Today on the Matt Walsh Show, we are told that all white people are the beneficiaries of privilege. But I have some examples of white people that would appear to have no privilege at all of any kind. That’s because our notion of privilege is too simplistic and literally black and white. Also Five Headlines and today in our Daily Cancellation, I cancel the mayor of Oakland for claiming that a swing in a playground is a hate crime.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, we're told that all white people in the country are the beneficiaries of privilege.
But I have some examples of white people that would appear to have no privilege at all of any kind.
And I think that's because our notion of privilege, this idea of white privilege, is far too simplistic and literally too black and white.
So we'll talk about that.
Also, five headlines.
And then today in our daily cancellation, I will cancel the mayor of Oakland for claiming that a swing In a public park is a hate crime.
Somebody put up a swing in a public park and is now being accused of committing a hate crime.
And it gets even more ridiculous than that.
So you have to stick around for that.
But here's something.
We'll start with this.
Here's something you probably didn't hear about a few months ago.
A region of our country was gripped by a natural disaster, devastated by it.
That region is Eastern Kentucky.
It was flooded entire neighborhoods, towns, underwater.
Here's some footage from WHAS in Kentucky.
As you can see there, I mean, it looks biblical.
Everything underwater, right?
And you never heard about this, did you?
And that's not your fault.
If you don't live in the area, if you don't live in Kentucky, the national media doesn't talk about it, then how are you going to hear about it?
Here's an account from one man, a trailer park resident, who lost everything in the floods.
And here's what he has to say.
Listen.
I walked outside and saw everything that was already up, and I knew it had to be deep already, up to my knees at least.
And I came through the house and told my wife, you know, don't freak out, but we gotta get out of here right now.
We gotta get the kids out.
And I carried two kids in the van, got her in the van, drove over there, and I was freaking out.
I didn't know what to do.
The only thing I could do was just try to run over here and grab anything that I thought was sentimental and we possibly couldn't buy back.
I lost everything.
Everything that took us years to build is gone.
One night, one day.
Rebuild.
Try to find somewhere safe where my kids won't have to go through that again.
Start off small.
Make it back somehow.
Now, why didn't you hear about this?
Well, because it's Eastern Kentucky.
This is happening mostly to poor white people in trailer parks.
And the media simply doesn't care about poor white people in trailer parks.
And when I say poor, you know, I mean poor.
I think the word poor almost doesn't quite capture The situation for many people that live in that part of the country.
Now, as I tell you about Eastern Kentucky, I'm going to put up on the screen some pictures taken by Shelby Lee Adams, a photographer.
These were published in an article in NPR a few years ago.
These are not pictures from the 19th century.
This is life in Eastern Kentucky today.
Nine of the poorest counties in the entire nation, nine of them, are in this one little small part of the country, Eastern Kentucky.
The poverty rate in one county, Owsley County, is 45%.
That's nearly half.
Nearly half of the residents are in poverty.
Across the entire Appalachian region, the poverty rate is almost 20%.
The average income is $37,000.
In Eastern Kentucky, it's $30,000.
$11,000 across the entire region. In Eastern Kentucky, it's $30,000. That's $16,000 less than the average income
nationally.
In 2014, the New York Times Magazine tried to compile a list of the places in the in the country with the worst
quality of life.
And according to this calculation, the worst place in the country to live, the worst quality of life in the entire country, is Eastern Kentucky.
Let me read from their article.
This is published in newyorktimes.com from their magazine.
It says, the team at The Upshot, a Times news and data analyst venture, compiled six basic metrics to give a picture of the quality and longevity of life in each county of the nation.
Educational attainment, household income, jobless rate, disability rate, life expectancy, and obesity rate.
Weighting each equally, six counties in eastern Kentucky's coal country rank among the bottom ten.
Clay County in dead last might as well be in a different country.
The median household income there is barely above the poverty line at $22,296.
That's the median income.
dollars, which is $22,296.
That's the median income and is just over half the nationwide
median, only 7.4% of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher.
The unemployment rate is 12.7%.
The disability rate is nearly as high at 11.7%.
Nationwide, the figure is 1.3%.
