Ep. 503 - The United States Of America No Longer Exists
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, years ago I wrote that the United States of America no longer exists. Sadly, recent events have only proven my point. We are not united and that is not going to change anytime soon. Also Five Headlines including insurrectionists taking over Seattle and now trying their hands at building a self-sustaining commune in the middle of the city. It’s going about as well as you’d expect. And later we’re going to play a new game I invented called the Cringe Challenge. It’s a difficult game, and the winner loses.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, years ago, I wrote that the United States of America no longer exists.
And sadly, I think recent events have only proven my point.
We are not united in this country, and that is not going to change anytime soon.
So what does that mean, and where do we go from here?
What's just the reality of the situation?
We're going to talk about all that today.
Also, five headlines, including you may have heard of those insurrectionists who are taking over parts of Seattle.
Well, now they're trying their hand at building a self-sustaining Commune, but these are all a bunch of city dwellers who have no survival skills whatsoever So it's going about as about as about as well as you might imagine and later We're gonna play a new game that I invented called the cringe challenge.
It's a very difficult game Sort of a harrowing game to play And the winner loses really but we're gonna play that today all that's coming up stick around for that.
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All right, so, I want to have a conversation, something I mentioned on the show at various points a few times in the recent weeks.
But now I want to dig into this and really talk about it in depth.
But to do that, I have to go back to something that one of the first articles I wrote, actually, for The Daily Wire was a typically optimistic and cheerful piece titled, The United States of America No Longer Exists.
And at the time, it was not met with a very warm reception from a lot of readers.
And I kind of understand that, because number one, I just started at the site, so I think a lot of people, they didn't know who I was, and they thought, who is this guy?
Who is this guy coming in here?
One of the first things he tells us, the United States doesn't exist.
It was a tad bleak, I admit.
Three years later, it brings me no pleasure to say, I told you so.
Usually one of my favorite things to say.
My wife will tell you.
But in this case, not so much.
My basic thesis in that piece was that our country, though existing still as a legal and geographic entity, cannot be meaningfully described as united.
So the United States of America no longer exists, except in name.
We have nothing but the law and the land holding us together.
And that is not enough to make a nation, to make a people.
There needs to be something else, some uniting principle, some defining commonality that binds us.
If we are going to be united, we must be united around something and by something.
Today, three years later, all of that holds true, only more so.
The key difference between now and three years ago is that, you know, arguably we no longer even have the law holding us together.
Between the unconstitutional lockdowns and the sudden abandonment of those policies in order to allow rampaging mobs to wreak havoc in the streets for weeks on end, the rule of law has broken down.
And with our borders still about as porous as they've ever been, you know, it's hard to say that we are meaningfully united even on a geographic level.
So with these two pillars crumbling, pillars that were already insufficient in themselves to keep a country together, what's left is the question.
Many nations around the world and throughout history have been held together by the bonds of their common heritage, ancestry, language, tradition.
These are the kinds of things that for many countries, that's what makes it a country.
Now the United States has always been different in these respects, but we once did have a common language and at least a few cultural traditions that we all had in common.
Now, though, it's ethnocentric and xenophobic and racist to expect immigrants who come to this country to learn the language of the country they're immigrating to.
As for traditions, our national holidays like Thanksgiving and Columbus Day have been abolished in many quarters, and that trend is rapidly gaining speed.
The trend is going in the direction of it happening more, not less.
No doubt Memorial Day and Independence Day will be on the chopping block soon enough.
These holidays are being torn down along with the statues of our historical icons, and politicized, like the sporting events that once gave us respite from the political back and forth, and now even those are platforms for the culture war, are political events, almost.
These losses are not insignificant.
To lose holidays, to lose the statues, You know, that is not an insignificant thing.
Healthy, vibrant countries have always had their traditions, have always had their holidays, have always had their heroes.
We're going to try to be the first country in history without any of that.
I don't think the experiment will prove successful.
But the thing that has always made America unique, of course, is that it's a nation founded on ideas.
On a creed.
So you could say that, hey, we can survive, tear down the statues, get rid of the holidays.
That's not what makes America, America.
And I agree, that's not what makes America, America.
If nothing else, we were once joined by our shared belief in the ideas and the creed that lays at the foundation of our country.
