Ep. 451 - Destroying The Economy Is Not A Good Way To Save Lives
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, many of us are worried that our current lockdown strategy is leading us quickly into an economic collapse unlike anything this country has ever seen. But the left wing media says if you’re worried about the economy in a time like this, then you are a heartless Scrooge putting money over people. That’s nonsense. Also Five Headlines including, for a change of pace, rather than toilet paper, an altercation in a supermarket over Mountain Dew. And a listener writes to explain why I’m wrong in advocating that we open the economy back up to avoid a depression.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, many of us are worried that our current lockdown strategy is leading us quickly into an economic collapse unlike anything this country has ever seen before.
But the left-wing media says that if you're worried about the economy in a time like this, then you are a heartless Scrooge putting money above people.
Which, of course, is nonsense, and we're going to talk about that today.
Also, five headlines, including for a change of pace.
You know, we're used to seeing the confrontations in the grocery store over toilet paper.
Well, we have one over Mountain Dew, so I figure that's a nice change of pace.
I'll play that video for you.
And a listener writes to explain why I'm wrong in advocating that we open up the economy to avoid a depression.
All of that on the way.
But let's start with this, and I have to tell you, I'm pretty mad, pretty ticked off, which I know, speaking of change of pace, that's quite a change of pace for me.
But, listen, I think a person can take any number of positions on this crisis and what the path, what the best path forward is, and any idea, any path we choose, has the potential to result in suffering and death.
In fact, that's going to be part of the package no matter what we do.
That's the situation that we're in.
That's the reality of it.
We have to face that.
We can't hide from it.
So, I'm not going to get angry at anyone who has really grappled with this and come to a conclusion, however tentative it might be, even if that conclusion is different from mine.
Because we can all, as honest and compassionate people, there are many different ways of looking at this thing.
But what I'm seeing, especially from people in the media, is a bad faith, dishonest, disgusting effort to shut down, shout down, those of us who suggest that perhaps it's not a good idea to deliberately crash the economy, to deliberately cause a Great Depression in order to stop a virus.
What I'm seeing from these people, again, many in the media, is an attempt to make a caricature of our position, which is a reasonable position.
In a serious position.
But they have painted it as putting money over people.
Or even as eugenics.
I've seen that quite a bit.
Which is pretty rich, coming from the pro-abortion fanatics that they are.
What they want to do is portray us as greedy, uncaring, unfeeling scrooges who would rather have millions die than see our portfolios damaged.
Now this is, as I said, nonsense.
It's worse than nonsense, actually.
And it makes me strongly suspect that those employing this strategy in the media actually want the economy to collapse.
That's actually what they want to see happen.
And I don't say that lightly.
But I can't figure out why else they would be doing this.
Why else they would be so flippant about the potential collapse of our economy.
Why else they would pretend that to worry about the collapse of the economy is somehow to worry only about money, as if you could actually separate the economy from the people who comprise it.
Now, we'll circle back to this in a second, but first let's just review again where we are, because I think it's very important.
We're now being warned, as I reported yesterday, that 30% unemployment is on the horizon.
Very, very close on the horizon.
The collapse of the commercial mortgage market could be close behind after that.
And these are just the relatively immediate consequences of closing thousands of businesses for an indefinite period of time.
Keep in mind that the worst employment rate, as I said yesterday, the worst employment rate ever in American history was 25% during the Great Depression.
The worst my generation has ever seen, 10%.
And we had that about 10 years ago, I think, back in 2009.
This would be then three times worse than anyone in my generation has ever seen.
And if you remember the 10% unemployment, people were freaking out over that.
This is three times worse than that.
To emphasize This point, this process is already underway.
140,000 unemployment claims were filed in Ohio.
Just in Ohio, just last week, in the first week of the shutdown, 140,000 unemployment claims.
So many unemployment claims were filed that it shut down, it crashed the website, the unemployment website in Ohio.
In Arizona, Their unemployment website also crashed when they received 30,000 people filing in a single week.
In New York, last Thursday, in one day, they received over half a million visits to the unemployment site.
Also crashed the site.
The next day, they got a half a million calls inquiring about unemployment.
So you've got unemployment websites across the country crashing from the amount of traffic they're getting from people who are suddenly out of a job.