Life expectancy is six years shorter than average.
Perhaps related, nearly half of Clay County is obese.
Later on in the article it says, despite this, rural poverty is largely shunted aside in the conversation about inequality, much in the way that rural areas have been left behind by broader shifts in the economy.
The sheer intractability of rural poverty raises uncomfortable questions about how to fix it or to what extent it is even fixable.
I should mention the suicide rate in Appalachia is 17% higher than the national average, which is not surprising given everything that I just read.
And then, of course, here's the one thing that you probably have heard about Eastern Kentucky and the Appalachian region generally, is that it's beset by drug addiction, particularly opioid addiction.
The opioid crisis has hit this part of the country perhaps harder than anywhere else.
Now, why do I bring all this up?
Because I have a question for you, and it's something to consider.
Take a hypothetical person living in Clay County, Kentucky.
Apparently, you know, perhaps the worst place in the country to live.
Clay County, Kentucky.
And let's say a child, a white child, living in a trailer park in Clay County.
Father committed suicide years ago.
Mother's addicted to painkillers.
Household income is $18,000 a year.
In a good year.
He lives in a two-bedroom trailer in a low-lying area, susceptible to flooding.
According to New York Times Magazine, he has maybe the worst quality of life of anyone anywhere else in the country.
Now this is a hypothetical example, but it represents a situation that a great many children in that part of the country are in.
There's nothing absurd about this hypothetical.
It's not far-fetched by any means.
And now the question, in what sense In what possible sense, in what specific sense, could we say that this child is privileged?
You know, we hear a lot about white privilege.
We hear that all white people everywhere in the country are the beneficiaries of this privilege.
And yet when we look at the reality, okay, when we look into, to borrow a phrase from the left, when we look at the lived experiences of so many white people in the country, this privilege doesn't seem to amount to very much at all.
So again, where does the privilege come in for this child?
When does he get to cash it in?
In what particular moment of his life can we say, oh, that happened because of white privilege?
What kind of privilege?
What do you mean?
What sort of privilege is this?
He's dirt poor, so it's not economic privilege.
He doesn't have access to a good education, so it's not an educational sort of privilege.
He doesn't have good healthcare, so it's not healthcare privilege.
There's no privilege in any of those senses.
What about systemically?
Does the system favor him?
I think this is, in fact, what we will be told.
We will be told that, okay, yeah, I mean, he doesn't have economic privilege, he doesn't have educational privilege, he doesn't have privilege in terms of his health, but he's got systemic privilege.
Really?
Do you think the system favors This child that we're talking about?
I mean, whatever system we're referring to here, it would seem to me that all of the systems have forgotten about this child and everybody else living in that part of the country.
There is just no sense in which you can say that a poor white kid in a trailer in Appalachia is favored by the system.
There is no system, no system anywhere that favors him.
He is forgotten by every system.
Do you think when he walks into a job interview one day, if that day ever arrives for him, which very likely it won't, but do you think if he does as a poor Kentucky kid with a thick accent, you know, living in poverty all his life, do you think his resume is going to go to the top of the stack?
Do you think he's not going to suffer any discrimination, any negative assumptions, given his background, his economic status, his accent, his mannerisms, and so on?
What employers are going to favor hiring people out of trailer parks?
It would seem like none of them do, because if they did, there wouldn't be trailer parks.
Because all those people would have jobs.
And good jobs, by now.
The claim of white privilege just doesn't hold up to the reality that many white people experience and live through.
And in fact, I would argue that the very concept of white privilege, the very claim of white privilege, is proof that white privilege doesn't exist.
Because the only way you can claim it is if you have completely forgotten about and discounted the millions of dirt-poor white people forgotten by the system across the country.
That's the only way that this, the whole notion of white privilege, when you hear white privilege, your mind immediately comes to, you know, relatively well-off white people living in the suburbs.
That's what you think of as the sort of the picture of white privilege.
And so we have erased, to borrow another popular term from the left, we have erased all of the white people who don't fit into that.
Just, they don't count.
Forgotten about them.
And for this hypothetical child, who's not really hypothetical because millions of kids are in this position, for this child and for the people there, that's what they're used to.
