Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the media continues to openly root against the United States, which is something they’ve been doing for decades, of course, but it’s been even more grotesque during this crisis. Also Five Headlines including a whole bunch of congressmen who need to be reported for not social distancing correctly. And today in our Daily Cancellation, I cancel everyone. It’s time. It needs to be done.
Check out The Cold War: What We Saw, a new podcast written and presented by Bill Whittle at https://bit.ly/2z2j1NB. In Part 1 we peel back the layers of mystery cloaking the Terror state run by the Kremlin, and watch as America takes its first small steps onto the stage of world leadership.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, the media continues to openly root against the United States, which is something, of course, they've been doing for decades.
But it's been even more grotesque and getting more grotesque by the day during this crisis.
Also, five headlines, including a whole bunch of congressmen who apparently don't understand how to wear a mask.
And don't understand why we are wearing masks, and I think need to be reported to the various snitch lines for their violations of social distancing.
And today in our daily cancellation, I will be cancelling everyone.
Just everybody.
It's time.
It needs to be done, and I'll explain why.
All of that is coming up.
But first, a word from LifeLock.
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There are some people who seem like they're prepared for anything.
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But if they're worried about identity theft and only monitoring their credit, they may not be as prepared as they think they are.
Breaches seem like they're happening more these days.
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Alright.
All right.
By the way, before I get going, I wanted to just mention one thing.
And I don't know if I'm alone in this among people who wear glasses, but I've discovered that if you don't wear glasses, you can't relate to this, okay?
Because you're not in the victim group, you know, that we're in as visually impaired individuals.
But apparently you can't wear glasses and also a face mask and still be able to see because the glasses get fogged up.
So I try to go to the store, I got the face mask on, and I'm wandering around the store bumping into things because my glasses are getting fogged up.
Because as you're breathing, the air from your mouth goes up into your glasses and causes this fog situation.
And so now I'm starting to think of all the doctors and surgeons that you see that wear glasses.
I mean, I had an Achilles surgery last year, and my doctor wore glasses.
And now I'm realizing that he couldn't see a thing he was doing the entire time.
And I'm just now realizing this, and I wish I didn't know it, to be honest with you.
So if there's any solution to that, that you're aware of, as a glass... Any glasses-wearing people, if you've discovered a solution to the fogging of the glasses, please let me know.
For my own safety and the safety of those around me.
Okay, well, it's not news, I suppose, that the media roots against America.
Especially in recent years.
As...
And especially now that America is governed by a man that they despise with every fiber of their being.
But this spectacle of the media rooting against us has been especially grotesque and outrageous and traitorous.
Traitorous at least in a moral sense during this coronavirus crisis, I think.
And it makes you think back to the very early days of 9-11.
I've been thinking about this a lot.
It's like, you know, we've always talked about right after 9-11, There was, at least it seemed at the time, there was a very real national unity for a while.
Didn't last, it was temporary.
But even the media for the most part, Democrats, Republicans, most everybody, for a time, a brief glorious time in history, there seemed to be a real sense of common purpose.
And everybody was on the same side.
For at least a few days.
Well, we never had that with this, and I wonder if we're even capable of it anymore.
I think probably not.
I think we're at a point in our culture where we're not capable of that kind of unity, even when we're facing a common threat.
So, I want to talk about just one example of the media rooting against us and celebrating, seeming to celebrate our, in their minds, demise.
And in fact, before I do that, just one other really egregious recent example that I happened to see online yesterday.
This is a woman named Samira Khan, who's a foreign policy analyst.
And here she is.
Now, follow this exchange on Twitter.
Samira says, sick of the following COVID-19 talking points.
One, it's a hoax.
Two, severity and death count equals exaggerated.
Three, China is to blame.
Feel free to add to the list.
Then some random guy responds, China has to be blamed, babes.
Isn't that obvious?
Then Samira says, babes, puke face emoji.
No, I don't know what your crap media is telling you, but the world should be thanking China for their efforts.
Now, I don't know if this woman lives in America or not.
I think she does.
But that was so egregious that I had to mention it.
Thanking China.
We should be thanking China for their efforts.
Their efforts in starting and lying about and thereby causing the uncontrollable spread of a deadly virus.
