Ep. 524 - Public School Teachers Insist That Public School Is Not Essential. They’re Right.
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Democrats, the media, and many public school teachers are now in effect arguing that public school is inessential and expendable. I agree with them and I think we should take them at their word. Also Five Headlines including Kanye’s powerful pro-life plea. And in our Daily Cancellation, we will discuss whether a black woman doing Irish dance should get an exemption from the “cultural appropriation” charge.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, Democrats, the media, and many public school teachers themselves are now, in response to the coronavirus, in effect arguing that public school is inessential and expendable.
And although I disagree with their take on the coronavirus, I agree with them on this point, that public school is inessential.
And I think we should take them at their word.
Actually.
Also, five headlines including Kanye's powerful pro-life plea, and in our daily cancellation we'll discuss whether a black woman doing Irish dance should get an exemption from the cultural appropriation charge, or should everybody be held to the same cultural appropriation standard, or should we just do away with the whole concept of cultural appropriation because the concept is itself a Absurd, stupid, insane, and many other things as well.
We'll talk about all that coming up, but first, we'll start here.
An article in the New York Times really captures the heroism and courage of our sainted public school teachers.
This is the article written by a public school teacher named Rebecca Martinson, and it says, I won't return to the classroom, and you shouldn't ask me to.
Please don't make me risk getting COVID-19 to teach your child.
As I said, just incredible courage and heroism on display there from Rebecca Martinson.
Let's read a little bit of this.
She says, every day when I walk into work as a public school teacher, I am prepared to take a bullet to save a child.
In the age of school shootings, that's what the job requires.
But asking me to return to the classroom amid a pandemic and expose myself and my family to COVID-19 is like asking me to take that bullet home to my own family.
I won't do it, and you shouldn't want me to.
Okay, so she claims that she would happily jump in front of a bullet, but she won't go to work when there's a pandemic that poses almost no risk to children and only a very moderate risk to middle-aged adults.
Okay.
I became an educator after a career as a nurse.
I teach medical science and introduction to nursing to 11th and 12th graders at a regional skill center that serves students from 22 different high schools and 13 different school districts.
My school district and school haven't ruled out asking us to return in person to in-person teaching in the fall.
As careful and proactive as the administration has been when it comes to exploring plans to return to the classroom, nothing I have heard reassures me that I can safely teach in person.
Now, she doesn't say what she would need to hear that reassures her that she can, to reassure her that she can safely teach in person.
I guess what she needs to hear is that the virus has gone away or that there's a cure, that there's a vaccine or something.
But as I've been saying now for a while, there's no guarantee that this virus will ever go away.
There's no guarantee that there will ever be a vaccine that's even close to 100% effective.
Now, we keep reading headlines about how they're working on a vaccine, they're making progress.
Maybe they are, maybe they aren't.
But we're still really far away from a vaccine that we know actually works.
So what is she saying exactly?
Is she saying that she doesn't want to go back to teaching until there's a vaccine, no matter how long that takes?
Let's say, hypothetically, it takes two years to have an effective vaccine on the market.
She's saying we should shut down schools for two years?
Well, she doesn't say that exactly, but reading this entire article and many other articles making this case that we shouldn't open schools up, The one thing that's almost always missing is a suggestion for another plan.
So we get a lot of complaints about the plan of opening up schools, but none of these people will ever say what they think we should do.
All they will say is, I don't like that.
I'm going to complain and whine about that, but in terms of what we should be doing, well, that I can't say.
Or at least I won't say, because they know how crazy And paranoid and selfish it would sound if they said, yes, I think we should keep schools closed down indefinitely, even if it's for two or three years.
We should just forfeit an entire generation of kids.
We should forfeit their education because I'm afraid of the virus.
They don't want to come out and say that, but that is apparently what they really think.
Let's see, she says, if I'm asked to return to the classroom as the pandemic rages, I will have to walk away.
As deeply as I love teaching, I will not risk spreading this virus in a way that could hurt a child or a family member of a child.
While children make up a small proportion of U.S.
coronavirus cases, and they are less likely to become seriously ill than adults, the virus might be linked to multisystem inflammatory system syndrome in children.
Plus, many of my students struggle with poverty or are from multi-generational households.
I will not risk passing a virus to them that they might pass to their vulnerable loved ones.
I won't do it.