They're used to being forgotten.
They've been forgotten by every single system.
There is no system, no system that is saying, let's go to those people and help them out.
This is why our discussion of privilege is too simplistic.
It is literally black and white, which is absurd.
It doesn't work with the reality.
And this is when we get into the back and forth of anecdotes.
And so somebody will respond by talking about a black child growing up in the inner city and the struggles and hardships he faces.
Struggles and hardships which are immense, of course.
And just like the white child in the trailer park, these are struggles and hardships that for many people are insurmountable.
But the problem is we could go back and forth with anecdotes all day long.
You give me one, I give you one.
Literally have millions of examples on both sides.
Maybe that's a good signal that we're thinking about this topic of privilege all wrong.
Because I, you know, I personally, Would not want to go up to someone living in one of those trailer parks, which is now water damaged because of flooding that nobody cared about.
I wouldn't want to go up to someone like that and tell them about their privilege.
That's not something I would want to do.
I don't know about you.
So I think it's time to expand our notion of privilege.
Because I'm not saying that privilege is non-existent.
I'm not saying that privilege is a myth.
I think white privilege.
Is a myth.
Privilege, though, is not.
There is something called privilege.
There are people who are privileged.
But what is privilege?
I mean, how do you get privilege?
Who are the privileged people in this country?
And I think that we could think of privilege in two broad categories.
So there's economic privilege.
We could say that someone who's born in a well-off family, a well-off community, is privileged in many different ways.
You know, they're going to get the best of everything in terms of luxuries and necessities, and they're going to probably have good schools, and they're going to have good health care, and they're going to have access to whatever they want.
That's privilege, of course.
But we already have established that not every, to put it mildly, this is an understatement, not every white person is economically privileged.
A great many of them are not.
So that is not something that can be separated by race.
But then there's a deeper sense.
I think there's a deeper sense of privilege.
The sense in which I would say that I am privileged.
I mean, I wasn't born to a well-off family.
I wasn't born in dirt poverty either.
So I suppose I am the beneficiary of some kind of economic privilege.
Just to be born in the middle class is a lot better than being born in a trailer park or being born in the inner city, economically speaking.
But I'll tell you the real privilege that I had, okay?
The real privilege that I had in modern society is that I was born to a household with two parents who were both living.
Both in the home, married, stay married, stayed married throughout my entire childhood, and are still married today, by the way, cared about my well-being, cared about my education, and cared about my moral formation as a person.
That is, I think, the real privilege that I inherited.
And I think that's what privilege really is for most people.
If you have that, if you have that going for you, Then you're going to probably get a fair shake at life.
And there are plenty of people in trailer parks in Eastern Kentucky or in the inner city who have that.
But a great many don't.
If you look at the fatherless rate, the rate of broken homes and domestic violence and domestic turmoil in the inner city and in poor trailer park areas in the Appalachia region, you're going to find that those rates are very high, much higher than they are for a lot of us.
And that doesn't That doesn't explain everything.
I mean, if you are born to a two-parent household with parents that love you and care about you and you live in dirt poverty, you're still going to have a lot of challenges and there's a very good chance that you're going to be in that dirt poverty for your entire life because it's going to be a very hard obstacle to get over even then.
But even so, that is a great advantage.
That's a great leg up for any kid.
Now, it's kind of sad that These days, we have to talk about this as being a privilege, because this should not be a privilege.
This is natural.
This is how it should be for everybody.
This should be a given.
But that's not the case.
And we know that the rates of broken homes and fatherless homes are high and getting higher for communities across the country.
In the black community, it's 70% of black kids.
In the inner city, it's even higher.
Grow up without fathers in the home.
For white people, the rate is lower, but it's much higher than it should be, and it's getting higher.
That's what we should be focusing on.
If we really want to talk about privilege, I think these are the two areas we should be looking at.
And we shouldn't be looking at them because we want to punish the people who have that kind of, someone who has the privilege, the economic privilege, or the privilege, the much better privilege, the much deeper privilege of being born to a, you know, two-parent household with loving parents.
It's not like we're looking to punish them or take anything away from them to even the score.
That's not the right way of approaching this.