We should thank them for that.
Anyway, so on to the AP.
Here's the AP's tweet of their article.
The caption says, It wasn't supposed to be this way.
America was the greatest of all nations with can-do spirit in its DNA, but now it leads only in COVID-19 deaths.
What's gone wrong?
And then the title of the article, Coronavirus Shakes the Conceit of American Exceptionalism.
The byline is Calvin Woodward wrote it, but then it says that Lauren Niergaard in Washington, Ted Anthony in Pittsburgh, and Aya Batray in Dubai contributed to this report.
So a reporter who doesn't live in America contributed to a report about how America is not exceptional.
So that's just great.
Reading from the article, it says, When the coronavirus pandemic came from distant lands to the United States, it was met with cascading failures and incompetencies by a system that exists to prepare, protect, prevent, and cut citizens at check in a national crisis.
The molecular menace posed by the new coronavirus has shaken the conceit of American exceptionalism like nothing big enough to see with your own eyes.
A nation with unmatched power, brazen ambition, and aspirations through the arc of history to be humanity's shining city upon a hill cannot come up with enough simple cotton swabs despite the wartime manufacturing supply powers assumed by President Donald Trump.
Then it continues on, for effective diagnostic testing, crucial in an infectious outbreak, look abroad to the United Arab Emirates, or Germany, or New Zealand, which jumped to test the masses before many were known to be sick.
Or to South Korean exceptionalism, tapped by Maryland's Republican Governor Larry Hogan, who accepted a plane load of 500,000 testing kits from South Korea to make up for the U.S.
shortfall.
Simple gloves, complicated ventilators, special lab chemicals, test swabs, masks, gowns, face shields, hospital beds, emergency payouts from the government, benefits for idled workers, each has been subject to chronic shortages, spot shortages, calcified bureaucracy, or some combination.
Okay, and then it goes on from there.
I can't read the whole thing, it's quite lengthy.
Now, here's the thing, and you get this a lot from the media.
Many of the points being raised that I just read there and throughout the article, Are not wrong.
It would certainly be hard to argue that the response from our country has been stellar, exactly.
And we were caught unprepared.
And we shouldn't have been unprepared.
And we have government agencies that are supposed to be keeping us prepared for this sort of thing, like the CDC.
And they didn't do their job.
And many of the other things that this article points out are true, yes.
But they marshal all of these facts in service to an ideological point.
And then they cover it in a falsehood.
The ideological point is that American exceptionalism is just a conceit and a false one.
And the falsehood is that we lead only in COVID-19 deaths.
Which implies, obviously, first of all, that we don't lead in any other category, which is not true.
But it's also untrue that we lead in COVID-19 deaths.
That, you know, the only way to get to that statistic.
And the media has to know this.
So when you have the media constantly saying that we lead in COVID-19 deaths, They have to know that what they're saying is not true.
I mean, at best, highly misleading, but really simply untrue.
Yet they keep saying it.
Why do they keep saying it?
Well, it's almost like they want it to be true.
Or at least they want us to believe that it's true.
And this is what I'm talking about with rooting against America.
Um, so the only way to get to that statistic, the only way to support the idea that we lead in deaths is to do two extremely disingenuous things.
One is to ignore population size and to just do a straight up comparison between our total deaths and total deaths in like New Zealand, you know, and Denmark, completely putting aside that our population is many, many, many, many, many times larger than those countries.
So obviously we're going to have more deaths.
Then you also have to ignore total cases.
And of course, we don't know the total cases for any country, and the fact that we don't know that is a problem, because it also means that the death toll is probably a lot lower than we think.
But still, obviously, if you have more cases, you're going to have more deaths.
And obviously, America's going to have more cases than a place like New Zealand, because we have a lot more people, and also, we have a lot more people coming here from other parts of the world.
Now, according to USA Today, and this is in an article meant to basically debunk Trump's claim that our death rate is low compared to other countries, which is actually true, that it is low compared to many other countries.
But in the process of trying to debunk that claim, the USA Today did admit, quote,
when compared only to the 10 countries with the most cases, the US ranks as the second lowest mortality rate as a
percentage of total cases.
That means eight of those countries hit hardest by the coronavirus have higher mortality rates than the US.