It isn't fair to ask teachers to buy school supplies.
We aren't the government, but we do it anyway.
It isn't fair to ask us to stop a bullet.
We aren't soldiers, but we go to work every day knowing that if there's a school shooting, we will die protecting our students.
But this is where I draw the line.
It isn't fair to ask me to be a part of a massive, unnecessary science experiment.
I am not a human research subject.
I will not do it.
Okay.
So that's a little sample of that.
Now, first of all, for the record, no teacher anywhere has ever been asked to stop a bullet.
That is melodramatic nonsense.
And we get this kind of thing a lot from teachers.
Constantly making these self-aggrandizing exaggerations.
Obviously, there is no school system anywhere that tells teachers to dive in front of live bullets.
That's not happening.
That is not the lockdown procedure at any school where the teachers are required to be human shields.
Yes, some teachers have died in school shootings, and some have chosen to be heroic and sacrifice themselves.
There have been cases of that.
We honor the teachers that do that.
They really are heroes.
There's absolutely no exaggerating there.
I mean, that is heroism.
But, a person choosing to be a hero isn't the same as asking every teacher to be a hero.
Part of the whole point of being a hero, in fact, is that you're doing what you're not asked to do.
You're going well above and beyond what you've been asked to do.
You're going beyond the call of duty.
And by the way, we don't ask soldiers to jump in front of bullets either.
I won't jump in front of a bullet.
I'm not a soldier.
Well, we don't tell soldiers to do that either.
We ask them to kill the bad guys, but they aren't required to dive in the line of fire on purpose.
Again, some do heroically, and those are the ones we rightfully reward posthumously with the Medal of Honor and other honors as well, but they aren't asked to, and that's a distinction that really matters.
Because this is a mischaracterization, a kind of hyperbole, that's meant to emotionally manipulate.
We're meant to see teachers as literal martyrs who are always asked and required to be superheroes.
And I guess the idea is now they're fed up, and they've had enough, and we've asked too much of them, and they're drawing the line.
That's the idea.
That's how it's being presented, and it's just not true.
And by the way, I'm sorry, I don't...
The idea, this woman, I don't know anything about her, I'm sure she's a perfectly nice woman, but the idea that she, her claim, that she would willingly jump in front of a bullet for her students, but she won't go to school during coronavirus, I don't buy that, I'm sorry.
I don't buy it.
On one hand, you're claiming that you will sacrifice your very lives for your kids and for the sake of education, but you're too scared to go teach during coronavirus.
Don't buy it.
Not true.
And don't try to pass this off, oh no I'm not worried about myself, I'm worried about passing this on to the kids.
Oh baloney.
That's not it at all.
Kids, we'll show you the numbers here in a minute, but as this woman well knows and she briefly mentions and then moves on from, kids only very rarely contract this and even more rarely is it fatal for them.
Let's go to the, in fact we went over this last week.
The comparison between how COVID affects, especially kids, as compared to the flu.
But let's look at this chart from the CDC, and you see there the total death counts.
And this really puts things into perspective.
Okay?
As of July 15th, there had been around 120,000 COVID deaths.
120,000 COVID deaths.
31 of those deaths were kids aged 0 to 14.
That's about 0.03% of the total.
The flu killed three times as many kids in that age range in that same amount of time.
Now, if you look up the age bar, you see the vast majority of deaths are in the 75 and up bracket.
And a great preponderance of those deaths were in nursing homes and were due oftentimes to horrible policy decisions made by people like Andrew Cuomo.
The 65 and up bracket accounts for, you know, you add that up.
So you've got 75 and up bracket, that's where most of the deaths are.
If you go down to the 65 and up, so retirement age on up, that's going to be almost, what, 100,000 deaths right there.
So, 65 and up, that's almost all of the deaths.
That's 80-85% of the deaths.
Most teachers are going to be in the 35-44 range.
The average age of a teacher in America is, I think, 41.
I looked it up last week.
I'll look it up again.
But I think it was 41 is the average age of a teacher.
So they account for, and by they I mean that entire age group, accounts for less than 2% of all COVID deaths.
The numbers there are pretty clear.
And we'll talk more about the numbers in just a second.
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Okay, so we're just going through the numbers here and, you know, they're very clear.
We have plenty of data at this point to make some determinations.