It's to look at the kids who don't have that and figure out what can we do for them So that they do have it.
I think that's how our discussion of privilege should work.
We're going to move on now to headlines.
Number one, and here's a thing that no one could have seen coming.
Well, no one could have seen it coming except for, you know, people with brain cells.
People with brain cells did see this coming.
Protesters, that would be Reed Felons, pulled down a statue of George Washington in Portland last night.
Here's the footage of that.
Yes, nobody could have seen this coming.
Nobody at all.
Except, like I said, people with brains.
Because this was inevitable.
Some of us, like yours truly, years ago were warning that tearing down the Confederate statues, allowing the mob to tear them down, or tearing them down at the behest of the mob, would lead to this.
It was always going to lead to this.
And yet a lot of dumb, weak, spineless conservatives said, no, no, that's not going to happen.
You know, three, four years ago when they were going around tearing down all the statues, there were even a lot of conservatives were saying, yeah, this is time.
It's time to take them down.
The left will stop here, I'm sure.
They'll stop and they'll be satisfied and we'll get rid of the Confederate statue.
And they're not going to cross any other lines after that.
These people will never learn.
They'll just never learn.
The mob does not stop.
The left doesn't stop.
Never going to be satisfied.
It's not hard to see how one leads to another.
That's the very frustrating thing, is that you didn't have to be a prophet to prophesy into the future.
You didn't have to look into a crystal ball to know that this was going to happen.
It's not hard to see it.
The Confederates were slave-owning secessionists.
The Founders were slave-owning secessionists.
Okay?
Now, there are nuances, there are ways to distinguish the two, there are distinctions you can make, of course, between the two groups, but the mob doesn't do nuance.
And that's why I've been saying all along, even if you don't like a particular statue and you think that, yeah, it'd be better if that statue didn't exist, yeah, it'd be better if we could take that statue down, we don't take it down now, in this circumstance, in this situation, at the behest of the raging mob.
Because it sends the wrong message, it's the wrong symbolism, and it's not a thoughtful act.
Taking down a monument that has stood for a hundred years or more, a priceless piece of art, taking that down should be a thoughtful act.
And everybody should understand why we're doing this, if it needs to be done at all.
But this is not thoughtful.
It's mindless.
And simplistic.
So we take down the statues.
What do they say when they're taking down the Robert E. Lee statue or Jefferson Davis?
What do we hear?
We hear these were racists, they were slave owners.
You know?
Or they were traitors.
Those are the three things we hear.
Racist, slave owner, trader.
Okay, well, if that's the standard now, For tearing down a statue, then a lot of other statues are coming down.
Arguably all of them.
Certainly for racists, as I've talked about many times over the last couple weeks, everybody in the 19th century was racist by our standards today.
Everybody.
By our standards.
Racist.
And certainly before that.
Want to go back to Columbus?
500 years ago?
Yeah.
Everybody was horrible bigots by our standards today.
So all the statues are coming down.
Slave owners.
There are slave owners all over the world.
And if not slave owners, people who were fine with slavery, either supported it or just had no problem with it, didn't question it.
Traitor?
Well, George Washington was a traitor of the British crown.
If the Revolutionary War had gone the other way, they would have been hung as traitors.
If that's the standard, those statues are going down.
And it's not going to stop here either.
I mean, I think we see now.
All the statues are coming down.
All of our historical heroes and icons.
All of them.
Number two, here's the CEO of Chick-fil-A, Dan Cathy, doing... Well, you just have to see it yourself.
Watch.
I know we're starting to get into some of our closing moments here, but a story that was shared with me by a dear friend who shared with me about a revival that was taking place at a church in Texas.
And at that revival, on the front seat was an older African American man that was sitting there.
And this young man got up.
that was there in that service and he'd been so gripped with conviction about the racism that was in that local community in a small town in Texas that he took a shoe brush and he walked over to this elderly gentleman and he knelt on his knees and began to shine his shoes And tears began to flow in that service.
It was an attitude of conviction.
So I invite folks just to put some words to action here.
And if we need to find somebody that needs to have their shoe shined, we need to just go right on over and shine their shoes.