Well, that's the honest comparison to make.
You have to look at other countries that got a ton of cases.
Because they have larger populations, in most cases, and also because maybe they have more people coming into their countries.
Or you can look at deaths per 100,000 people, or per a million people.
And when you do that, so you're looking at it more on a per capita basis, and when you do that, we're nowhere near the top of the list.
In fact, I don't think we'd even make it into the top ten when you look at it that way.
And then, in order to claim that America leads in deaths, you also have to take China at its word on its death count, and you have to assume that a country like India, with a billion plus people, claiming only 700 deaths, you have to assume that that number is accurate.
And not to say that India would be lying about their death count, maybe they would be.
But also you have to think in a country like India, they may not have successfully counted all the people who actually died of this illness.
So, but you have to put that to the side.
You have to assume that in India, with one point, I think it's 1.3 billion people, only 700 have died of coronavirus.
And China's being honest.
So you assume all of that.
And then even then, you don't get to America having the most cases.
Now, none of this, again, is to say that our response in America has been good.
It hasn't, in my view.
But the media wants us to believe that it's the worst, and that we're the hardest hit, and that we're the most incompetent, and you can practically see the gleeful smiles when you read this stuff.
This is what happens when you buy into the narrative that America is the villain of the world.
And then when bad stuff happens to your country, if you've bought into a narrative that your country's the villain, bad stuff happens to your country, and then I guess you feel pretty good about it.
Which it seems that that's the case for a lot of people in the media.
Okay, let's move on to headlines.
Number one, NFL draft was last night.
They had to do it all virtual, which meant that Roger Goodell, for the first time ever, wasn't booed every time he spoke, the NFL Commissioner.
Usually at these events, he gets up there for the first round, anyway, to announce the people who've been drafted to the various teams.
And every time he takes the stage, he's booed.
But that didn't happen this time.
I watched a little bit of it.
Mainly because I'm desperate for sports, like most red-blooded American men.
So I'll even sit and watch guys on a webcam list the names of players who've been drafted.
That's how desperate I am for some kind of live sporting event.
But it was kind of awkward because they had webcams in all of the homes of the projected first-round draft picks.
So we could see their excitement in real time as they learned that they were drafted.
Which had to be annoying.
You know, I felt bad for those kids because this is one of the biggest moments of their lives, the moment their life changes, the moment that all the years of hard work pays off.
It's a very significant, profound, beautiful moment for them.
And they've got a camera shoved in their face so that millions of people can watch and judge their reaction as they learn the news.
Now, I mean, I think even like during holidays or a birthday, Would I have to open presents in front of other people?
And I don't have a camera shoved in my face.
Well, sometimes I do.
But I don't have millions of people watching.
But even that, I really hate opening presents in front of other people.
That's why I don't like holidays.
I'd be in favor of abolishing the gift-giving process altogether.
Because then I feel like I've got all this pressure, I have to be excited about every gift that I open, and I'm not an excitable person.
So even if I'm very excited about a gift, like I could get a gift, I could open a gift, and it could be a treasure chest full of gold bars, you know, adding up to like three million dollars in value.
And my reaction to that would be something like, oh, cool.
Wow, really cool.
Thanks for this so much.
Yeah, I really, thank you.
Really cool.
That'd be my reaction.
That would also be my reaction if you give me socks.
Either way.
Just how I am.
So, I felt bad for these kids, because I think a lot of them are sort of the same as me, not as excitable.
And so you're watching their reactions, and many of them do not appear excited at all.
And so it's very awkward.
Especially the guy that was drafted by the Jaguars.
Here was his reaction.
Well there you see happiness all the way around.
And just so you know, obviously it makes a lot of sense because the Jaguars moved on
from Jalen Ramsey last year.
They clearly needed help with the cornerback position.
Now in fairness, I think he was actually overcome with emotion there.
And so I think he was excited, but it did kind of look like he was mourning over being
drafted by the Jaguars.
And I wouldn't blame him for that if he was.
By the way, his reaction was judged by jerks like myself.
As I am doing to him right now what I hate when people do to me.
So, moving on.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Twitter says this.