Millions and millions of people.
Out of work, no income, no way to provide for themselves.
After one week.
One week.
Okay, and it wasn't even a full week for a lot of people.
It was just a few days of a company being shut down and already they're laying people off and they're firing people.
And not because they're greedy, not because these companies are run by greedy fat cats who don't care about the little man.
No, most companies in America are small businesses.
And the reason why they're getting rid of people, firing, laying off, they have no choice.
They can't operate with zero revenue.
They have to.
They have no choice.
Now, the hope, I suppose, is that the jobs will be there to return to once the government lets people go back to work.
And this is what I've heard.
This is the argument I've heard.
I've heard things like, well, the economy can be resurrected.
In fact, that's what somebody in some media person, some journalist said to me on Twitter yesterday.
You can resurrect the economy.
Just resurrect it.
Like Jesus on Easter morning.
A miracle!
Resurrected!
Look at that!
No, that hope is, as CNN might say, unsubstantiated.
Most small businesses cannot survive on zero revenue for very long, let alone months.
When they go down, they're done.
They're not going to be resurrected.
They don't magically come back to life.
That's not what happens with a business.
Even the significantly larger companies.
are going to have to downsize.
And when the government says, OK, you can go back to work, it's not like the past however many weeks and months disappear like they never happened.
And what will happen in the meantime to people?
A large majority of Americans are already living paycheck to paycheck.
A large majority.
Now, paycheck to paycheck means if you miss one paycheck, you're in trouble, especially if you have kids.
What happens when you miss two paychecks?
Three, four, five?
What happens to you?
How do you feed yourself?
How do you feed your kids?
How will you pay the rent or the mortgage?
Government stimulus checks only go so far.
Yes, send the checks.
And we'll talk about those checks during the headlines, but that can't be a new way of life.
We can't sustain the entire country that way, no matter what the socialists might say.
People need to work to care for themselves and their families.
What happens when millions of people are prevented from doing so for a long stretch of time?
Well, nobody knows the answer to that question, really, because nothing like this has ever happened before.
No government, as far as I'm aware, has ever, ever, ever willfully plunged itself into a depression, obliterating its own economy on purpose, In order to prevent some other potential calamity.
If we go that route, we will be the first to ever try it.
Along with the other countries that are, some other countries in the world right now that are currently trying it too.
That's a whole other aspect of this thing that we're not even talking about.
We're just talking about America crashing its economy.
What happens when a bunch of other economies crash also at the same time across the globe?
Well, we don't know exactly, but I think there are many very good reasons to predict rather horrifying results from such an experiment.
Destitution, poverty on a massive scale, looting, rioting, millions homeless.
That's just the beginning.
We have seen looting and rioting in major American cities in recent history for almost no reason.
In Baltimore, they said it was about Freddie Gray, the guy that was allegedly a victim of police brutality.
Well, of course, most of the looters didn't really care about Freddie Gray or even know about that situation or know much about it.
They were just looking for an excuse.
What happens when you give them a legitimate excuse?
What happens when you make people desperate?
What happens when you make even decent people who could never have even imagined themselves looting?
What happens when you make them considerate?
Because they need a loaf of bread for their kids and they have no way of buying it.
Now, this 15-day period, Is one thing.
But if it goes exponentially longer than that, it's just, that is an option that cannot be on the table.
We cannot open our arms and embrace exactly the kind of catastrophe that the shutdowns are supposed to be preventing.
Many lives will be ruined.
Lives.
Human lives.
Now, I'm not sure that it will be entirely safe to go back to work after 15 days.
I think the 15-day period probably, I suspect, was sort of arbitrary, but we have no other choice if we want to preserve our civilization.
Does that mean that we fling open our doors and run outside and start infecting each other with abandon?
No, of course not.
Here's the plan that I outlined yesterday.
I'll say it again, and I'll expand it a little bit.
Tell me where I'm wrong here.
Let's go over this one more time.
Step one, open the economy.
Let young and healthy people feed their families.
Step two, encourage masks.
Produce lots of masks, get them out there, and encourage them, maybe even require them for certain industries and certain situations where transmission might be especially likely, in areas where there might be large gatherings of people in a confined space.