And whether they got tennis shoes on or not, maybe they got sandals on, it really doesn't matter.
But there's a time in which we need to have, you know, some personal action here.
Maybe we need to give him a hug, too, brother.
and some stock in Chick-fil-A.
Yeah.
But I bought about 1,500 of these and I gave it to all our Chick-fil-A operators
and staff a number of years ago.
And so, any expressions of a contrite heart, of a sense of humility, a sense of shame, a sense of embarrassment, begin with an apologetic heart.
I think that's what our world needs to hear today.
I'll tell you what, Dan.
Here's my alternative suggestion.
How about I don't shine anybody's shoes, or bow to anyone.
Or kneel to anyone.
Or apologize to anyone for things I didn't do.
Because I have no remorse, and I have no guilt, and I have no shame, and I have no embarrassment for historical racism or slavery.
And do you know why?
Because I had nothing to do with any of that.
And that's not some sort of technicality.
Okay?
I'm not being pedantic here.
By saying, well, technically I had nothing to do with it.
I didn't!
I didn't exist!
I didn't exist when those things were happening.
How could I possibly be responsible?
And my ancestors were in Ireland, in fact.
And they didn't have such a great life either, historically.
They were persecuted by the British.
Are any Brits going to shine my shoes?
And then they came here and they were discriminated against too.
The Irish people, my ancestors, historically have not had a good time of it.
Many other groups you could say the same about.
So what am I supposed to be sorry for?
My ancestors were busy dying in the potato famine while people were buying slaves in this country.
They weren't slave owners.
I literally cannot apologize for it.
It wouldn't make any sense for me to do.
And I'm not going to do something that's incoherent and makes no sense just because the emotional mob has demanded that I do it.
But, Dan Caffney, you know what?
Chick-fil-A, if you want to apologize for something, don't apologize for racism, but you could apologize for your waffle fries.
Because, let's be honest about that, your waffle fries are bad.
Certainly overrated, I would call them outright bad most of the time.
And I think it's time we have an honest conversation about Chick-fil-A.
Yes, their chicken sandwich, the number one on the value meal, is good.
That's it.
They have nothing else on the menu that's anything to write home about.
Their wraps are actually bad, like stale, and it's like something you'd buy at a gas station.
Salads are okay, but you get a salad just as good at McDonald's or any other fast food place.
If I want great fries, I'll go to Arby's, get a curly fries.
I go to Sonic, get a, get, get tater tots.
Okay?
Any of those options.
I mean, go to McDonald's or their fries are better.
Then Chick-fil-A.
That's the real point here.
That's what we need to talk about.
Number three.
Here's something that happened in Southern California.
A mother was attending a protest with her child.
The child stopped breathing.
She screams for help.
A cop rushes in.
This is the footage right now.
Clears the child's airwaves and saves his life.
Now, you know, you see that and you think, okay, if we defund the police or if there are no police, who's running in to save the kid's life?
Call a social worker to come in?
Who are we calling?
A lawyer?
Somebody from the ACLU?
They're going to come save his life?
This is what cops do all the time throughout the country every day.
There's hundreds of examples probably every single day of cops saving somebody's life.
All that's going out the window if we get rid of the cops.
Number four, Amy Klobuchar is withdrawing her name from the VP consideration saying that a woman of color should be picked instead.
Here she is.
You know, Lawrence, I have never—as you probably know, on many, many shows since I endorsed the vice president on that joyful night in Dallas—I've never commented on this process at all.
But let me tell you this, after what I've seen in my state, what I've seen across the country.
This is a historic moment.
And America must seize on this moment.
And I truly believe, as I actually told the vice president last night when I called him, that I think this is a moment to put a woman of color on that ticket.
And there are so many incredibly qualified women.
But if you want to heal this nation right now—my party, yes, but our nation—this is sure a hell of a way to do it.
And that's just what I think, after being through this in my state.
I am very inspired by that.
I find that so inspiring that I'd like to announce that I am also withdrawing from consideration to be Joe Biden's VP so that a woman of color can be picked instead.
Hashtag hero.
Hashtag end racism.
In fact, I'm withdrawing from consideration.
