Ep. 549 - The Truth About The Police Shooting In Wisconsin
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, another police shooting caught on tape. Another round of rioting. Once again, the shooting is declared a racist murder right away. But, as we always try to do on this show, we’ll look at the actual facts of this case. They tell a very different story. Also Five Headlines including an NHL announcer getting suspended for an utterly innocuous joke that feminists have labeled “sexist.” And in our Daily Cancellation, we’ll talk about the incredibly misleading CBS poll that has the media accusing Republicans of murderous nihilism.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, another police shooting caught on tape, another round of rioting.
Once again, the shooting is declared a racist murder right away, as soon as the video comes out.
But as we always try to do on this show, we'll look at the actual facts of this case and see what they say, because they tell a different sort of story.
Also, five headlines, including an NHL announcer getting suspended for an utterly innocuous joke that feminists have labeled sexist.
And in our daily cancellation, we'll talk about the incredibly misleading CBS poll that has the media accusing Republicans of murderous nihilism.
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Well, So let's get into this.
As we continue to live through this never-ending Groundhog's Day, rioting and looting broke out in yet another city this weekend.
Black Lives Matter protesters, in big scare quotes there, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, burned, pillaged, destroyed, stole, all in the name of justice, of course.
Here's what some of that looked like.
Take a look.
Rioters also burned an entire car dealership.
You can take a look at the footage there.
And I think by far one of the most disturbing incidents from this round of rioting and really
any of the rioting we've seen is the apparent attempted murder of a police officer who was
hit directly in the head with a brick during the melee.
Now the rationalization, the excuse being offered for this
latest round of rioting and chaos is the police shooting of a man named Jacob Blake on Sunday.
At this point, not much is known about the circumstances surrounding the shooting.
But we'll show you now the video that has gone viral and prompted, allegedly, all of
this widespread rioting.
Now, media reports indicate that police arrived on the scene in response to a domestic disturbance.
They tried to arrest Blake, who resisted, even after a taser was used on him.
Blake then walked around his car with multiple officers pointing their weapons at him, as you saw, and he opened his door and reached inside and he was shot seven times at that point.
He's currently alive, though in critical condition.
Neighbors claim that Blake was trying to break up a fight between two women before the cops showed up.
That hasn't been confirmed, but it does appear that Blake Um, that there were multiple warrants out for Blake for multiple alleged crimes.
Were cops arresting him because of his involvement in the disturbance, or because of the warrants that were out for him, or both?
Who knows?
Apparently Blake has had other violent run-ins with police as well, including an incident in 2015 when he had to be subdued by a K-9 unit after pulling a gun at a bar.
Now it's not clear, again, whether police on the scene on Sunday knew about his violent history or his warrants or anything else.
What we're left with, for now, is a man who chose not to comply with lawful orders, instead opened his car door and leaned inside even as police guns were pointed at him at point blank range.
As always, the dearth of evidence and context has not stopped the media, protesters, politicians from leaping to drastic and firm conclusions.
The governor of Wisconsin, Tony Evers, has already tied the case to racism and essentially accused the officers of carrying out a racist hit on an innocent man.
Evers tweeted in part, Tonight, Jacob Blake was shot in the back multiple times in broad daylight in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Kathy and I joined his family, friends, and neighbors in hoping earnestly that he will not succumb to his injuries.
While we do not have all the details yet, what we know for certain is that he is not the first black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country.
I have said all along that although we must offer our empathy, equally important is our action.
In the coming days, we will demand that just that our elected officials in our state who have failed to recognize the racism in our state and our country for far too long.
Okay.
Needless to say, a decent human being who is interested in providing leadership rather than intentionally fanning the flames of anarchy would never use phrases like mercilessly and racism to describe an officer-involved shooting before he even has the details by his own admission.
But Tony Evers is not a decent human being or a leader.
Or a good man.
I mean, these are really bad people that are doing this, that are intentionally causing chaos and rioting, even after he knows that one of his police officers was nearly killed.
The people, you know, in the media and politics encouraging the chaos, that again has nearly killed a Kenosha police officer, also are not decent or good people.
Putting the politics and narrative aside then, what should we really think about this situation?
Well, the first thing we should keep in mind is that we've only heard one side of the story, and there's quite a lot we still don't know.