We have never succeeded in actually applying all of those lofty principles to everybody equally.
You know, that all men are created equal, endowed by the Creator with inherent dignity and value.
We have never succeeded in actually applying that to everybody.
Never.
And we don't now.
Now, we exclude the, you know, one million babies who are killed every year.
So there have always been some really glaring and terrible exceptions that we have made to that, but we shared these ideas on an aspirational level at least.
Now we no longer even aspire to be that sort of country.
Many Americans fundamentally reject the inherent dignity of human beings.
It's not just that they believe in the inherent dignity and they profess it, but they don't apply that principle to babies.
That would be bad enough.
No, it's that for a lot of people, they just don't believe that that's the case.
They don't think people have inherent dignity and worth.
So we are no longer at least aspiring to be the sort of country that protects and values all people equally.
And our ideas of what it means to be equal are so elementally opposed as to render the term meaningless.
Are we joined then by our shared desire to be free?
Is that something that we can say?
At least, maybe we don't have anything else, but we're America, we love freedom.
We've got that going at least for us.
No.
In the minds of many people, the ultimate vision of freedom is a socialist utopia where the free market is abolished, the government provides all the basic needs, Everything is basically controlled and planned by the government.
Now to me, and to many others, this is a vision of slavery.
This is not a vision of freedom.
So it may be true that all Americans talk about freedom, that we all say we want freedom, but the only commonality between the competing views of freedom is the word itself.
Nothing else.
Can we be bound by our passion for human rights?
Again, no.
The situation with rights is much like that with freedom.
Those on the left, not just on the leftist fringes, but in the mainstream, would say that mothers have a right to kill their offspring.
Some Americans have a right to the money and property of other Americans.
Biological males have a right to enter a woman's locker room or be on her sports team.
Gay couples have a right to the goods and services of Christian business owners.
And so on.
They see a human right as something always in competition with other rights claims.
So for them, rights are a competition, a struggle.
One right must always supersede another right.
So we've got this concept of superseding rights.
The woman's right to autonomy trounces violently a child's right to life, a college student's right to be free of debt, overpowers a wealthy man's right to the fruit of his own labor, and so on.
Now I would say that what they're really describing is one group's struggle for power and dominance over another.
This has nothing to do with rights.
Rights are inherent to our human nature.
By definition, human rights, real human rights, cannot be in competition with one another.
If you find yourself weighing these claims to superseding rights and trying to figure out whose right comes before the other, if you find yourself doing that, it means that your whole concept of rights, human rights, is flawed.
That's the way that I would see it.
And since we have fundamentally opposing definitions of the term human rights, we cannot be united around it.
If we cannot be united around tradition, around language, around heritage, and we also cannot be united around a shared belief in freedom and human rights, then what's left?
We would appear already to be two different countries, or perhaps several different countries.
And even that is generous, because really, when a man, when I talk to somebody, and he tells me that he believes babies aren't people, that it's okay for a mother to kill her child, which he calls a fetus, Biological sex doesn't exist.
Men can get pregnant.
Police departments should be abolished.
America is racist to its core.
I'm a white supremacist if I disagree with any of these points.
When I'm told this, I find myself questioning whether we're even from the same planet, let alone the same, from the same universe, let alone the same country.
This is how absolutely opposed we are on all levels, with almost no common ground, no shared frame of reference.
And that's why, if you're wondering why our arguments and debates are so unproductive, they never go anywhere, it's because we have no way to argue these points.
We have no way to communicate.
In order to communicate and debate someone, you have to have some frame of reference that you share between you two.
There has to be something there.
I mean, there has to be some common value you both have, and that's gonna be your starting point.
You're gonna build from that when you're having your debate.
But if you don't even have that, there's just nothing that can happen here.
It's not gonna go anywhere.
And that's where we are in our country, where we've got people, there's just nothing there at all.
That they share.
And it is not an exaggeration to say that in this way, we are far more divided now than we were during the Civil War.
I mean, you read about the Civil War, and obviously we can't romanticize or idealize the Civil War.
600,000 people died.
It was a brutal, violent, horrible, horrific, nightmarish time.
So there's no doubt about that.
But even then, you know, fundamentally, The two sides were not nearly as opposed, you know, sort of philosophically as we are now.