I'll go a step further.
I'll go several steps further, okay?
I withdraw from consideration to be VP.
I also withdraw from consideration to be a NASA astronaut, to be a professor of physics at Princeton, to be a head chef.
To be the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers?
I will not accept any of those positions.
I'll tell you right now, I will not accept it.
I am withdrawing from consideration.
Don't even consider me.
I'm not going to take the job and I'll tell you why.
A woman of color needs to be in all those positions.
I will cede my position, which I don't have, to her.
You want to talk about heroism.
There it was, folks.
You're welcome.
Number five.
Finally, a report from the Daily Wire says flyers passed among members of the New York City Police Department, NYPD, are reportedly urging officers to go on strike on July 4th.
The New York Post reports that multiple cops informed them that the flyers are retribution for police reform and a perceived anti-cop climate following the outrage over high-profile police killings of unarmed black men across the country.
One text message that has been shared among police officers reads, NYPD cops will strike on July 4th to let the city have their independence without cops.
Cops that say we can't strike because of the Taylor Law, the people and the city doesn't honor us, why honor them?
And then it goes on from there.
So I don't know if this is actually going to happen or not, but you hear reports of this all across the country of cops that are going on strike or will go on strike.
And you know, and I think they should.
This is one area.
I'm not always in favor of or impressed by strikes.
But in this case, yeah, I think that if there was ever a time, if there was ever a time for a group of people to go on strike, I think this is it.
And I hope they do.
We're gonna get to our daily cancellation in just a second.
Before we do, if you're not a Daily Wire member, you should consider getting a reader's pass to dailywire.com.
It's a great value for only $3 a month.
And when you sign up, you get that first month for only 99 cents.
And the thing is, you know, there's a lot of leftist spin and You know, there's a lot going on in the news.
It's hard to know exactly what to think of all these things and what the truth is, and that's why you need a Daily Wire pass.
One of the articles, for example, that you could read if you get a reader's pass is an article I just wrote last week called, It's Time to Face the Facts.
We Cannot Be United.
Kind of a depressing article.
Well, we've talked about it on this show, the fact that I think unity is impossible in America at this point.
And we are headed for some kind of fracturing or break.
I think that's almost inevitable at this point.
But I make my case for that in that article.
If you get a reader's pass, you can read that.
And go to dailywire.com right now and sign up.
All right.
Today for our daily cancellation, I'm cancelling the mayor of Oakland, Mayor Libby Schaaf.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
Some background here.
A few days ago, somebody was walking through a park in Oakland.
They found some rope hanging in a tree, which they interpreted immediately as a noose and as a hate crime.
Here's the footage of that.
You could sort of barely see some rope there.
That's actually not a noose, but it is a rope with like a little loop at the end.
Um, it doesn't really look like a noose to me at all.
I see that.
And I think of the context, it's in a park.
The first thing I'm going to think is that that was there for someone that there's probably something connected to that.
And it was there as a swing or some sort of activity.
Um, you know, there was a, people were climbing the tree with it.
That looks exactly like the sort of thing I see in trees around my house where my kids will put ropes and stuff in trees so they can climb and they can make swings and all kinds of different things.
That would be my first assumption.
And what do you know?
That's exactly what it is.
A guy named Victor, a black man, put the rope there for kids to play on.
There used to be a whole swing system for exercising and for playing, and he put it up there.
In fact, here he is on camera explaining that he put it there and why he put it there.
He likes to climb things. He climbed up that tree, put another rope here, put another swing there.
The children are having a good time with it.
There's actually a family of father, mother, and little child, daughter.
Oh man...
There's nothing here.
There's no hate crime.
Nothing.
swing around.
And, you know, out of the dozens and hundreds and thousands of people that have walked by,
no one has thought that it looked anywhere close to a noose.
So there you go.
There's nothing here.
There's no hate crime.
Nothing.
It is 100% confirmed with zero doubt that this is not a hate crime.
It's a completely innocent and even friendly act by a black man who is on camera saying,
not a hate crime, folks.
I just put it there for, you know, you're wildly misinterpreting this.
Thank you.
So let's all move on.
Can we move on?