Here's a rather significant detail that's being treated as irrelevant somehow.
Did Blake have a gun in his car?
Media is reporting that he was unarmed, but they don't appear to have any firm basis for that characterization.
Blake went back to his car for something, for some reason, right?
Was it to retrieve a firearm?
He has a history of pulling guns.
Did he try it again here?
If he did, then case closed.
No honest person could possibly claim that a police shooting is unjustified when the suspect is reaching for a gun to use against the officers.
But what if there was no gun?
Then we're back to the original question.
Why was Blake going to his car and reaching inside?
Could there be any plausible or even imaginable innocent reason to resist arrest, walk to your car as police point their guns at you and tell you to stop, and then open your door and reach inside?
Is there a version of this story where Blake's actions are justified or innocuous?
I can't see what that version would be.
And more important than how I see this, or how you see it, we have to ask whether the police on the scene had good reason to suspect that Blake was reaching into his vehicle to grab a weapon.
The answer there is, without question, yes.
Again, why else would he be reaching into his car in that situation?
If you can scarcely come up with an innocent reason as you sit pondering it on your couch out of harm's way, how can we expect the officers to imagine an innocent reason while they're in the thick of it?
And even if they could imagine an innocent reason, are they expected to assume that his actions are innocent and stake their own lives on that gamble?
You know, anyone who doesn't understand why police would want to prevent you from reaching into your car during an arrest, need only watch this dash cam video from a highway stop in Pennsylvania for clarification on the matter.
And just a warning, it's very graphic here, but I think this is important because it's additional context for the way police are looking at this.
Look at this.
Okay, sir.
You're going 87 miles an hour.
All those costs are associated with the traffic citation, okay?
Okay.
Are you okay?
Alright.
I mean, it's... Okay.
Do me a favor.
Come over here.
Go ahead and place your hands behind your back.
Hey, thanks for your hands.
Oh!
Stop or she'll hit you!
I got him.
Keep the taser on.
Stop resisting!
what fuck
oh The shooter there Daniel Clary resisted arrest
Even through zaps from a taser eventually made it back to his car where he drew his gun and nearly killed two police
officers The Clary arrest and the Blake arrest are eerily similar in many respects, except that in one case it's the cops getting shot, in the other it's the suspect.
One excuse I've heard offered for Blake is that he was going back to his car because he wanted to get inside and drive away.
Well, I would note that driving away while there's a warrant for your arrest and cops are attempting to detain you is not a legal option.
Driving away in that case would be far from innocent.
Also, the family's lawyer, Benjamin Crump, who manages to involve himself in every high-profile police shooting in the country, says that Blake's kids were in the car.
Now, this is supposed to make Blake more sympathetic, but it does the opposite.
Why was Blake bringing the officers back to his car where his kids are sitting?
He knew they had their guns out.
Why would he want to put his own children in harm's way?
And if his plan was to drive away and get into a high-speed chase with kids in tow, that would in itself be justification for opening fire before he could get inside and endanger his children's lives in that way.
I don't see any excuse for Blake here.
I see a number of reasonable, possible excuses for the police officers.
Now, it's possible that more details could emerge that change the equation, and if so, then I'll change my opinion to comport with the facts.
The protesters, on the other hand, form their opinions completely separate from the facts, and no additional evidence or context can sway them from the conclusion they drew within five seconds of seeing the original video.
That is why our society is falling apart at the seams.
Not because of police shootings or racism or anything like that, but because a certain very large segment of the population doesn't care at all about the truth.
And it really is as simple as that.
And that's what we're witnessing.
And that is what is burning our cities as we speak.
Let's get to five headlines.
Reporting from CNN here, White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway announced Sunday evening
that she will leave her post at the end of the month while her husband, George Conway,
said he was withdrawing from the Lincoln Project, both citing a need to focus on their family.
CNN continues, quoting from a Kellyanne Conway statement, I will be transitioning from the White House at the end of this month.
George is also making changes.
We disagree about plenty, but we are reunited on what matters most, the kids.
Our four children are teens and tweens starting a new academic year in middle school and high school remotely from home for at least a few months.
As millions of parents nationwide know, kids doing school from home requires a level of attention and vigilance that is unusual at these times.