Because they at least had, you know, they had some common ideas, like common ideas like dignity and manliness and honor.
You know, they had that between them at least.
I mean, they even both valued freedom.
It's just that they had very different ideas of what freedom meant.
But they did, and you know, which is the case now, you could say, but they did believe that, you know, you had human rights endowed by the Creator.
Inherent human dignity.
They believed in that.
They didn't apply it equally.
They didn't apply it all the way.
There are obviously some huge blind spots there, just like we have now.
But, on an aspirational level, they had that.
There was something there.
There was a morsel of something.
Which is why, you know, the Civil War ended.
Reconstruction was a terrible time as well, in many ways.
But, the country did survive.
Somehow.
600,000 people die.
Brutal, violent.
It was the worst war we've ever seen, still, to this point.
In America, anyway.
The deadliest war.
It survived.
And America went on to become a powerhouse.
How did that happen?
I think one of the ways it happens is that there was at least some commonality, some shared uniting principles that they had, as opposed as they were on so many other things.
We don't have that now.
What does that mean?
Well, you know, I guess this is the part where I'm supposed to have a solution.
You know, I'm supposed to give you the one, two, three step plan of how we can solve all these problems and come together.
I don't have it.
That's sort of my point.
I just think that we need to begin by confronting and acknowledging the situation we are actually in as a country.
And we need to be realistic.
And so if you're sitting there calling for unity and saying, we need to put our differences aside, it's not going to happen.
It can't happen.
In order for that to happen, millions of Americans on one side or the other are going to have to radically change how they see reality.
And that's not going to happen overnight or at all, potentially.
So we just need to start thinking about what we can actually do in light of all of this.
You know, the only problem people talk about breaking apart as a country and, you know, forming two different countries.
I think there's a lot to be said for that, actually.
Listen, no country lasts forever.
No country does.
They all come to an end.
We have to confront that reality, too.
The only problem is, though, that our division is not as geographically defined as it was during, say, the Civil War.
So, I don't know how that would work, but I think we need to start thinking along the lines of what can we do in light of the fact that there are these unbridgeable gaps separating one group of Americans from others.
All right, we're going to move on to headlines in just a second.
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Okay, headlines number one.
Antifa people in the so-called autonomous zone are making a stab at self-reliance.
They've started a little farming project.
Take a look at the picture here.
Isn't that the saddest thing you've ever seen?
And look at the guy sitting there watching the plants, expecting like an entire large salad to just sprout out of the ground all at once.
So they've got topsoil on top of cardboard, and that's where they're starting it.
But then it looks like they've got some of the plants that aren't actually planted.
They're just sitting on the top of the soil.
Maybe that's what they think topsoil means.
It's topsoil, so you just put the stuff right on top.
And then you see in the back there, they've got that little watering can.
They're gonna try to keep this whole plot watered with a little plastic watering can.
Like the thing that my daughter uses to water the garden because she wants to feel like she's helping.
And the problem is, even if all those crops come up, which they won't, you've got enough food there to maybe, maybe feed three people in a couple of months.
In late August, there will be enough food for, you know, three adults to have a couple slices of tomato, handful of lettuce, a cucumber.
So this is pretty pathetic.
You almost feel sorry for these city slickers play-acting as survivalists.
And here's the thing.
If you're really serious about this, and you want to have your own commune, your own little community, and you want to be relatively free of government interference, and you really just want to be on your own and make your own rules, I respect that, actually.
I've got nothing but respect for that.
You want to drop off the grid, do your own thing, Say screw you to modern society.
I love it.
I think it's a great idea.
You can't do it in the middle of Seattle.
Okay?
That's not what you do.
If you're serious about it, go off into the wilderness.
There's a lot of wilderness still left in America.
And you could go off into the woods somewhere, into the mountains, into the desert, wherever you want to go, and take a stab at it.
And if you do that, you know, For the most part, the government will leave you alone, with some rather notable and awful exceptions.
If you were serious about it.
But they're not serious about it.
This, again, is just play acting.
This is like a theater performance on their part.
They're not serious about actually trying to create their own state or community.
And, of course, if they did try to go into the woods and survive, they'd all be dead in three days.
So maybe they shouldn't actually do that, but That's, anyone can.