Study of 318 outbreaks in China found transmission occurred out of doors and only one involving just two cases.
Most occurred in home or public transport.
Raises key chance for states to move service outdoors.
Religious, gym classes, restaurants, etc.
Now this is, in spite of this, You've still got morons panicking over people going to the beach.
And as I've been saying all along, even though I'm not a doctor, it seemed obvious to me that the beach is probably one of the safest places in the world you can be right now.
Fresh air, open air, lots of wind, lots of circulation there.
It's hot, it's sunny.
Just doesn't seem like the best environment for a virus to be transmitted.
You know, if I were a virus and I wanted to be transmitted, I would not choose, and I could choose anywhere, I would not choose a beach.
I would choose a public transportation, and in lieu of that, if not that, at least, yes, being... I think the best case scenario would be, you know, being cooped up in a house with other people.
Now, that's a great opportunity for transmission.
So, yeah, I think this could be a solution for...
A lot of businesses that are apprehensive about opening, when they're allowed to open, if you can, move it outside.
Have people sitting outside as much as possible.
Churches doing outdoor services.
As we move into the warmer months in the summer and everything, I think that could be a great solution.
Might not be possible for every church and every restaurant, of course, but where it is possible, I think that could be a good way of doing it.
Let's see, number three, the mayor of a city in Japan is under fire for saying that men should do the grocery shopping because women take too long and they clog up the lanes at the store by doddling around.
He said, this is what he said, quote, women take a longer time grocery shopping because they browse through different products and weigh out which option is best.
Men quickly grab what they're told to buy so they won't linger at the supermarket.
That avoids close contact with others.
I think this is obviously true.
People are upset, of course, because they're always going to get upset when you make any sort of observation about women that appears to be less than flattering.
You know, if you dare say anything about women that is short of bowing before them and worshipping them.
Anything short of that, and it's highly offensive.
But this is obviously true, it seems to me.
Certainly in my experience of both being a man and a husband, and also going to grocery stores, and also just what I know about men.
Men are all about efficiency.
Okay?
Men are going to be more efficient in pretty much everything.
If you want efficiency, go to a man.
Whether it's grocery shopping, whether it's telling a story about what happened to them during the day, whether it's anything.
Man's gonna be more efficient.
Now, that's not to say that the man is always gonna do a better job.
Because, yeah, I would say that women, if you got all the time in the world, then, yeah, you want the woman to do the grocery shopping because she is.
She's gonna be thinking very hard about what she's buying.
She's gonna be finding the best deals, you know, and all of that.
But we're in a position right now where we just need to get in and get out.
And if you need someone to get in, get it done, and get out, that's, you need men.
You need men for that.
So, that's, now, when I'm at the grocery store, I've got my list, and I'm just going through the aisles as fast as I can, you know?
Grabbing it, I don't even look at it hardly.
I just grab, first thing I see, first version, you know, if there's something on the list that says, you know, mayonnaise or whatever, I'm just grabbing the first jar that I see.
I'm not sitting there.
Now, if it was my wife, she's going to sit there and she's going to look at all the different versions of mayonnaise.
She'll think, you know, what's the healthiest?
What's the cheapest?
Can I get a deal here?
What brand do we like the most?
You know, this jar is a little bit bigger than that jar.
Is that a better deal than that one?
Oh, do I want mayonnaise that has olive oil flavoring?
We don't have time for that right now.
Maybe in the future, but right now, you just gotta grab the mayonnaise.
And so I think that, obviously, you need men for that.
Number four.
I'm gonna be putting a report into de Blasio's social distancing snitch line, where you report violations of social distancing rules, because I saw a New Yorker, a New York resident, flagrantly violating social distancing policies.
And I think this needs to be reported to de Blasio ASAP.
On behalf of my constituents in the Bronx and Queens, New York's 14th congressional district, the most impacted district in America, calling people, losing their families every day.
It is a joke when Republicans say that they have urgency around this bill.
The only folks that they have urgency around are folks like Ruth Chris Steakhouse and Shake Shack.
Those are the people getting assistance in this bill.
You are not trying to fix this bill for mom and pops, and we have to fight to fund hospitals, fighting to fund testing.
That is what we're fighting for in this bill.
It is unconscionable.