And then George Conway also tweeted that he'll be leaving the Lincoln Project.
And this all happens while one of, and CNN says, one of Conway's high school aged daughters has generated attention on social media about her family and their political views over the last several months.
Now, the high school aged daughter, by the way, I believe is 15.
And this is all newsworthy because of Conway's position and the fact that she's leaving it.
So, you know, fine, that part is newsworthy.
But all the rest of it, the family drama, the stuff with the child, all of that is none of our business and not relevant to anyone else but them.
And the way the media is using a 15-year-old girl to attack her parents, Well, it's redundant at this point to say, but the media, of course, has behaved disgracefully.
Not that they care, but just for the record, once again, it's happened.
And also, just so you know, a 15-year-old girl professing to hate her parents, there is nothing new about that.
Okay?
She can join the club with all the other 15-year-old girls in the country.
Now, it's unfortunate that this is a normal phase of adolescence in modern society, and we could talk about why that is and, you know, because I don't think it should be as normal as it is, but it is normal.
So, you know, the fact that her parents are high profile doesn't necessarily have anything to do with that whatsoever.
Okay.
NHL announcer Mike Milbury has been taken off of all NHL broadcasts for the remainder of the year because of a terrible, horribly offensive thing that he said while calling a hockey game on Friday.
We're going to roll the tape on that.
It's pretty rough.
I'm just telling you.
Hopefully I can play it without bleeping it out.
I don't know.
But this is really outrageous stuff.
Really bad.
Take a listen.
Yeah, that's it.
That's the whole thing.
That was it.
Millberry said that it's good there aren't women there because then they won't be disrupting the hockey players' concentration.
That was the joke.
to disrupt their concentration.
Yeah, that's it.
That's the whole thing.
That was it.
Milbury said that it's good there aren't women there because then they won't be disrupting
the hockey players' concentration.
That was all.
That was the joke.
Harmless, innocuous, nothing to it.
But that was shared by a female, I believe it was a female NHL reporter who was deeply
And then a bunch of other women all chimed in to say they are deeply, deeply offended.
Here's Emily Kaplan, another NHL reporter, talking about her own deep offense, which she feels so deeply and so offendedly.
Listen.
To be honest, it's highly disappointing.
It undermines anything that any woman who is in this industry does.
You know, the athletic came out with their 40 people in hockey under the age of 40.
And I was just impressed by how many women were on that list,
whether it was from scouting ranks, analytics.
Now we have an agent who's gonna represent the likely number one pick in the league, Keston Gay.
And when I look at Mac Milbury, this is a pattern of behavior.
This is not the first time he's made sexist comments.
It was so cavalier and natural the way he said it.
And he's in such a position of privilege and power.
There's so few people who do what he does.
And I just think it's a shame that we're giving someone like that a platform when they continue to say these things and alienate large swaths of people who can be hockey fans and can enjoy this great sport.
And, you know, I hope that NBC takes that into consideration.
You know, he said, well, there's no distraction to women in the bubble.
And I think he's talking about wives and spouses, but also at press conferences.
And I think Okay, I'm a woman that shows up for the press conference.
Does he consider me a distraction if I'm in the locker room?
Like, that's BS.
That's my job.
So yeah, you know, that makes me feel like hockey is not for me or I'm not welcome.
And, you know, we have these conversations a lot about race.
We do have it about gender.
We have it about sexuality.
And I think the important thing is that we keep having these conversations and we keep, the league needs to keep their eye on the prize and keep their eye on the ball and keep doing with initiatives.
Even if we don't have change right away, that doesn't mean we can stop.
Oh my gosh.
The irony here is that all of this only proves Milberry's point.
All of these women getting emotional and crying about a joke.
Or it proves a similar point, I should say.
I think what Milberry was getting at was that women can distract men sexually, which actually is a compliment to women.
If a man says that he's distracted by your beauty, that's a compliment.
I think any man in the country would love to be told that by women.
You know how any man would feel if they walked in and there's a group of women and he's told that he's a distraction because he's so good looking?
That's a compliment.
And I sometimes wonder, the type of women who get offended by these kinds of jokes Are they getting offended because they never hear comments like that and are jealous?
Is there some envy going on?
I don't know.