No, apparently we can't.
The patrols will start around the clock here at Lake Merritt starting tonight until Sunday.
Organizers say they want to create a presence to ensure safety.
We can organize ourselves to take care of ourselves.
That's what's happening tonight at Oakland's Lake Merritt.
I'm going to be behind you guys trailing.
A group called Community Ready Corps is taking to the streets.
Three to five nooses that have been found hanging around the lake.
Folks can't quite identify where they come from and who did it.
It all started Tuesday when someone spotted what appears to be a noose tied to a tree branch on the Grand Avenue side of the lake.
A Facebook video of that rope with the hashtag end racism went viral.
Mayor Libby Schaaf is condemning what she calls symbols of hate.
These symbols are symbols of racial violence and it's incumbent on all of us to have that sensitivity, to have that knowledge.
The mayor says even though there are claims the ropes aren't nooses and were used for exercise equipment, that doesn't excuse the person who put them there.
She is calling for a hate crime investigation.
A man shared this video with us, telling us the ropes have been there for months and there was no malicious intent behind them.
That's not how the public feels about it tonight, especially after two men found hanging from trees in Southern California were ruled suicides and are now being investigated.
For a noose to show up on on Monday morning after two Black Lives Matter events, Just seems far too coincidental.
And for those who are patrolling, it is not acceptable.
We have to transition into systems of community safety.
In Oakland, Cheryl Hurd, NBC Bay Area News.
Yes, it is 100% confirmed that this is not a hate crime, but that's not how the public feels about it.
They don't feel that way.
That's not how they feel.
Their feelings are wrong.
They were wrong in how they felt.
They felt a certain way.
They interpreted it a certain way.
They're just wrong.
That's it.
You're just wrong.
People are wrong all the time.
And this is one of those times.
So, you're wrong.
Stop being wrong.
I don't know what to tell you.
But the feelings.
No, the feeling is what matters.
Not the fact.
Not the reality.
So, they're gonna go on patrols.
They're setting up patrols because of a swing in a tree.
Did they say they're doing overnight patrols?
I don't know if I... I wasn't really... I was too depressed to pay very close attention.
Are they setting up, like, overnight sentries on the border?
Then, you know, the one person says, it's not a coincidence that these ropes showed up after a Black Lives Matter protest.
Well, you're right, it's not.
Because they didn't show up after the protest.
They've been there for months.
It's just that you just noticed it.
But the truth doesn't matter.
The truth doesn't matter at all anymore.
It makes no difference.
Here's the mayor doing a press conference about the swing.
And keep in mind, as you listen to this, she knows that it's a swing.
And this is what she said.
The Oakland Police Department has turned over the evidence to the FBI.
We have to start with the assumption that these are hate crimes.
We cannot take these actions lightly.
These symbols are symbols of racial violence and it's incumbent on all of us to have that sensitivity, to have that knowledge.
And that is why I've directed our staff to remove any such symbol of hatred, regardless of the intention of what put it there.
What a privilege for those of us that don't feel complete fear and terror when we see a rope in the tree.
That is a privilege that so many of our African-American residents do not enjoy.
You see an overwhelming amount of anguish, of rage, of fatigue, of grief.
And yes, the fact that we had an extremist charged with the murder of Patrick Underwood, an extremist group, the Boogaloos, that is trying to ferment a race war.
We have to see this moment for what it is, a reckoning.
And in Oakland, We cannot further terrorize or traumatize our black residents.
And yes, the incidents of the last few weeks, but frankly of the last few centuries, is the backdrop upon which we have to make these decisions today.
Enough is enough.
And again, the intentions do not matter because the harm is real.
First of all, I want to note for the record that she did say that extremists are trying to ferment hate.
I don't think I misheard that.
She did say ferment, didn't she?
So they're putting hate in like a big barrel and they're letting it ferment for a few days to get that alcohol content and then they're bottling it, selling it like moonshine on the street.
Fermented hate.
Delicious.
But of course I shouldn't be surprised that this woman doesn't know the difference between foment and ferment because she is of course profoundly, deeply, impressively stupid.
Notice at the beginning she says, we have to start with the assumption that it's a hate crime.