If you had urgency, you would legislate like rent was due on May 1st and make sure that we include rent
and mortgage relief for our constituents.
So there is AOC inside around other people holding her mask in her hand while she shouts.
I think taking the mask off to shout, taking the mask off in order to shout
Seems like it really defeats the purpose of the mask.
In fact, you probably mainly need the mask for the shouting part.
You'd be better off not wearing it for any other part and just putting it on for the shouting because that's when the spittle is going to be going all over the place.
That's like if you have a mask and you're walking around to the store or something and as soon as you have to cough you just pull the mask down to cough and then you put the mask back up.
It defeats the purpose.
It reminds me of the fact that I was at Walmart the other day, and there was a woman, I'm not joking, she was walking through the store, and she had pulled her mask down to sing.
She was singing with her mask pulled down in Walmart.
And I almost did report her, as much as I'm against snitching, and I believe snitches get stitches, and for good reason, I almost reported her, but not really because of the mask thing, it's more that she was happy at Walmart, and you're not supposed to be that happy at Walmart.
It's not a place for happiness.
But anyway, this was a common theme, actually, in Congress.
None of these people who lead our country apparently understand how to wear a mask or why we wear them.
So let's take a look at a couple more examples of these pictures here.
These are people that have masks at various different places on their face, but not really covering the mouth and the nose, which is what it's supposed to do.
And then the worst of all is this.
This is a very important piece of legislation.
So we come to the floor... Very important piece of legislation.
So we come to the floor with such heartache, with such sorrow about those who have lost their lives and their loved ones, those who are suffering from the virus assault now.
So that's Nancy Pelosi, mask off, wipes her nose, and then touches the podium.
That a bunch of other Congress people are going to be using.
That is a terrorist attack, really, is what that is.
That's a national security emergency, which has happened there.
She could have unleashed a deadly pathogen into the halls of the U.S.
Congress.
I think she needs to be arrested immediately.
For this and many other reasons.
Finally, a report from the CBS affiliate in New York says... MTA subway conductors say trains are filthier than ever amid coronavirus pandemic.
It says the subways are only supposed to be for essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic, but conductors say the trains are filthier than ever.
The MTA says that only about 5% of its regular ridership is taking the subway, and that's made up of people who work in hospitals, grocery stores, and every other essential service, but conductors say the subway has become a homeless shelter and social distancing is near impossible.
Cell phone video shows subway cars lined with people passed out, using shoes as pillows, not wearing masks, trash piled in shopping carts.
Urine, feces, so on and so forth everywhere.
And this is what's happening in the subway system in New York.
We see how, and this has been the case all along, that it's pretty clear that public transportation, the New York subway system, was a vector of disease, basically a disease transmission system.
You want to talk about efficient, getting the virus from one corner of the city to the other.
If you're wondering why, one of the reasons why New York has had it so much worse than every other place in America, it's this.
When you've got this disease transmission system shooting the disease all over the place, and then you've got, you know, like 20,000 people per square mile living in this densely packed place, it's not hard to see why they've had such a hard time of it.
Okay, now let's move to our daily cancellation.
For our daily cancellation, I'm going to be cancelling everybody.
You know what?
Everybody's cancelled.
Everybody.
And I'll tell you why.
There have been headlines in the media like this from NBC.
And it says, Trump suggests injection of disinfectant to beat coronavirus and clean the lungs.
So Trump suggests injection.
And then tweets like this from a Biden staffer.
It says, this election is a choice between two competing visions for America.
One that says you should drink bleach to cure viruses, and another that says do not drink bleach.
And then we've got indignant fact checks from conservative sites like Breitbart.
Fact check.
No, Trump didn't propose injecting people with disinfectant.
So this is what's going back and forth, okay?
Here's what Trump actually said.
Let's go to the tape.
Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light, And I think you said that hasn't been checked, but you're going to test it.
And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or in some other way.
And I think you said you're going to test that, too.
Sounds interesting.
Right.
And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute.
One minute.
And is there a way we can do something like that?
Okay, so Trump didn't propose or urge injecting disinfectant.
He certainly didn't say we should drink bleach.
a tremendous number of the lungs, so it'd be interesting to check that so that you're
gonna have to use medical doctors with.