It's just one theory.
But there's another reason why a group of men might want to just have some time without the girls, and the reason is this.
So they can joke around and have some fun and say what they want without anyone getting emotional or taking things too seriously.
Now, granted, with the state of masculinity in this country, That's no guarantee anymore.
Just because it's a bunch of guys doesn't mean that you're not going to end up with someone crying and getting emotional these days.
But still, the likelihood is reduced dramatically if it's just the guys around.
So as I said, the irony is that these feminists are only proving the point exactly.
And I'll tell you another thing.
If you're a female sports reporter and you want to be accepted And pretty much the last thing you should do is start crying because a harmless, innocuous comment that you heard is sexist, according to you.
Like, when you start ranting about male privilege, do you really think the guys are going to want you around?
Why would they?
They're trying to play hockey.
Why would they particularly want someone around to lecture them about the patriarchy and sexism and male privilege and toxic masculinity?
It's probably not something they want.
Any more than if you're a woman and you're out with the girls, do you want a guy around to tell fart jokes?
Like when you're sitting around at the winery or whatever you're doing, is anyone at the table saying, hey, you know, I wish there was a guy here to fart?
That's what we're missing.
Probably not.
So, okay, let's go to our next one.
I think this is, what is this, number three?
I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but you may have heard about this asteroid that might hit the earth the day before the election day.
Great timing, of course, but turns out it's only six feet long and has less than a 1% chance of hitting.
And you know, so it's like at six feet, even if it hits, What are the chances that it does any significant damage?
So I'm sorry to ruin your Monday.
At this point, I feel like the universe is just toying with us, sort of tormenting us, dangling these asteroids in front of us, like, hey, bet you liked this, wouldn't you?
Sorry, it's hitting Mercury instead.
And then, you know, to make it worse, we look out at the night sky, and we see the moon over there, flaunting its crater-covered body, bragging at it all the time, And we have to see that, and it's difficult for me.
I'm sure it is for you as well.
Okay, let's go number four here.
Police arrested two women in Delaware who stole a seven-year-old's Trump hat outside the DNC.
The boy and his mom were protesting outside the DNC, and then here's the altercation that was caught on tape by the boy's mom and led to the arrest.
Watch.
Can you get off my property?
Get off my property?
Are you destroying my property?
Yes we are.
You know that's a felony?
We don't give a f*** about that one.
Get away from me.
Ask the f*** out.
Get it Liv.
Get it.
Touch my hat.
Take your f***ing hat.
F***ing hat.
That's somebody else's hat.
Take that f***ing hat.
Get your hat back baby.
Look at what you just did to my son.
Get your hat back, baby.
Get your hat back, baby.
I just wanted to sit on the floor.
We don't give a f***.
Your mom f***ing likes trust.
Give me back my hat.
F*** you.
Give me back my hat.
F*** you.
Give me back my hat.
You're gonna steal my property?
I'll follow you to your car and get your license plate.
Okay, so I'm glad that the two trashy women there got arrested, and they were obviously wrong for taking the boy's hat.
Bullying a seven-year-old boy when you're an adult is clearly... I don't know how to explain why that's wrong, but the mother is no victim in this.
Let's just be clear about that as well.
The boy is a victim, but he's a victim of all three women involved, the mother and the two others.
So let me just state this very simply.
There is no good reason, no good reason ever, To involve your young children in politics.
Bringing a seven-year-old boy to counter-protest the DNC convention and dressing him in Trump gear is an absolutely inexcusably crappy parenting decision.
I would never in a million years do that.
I have seven-year-olds.
I go into contentious environments where there might be serious pushback, whether it's a protest or I'm speaking at a college or something.
I would never bring my kid.
And it's not that if I brought my kid and my kid was attacked, it's not the fault of the protesters for doing it.
No, it would be their fault.
But I'm not going to bring my kid in as some sort of guinea pig.
I'm not going to take a gamble, take a chance.
I would never, ever do that.
Why?
Because I love my kids, I want to keep them out of harm's way.
There's just no possible way that this could benefit them.
There's only downside, there's no upside whatsoever.
So leave your kids out of politics.
Just leave them out of this garbage.
And using your kid as bait to get a reaction so you can film it for clicks, which I believe is what happened here, let's not be naive, is disgusting.