Those were her actual words.
Start, we have to start with the assumption that it's a hate crime.
No, no we don't.
No Mayor.
You see, that's exactly the opposite of what we have to do.
That's not, No.
When something happens, you don't come in and say, okay, everybody calm down.
Calm down.
Let's just begin with the assumption that your worst possible interpretation of this event is correct.
Let's begin with that.
Okay.
In order to clarify things, imagine in your head, what is the worst possible explanation and just assume that it's true.
No, that's not what you do.
And in this particular case, when it comes to assumptions, The assumption should be that it's there for a swing.
That should be your assumption to begin with.
Because all you have to do, all you have to do is count how many swings are hanging in parks versus how many racist nooses are hanging in parks.
And I think that the ratio is probably something like 80 billion to one.
Approximately.
Which means that your assumption should be that it's a swing until evidence to the contrary emerges.
And in this case, evidence for the swing emerged.
Evidence in the form of a black man saying, yep, it's for a swing, I put it up.
And then this white woman goes on about what a privilege it is for people who aren't traumatized by ropes.
A black man put it there.
You're saying that, what, he's... he's...
He's privileged?
You're saying that the black man put a swing up for kids because of his privilege?
What are you babbling about?
And of course, the coup de grace at the end where she says, intentions don't matter.
Intentions don't matter.
Yes, Libby.
And I love that her name is actually Libby, by the way.
Libby the Lib.
Yes, Libby.
Intentions do matter.
They're all that matter, actually.
When it comes to a hate crime, the only thing that matters is the intention.
That's how you judge if a hate crime's been committed or not.
When it comes to a person's actions, when it comes to an action, a statement, an event, that can be interpreted multiple ways, The only deciding factor is intention.
If somebody does something and you're not sure how to interpret it, what you do is you go to them and say, why did you do that?
And then they'll tell you and they'll say, oh, I did it because of this.
And that's it!
Now if they tell you that, oh, I did it because I'm a racist, I'm a Klan member, it would be kind of odd for that particular gentleman to say that.
Because the other thing is, if there's a racist group out there that are planting nooses in They would, I imagine, like terrorists, okay?
Terrorists want you to, when they commit an act of terrorism, they want you to know that it was terrorism, and they're gonna claim credibility, credit for it, because that's the whole point.
They're trying to terrorize you.
And so if someone, for a racist reason, put a noose in a tree to terrorize the community, and then someone else comes along and claims credit for it and says it was just a swing, well then the person who put it there is going to come out and say, no, no, no, no, my point was to terrorize you.
No, so be terrorized.
Words to that effect will be communicated.
So that's why, when it comes to intention, Attentions do matter, number one.
And in order to know the intention, you have to ask someone.
And when they tell you, all you can do is just take them at their word.
That's all you can do.
If I say something and you're not sure how to interpret it, it sounds like it could be horrible or maybe it could go... All you could do is say to me, Matt, why'd you say that?
And I'll gladly tell you, this is why I said it.
This is what I was trying to communicate.
It doesn't make any sense for you to then say, you claim that's what you meant, but I feel like you meant this other thing over here, so I'm just going to assume that that's what you actually meant.
Now, you're a better authority on what was in my head than I am.
When it comes to actions and intentions, There is only one authority on Earth.
There is only one person on Earth who is an authority and an absolute authority on that subject.
And that is the doer or the sayer.
The doer of the deed or the sayer of the words.
That is the one absolute authority on planet Earth on that subject.
The only person who can speak to their own intentions is the individual themselves.
And once you hear them explain it, all you can do as a thinking person is just accept it.
But again, I mean, here I am trying to be reasonable and explain and give arguments and everything and it doesn't matter because we're way past the point of explanation or logic or rationality and this is just blind hysteria.
And that's why the mayor of Oakland is cancelled.
Like so many other mayors across the country are cancelled and really have just cancelled themselves, I guess, by stepping back and letting anarchy take over in their streets.
So maybe it's a little bit redundant to cancel them.
We'll leave it there.
Have a great day, everybody.
Have a great weekend.
We'll talk on Monday.
Godspeed.
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The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
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