Maybe you say, for a time, you have to wear a mask.
Okay?
Step three, keep nursing homes quarantined.
Step four, tell other at-risk people to remain in their homes from now.
Step five, test aggressively.
Quarantine the infected.
Step six, provide financial relief to at-risk people who cannot work.
We do all of those things.
Now, I'm not saying that's going to solve the problem.
I don't think this is a problem that can be solved so much as managed at this point.
But why wouldn't that manage the problem?
That's not doing nothing.
I'm not saying that we do nothing.
I certainly don't think we should do nothing.
I'm not someone saying that this is no big deal, we shouldn't even have to worry about it, it's nothing but the flu, yada yada.
That's not my position.
I think it is serious.
But crashing the economy and destroying millions of lives just cannot be a solution.
It's a form of collective suicide.
It's killing the patient to stop the disease.
You can't do that.
It can't be a solution.
So, what's another solution?
What about this?
This is not choosing the economy or people.
The economy is people.
So if you hear that the economy is destroyed, that means millions of people's lives are destroyed.
That's what it means on the ground.
The economy is not some kind of separate entity that hovers above us, detached, uninvolved, just up there.
You say, oh, look at the economy!
Hi, economy!
Oh, the economy's not doing so well today.
Well, that's all right.
We all comprise the economy.
We're part of the economy.
So when I say I don't want the economy to crash, I mean that I don't want people's lives to crash.
Now, I've already said, I would love it if in the long term, and by that I mean generations, like probably many generations, but in the long term, I think we should work towards a society and an economy that could actually withstand something like this, where people could go a few weeks or several weeks or even a few months without buying a lot of stuff and we could survive it.
I think that we should be working towards an economy like that.
Over the long term.
An economy that is not so consumer-based, an economy where people are more self-sufficient, where it's more focused on the home life and supporting the nuclear family than it is on supporting retail shops and everything else.
But that's the long term.
You can't do that overnight.
Which is what we're trying to do now.
You do it overnight, and you're going to have massive, massive suffering and death.
But what we're hearing from the media, especially left-wing media, is that anybody who expresses these concerns hates people, hates the elderly, is cruel, is heartless.
This is the rhetoric all over MSNBC, all over CNN.
But let me give you just a little taste of things that some people in the media and other blue checks on Twitter, journalists and so on, have been saying to me.
As I've been making these arguments on social media, these are the kinds of responses I've been getting from these people.
Just a few examples.
It says, Matt can work from home, but all you expendable peasants get back to the front lines so the stock market doesn't crash anymore.
F me, our society is terrible.
Another one, another capitalist... Well, I can't even read that.
The implication is I'm a capitalist and I have a fetish for mass murder.
That's what it said.
This is mass murder that I'm advocating.
Another one.
We're going to hear this slimeball take a lot soon, but there's too much money at stake to not let people get infected and die.
Someone else.
So throw the bodies of service and industrial workers at the virus while people like Matt Walsh continue to work from home.
Because they can.
Sorry, expendable young people, but capitalism would like to carry on, so shut the F up and go back to work.
I care about people not dying.
You're a fool.
So on and so on.
You get the idea.
If you say that we have to take steps to make sure there's not a depression, you don't care about people dying, you in fact are in favor of mass murder, you're throwing young people and the elderly off a cliff, essentially, sacrificing them for your own bottom line, your 401k, your portfolio, your stock options, and everything else.
Now, I am saying, not just me, lots of people are saying, If the economy crashes, if we become the first country ever in history that chooses to crash its own economy, the result will be catastrophic for people, for working families, for parents who won't be able to feed and clothe their children.
Not just for the stock market, not for portfolios, for people, actual people, not just 401ks.
Although, by the way, you know, 401ks are pretty important.
If all of our 401ks plummet, that's going to cause a lot of suffering to people.
Not rich people.
People who are relying on that.
So that's not a small thing.
This is what I'm talking about.
People are dismissive.
Ah, just a 401k.
What are you talking about?
That's somebody's savings.
They're relying on that to live on.
These are people.
And whether you agree or not with the plan to end the shutdowns, I don't believe that any rational person, any sane person, could actually interpret this argument as an argument for letting people die just for the sake of money.
I don't believe that any person who claims to hear it that way really does.