One of which is that COVID is not even close to a significant threat to children.
They're very unlikely to spread it, very unlikely to contract it, even more unlikely to die from it.
And before you get into the, well, even one death is too much, are you saying that 30 deaths is okay with you?
No, no death is okay with me.
If it were up to me and I could make the decision, of course, I wouldn't want to see anyone die at all, obviously.
Every death is a tragedy, especially when it's a child.
But you can't argue that.
You can't argue for shutting down schools, On the basis of the threat it poses to children because of COVID.
And then justify it by saying even one death is too much.
You cannot do that if you haven't also argued for shutting schools down during flu season.
Which is a disease, again, that kills three times as many children.
This is an inescapable, logical conclusion.
If at least part of your reason for wanting to shut down schools is that it's killed a few dozen school-aged children, if that's even part of your reason, then you should have been advocating for shutting down schools during flu season.
And probably you haven't.
Now, yes, you have isolated cases when the flu season gets really bad or hits a particular area really hard.
You have isolated cases around the country every once in a while where a school system shuts down temporarily.
But something like this, where we shut down the schools indefinitely across the entire country, 50 million kids no longer going to school, we've never done anything even close to that for the flu.
Even though for the third time, and I'm going to keep saying it, the flu is a much, much, much greater threat to children than COVID.
Even with a vaccine.
Still is.
And I think we have to keep emphasizing this because there's no getting around it if you're someone advocating for shutting schools down and you haven't advocated it for the flu.
It doesn't make any sense.
You're being a hypocrite and you know it.
You know it.
You know your position doesn't make any sense.
Now, you know, someone on Twitter, and of course we also acknowledge though that this is, we're talking about the threat it poses to kids, and the reason I'm emphasizing that is because that's the emphasis we're getting from the media and from a lot of school teachers and people that are advocating for shutting schools down.
Yes, they're also saying it's a threat to adults, but what they're emphasizing is the threat to kids, and they're saying that we cannot put our kids in harm's way.
They're using the kids as the excuse.
And if you're doing that, then we have just, you have just, then the flu is going to enter the chat, because that is a very relevant aspect of this.
Now, it is substantially more dangerous to adults than to kids.
That's true.
It's still not fatal to well over 99% of adults who are likely to be working in schools.
Yes, any adult whose retirement age or over should probably just retire.
But if you're 30, 35, 40, you'll probably be okay.
I'm 34 myself.
I haven't gotten COVID yet, as far as I know.
But I probably will eventually.
Somebody on Twitter said to me today, watch what happens to you when you get it.
Then you'll be sorry for saying all this.
And I said, yeah, I probably will get it.
You're right.
It's probably going to be endemic like the flu.
I've had the flu.
Had it recently.
Wasn't fun.
And yes, I'll probably get this too eventually.
So will you, whoever you are out there watching this.
I hate to tell you, you're probably going to get coronavirus eventually if you haven't already.
Doesn't mean I want to.
Doesn't mean I'm going out to try to infect myself.
I'm not going to a coronavirus party to intentionally infect myself like they used to do with the chicken pox parties and stuff.
I'm not doing that.
But I probably will get it.
The point is, I'm going to have to function in society in spite of that risk.
And society is going to have to function In spite of that risk.
One way or another, eventually, we're all going to have to just figure out how to continue on with our lives, even knowing that this threat, this risk is out there.
Because what's probably going to happen is that the coronavirus is going to become one of the many threats that we all face as we go about our daily lives.
One of the many things that could kill us as we go about our daily lives.
One of the many things that eventually will kill us because we're all going to die.
For the umpteenth time.
That doesn't mean that we're okay with it, or we're nihilistic, or we're saying, oh, just take me coronavirus, I don't care if I die.
No one has that view.
Of course not.
But either we're going to function as a human society or not.
The only other option is what, exactly?
The total abandonment of human society?
But here's the greater point to all of this, I think, and this cannot be emphasized enough.
That what schools are doing here, I mean, what that article I just read to you, it's one long article basically making the case that schools are not essential.
Grocery store workers have been working this entire time.
You know We can think of many different bus drivers and we can think
of many different people working public transportation Which is pretty damn high risk.
risk.
We can think of many different types of jobs where they've been going to work, people working at Walmart, have been going to work this entire time, have been granted status of essential workers.