You can go give it a shot.
Alright, number two.
Big news from NBC.
Eric Wemple of the Washington Post reports, effective immediately, NBC News and MSNBC will capitalize the B in Black when referring to people or the community across all the network's platforms.
So Black people, capital B. Why?
I have no idea.
Well, we know why.
Because we've learned that proper grammar is violence.
And so that's not proper grammar, but this is a struggle against many things, including grammar.
Number three, crazy story out of Baltimore reported by Fox 45.
According to a woman named Courtney Lancaster in Baltimore County, her son was having his virtual class recently.
He attends public school, elementary school.
And he was doing his virtual class, like so many kids are across the country during COVID, and someone notices on the wall behind him, in his home, a BB gun, which is hanging there on the wall.
The principal notifies the school resource officer, he calls the cops, and then the cops show up at the woman's house and search her house because of a BB gun.
And the principal apparently, according to the mother, said that having a BB gun in your own home during a virtual class is tantamount to bringing it to school.
Because now they own your house.
Right?
You send your kid to public school, they own your kid, in their minds.
If you do virtual school, they still own your kid, and now they own your house too, because they can see it.
Get your kids out of the public school system, people.
Get them out.
Number four, the Dallas Police Department put out a video yesterday kneeling in submission to the Black Lives Matter organization.
And here's a little bit of that video.
So, so
you can't hate your heart for people of color get over it Because this city is a minority-majority city.
And this city is a city where blacks and whites and browns, legal and illegal, all get together because we judge each other by the content of our hearts.
Pretty bold stuff there from that officer, right?
Hey, if you're racist, get over it.
I disagree.
I disagree with racism.
You hear me?
I'm not afraid to say it.
Racism is bad.
Yay!
And then the crowd cheers.
No, how about this?
Don't kneel.
Don't kneel.
Get up, get off of your knees, and do your damn jobs.
How's that for an idea?
Enforce the law.
You can't do it from your knees.
Get off your knees, stop embarrassing yourself, and do your job.
Protect the community.
That's what people want.
That's what communities want.
At least the people in the community who you should be listening to want the law to be enforced.
Number five, finally, here's Donald Trump talking about the takeover in Seattle by the anarchists.
If there were more toughness, you wouldn't have the kind of devastation that you had in Minneapolis and in Seattle.
I mean, let's see what's going on in Seattle.
But I will tell you, if they don't straighten that situation out, we're going to straighten it out.
And what do you mean by that?
I don't know if you caught it, but Governor Cuomo was so upset with Mayor de Blasio of New York, he said, I'm going to displace him.
I don't really know how that would work.
But I mean, is that what you mean in Seattle?
What I mean is very simple.
We're not going to let Seattle be occupied.
I like what he says there.
Of course, a lot of people on the left are upset, as always.
Every time he opens his mouth, they're upset.
But I like what he says there.
I mean, you think he was a weak person in Minneapolis?
The woman, I don't know, has she ever done this before?
How can you?
Oh, it's pathetic.
I like what he says there.
Of course, a lot of people on the left are upset, as always, every time he opens his mouth, they're upset.
But I like what he says there, sounds good to me.
The only problem is, with Trump, oftentimes, the problem is when it comes to actually doing it.
So I like what you're saying.
Great stuff.
Tweeting it, that's good stuff too.
Trump's been tweeting a lot.
He's doing a lot of tweeting during all this.
He keeps tweeting law and order in all caps.
He's tweeted that, you know, like 10 times.
I agree.
Law and order is good.
At a certain point, though, you have to go beyond tweeting and just saying it and actually do something.
That's part of governing.
So he's got the tweet down.
He's got all that down.
But it makes it so much worse.
And I know there's no point in complaining about it now.
I mean, Trump is Trump.
It's not ever going to change.
He's 74 years old.
He's not going to change.
And with the Twitter thing, it's not ever going to change.
Never will.
You know, he'll go down.
I mean, if he's going down, he's going to go down tweeting.
Even if tweeting takes him down, he doesn't care.
He's going to cling to that.
All right.
I get that.
All right.
But even so, the reality is that when you've got riots and the breakdown of law and order, and the president isn't really doing anything except just tweeting the phrase law and order, it looks impotent and pitiful and weak.