Because you would have to be a lunatic to interpret it that way.
I think they're pretending.
I think these people in media They're saying, oh, it's money over people.
I think they're pretending to see it that way.
Why?
Well, keep in mind, every person, everyone who left one of those comments I just read, all of them, and the pundits on cable news, they're fine.
They still have jobs.
Either they work from home or they can still go to their TV studio and do their job.
They have an income stream.
It's not shut off, like mine is not shut off.
They're doing okay, like me.
We'll be okay.
Media is a booming business right now.
Now, sure, eventually, if there's a Great Depression, it will probably destroy my life too.
So it's not like I have no skin in this game.
You know, media depends on advertisers, and if you can't afford to advertise, if a bunch of companies all go down, can't advertise anymore, then we're finished also.
Now, we have subscribers also, but if subscribers have to choose between paying their subscriptions and paying for the rent, we know which one they're gonna choose, and should choose.
So, I'm not immune.
If this whole ship goes down, I'm in the water with everybody else.
Or nearly everybody else.
But for now, I'm okay.
And so are all these people pretending to care so much about people, and yet completely ignoring the people, the millions of people, whose lives are being ruined right now as we speak.
Not just ruined, people will die if the economy collapses.
People won't be able to afford to live.
And there will be suicide.
A lot of it.
Studies show, not surprisingly, that suicide rates increase along with recessions.
As the economy recedes, suicide rates increase.
What will happen during a historic crash unlike anything we've ever seen before?
40,000 people, according to an article I was just reading in the Atlantic, 40,000 people killed themselves in America in the years 1937 and 1938, a few years after the Depression.
And you would expect, actually, to see the suicide rate maybe lagging behind a little bit because people are hanging on for a while and then their whole lives go to hell.
And that's when you really see the suicide rate kick up.
So the rate per 100,000 citizens back in 1937 and 1938, how that works out on that basis, is the highest ever recorded.
Suicide, homelessness, civil unrest, looting, that's what we're looking at.
And all of that Equates to human beings suffering and dying.
The point here is so obvious.
I don't mean that it's obvious that you should agree with me.
But just that the economic collapse obviously means suffering and death.
And therefore people who are saying we need to do everything we can to avoid that are trying to avoid suffering and death.
That is so obvious.
That those who are mischaracterizing this as money over people, well, as I said, I have no choice but to assume they have some other motive.
And I can't figure out what their motive would be.
Either they're lunatics, and they really just don't understand the really simple concepts that are being put before them.
They're lunatics, or they have room-temperature IQs, and so they hear about another Great Depression, and they think, ah, that's nothing, we'll be fine.
We'll be fine.
We could shake that one off and keep going.
Rub some dirt on it.
We'll be alright.
So either it's that they're extremely, extremely stupid or crazy, or there's something else going on here.
And you begin to suspect that some of these people actually want the economy to collapse.
Not just because of how we'll hurt Trump.
That's certainly part of it.
You've heard some of those comments I read about capitalism.
There's a disturbing amount of that.
Of, well, you see, this is what capitalism does.
This is capitalism's problem.
I think there are some far-left radicals who are thinking, okay, let's crash the economy.
Let's destroy capitalism, and then we can rebuild it into our socialist utopia.
I think there's some of that going on, too.
Let's move on to headlines.
Five headlines.
Number one, Nancy Pelosi last night introduced her own stimulus package, and people on the right are very upset because she put a lot of left-wing pork into the bill, tried to use this crisis as an opportunity to ram her ideological agenda through.
And people are upset.
Yeah, it's bad.
Honestly, though, it's so utterly expected and predictable that I can't even muster the energy to be upset about it.
I assume that's what they're going to do.
It's like getting upset at a fly for buzzing around your garbage.
It's what a fly does.
How can you even... Yeah, it's annoying, but to get angry, it's hard to even get angry about it.
Here's the part that, for me, is most upsetting.
Forget about the pork.
Her actual ideas for the stimulus itself.
That's the bad part.
So here's what she wants to do.
Quick rundown.
$1,500 checks for individuals.
$500 checks for individuals, $3,000 for joint filers, $1,500 per kid up to three kids, max
of $7,500 per family.
Thank you.