And the interesting thing is there hasn't been nearly as much hand-wringing over grocery store employees and the risk that they're in as it is now over teachers.
I think part of the reason for that is that even though I'm opposed to the government being able to stand up there and declare who is essential and who isn't, and of course every job is essential, At least to the people that are working that job, it's essential to their families.
So essential in a very real way.
I don't like the idea of the government declaring who's essential and who isn't.
But certainly, I don't think anyone disagrees that grocery stores are essential.
And that's why there wasn't nearly as much hand-wringing, because we all said, well, grocery stores need to stay open.
And if you choose to work for a grocery store, then you're going to go to work and you're going to have a job, you're going to have a salary.
A lot of people don't.
If you decide that that's too much of a risk, then you can quit that job.
But there hasn't really been anyone, there's been hardly anyone arguing that we should just shut down grocery stores, right?
Because we say we need it for society.
Now, up until this, Most of the people arguing for shutting down schools up until the coronavirus, they would have been the ones saying, yeah, schools are absolutely essential.
They're even more than grocery stores, if anything.
We have to have schools open.
Kids need it.
There's no way to replace that educational experience that they get inside the schools.
That's what we've been told for years.
Everyone who opposes homeschooling, There used to be a lot of people who opposed homeschooling.
I should know, as a homeschool advocate for years, I've been dealing with these people.
And they all said, there's no replacing this, you gotta send them into the schools, it's an essential need that kids have to go to school and be a part of that school experience.
Now, all at once, it seems like, all the people that have been arguing that for years are saying, oh, never mind.
Actually, schools aren't essential.
We can shut them down indefinitely.
We shut them down for half the school year last year.
Shut them down for another school year.
They'll be fine.
It's not going to hurt the kids much.
They'll be okay.
And the thing is, I agree.
I agree that the public school education system is not essential.
Even more than not essential, it is oftentimes actively harmful.
But I've been saying that for a long time.
That's always been my position.
I think that parents can step in and fill the gap and do, in fact, an even better job, a much better job oftentimes, than the public school system can do in educating children.
When you're educating your own child, nobody knows your child better than you do.
And no one can give your child a more personalized, customized education than you can.
You put a kid into a classroom with 30 other students, and they go from classroom to classroom, they have a teacher for 45 minutes or an hour, they go to the next one.
You're putting them on the factory assembly line and just sending them down the conveyor belt.
And everybody has to fit into that particular mold, and all the kids who don't fit into the mold are basically abandoned by the system and have no chance of really learning anything.
That's a terrible way to educate kids.
They'd be much better off at home.
I believe that.
But the point is that most of the people who would have strenuously objected to that idea are now saying the public school system is not essential, and we should remember that.
Because eventually, whatever happens, whether it's a vaccine or whatever, and they start opening up the schools again, And a lot of the people that were saying schools are not essential will go right back to saying, oh yeah, there's nothing more important than education.
Got to get the kids into the schools.
No.
We can't allow them to do that.
We have to remember what they've been saying and hold them to it.
Let's go to our headlines before we do.
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Alright, let's go to five headlines.
♪ Number one, Kanye West appears to actually be running for
president.
It seems.
I admit that that comes as a bit of a surprise to me.
I assumed that this was all a stunt to sell albums, which I'm still not convinced it isn't.
I think maybe that is what this is, but He did hold an actual campaign rally of sorts this weekend, and he's got petitions to get him on the ballots in various states.
I don't know what the endgame is.
Maybe the endgame is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Who knows?
The Kanye doubters, like myself, it's as if we've already forgotten that a reality TV game show host won the presidency in 2016, despite how improbable that seemed at the time to people like me.
In any case, the highlight of Kanye's event, without question, I think, was his very emotional and compelling discussion about abortion.
And he reveals some things that was new to me.
I'd never heard this before.
I'm not sure if he talked about it publicly in the past or not.
But he reveals why the issue is so important to him and why he takes it so personally.
Watch this.
She said, I'm pregnant.
I said, yes!
Then I said, no.
I've got to tell you what was in my mind.
She was crying.
She said, I just came from the doctor.
I was like, oh my God, what's in my baby?
Because I was having my breakfast lifestyle.
So she said she was pregnant.
And for one month, and two months, and three months, We talked about her not having this child.
She had the pills in her hand.