And that is not the image that Trump should be projecting.
So what I would like is for him to actually do something about it, actually fall through on some of these threats for a change.
If you're not, though, then probably stop tweeting law and order, because it only highlights the fact that there isn't law and order right now, and you're not doing anything about it.
Okay, let's go to our daily cancellation.
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So that they know that we sent you.
Okay, for our daily cancellation, it's a little bit different.
I'm going to be canceling all of the celebrities in the White Guilt Celeb PSA that I'm going to play for you in just a second.
But I'm not going to spend time explaining why they're canceled and why it's dumb and all of that.
That should be pretty obvious.
And the incredible thing is that with these celebrity videos, These celebrity videos are roundly mocked by almost everyone on all sides every time.
They are always a huge fail.
And yet the celebs keep doing it.
They keep doing it.
They must know at this point that it's just going to be made fun of.
By everybody.
Not just conservatives, everyone.
In fact, I started the show talking about there's nothing that binds us together and unites us.
This might be the one thing left, is that we all hate celebrity PSAs.
This is the one thing holding us together, which means probably they should keep doing it.
This is the only thing stopping us from a full-on civil war, is that at least we have this in common.
Now, what I'd really like to do Then is a little game, a little challenge I came up with called the Cringe Challenge.
The game is to watch this video for as long as you can until the cringe factor is overwhelming and you have to stop it for fear that you might die of secondhand embarrassment.
Now, I warn you, this is not for the faint of heart.
If you've seen any of these celeb PSAs in the past, you know how cringey they get.
This one is way worse.
Okay, this is the ultimate right here.
This is expert level cringe challenge.
So if you've never played the cringe challenge, we're going to be jumping into the deep end with this.
It's a dangerous maneuver, but I think now's the time to do it.
So we're going to watch it together.
I'll see how far I can go.
And one note about the rules, okay?
You can try multiple times to see how far you can make it, but if you have to stop, then you have to go back to the beginning and do it all from the beginning again.
Those are the rules.
Sorry, I don't make them up.
Actually, I do make them up, but still, those are the rules.
All right, so let me pull the video up.
Okay, we're gonna watch this together.
It's 2.06.
The video's a little bit over two minutes.
Can we get through the entire video?
Let's see.
All right.
I take responsibility.
I take responsibility.
I take... Okay, I gotta stop already.
I gotta stop already.
That Aaron Paul.
The pause there.
The pause with the hands like this.
Oh, man.
The pause did me in.
I couldn't even... What was that?
Four seconds?
Five seconds?
And that's Aaron.
That's Jesse Pinkman.
It kills me that Jesse Pinkman is being corny right now.
Why did Jesse... E2 Jesse Pinkman?
Okay, we're gonna try again.
Let's give this another shot.
All right.
Let's go.
I take responsibility.
I take responsibility for every unchecked moment.
For every time it was easier to ignore than to call it out for what it was.
Every not-so-funny joke.
No, stop.
Stop.
Stop.
I can't do it.
Every not-so-funny joke.
Oh, man.
That guy.
Who is that guy?
Is that- who is that?
I don't even know who these people are.
I can't even rec- I don't know who these- Jesse Pinkman I recognized.
Is that- is that uh- Is that Justin Theroux?
Is that who that is?
I don't know.
Anyway, he- Whew!
That's a tough one.
That's a tough- he- he- he's really- he's got the finishing move, doesn't he?
What is that?
20 seconds.
He's coming in.
I mean, that's- that's- that's a hard one to get past.
Okay, let's try again.
We'll try one more time.
I know I can do better than this.
You know, I've been watching cringe comedy, like The Office, a lot of British comedy, Ricky Gervais.
Now, I've been watching cringe comedy my whole life.
I thought that this would prepare me for this moment, but it turns out that it's different at game speed.
When you're actually doing it in real life, it's a lot harder.
So, all right, let's try again.
I take responsibility.
I take responsibility for every unchecked moment.
For every time it was easier to ignore than to call it out for what it was.
Every not-so-funny joke.
Every unfair stereotype.
Every blatant injustice, no matter how big or small.
Every time I remained silent.
Every time I explained away police brutality.
Or turned a blind eye.
No.
I'm done.
I can't do it.
The pauses.