Every taxpayer gets a check.
Okay, so far so good.
That part I think is actually better than what the Republicans came up with.
Here's where we go off the rails.
Individuals making 75K in 2020 will pay some or all of it back.
Now, wait a second.
Pay it back?
First of all, pay it back at $75,000?
$75,000 is not wealthy.
Especially depending on where you live.
Like we talked about with the Republican package.
This is one of the problems with trying to do this kind of means-testing thing.
It really depends on where you live.
$75,000 around New York is not wealthy.
You're not living a luxurious life.
And if you have kids and you have a family, forget about it.
So, first of all, you set the limit at $75,000, but even the idea that you gotta pay it back So this is not stimulus, this is not relief, this is debt.
You're giving debt to American families.
So to an American family, you're giving them $7,000 of debt.
Saying, here it is, we're gonna need that back from you.
And that becomes even more absurd when you consider this is our own money we're getting back.
That's the way we should think of this.
It's the government preventing people from working.
We're the ones who fund the government, and so the government is saying, or should be saying, this is the way it is, it should be framed, this is the reality, we're gonna give you some of your own money back.
But now what they're saying is, we're gonna loan you back your own money that you gave us, but you're gonna have to repay your own money back to us, that we gave you.
So you have to repay the repayment.
I find that ridiculous.
Number two, well, you've heard about people panic buying toilet paper.
What about panic buying Mountain Dew?
I don't know if this video will spark a run on the soda aisle, we'll see, but video has surfaced of a man in Kentucky yelling at cashiers at a Kroger because they won't let him buy 500, well, over 500 cans.
I think it's 552 cans of Mountain Dew that he wants to buy.
They won't let him buy it.
Apparently, when the video picks up, he'd already bought a whole bunch of boxes of Mountain Dew, put them in his car, had come back for another round, and that's when he was told, okay, we're cutting you off.
And now, before I play this clip... So we've got a guy trying to buy 552 cans of Mountain Dew.
I want you to imagine in your head what you think this guy will look like.
This is always a fun game.
A guy who tries to buy 552 cans of Mountain Dew during a pandemic.
That's what he's hoarding, is Mountain Dew.
Imagine that.
Just put his image all in your mind.
Sketch the...
No, do the little kind of police sketch in your mind of what this person looks like.
Hold that image in your head.
And here's the clip.
Oh, there's some Mountain Dew.
Wow.
I'm telling you, you're such a liar.
You just told me just now that I could go outside and come back in and get the drink.
That's what you just said.
But that's what you just told me.
Hey, come on, man.
You just told me.
Wow.
You are so rude.
No, just...
You are so rude.
I don't even see how you have a job.
You nailed it, didn't you?
You had that guy pegged.
Especially the hairstyle.
That is the hairstyle of a Mountain Dew drinker.
And I... No disrespect, okay?
This is not any... Because listen, if you heard about a guy breaking down in tears at the liquor store because he wasn't allowed to buy 500 bottles of Goose Island IPA, you would expect him to look like this.
This is what you would... In fact, you would expect him to be me.
That's what you would expect.
So we all look like what we drink, I suppose, and so that's what that is.
All I can say, though, is that the cashier saved that man's life because that much Mountain Dew would kill a whole herd of elephants, let alone a human being.
And I'm not even kidding.
This one can of Mountain Dew has 46 grams of sugar and half the caffeine content of a can of Red Bull.
So you throw four or five of those back in a day, Think about the amount of sugar and caffeine you have just put into your body.
Also, there's the problem that Mountain Dew tastes like somebody mixed club soda and goat urine with half a pound of Splenda.
And that's the other problem.
It's just, it's not my, not my favorite thing in the world.
Number three, and the latest cancellation due to the China virus, or postponement at any rate, is the Olympics.
Reading from Fox News says the global spread of the coronavirus has forced the Tokyo Olympics to be postponed until next summer at the latest.
Japan's Prime Minister announced, he said that he and the International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach came to an agreement to postpone the games.
The latest the event can take place is the summer of 2021.
Number four, people on social media are beginning to panic over another virus in China, the Hanta virus.
There was reports of a man dying on a bus.
Now, I mention this here, and what I saw on social media was the number one trending thing, hantavirus.