People know those pills where you take the pills and if you take it, it's a wrap.
The baby's gone.
My mom saved my life.
My dad wanted to abort me.
My mom saved my life.
There would have been no Kanye West because my dad was too busy.
Hey.
Oh, my God.
Kanye has obviously sustained a lot of criticism recently.
When he put out the Christian album and he was coming out in support of Donald Trump, even though I guess he's backtracked from that recently and said he doesn't support Trump anymore.
But all of that criticism was nothing in comparison to what's coming to Kanye now.
Because once you start talking about abortion, and especially you talk about it the way that he is, that's a powerful testimony.
Not only as a man who, as he says, almost was never born, and his life was saved by his mother, but he's admitting that he himself, if it were up to him, would have aborted his child.
And his wife stepped in and said, no, we're not going to do that.
Now he's looking at his daughter and is obviously grateful every day that he didn't make such a horrible choice.
That's a very powerful testimony.
Um, to hear from someone, a man, a black man, you know, and the left cannot tolerate that.
They simply, they can't have someone going around saying this kind of thing about abortion, their holy sacrament.
So just watch.
If you thought it was bad before, you're going to see the treatment now that Kanye gets.
And it's going to be, it already has been, uh, ugly.
Number two, as we get close to, I guess, our third straight month of leftist violence and chaos, there are no signs of it letting up.
Here are just some examples over the weekend.
Here are leftists in Seattle breaking into an Amazon store to steal stuff.
And then we go over to Portland.
There was rioting in Portland featuring the familiar serial arson.
And here are some Antifa terrorists trying to start fires in the city.
And it's not just Portland and Seattle either.
Let's be clear about that.
Eighteen officers were injured while protecting a Christopher Columbus statue from being torn down in Chicago.
And you could see how they were injured.
Here are the quote unquote protesters throwing rocks and bottles and other assorted projectiles
at the officers.
Number two things though, folks.
Number one, first of all, all the people you've seen in those videos, those are poor starving children who just want some bread, according to AOC.
They just want bread, that's all.
Why won't someone give them some bread?
That's all they're looking for.
They're going into an Amazon store looking for bread.
I don't think they're going to find any there.
But that's it.
These are starving people who desperately are just committing crime out of desperation because they're on the brink of starvation and they figure the only way to survive is to throw bottles at police officers.
Makes a lot of sense.
And second, Also remember that even in spite of everything you've seen there and everything we've seen over the last two or three months, we should really be worried about the real problem, the real threat, is that federal law enforcement officers in scary camo uniforms are quote-unquote abducting people off the street, otherwise known as making arrests.
Because after that one video that we played last week of some police officers in uniform saying police went and quote-unquote kidnapped someone and put him in an unmarked van and we're supposed to see this as some horrible new innovation by the police.
No.
Unmarked vehicles are very common.
Police have been using them for a very long time.
And kidnapping someone off the street, otherwise known as making an arrest.
That's what an arrest is.
Are we now saying that arrests have to be consensual?
Is this a no-means-no situation where the person could say, no, officer, I prefer not to be arrested today, in fact.
Maybe try back tomorrow, but I'm just not in the mood for an arrest.
Oh, okay, if you don't want to be arrested, then never mind.
Have a great day.
And we laugh about it, but that is really actually what the left wants.
That's basically their vision of how policing should work.
Number three, reading from the Daily Wire, it says, a pair of doctors in Australia want to do away with terms like Adam's apple and Achilles tendon, with one doctor calling them misogynistic.
Dr. Kristen Small, a Queensland specialist, obstetrician, gynecologist, and anatomy lecturer, calls for the terms to be phased out, saying that they represent older generations.
I think we have personal choice to decolonize our language and these historical terms will fade out, says Small.
She still teaches the terms known as eponyms for exam purposes, but notes that there are alternatives for the dead man's names.
She says the century-old anatomical terms are named after old men kings.
heroes And I guess we got to get rid of Adam's apple because it's
believed to be named after the biblical figure of Adam Okay, of course Achilles tendon named after the Greek hero
of the Trojan War I don't know why that's sexist exactly but apparently it is
We have to get rid of that, you know This is another thing that we kind of laugh about because
it's so silly and it is silly But there is we always have to remember with these PC name
changes There's something nefarious under the surface of this and
because it's all about control It's about controlling what we say, how we speak, controlling the language.