It's the dramatic pauses that are... That's the cringiest thing somehow.
It's not even... It's not what they're... It is what they're saying.
I mean, it's everything.
Everything about this.
The music.
The black and white.
Everything.
Those dramatic, theatrical pauses they keep taking.
Oh.
Yeah, that's it, 36 seconds.
I'm a failure.
I can't do it.
Alright, that's the best I could do.
I kind of want to, let me just keep playing a little bit.
I'm not going to go, I'm going to break my own rules, because I can break my own rules.
I'm going to play a little bit more of this, just to, the game's over, I already lost, but I want to see what else.
I do want to see, who is this right here that we're looking at?
I don't know, but I want to see what she has to say.
We'll just go a little bit further into this.
I take responsibility.
Black people are being slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes.
These are our brothers and sisters, our friends, our family.
We are done watching them die.
We are no longer bystanders.
We will not be idle.
Enough is enough.
I will no longer allow an unchecked woman.
I will no longer allow racist, hurtful words, jokes, stereotypes, no matter how big or small, to be uttered in my presence.
Okay.
All right, that's it, we're good.
I've done enough.
To be uttered.
We're no longer allowed to be uttered in my presence.
Why did he say it like that?
And the thing is, they're reading.
You can tell they're reading a script.
They couldn't even memorize their lines.
I will no longer allow racism to be uttered.
It won't be uttered.
No.
All right.
That's it.
That's the most I could do.
I told you, that's a tough one.
But that's two.
If you want to go on your own, if you want to play this game at home on your own, and see if you can get through all two minutes, let me know if you can do it.
I want to move on to emails.
I haven't read emails in a while, and we're going to do that in just a second, but first, You know, the Daily Wire reader pass we've been telling you about.
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We haven't done a lot of emails in a while, so I want to read a couple of them.
You can email the show by becoming a Daily Wire member as well.
That will give you access to the mailbag.
And this is from Ron, says, Matt, first I would like to let you know how much I enjoy your show.
Your common sense approach is refreshing.
On today's show, you mentioned the Gulag Archipelago was Solzhenitsyn's magnum opus and then said he had many great opuses, opi maybe is the plural of that.
I just about fell out laughing.
I live in Japan, and opai is the Japanese word for breast.
Specifically, female breast.
So what went through my mind was, he had many great opai.
I just thought it was funny, and that you may appreciate the humor.
Well, Ron, no, I don't appreciate the humor at all.
I knew that opai was the word for female breast in Japanese.
I am fluent in Japanese, okay?
But this was a test.
I was testing you to see how enlightened and tolerant you are.
And, sir, you failed.
Miserably.
There should be nothing funny to you about a man like Solzhenitsyn having many great female breasts.
Why is that funny?
Let's say Solzhenitsyn had two female breasts.
Maybe he had three.
Maybe he had one.
Maybe he had seven and a half.
It's up to him.
Okay?
This is his life.
It's his choice.
His truth.
If he wants to have seven and a half female breasts on his body, who are you to say he can't?
The fact that you would laugh at something like that is shocking, outrageous, and I find your cruelty to be traumatizing for me.
I can only imagine how Solzhenitsyn must feel, even though he's dead.
Just makes it even worse.
Insult to injury.
So, um, we still have far to come as a society, is my point.
So, uh, we'll move on to the next email.
It says, from Amanda, says, Hi Matt, I enjoy your show.
That said, I think you're off on your take on the statue issue.
You glossed over it during your segment, but the fact remains that Columbus enslaved women and children.
He was a murderer and a slave owner and traitor.
I don't see why traitor as in t-r-a-d-e-r is what you said.
I don't see why a man like that needs to have a statue.
And the Confederates?
Do you really think it makes sense to have statues of traitors on American soil?
Traitor as in t-r-a-i-t-o-r.
Okay, this is getting a little confusing.
Do you think it makes sense to have statues of traitors on American soil?
Traitors and traitors is what we got, I guess.
Amanda, I think I already addressed many of your points over the last few days.
I've addressed a lot of this.
In the case of Columbus, yes, I think he deserves the statue, being one of the most significant men in history, one of the greatest men in the history of the world.
A little detail like that, like being one of the great men in history, I think that is deserving of a statue or two.