But it sounds interesting to me.
Okay, so Trump didn't propose or urge injecting disinfectant.
He certainly didn't say we should drink bleach, okay, that was never brought up.
But he did clearly, and we all heard it, you heard the tape, there it is in context.
He did ask whether we could inject disinfectant into the body to clean the body.
He did ask that, he did bring that up.
He didn't urge it, didn't propose it, didn't tell people to run out and do it.
He certainly didn't say go grab some Lysol or Clorox or something and inject it into your veins.
He didn't say that.
But he did ask about it.
And so we see here a familiar dynamic.
And this is a dynamic that I'm really tired of.
I loathe it, in fact.
And that is where Trump says something dumb, and let's face it, this was very, very dumb, and then the media twists it into something even more dumb, and then conservative media comes along and righteously, you know, calls the media to task, calls them godforsaken liars, and explains that Trump didn't say that dumb thing, he said a slightly less dumb thing.
You liars!
He didn't say that dumb thing!
I mean, he did say something pretty dumb, but it wasn't that dumb!
And I'm just so tired of the whole thing.
Yeah, the media is lying about it, but I can't muster the energy to be that angry at them when he did in fact say something very stupid.
And so I kind of think he's the President of the United States, he's an adult, maybe don't say the stupid stuff.
Just a thought.
I don't know.
You're doing a press conference.
It's the middle of a crisis.
Maybe, for once, think a little bit before you speak.
Maybe.
And if you're not going to, I don't really feel like going to the mat for you 50 times a freaking week to explain that the dumb crap you said is not quite as dumb.
I just don't feel like doing that.
So many people in conservative media have spent years doing this.
This has become their entire job, is doing this, is just explaining every dumb thing that he says.
And that, to me, is annoying.
It's also annoying, of course, that the media would lie about it.
I mean, the idea that he would propose drinking bleach is totally crazy.
And there is a significant difference between asking, can we do this, or speaking about it hypothetically, and urging it.
And the really stupid thing for the media is if they could just stick to the truth, the truth is pretty bad in and of itself.
And if they stuck to the truth, then the story would remain the dumb thing Trump said, which is what they would prefer, instead of the story becoming them lying about it.
Because, of course, what conservatives want to do is they never want the story to be the dumb thing that Trump said.
They want the story to be the media lying about it.
I mean, that's no secret.
Many conservatives in media, they would like to deflect every time Trump says something dumb.
They're looking for a reason to deflect it.
And the media always comes along and gives them a reason to.
So it's just stupidity all across the board.
And that's why I say everybody is cancelled.
Trump is cancelled.
The media is cancelled.
Conservative media is cancelled.
I'm cancelled.
You're cancelled.
Your pet goldfish is cancelled.
Everyone and everything is cancelled.
Period.
Okay?
That's the only way we can be free of this.
Let's go to some emails.
Before we do.
You know what is not cancelled?
The Daily Wire and our tumblers, specifically.
In fact, you get two of our tumblers if you become a Daily Wire member.
On top of that, you get many other benefits as well.
You get an ad-free website experience, access to all of our live broadcasts, show library, the full three hours of the Ben Shapiro show, access to the mailbag, and now exclusive election insight op-eds from Ben Shapiro.
Daily Wire members also get to ask us questions during backstage.
And you get to participate in our all-access live shows, which are a lot of fun as well.
So, that's two leftist tumblers, leftist tears tumblers, not leftist tumblers, I should clarify.
These are not tumblers for leftists, they're tumblers for the tears of leftists.
When you become a Daily Wire Insider Plus or All Access member and you get 10% off with coupon code WALSH, just head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe, that's dailywire.com slash subscribe, coupon code WALSH, and you get the rarest of all beverage vessels times two.
Let's see.
This is from Madison.
Says, good afternoon.
I just finished listening to your program and felt compelled to comment after hearing the stories about weird homeschooled kids in college.
I wanted to refute the idea that these people are somehow less or strange because of it.
I'm currently in college and help mentor incoming freshmen.
I can't speak.
I can't read or speak.
And I went to public school.
So what does that tell you?
Don't blame this on homeschooling.
I mentor incoming freshmen as they transition from high school.