It's something the left has been doing for a long time, and they've been very successful.
It's been one of their most successful ploys and tactics.
Let's go to number four.
Well, we call this segment Five Headlines.
So here is the headline.
Claremont 13-year-old dies after experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.
This is the headline from the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles.
That's it.
Claremont 13-year-old dies after experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.
And other outlets like the Daily Mail have picked this up and had almost exactly the same headline.
Now, You read that, you think that's obviously horrible, and you read through it.
Now, I read the article.
It's not until you get to, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, you have to get six paragraphs in before you get to this.
On July 9th, Mac, the boy's mother, took him to get tested for COVID-19.
That test came back negative.
The mother says his symptoms matched, but then the test came out negative, so we were a little bit confused.
Okay, so what we have here, put in the headline, dies after experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.
Don't tell us until six paragraphs in.
He tested negative for the virus.
So what, so all we have from this story, all we know, is that this was a child.
He had COVID symptoms, which means what?
Fever, coughing, that sort of thing.
And then he died.
So what we know for sure is that it's a terrible tragedy.
But that's all we know for sure.
And we also know he tested negative for COVID-19.
Now, that doesn't mean he didn't have it.
You could get a false negative.
That does happen.
But there's no reason at all to assume he had a false negative.
In fact, based on the reporting, there's no reason to assume that his symptoms had anything to do with his death.
We don't know.
They said they're going to do an autopsy.
We don't have the results of that yet.
So what we have the media doing here is blatantly, explicitly exploiting the death of a 13-year-old child for their own purposes.
For clicks and ratings and for political reasons, too.
Because they want to scare people.
They desperately want to scare people, especially when it comes to... There's no coincidence here that they're taking this headline and they're reporting in an extremely, let's call it, misleading way, right when we're in the middle of debating, you know, opening schools or not.
And Trump, obviously, is out in favor of opening them up.
The media, they're looking for, and they want to find, stories of kids dying of COVID-19.
And if they can't find it, then they're going to do this, which is grotesque and disgusting and evil.
And they know exactly what they're doing.
By the way, COVID symptoms?
Those are also flu symptoms.
And since we know that flu kills three times as many kids in his age bracket, Why not assume that it was the flu if we're going to make any assumptions at all?
You could just as easily assume that he died of the flu.
Or here's a better case.
Here's a better idea.
Don't make any assumptions.
Make zero assumptions.
Wait for the autopsy to come back and then, you know, wait for actual information about what killed this child.
Number five, I have no idea of the context here, but I've seen some people talking about this on social media.
I guess in New York, people are getting this alert on their phone.
Here it is.
One person on Twitter has this screenshot.
It says, report of man armed with banjo.
There's a man armed with a banjo somewhere.
I guess the police are responding.
I don't know what's happening.
Details are very sketchy.
What I want to say, first of all, is that the attempts that have been made to connect me to this incident are baseless and libelous.
I was not involved in this event.
I have no knowledge of it.
Second, though I was not involved, let me say that I understand why this happened.
Whatever happened, I understand why it happened.
We banjo players, we members of the banjo community, we banjoists, as we call ourselves, have been minimized and otherized and stigmatized and marginalized And dehumanized, and vaporized, and cauterized, all the eyes.
We've, for too long, that's happened to us.
There's only so much you can take after a while.
I mean, when you hear banjo, okay?
The word banjo, you hear the sound of a banjo, the glorious, beautiful sound.
What's the first movie you think of with the banjo?
Right?
You think of Deliverance.
This is how my community has been portrayed on film for decades.
Hillbilly, backwoods rapists.
So is it any wonder that a community which has been the target of such degrading stereotypes and prejudices would lash out in this way, in whatever way this was?
Whatever happened?
Can you blame us for communicating our anger and our sorrow in a way that gets your attention?
I'm not justifying it.
Whatever happened.
I'm just saying.
A little bit of empathy, I think, would be necessary.
We're going to go to our daily cancellation.
But first, in the midst of all this news we've been talking about, Ben Shapiro has a new book out called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
This is a prophetic book in a lot of ways, because we're seeing a lot of what he's been writing about, a lot of what he wrote about in the book, coming to life all around us.
The book goes on sale Tuesday, July 21st at 6 p.m.
Eastern, 3 p.m.