So I mention it here only to tell you that if you did hear about it, there's no reason to freak out or worry.
It is not spread from person to person, says the CDC.
It is not a pandemic kind of disease in that way.
Here's how you get it.
You get it from interacting with the feces or urine of rats.
Interacting with.
So don't do that.
And that's a good, even without the hantavirus, good general principle.
If you see the feces or urine of a rat, don't interact with it.
I really wouldn't do anything with respect to it.
Don't interact.
Don't have a conversation.
Just keep on moving.
And you have to ask, how did this guy get it?
Well, in fairness, you could get it from inhaling.
So if you had a rat feces all over your floor, you were sweeping it up, you could inhale it, get it that way.
But they do also eat mice and rats over in that part of the world, so who knows?
And that's why China is sort of becoming a bit of a pandemic factory.
Number five.
Finally, this perhaps is less of a global news story and more of a regional news story, but I do have to report, because I know you want to hear, that the score is now 2-0 against my wife in our quarantine board game duel.
Report suggests that we played Scrabble two nights ago, a game in which I surge back in a heroic come-from-behind victory, thanks in part to playing the word jeet on a triple word score.
The word jeet is a legitimate Scrabble word, G-I-T-E.
And as you know, it is a small furnished home in France.
That's what everybody knows.
That's what that means.
And I put that on a triple word.
That's kind of how I sealed the deal at the end of the day.
I had to really dig deep into the Scrabble dictionary like that, and I did win the game.
And then last night we played Stratego, a game which I dominated from the very first From the whistle, assassinating my wife's general, killing her spy, decimating all of her high-ranking officers, before dramatically capturing her flag in a show of strategic brilliance that I think will be studied by military schools for centuries to come.
Now, I know a lot of people are playing board games during quarantine, and just be glad that you are not quarantined with me, because I am widely regarded as the greatest board game champion, certainly in the country.
And when I say widely regarded that way, I mean that I regard myself that way, and I tell people this all the time.
And when they hear me say that, the first thing they probably think is, what a sad life this pitiful man must lead.
And that's probably true.
But in any case, that's the headline.
The news you were waiting to hear.
Now, let's go on to our daily cancellation.
Today, we're canceling all of the media outlets that tried to blame President Trump for the fact that a couple in Arizona decided to drink parasite treatment for fish in order to prevent the coronavirus.
Now, the man, unfortunately, died.
The woman, last I heard, is in critical care in the hospital, so it's very sad.
But they drank parasitic treatment for fish, and that's what happens.
Now, and this is very sad.
As I said, it's not really newsworthy.
And it certainly has nothing to do with Trump.
But the media reported this story breathlessly last night because they thought they could pin it on Trump.
And here's the NBC report on it, and I'll show you this.
You'll understand how they're trying to connect it to Trump.
I want you to also pay attention.
How long does it take the reporter to mention that they didn't take the medicinal form of
this drug they were looking for, but they took it in the form of something that you
would buy at PetSmart?
How long does it take him to actually mention that?
Here's the clip.
One other development this morning.
An Arizona man has died after he took chloroquine phosphate because he believed it would protect him from the coronavirus.
You may recall, the president has been talking about chloroquine in a tablet form, which is a malaria drug, which he believes could, in fact, help people who are struggling with the coronavirus.
We talked to this man's wife, who is now also in the ICU, about how and why he took this particular chloroquine phosphate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We saw his press conference.
It was on a lot, actually.
Yeah, yeah, we saw his breast con. It was on a lot, actually.
And then what, did you seek out chloroquine?
I had it in my house because I used to have koi fish.
So this particular form of it that he took was used to kill parasites in fish, apparently.
As you know, the FDA is looking at whether chloroquine could be used, it's a malaria drug, could be used to help people with coronavirus, but not in a raw form, certainly not in the form that you would use to kill fish parasites.
Okay, Trump mentioned chloroquine.
They were looking for that.
And they took some.
And then when we're well into the news report, we're about a minute in, that's when the reporter says, oh yeah, by the way, it was a fish treatment.
It was parasite treatment for fish.
That's what they took.
It wasn't a medicine.
So this would be like if I said that drinking an alcoholic beverage at night can reduce stress, and then you went home and drank a gallon of nail polish remover and died, and everybody blamed me.