Did he engage in slavery and other atrocities?
Yes, he did.
Was that bad?
Yes, it was.
Can we assess his moral culpability for those actions through our 21st century lens and hold him to a modern standard on those issues?
No, we certainly cannot.
We cannot do that.
You have to understand, Amanda, 500 years ago is a long time.
It's a very, very long time.
I know that might seem obvious, but apparently for a lot of people, like you, it's not so obvious.
Very, it's half a millennium ago.
The world back then was nothing like what it is now.
It may as well have been an alien planet in outer space somewhere in terms of how different it was from our experience in modern times.
It was a brutal, violent age across the world.
Concepts like the absolute equality of the races didn't exist.
Nobody believed in that.
I mean, not a single person who existed in 1492 would pass as racially enlightened and woke by our standards today.
Not a single person.
And, you know, all of the great men everywhere in all parts of the world were by necessity hard-bitten, violent, tough, cruel.
You know, we could shake our heads about that now.
But we do it from the comfort of our modern life, enjoying the fruits of the labor done by those men.
We have the benefit, the luxury, the privilege to be scandalized by the brutality of older times.
They didn't have that privilege.
You know, for them it was reality.
That doesn't excuse anything.
We're not talking about moral truth, we're talking about moral culpability.
I'm not saying that slavery was morally okay back then, just because most people thought it was.
I'm saying the moral culpability, when we assess the moral culpability of someone, you know, someone who owns slaves, if your neighbor Jim was found to have been owning slaves that he had tied up in his basement or something, he would be much more morally culpable for his slave ownership than a person 500 years ago would be.
And I think that's just undeniable.
I mean, any thinking person must realize this.
And so, you know, we have to judge everyone through that lens, Columbus included.
Now, one other point though, a different point.
You're arguing that these statues shouldn't exist.
That's what you're arguing.
You're saying that they shouldn't have the statues.
That's different.
There's a distinction there.
That's different from arguing that they should be torn down.
So maybe you see the difference.
Statues are all about symbolism.
Tearing a statue down is symbolism.
There's symbolism in that.
Especially when an angry mob tears it down.
Illegally.
There's a lot of symbolism in that.
What I would say is that the symbolism of tearing down a historical statue, particularly when it's a mob doing it, is terrible.
Awful.
And so, for that reason, I think a reasonable person could be of the opinion that a particular statue isn't great and they don't love it and they wish that it was never put up, but they are not in favor of it being torn down.
I think that's a position a person could take.
That's not my position when it comes to Columbus.
I like the statues and think they should be up.
If it were up to me, I'd put them up.
But it's one thing if you're part of a community and they're talking about putting a statue up that isn't up yet.
And you don't like the statue, and so you're saying, no, don't put that statue up.
That's a very different argument from saying, this statue has been up for a hundred years, let's tear it down.
Especially when it's part of a hysterical rush, a panic, to tear down statues all across the country.
These are not isolated incidents.
This is happening all across the country.
And what is the symbolism in tearing all these statues down all at once across the country at the behest of the mob?
The symbolism is one of affirming mob rule.
It's one of condemning completely our historical, who were once our historical heroes.
You know, when you tear down Columbus statues all over the place, the message you're sending is not that, okay, we need to have a more nuanced view of Columbus.
I mean, there were a lot of bad things that he did.
We need to also be talking about that.
That's not the message.
The message is, this was a scum, he was dirt, he's nothing, we shouldn't even remember him.
That's the message you send when you tear him down all across the country.
That's a terrible message to send.
If we want to have a more nuanced perspective on the people who pioneered and founded and shaped Western civilization and later on the United States of America, I'm all about that.
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, You want to talk about the slavery issue in relation to them?
They were slave owners?
Yeah, I'm fine with that.
These were not perfect men.
They weren't saints.
I don't think any church anywhere is canonizing these people.
So I'm fine with that, but tearing down the statues is not what you do in order to begin a nuanced conversation.
That's what you do when you are condemning totally these people and throwing them on the ash heap.
And that I oppose.
Absolutely oppose.
We can't do that.
All right.
We will... I had a couple others here, but I'm long-winded as usual, so we'll have to save those for later.
And I hope you guys have a great weekend.
Godspeed.
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The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
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The Matt Wall Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2020.
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