Pacific, and Ben will be doing a virtual live signing event on the day of the release.
With your purchase of the signed book, you can write in a question which may be read and answered as he signs your books.
Live on air, you can pre-order your signed copy and write in your questions at dailywire.com slash ben.
As far as the book itself, you know, it covers two fundamentally different visions of America that are on the table right now.
One vision is unifying, finds our unity in shared philosophy and culture and history.
the other disintegrates our culture and our country in the name of fundamental change.
How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps details how this alternate worldview has gained so much cultural ground so
quickly.
How has this happened? Why is it happening? That's all covered in the book. Again,
go to dailywire.com slash Ben, order your signed copy and join Ben's live signing on Tuesday, July 21st.
Okay, today for our daily cancellation, I have to issue a cancellation begrudgingly,
Not because I want to with no personal animosity behind it it.
In fact, in performing this cancellation ritual, I am following the rules and customs of our modern society.
I am enforcing the rules.
Their rules, not my own.
These are not my rules.
The subject today is a young woman by the name of Morgan Bullock.
And she was profiled by the BBC recently.
Uh, that profile has gotten some attention online.
Let me, uh, it's about a five minute video.
I won't play the whole thing, but let me play just a clip of that for you.
Watch this.
People saying that I shouldn't be Irish dancing because I'm black and I don't look like most Irish dancers.
but I saw it for the first time at a recital and it was just the coolest thing ever to me.
When you went into those Irish dancing classes, were you the only African-American girl in the class?
Yeah, I was always the only one in my class.
Did that ever have any effect on you or how did that make you feel?
I mean, obviously, it's hard to miss someone whose face matches their legs at the competitions because, you know, there's like the tanner.
There's a lot of tan.
Yeah, a lot of tanner, but it's hard to miss someone who's African-American.
I don't think I ever considered it an issue.
It was definitely something that I took note of, but I had grown up in a predominantly white area, so it wasn't something that I was uncomfortable about.
After going viral with her Irish dancing, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, but there were a few who thought that what she was doing was inappropriate.
The negative comments that people were leaving under the video, what were people saying?
Just early on, shortly after posting it, some people were saying that what I was doing was cultural appropriation, just because I don't look like what you would typically picture an Irish dancer to look like.
But, I mean... So were they saying because you weren't Irish, and because you were not white, that you shouldn't be performing Irish dancing?
Yeah, basically that's what they were saying.
You were misappropriating the Irish dancing culture.
I mean, my understanding of the term is that it means when you're taking something from another culture, claiming it as your own without recognizing where it comes from, and that couldn't be further from what I'm doing.
It's important for people to recognize that there's a difference between appropriation and appreciation.
I think people use the term appropriation without knowing what it really means.
Okay, so she's an Irish dancer, black woman from, what did they say, Virginia.
Now, first of all, they didn't show an example of the supposed negative comments that this woman has received, but it's obvious that the negative comments were way, way, way outnumbered by the positive, which is good.
And let me be clear about this.
I agree with everything she said.
I agree that she's not guilty of appropriation.
I agree that this is appreciation.
I agree that if you see a type of dance, you know, for example, and you like it, and you admire it, and you want to do it, that is by definition appreciation and should be embraced.
I also agree that if cultural appropriation means anything at all, it must mean taking
something from another culture and pretending that you came up with it, or that your culture
came up with it.
So if she did an Irish dance and claimed that she invented the style or something, or that
it's a style she inherited from her ancestors or whatever, then yeah, that would be, I suppose,
appropriation.
But of course, she didn't do that, and almost nobody would do that, because that would just
be bizarre.
You know, she likes Irish dance.
That's why she got involved in it.
And she's not trying to, she has no interest in trying to degrade Irish dance or hide from
She likes it.
That's the whole point here.
She admires it.
You wouldn't give so much of your life and so many hours of your day to practicing it if you didn't admire it.
However, everything she's saying and the definitions she's giving, even though she's right, And she's being reasonable.
None of that is actually what the left says about cultural appropriation.
According to the left, it doesn't matter if you appreciate the culture.
It doesn't matter if you think that it's cool or beautiful or whatever else.
To do a dance or to take a style or anything else from another culture, if you are not of that culture, is appropriation.
Those are the left's rules.
And since they're the left's rules, those are the rules of society.