Or if I said that petroleum jelly is a good way to treat, you know, if you have dry skin, use some petroleum jelly.
And then you went home and, or you went to the gas station and smeared gasoline all over your face and went blind.
And everybody blamed me.
It's completely ridiculous and cynical and exploitative.
That reporter, NBC, the rest of the media that was doing this, they're exploiting the suffering of these people.
And not only that, but they're, They're taking these people, this woman who just lost her husband, exploiting her, and they're traipsing her out in front of the world to be laughed at, which is what happened.
Now you got all these people on social media laughing at them, mocking them, which is inevitable with something like this.
And of course it is an enormously foolish thing to do, obviously, but at the same time, somebody died, so it's a very sad thing.
I can see this being a news story locally in Arizona.
Maybe the local Arizona affiliate will pick it up, but this is not national news.
The media doesn't care, though.
We're going to take these people, use them as pawns, use their suffering as pawns, put them out in front of the world to be laughed at and mocked, all for the sake of landing a blow on Trump.
It's despicable.
Evil.
Let's go on to emails.
And if you become a Daily Wire member, you can always send an email to the mailbag, so I would encourage you to do that.
This is an email from Stan.
It says, Hi Matt, I need to address the nearly hairless elephant in the room.
What happened to your beard, man?
You do the show on Monday with your luscious beard almost completely gone and don't even offer an explanation.
I feel betrayed.
You are no longer a fellow beardsman.
I do not know you.
First of all, Stan, can I say, I don't mean to deflect, but please do not ever describe something on my body as luscious.
It is simply not a word that men should ever be using in reference to each other.
But you're right, of course, it is a luscious beard, or it was.
Honestly, I have no defense.
I can only throw myself at the feet of the Beardsman Council and beg for your indulgence, which is a thing, by the way, as we all know, for your indulgence and forgiveness.
All I can say is it was a moment of quarantine-induced mania Or QIM, as it's called now in the psychiatric community.
Here's all that happened.
I was getting ready for the day.
I'm going a little stir-crazy like everybody else is.
Getting ready for the day.
I'm in the bathroom.
On a whim, I grabbed the clippers and I sheared my beard right off.
I don't know why.
I really don't know why I did it.
And then when I realized what I had done, I dropped the clippers.
Very dramatic moment.
I dropped them.
I stared in the mirror in shock.
I said, Oh God, what have I done?
I broke down on the floor, weeping hysterically.
Then my wife came in.
She found me sobbing in the fetal position on the floor.
And said, again, it was just a bad time all around.
It was a really bad time, but all I can do is try to grow the beard back.
And I'm also afraid that, because we hear about how beards spread disease during the coronavirus, I'm afraid that I have contributed to the stigma of beards by trimming mine during a pandemic.
I didn't intend to do that.
I want to make that very clear.
This is from Owen, says, hello Matt, long time listener.
This is our why you're wrong email for the day.
This is from Owen, says, hello Matt, long time listener and fan of your show.
I disagree with your takes often, but very much enjoy listening to the logical presentations of the arguments you make, which forces me and your other listeners to think critically about our own arguments with regards to our core beliefs, which I think too many people engage in.
Too few people engaged, we should say.
My question is in regards to what you said on your show today.
You said that the mitigation of the loss of a single life is not worth the economic hardship that would befall everybody given the alternative that the government is currently implementing.
On a microeconomic level, how exactly is this different than an individual who has fallen on economically hard times deciding to get an abortion simply for the sake of the economic gain received by doing so?
You said that there's obviously a line, a number of human lives lost, in which the argument would tip to one side or the other, but this kind of cold utilitarianism seems generally out of line with the moral arguments that you yourself often make regarding the inherent value and preciousness of human life.
To put simply, Are there any conditions in terms of an individual's economics under which you would condone an abortion?
And if not, how is this any different than a larger scale version, albeit much larger, of a similar scenario playing out right now in which you say that a certain number of deaths are acceptable if it keeps millions out of poverty?
The death of a single individual is unacceptable for the economic gain of the individual, but the death of thousands is acceptable for the economic gain of millions?
Is it just the scale alone?
What if a thousand abortions happen for the economic gain of millions?