And I hate it.
I hate everything about it.
Notice how the mom actively involves the kid every step of the way.
Go get your hat back, baby.
Go get your hat back.
No, you get it back.
You're the adult.
What do you say to a seven-year-old to go retrieve his stolen property from an adult?
That would be like if I was in my house, and I looked out my window, and I saw, you know, my kid's bike is on the front lawn.
I see a man drive up and try to steal the bike, and I yell to my seven-year-old, hey, go get your bike.
Go get your bike.
Go get it.
I'll wait in here and film it.
This will be good for YouTube.
No.
I wouldn't do that because, again, I care about my children's well-being.
I'm the adult.
If there's an adult situation, I will handle it.
I keep my kids out of it.
And that's what we should all do.
Let your kids be kids.
Your seven-year-old doesn't need to be spending his nights holding signs outside the DNC.
He doesn't even understand what the signs say or anything.
He doesn't know anything about this.
He's seven years old.
He should be running around the yard, you know, making a tree fort or something.
Even playing video games would be better than this.
Let him be a kid.
Just let him alone, for God's sake.
All right.
Finally, let's go to this.
I thought this was just wonderful in many ways and also relatable.
I've never related to LeBron James really at all until I saw this clip.
So you're holding the autobiography of Malcolm X along with Alex Haley.
I don't know how far you are into the book, but what's your biggest takeaway so far?
I kind of just started a couple days ago.
But I've read a lot of notes over the years.
It's my first time actually reading this from start to finish.
But just a very, very smart man.
Very, very, very smart man.
And basically, his words in the 60s and what was going on is actually what's going on today still.
Him understanding how powerful the Negro can be.
He used that word a lot.
How powerful we are.
But we have to unite.
And we have to be together.
We have to stand strong.
Because there's always going to be obstacles.
There's always going to be Things are going to be thrown at us where they try to weaken us.
They try to make us feel like we're not kings and queens.
And it's gonna come from all different races and different shapes and sizes and things of that nature.
And just a very powerful minded gentleman.
That's just great there.
I mean, he didn't read the book at all, obviously.
And the first clue is that he's holding it during the post-game conference.
Why does he have his book with him?
Did he think he was going to be able to read a few chapters in between each question?
But like I said, I relate to that, painfully so.
It reminds me of, well, pretty much every day in English class when I was a kid, a teacher would call on me.
So, Matt, we were supposed to read Chapter 3 of To Kill a Mockingbird last night.
What were your impressions of the chapter?
Chapter 3?
Oh, yeah.
Well, geez.
Chapter 3.
My goodness.
Chapter three.
Am I right?
Chapter three.
It's just, you know, the main thing about chapter three is just like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's like, it's, you're, you're part of the way into the story, but you're not, but there's still so much of the story.
And so like, there's so much that's, that's happening that has happened.
And, but there's a lot that will happen.
And so the main thing is just like the threeness of chapter three is what jumps out at me, you know?
And it never, I never got, I got better at BSing as I got older, but I never got much better than that, unfortunately.
And neither did LeBron James.
But I will mention just one note for the kids.
If, when you have school reading, you should actually do it.
Don't take your lessons from me.
And actually, I discovered when I left school that I really enjoy reading.
I just enjoy it when I'm not being forced to do it, and I can read books that I really care about.
So it's funny how that works.
Anyway, uh, so there's maybe a, we'll have to check in with LeBron James in a little bit to get his full book report.
We're going to go to daily cancellation in just a second, but, um, if you haven't heard by now, Joe Biden is officially the Democrat party's presidential nominee for 2020.
Very exciting.
We know this because they made me watch his acceptance speech at the DNC last week.
And it was the, Worst thing I've ever had to do.
And you might say that speaks to a very comfortable life.
Maybe.
Or it could just speak to how horrible the DNC convention was.
Maybe both.
They said that they had a good reason for me doing this, though, because I was hosting All Access Live over at DailyWire.com with our All Access members, DailyWire's most exclusive membership tier.
All Access members get to join these All Access Live sessions where one of our hosts Hops on every night to chat with you both in live stream and in the comments.
Usually these sessions are casual hangouts, but on special occasions, we host watch parties like that one.