Back in August, I met a woman named Penelope who'd been homeschooled from middle school, and she was one of the nicest people I'd ever met, except for not knowing what a Scantron was.
What a freak.
What a freak doesn't know what a Scantron is?
Weirdo!
She was no different from all the other students and proved to be kinder and more intelligent than a lot of incoming freshmen.
She has been accepted into the mentoring program and will be helping other students next year.
It seems to me that all these stories are coming out now because people are jealous.
Homeschooled students are ahead of the curve and are doing better with the transition to online than most other students that I've helped.
I appreciate what you do on your show and thank you for being one of the few people in the media who are keeping their heads on.
Yeah, and I wanted to read that because we were getting all these anecdotes from people that I did read, in fairness, trying to get both sides of it.
But anecdotes from people talking about the weird homeschoolers and so on.
I've responded to that.
I'm not going to respond to it again.
But all these people saying, I meet all these homeschoolers and they're so weird.
I don't know what...
I'm not saying they don't exist, but I've met a lot of homeschoolers, and for the most part, these are really impressive people.
So what homeschoolers are you meeting, exactly, if you've never met any of the really impressive ones?
So, I agree with Madison, that's been my experience as well.
This is from Kyle, says, Hi Matt, I enjoy hearing you talk about the arguments for God, especially the arguments for God that you don't like.
Most apologists aren't willing to do this, so your honesty and critical thinking is refreshing.
I've never heard you talk about the transcendental argument for God and would love to hear your take on it.
I know you're not a fan of the presuppositional approach, so I think I know how you'll feel about this.
I'm not, that's true.
If you aren't familiar, TAG, transcendental argument for God, goes like this.
Sorry, I lifted this from Wikipedia just because it's a short explanation.
1.
God is a necessary precondition for logic and morality, because these are immaterial yet real universals.
2.
People depend upon logic and morality, showing that they depend upon the universal, immaterial, and abstract realities which could not exist in a materialist universe but presuppose Presumes the existence of an immaterial and absolute God.
Three, therefore, God exists.
If he didn't, we could not rely upon logic, reason, morality, and other absolute universals, and could not exist in a materialist universe where there are no absolute standards or an absolute law-giver.
Or, going back to Kyle's phrasing, or to put it in the terms that Matt Slick, he's an apologist, puts it, one, we have only two possible options by which we can explain something, and one of those options is removed.
By default, the other option is verified, since it is impossible to negate both of the only two existing conditions.
I think there was a word missing there.
If we have only two possible options by which we can explain something and one of those options is removed, then by default the other option is the one that we have to go with.
Two, God either exists or does not exist.
There is no third option.
Three, if the no-God position, atheism, clearly fails to account for logical absolutes from its perspective, then it is negated and the other option is verified.
Four, atheism cannot account for the necessary preconditions for intelligibility, namely the existence of logical absolutes.
Therefore, it is invalidated as a viable option for accounting for them, and the only other option, God exists, is validated.
Back to Kyle.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Thanks.
Okay.
That's interesting.
I haven't given this line of argumentation much thought.
I am vaguely familiar with it.
So...
Just off the top of my head here, I will say that I appreciate what the argument is trying to do.
It's trying to prove God.
Prove God!
Right?
By using logic.
And most apologetic arguments are not actually trying to prove God, because they can't.
Because, you know, they are... Most apologetic arguments that you hear are evidential arguments.
And an evidential argument, the problem with an evidential argument, and I like many of the evidential arguments, but they can only go so far.
They are limited.
Because there's always going to be different ways of interpreting the evidence.
And if you're following the rules of philosophy, you can't make an evidential argument, even a strong one, like fine-tuning, which I think is a very strong evidential argument for God.
But you can't make that and then say that based on that you know for a fact that God exists.
You can only say, and this is how someone like William Lane Craig is going to phrase it, he's going to say that God is more plausible than not based on that.
But then of course that leaves open, philosophically, by the rules of the argument, you have to leave open the possibility that there is no God.
And of course, if you're an apologist, or if you're a Christian in general, you would like to have arguments that don't leave that open, and so you want an argument, right, that's going to 100% prove logically that God exists.