I don't know exactly how that would be the case, but you see my point, obviously.
Well, so there are a few things there.
Good question.
Good point.
I think there are a few things to consider.
And so we've got kind of a ends justify the means versus principle of double effect.
There's a big difference, okay?
A number of differences, but let's focus on one.
An abortion is the direct intentional killing of a human life.
You are directly taking human life.
You're killing somebody.
What I would say is that it is never okay, it is never ethical, it is never moral to directly kill an innocent human life.
Never okay.
There could never be any benefit that would make it okay, because it's inherently wrong.
And I don't care if killing one person will make everybody else in the world millionaires.
Doesn't matter.
That couldn't even begin to make it okay.
But what we're talking about here, with the plan that I'm proposing, others are proposing, if we start to open the economy up, we take steps, we take precautions to try to stave off A mass outbreak that kills a lot of people.
We're not talking about directly killing people.
I'm not saying that we... See, the analogy would be if I was suggesting that we go and just kill everybody who has the disease in order to stop others from getting it.
That obvious.
Now, even if I could prove to you and I could show that doing that would be economically beneficial and would be beneficial to public health, which maybe it would be.
That obviously would be gravely immoral and psychotic.
But we're not talking about that.
We're talking about doing our best in a difficult situation to preserve as many lives as we can, while also staving off suffering and the collapse of human civilization, of American civilization, as much as we can.
So those are the two things we're trying to balance.
We're not directly killing anybody.
So, directly killing someone, an innocent person, because you think it's going to benefit you or benefit others, that is an ends-justify-the-means approach, which is wrong.
What we're talking about here is more a double-effect situation, where I'm saying, we do a good thing.
The good thing is allowing people to work and feed their families.
Good thing.
Which may possibly have A negative, even a potentially very negative, side effect.
But we're not doing the negative thing in order for the good thing to happen.
We're doing the good thing, knowing that a negative thing may come up and may come from it.
Which is the same calculation.
Now, those who are saying, let's keep it locked down, they're making the exact same calculation.
They're saying, okay, we're going to keep it locked down to try to save lives, even though it's going to crash our economy and many millions of people will suffer and die because of that.
So, either way, you're stuck with that kind of calculation.
And I don't think that whichever way you go, either way is necessarily inherently immoral.
I just think that it's certainly a lot more prudent and will probably be more effective and will preserve more lives and stave off more suffering if we go the route of opening things up again and taking the precautions that I just mentioned.
So hopefully that explains it.
And that's why I keep wanting to emphasize that I don't think we have to choose between opening the economy and trying to prevent an outbreak.
I think that's a false choice.
I think we can do both.
I think there is a way to do both.
And if we begin from the premise of ruling out any strategy that would essentially Would almost certainly result in the destruction of our economy.
If we rule that out to begin with, which I think we should, because the cost there is just far too great, then we could start thinking about other ways.
And I think there are other ways.
I've suggested one.
There are other ways of doing it, too.
There are even other rather strict and arguably draconian laws that could be put in place while still allowing people to work and feed their families.
I mentioned the thing about the masks.
There are some people suggesting there should be a nationwide mask law.
That everybody has to wear masks when they go outside.
Now, I'm not suggesting that.
I don't know how that would be enforced.
I also don't think we have enough masks to even do that.
And I would worry about depriving the hospitals of masks where they really need it.
I would certainly take that over causing a Great Depression.
That would obviously, to me, be exponentially better.
So even that.
If you're inclined to support the more draconian governmental measures, why don't you start thinking in that direction?
All right.
Well, thanks for the email.
Thanks, everybody, for watching and listening.
We'll leave it there.
Godspeed.
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The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Supervising Producer Mathis Glover, Supervising Producer Robert Sterling, Technical Producer Austin Stevens, Editor Danny D'Amico, Audio Mixer Robin Fenderson.
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House and Senate Democrats torpedo a bipartisan coronavirus relief bill, raising an important question.
If elected Democrats aren't taking the pandemic seriously, why should we?
We will examine the political shenanigans and the light at the end of the economic tunnel.
Then, the mainstream media spread a story of a man dying from the drug touted by President Trump as a possible cure for coronavirus.
The only problem with their story is it's completely false.