This Thursday, August 27th, we'll do it again.
Live stream and all access live watch party for the final night of the RNC hosted by Michael Knowles.
The live stream will start at 845 a few minutes before the convention kicks off.
So make sure you tune in for that.
Dailywire.com slash Walsh right now to get signed up.
20% off all access with coupon code access at Dailywire.com slash Walsh with coupon code access to get 20% off your membership.
Today for our Daily Cancellation, we will be cancelling the pollsters at CBS.
Now, the media and the left were engaged in more of their customary performative hysterics yesterday over the results of a recent CBS poll.
As a quick side note here, this is yet another poll for which I was not contacted.
I have never been contacted about any poll or survey ever in my life.
Neither has anyone in my family or anyone I've ever asked.
Do they just poll the same 600 people?
Where do they keep these?
Are they being held in a dungeon somewhere?
Or maybe like a robotic womb a la The Matrix?
But these are questions for another day, I suppose.
In any case, this poll asked respondents about the coronavirus.
I don't know how they would even know about the virus from their Matrix womb, but that, again, is beside the point.
One of the questions was this.
This is how it was framed.
The number of U.S.
deaths from the coronavirus has been, and then the options are, acceptable or unacceptable.
And as you can see, 50% of Republicans said it was acceptable, while 90% of Democrats bravely took a stand and said, no, no, death is unacceptable.
Entirely unacceptable.
I will not accept it.
And I guess this explains why I don't get called for polls, because if they had asked me, I would have said option C. The poll question is unacceptable because it's stupid and incoherent and has absolutely no function or purpose except to trap Republicans into saying exactly what 57% of them did say.
Acceptable?
What the hell could that possibly mean in this context?
To call something acceptable is to say that you accept it.
And to say that you accept it is to say that you will allow it, you will tolerate it, you will bear it.
So what else could a death toll be other than acceptable?
Phrased another way, what choice do I have but to accept it?
1,500 people died when the Titanic sank.
Is that acceptable to me?
Well, it's sad.
I don't like it.
I wish it hadn't happened.
But now that it has, do I accept it?
I suppose so.
What other choice do I have?
If I say no, I don't, you know, oh no, I don't accept a Titanic death toll.
Okay, then what does that mean?
What does that amount to?
Can I cause those lives to regenerate by refusing to accept their loss?
Will the ship emerge from the icy depths?
Fully intact because Matt Walsh has announced that its sinking was simply unacceptable to him?
Everything that has happened in the past is acceptable to you because it must be.
It might also be horrible, infuriating, outrageous, tragic, terrible, a million other things, but it must also be acceptable because you have literally no other option besides begrudging acceptance.
You know, try conducting a poll on an airplane after both engines have failed and it's plummeting to the earth.
Ask the passengers if gravity is acceptable to them.
I'm sure a lot of them will say no, but sadly gravity will still be gravity and they're still going to be going down whether they accept it or not.
So the dichotomy of acceptable versus unacceptable is meaningless here.
There's a reason why nobody ever polls to ask how many cancer deaths are acceptable, or diabetes deaths, or heart disease, or car accidents.
If they did, you might think, on one hand, no deaths are acceptable.
Death itself is unacceptable.
But on the other, if you possess even the slightest capacity for honest self-reflection and assessment, you will see that inevitabilities don't care whether you accept them or not.
Now, you could argue that what this question is really trying to ask is whether the respondents think the response to the coronavirus was acceptable, whether more could have been done, whether steps could have been taken to save some of those lives, whether the policies put in place were effective or not, et cetera.
But those are not the questions that were asked.
Those questions could have been asked, have been asked, but this question is different.
This is asking whether you accept What has already occurred?
They might as well ask you whether you accept that the color blue is not the color red.
You might say that I'm playing a game of semantics here, splitting hairs, missing the larger point.
But if you say that, I would say that it is you who is missing the larger point.
Because the fact that the question makes no real sense is exactly the point.
It's why it was posed in the first place.
There is no right answer to a nonsense question.
And there can only be one reason why pollsters would pose a nonsense question.
It's because they can frame the answer however they want.
It becomes like some sort of strange reverse Rorschach test type of thing.
But let's pretend for a moment that this question had been posed about the future.
Rewind the clock back.