So, that's what this argument is trying to do.
That's what the ontological argument is trying to do.
I appreciate the attempt, but I don't think this argument is successful.
It doesn't strike me as successful.
The first problem is the premise that God is a necessary precondition for logic and morality.
The issue is, now obviously I agree with it, but that's a highly contentious premise.
I mean, it's almost like trying to make an argument and your first premise is something like, I don't know, this maybe isn't a great analogy, but it's like if your first premise was The Bible is the most important book ever written.
If that was like the first premise of an argument you were making for God.
Now, I agree that the Bible is the most important book ever written.
I think it's a fairly easy thing to prove, or at least to argue in favor of.
But it is controversial.
It's not self-evident.
You do have to argue for it.
So you can't really start there.
You gotta start further back to get there.
And I think something like God is a necessary precondition for logic and morality, that's a highly contentious premise.
It's an argument, in fact, in and of itself, that you have to provide evidence for.
You can't just assert it.
Because first of all, you know, you could rebut this by saying, well, morality doesn't exist.
At least in an objective sense, there is no objective morality.
So even if God is a necessary precondition for it, so what?
Because objective morality doesn't exist.
And I think for an atheist, when it comes to the moral argument, which I think is another strong argument for God, but with the moral argument, now there are some atheists like Sam Harris, who will try to argue that, no, objective morality does exist without God, and he can make an interesting argument.
I don't find it persuasive.
I think the better argument, the stronger argument for an atheist perspective is just to say, no, there is no objective morality.
Okay?
I think we kind of pretend, in order to make society function, we have to do things like not kill each other, and we have to punish people who do, just so society can function.
But there's no reason to say that it's objectively wrong to kill somebody.
That's the route some atheists will go.
It's a little bit... I could see why they wouldn't want to defend that, because of the implications of it, but...
In terms of an argument, that's going to be stronger.
So anyway, they could always say that.
And I think that's going to undermine your premise.
And then the idea that logical absolutes can't exist without God strikes me as somewhat unintelligible.
I mean, a logical absolute.
What's a logical absolute?
A logical absolute is something like A is A. Or A is not B, therefore B is not A. Those are logical statements.
They are logical absolutes.
Why couldn't that be true without God?
I mean, you might argue that we couldn't come to know the logical absolutes without God, and that gets into the question of consciousness.
Where did consciousness come from?
But then again, you're going back to the consciousness argument, which I've already said, I think, is maybe one of the strongest arguments for God.
Maybe the strongest.
But that's really the argument.
It's about the argument of consciousness.
So you've got to go all the way back there.
But can logical absolutes exist?
You know, if there was no God, and the universe just existed, would A still be A?
Sure.
I don't see why it wouldn't be.
And then there's the issue that I guess a Christian apologist, you know, if you're a Christian apologist and you're making this argument, you would want it to prove the Christian God, I would imagine.
But it doesn't really prove the Christian God.
At best, if the argument is successful, it proves some kind of God.
The problem is, you know, I could use Matt Slick's formulation, and I could use it to prove any God, right?
Couldn't I?
So I could say, Brahma is the Hindu God.
So couldn't I say, If the no-Brahma position, atheism, clearly fails to account for logical absolutes from its perspective, then it is negated, and the other option is verified.
Atheism cannot account for the necessary preconditions for intelligibility, namely the existence of logical absolutes, therefore it is invalidated, and the only other option, Brahma exists, is validated.
I don't see why I couldn't do that by this logic.
I could prove Brahma, I could prove Vishnu, I could prove Zeus, Poseidon, you know, Anybody.
And maybe that's okay, because the argument is only trying to establish some kind of God.
It's only trying to get you to that point.
And if it could get you to that point, that's pretty significant in and of itself, I would think.
But you still have a lot of work still in front of you to do.
And so, but anyway, I don't think that the argument gets you to that point.
I don't think it really achieves a liftoff because of the problems with the premises.
I have to think more about it, though.
It's an interesting... As I said, I think this is good for apologists to be doing, to be thinking in terms of logical arguments as well as evidential arguments.
But I don't know if this one really works.
Thanks for that, though.
Thank you for that question.
Always interesting.
And have a great weekend, everybody.
Godspeed.
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