake to never again steal a calf from its mother and to encourage all who cross my path to consider the feelings of all cows before they too decide to steal their calves.
That brought a tear to my eye.
That was a work of art.
Well done.
Best email of all time.
That was the sarcasm dripping like milk over the cornflakes from every sentence of that email was a thing of beauty.
And sir, you have inspired me, Paul.
And I thank you for that.
And I won't detract from it by rambling myself, so we'll wrap things up here, but before I do, I did want to mention that January has been a crazy year so far, and the election race hasn't even started yet, hate to say.
Best way to stay informed on top of all of it as well is to become a Daily Wire member with 20% off your membership.
This promotion will be going away tomorrow, so That's tomorrow.
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And we will leave it there.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
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The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Senior Producer Jonathan Hay, Supervising Producer Mathis Glover, Supervising Producer Robert Sterling, Technical Producer Austin Stevens, Editor Donovan Fowler, Audio Mixer Robin Fenderson.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who studied economics in college and writes economic policy in Congress, can't name the most prominent economists of the 20th century.
MSNBC's Katie Turr doesn't know how senators get elected.
And Joe Biden wants to ban guns that don't exist.
The problem isn't that our alleged elites are ignorant.
It's that they know so much that isn't so.
We examine the root of their confusion.
Then Biden collapses in the polls, Bloomberg surges, and Snoop Doggy Dog gets the media to expose themselves.