What if they'd been asked whether 170,000 potential deaths in the future would be acceptable?
Maybe if you want to be generous, you'd say that that's what the poll question is getting at.
It's asking, if you could go back in time to before the deaths occurred, would you consider 170,000 plus deaths acceptable?
Of course, again, if that's what they meant to ask, they could have asked it, but let's pretend they did.
Would that make more sense?
No, not at all.
Past deaths obviously can only be acceptable to us because they are facts, and one can only accept facts or shut his eyes and think happy thoughts instead, but not a lot of good that does.
What about future deaths?
Those aren't facts yet.
Can we talk about acceptable versus unacceptable in that context?
No, we can't.
Or we can, but it will be a totally arbitrary and meaningless conversation.
170,000 deaths is a lot.
You say it's unacceptable.
Fine.
What amount of death from the coronavirus would have been acceptable to you?
And how did you arrive at that figure?
Would you have insisted that zero people are allowed to die from this?
Even one death is unacceptable?
Okay, but was that ever an option?
Was there ever even a theoretical possibility of no one in America dying from the global pandemic?
Probably not.
So, what is your acceptable figure?
And how did you arrive at that number?
Let's pull something out of the blue.
Let's say 50,000.
Would that have been acceptable?
If you say yes, then I'd have to ask how you know that 50,000 was ever in the cards, ever possible.
And whether it was or wasn't, 50,000 is still a lot.
It sounds horrible to say that 50,000 deaths are acceptable.
Just like it sounds horrible to say that of 170,000 deaths, or any amount of death.
There just is no way to ever attach the word acceptable to death, any death in any number, that won't sound bizarre, callous, and somewhat sociopathic.
That's because, again, acceptable versus unacceptable is a meaningless dichotomy in this realm, and wherever we draw the line between the two, it will be unavoidably arbitrary.
But I do think there's something deeper going on here, deeper than a dumb and pointless question.
Our reaction to this pandemic, to this confrontation with a mortal threat, and thus a confrontation with the fact of our own mortality, has revealed again that we are a culture totally unwilling to accept the reality of death or confront it in an honest way.
In fact, it turns out lots of us really do think that not accepting death is a viable option.
Which is why many people support the idea of locking down all of society and hiding in our homes indefinitely.
Economy be damned.
Thousands of small businesses be damned.
Personal liberty be damned.
Constitution be damned.
Everything be damned.
As long as we can avoid, at all costs, any amount of physical risk.
We cannot bring ourselves to face the fact that this disease is out there, that it will probably always be out there in some form, and that people will die from it.
That we can and should take steps to mitigate the risk to some extent, but that society still must function, and that as society functions, people will die from this and a million other things.
We can't face that, because we're so terrified of and overwhelmed by the very idea of our own mortality.
We will not say to ourselves, I might die, and I accept that.
And we mock anyone who does say it as though they're suicidal nihilists, when in fact those, you know, they're saying it or only acknowledging a fact that applies to us too, no matter what we do.
Because we cannot escape mortality any more than we can escape the waves on the ocean while we sail across it.
Another example of this feeble refusal to accept the inevitable can be found in climate alarmism.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this weekend tweeted in response to the news that two hurricanes might strike the Gulf Coast at the same time and she said, talk to me again about how a Green New Deal goes too far to address the problem.
This is a woman who really believes that a piece of legislation can stop hurricanes.
It's not an exaggeration to say that climate alarmists like her think we can legislate hurricanes away.
They believe we can raise our hands and halt the winds and calm the seas like gods.
Our utter powerlessness in the face of these natural forces is too much for them to accept.
Our smallness and finitude and vulnerability against the scale of the whole Earth and cosmos is so terrifying that they try to reduce it all down to a problem for bureaucrats in DC to handle.
They might as well hold a congressional hearing to come up with a strategy to stop our galaxy from colliding with Andromeda in five billion years.
The refusal to face the inevitable and the unstoppable, especially that most inevitable and unstoppable of things, mortality, has been a driving force for human society since the birth of consciousness.
But in our society in particular, the force is very strong.
And never has that been more obvious than right now.
And that is why Wait, who was canceled at the beginning of all this?
Oh, yeah.
CBS pollsters are canceled.
And we'll leave it there.
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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