In fact, here's an example.
This is also from the BBC.
Just to frame this here.
This is an example also from the BBC a couple years ago.
Another cultural appropriation controversy.
But you'll notice that though the BBC defended Ms.
Bullock, they take a very different tone here.
If you look at this headline, Prom Dress Prompts Cultural Appropriation Row.
And then it goes on, I'm not gonna read the entire article, but maybe you remember this case.
A white girl, high school student, in Utah, decided to wear a traditional Chinese dress to her prom.
And she posted pictures because she was proud of it, and she thought it was cool, and she liked the style and everything.
And it went viral in a negative way.
I mean, overwhelmingly negative response.
One widely shared response from a Twitter user, Jeremy Lam, said, my culture is not your effing prom dress.
And a lot of criticisms like that, and finally the girl was forced to take down the pictures.
She tried to say that she didn't mean it to be negative, she was appreciating Chinese culture, but she had to take it down and she apologized.
Now, if wearing a Chinese dress to prom is appropriation from the Chinese, Then doing an Irish dance and performing in Riverdance is appropriation from the Irish.
There's no way around it.
Now, I know the way around it, the attempted way around it, is, in fact, they, in one of the articles, I think in the BBC article, they say that appropriation is oftentimes when a dominant culture takes from a minority culture.
But first of all, that's just ad hoc silliness, okay?
You're inventing definitions as you go along, adjusting the terms as you go along according to what it will be politically useful to you.
So that's not a legitimate way of going about this anyway.
But secondly, Irish culture is not dominant or in the majority anywhere.
Except for maybe in Ireland, even though even there, you know, it's...
Debatable at this point.
And I would submit that black culture in America is quite a bit more dominant and has quite a bit more power in America than Irish culture.
I don't think there's any denying that.
So no matter how you slice it or try to define it, this is appropriation and cancellations must be handed out, I'm afraid.
I don't want to do it, but those are the rules.
Unless, of course, we want to all admit that the whole idea of cultural appropriation is nonsense.
A culture actually cannot be appropriated.
Like, even if I were to become a Hindu and give myself a Hindi name and wear the traditional attire that Hindus wear and I were to celebrate Diwali and other Hindu holidays, all the rest of it, I wouldn't be appropriating anything from the people of India because I'm not depriving them of their culture by partaking in it myself.
This is not a zero-sum game with cultures.
A culture doesn't lose something just because someone outside of it is influenced by it or imitates it.
I mean, they used to say imitation is the highest form of flattery.
It's not appropriation.
It is, at worst, imitation.
Okay, what I would really say is you're partaking in it.
I would say it's more participation than even imitation, but fine.
If you want to call it imitation, that's fine too.
And not only do cultures not lose anything by having other people imitate it, they actually gain.
Cultures gain influence, they gain power, they gain recognition by being, you know, quote-unquote, appropriated in this way.
And this is really obvious with the Irish dance thing, okay?
You know, Irish dance, traditional Irish dance.
Now it's being performed by a black woman in America, and it's getting media attention because of that.
Anyone who's a fan of Irish dance, whether you're Irish or not, you're not going to see that as a negative.
That's great!
Just more attention, more people getting involved in it.
You have younger generations, more diverse generations of people getting involved.
Fantastic!
Great stuff!
Why would anyone have a problem with that?
Well, it should be the same thing with a Chinese prom dress.
It's spreading the influence of that culture.
More people are getting exposed to it.
More people are saying, oh, this is a beautiful dress.
What could possibly be the problem with that?
To have someone seeing a dress, a traditional Chinese cultural dress, is like, that's beautiful!
I want more people to see this beautiful dress!
There's no way for a sane person to interpret that in a negative way.
But of course there are a lot of insane people in this culture.
So it's one way or the other.
If we don't want to cancel this young woman for doing Irish dance, which I certainly don't want to, then the only other option is to say we're going to cancel cultural appropriation.
The whole concept is cancelled.
We're getting rid of it because it's nonsense.
And if you like a part of someone else's culture and you want to imitate it, partake in it, whatever, go for it.
That's how cultures work.
Perfectly fine.
And we'll leave it there for now.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
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The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
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Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
We're watching the end of something, the end of the old Republican Party, the end of the Democrat Party's pretense that they're pro-American, and the end of our faith in our institutions.
