Ep. 552 - The Media Narrative In The Jacob Blake Shooting Begins To Crumble
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the media narrative in the Jacob Blake shooting is falling apart. As the truth emerges, the story we were originally told appears wrong or misleading on a number of key points. But that doesn’t matter to the rioters, who consider truth to be an irrelevant detail. Also Five Headlines including the nun at the RNC convention last night sent in to do battle against the DNC’s fake nun. There was a clear victor. And in our Daily Cancellation, I will cancel the New York Times for an article that asks us to feel sorry for men who get caught by police while trying to have sex with children.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, the media narrative in the Jacob Blake shooting is falling apart.
As the truth emerges, the story we were originally told appears wrong or misleading on a number of key points, and we'll talk about that today.
But it doesn't matter to the rioters who consider truth to be irrelevant detail to them, and same for the media.
Also, five headlines, including the none At the RNC convention last night, sent in to do battle against the DNC's fake nuns.
Spiritual battle.
And there was a clear victor, I think.
And in our daily cancellation, I will cancel the New York Times for an article that asks us to feel sorry for men who get caught by police while trying to have sex with children.
Yes, really.
All of that coming up and much more.
Pac's show today, a lot to cover.
We will begin here.
Only hours after the shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha police, the narrative had already solidified.
That's all it takes these days.
Sometimes not even hours.
A narrative can take shape in mere minutes.
But in this case, in spite of the fact that all we had to go on was a short video of police shooting a man while he leaned inside his car, the media had rendered its verdict.
Jacob Blake was an unarmed victim, gunned down by police after he stopped to innocently break up a fight between two other people.
Well, there were questions though.
Was he unarmed?
Was he breaking up a fight?
Why was he reaching into the car?
What exactly happened between Blake and the police right before the shooting?
And why were the police there in the first place?
These were open questions.
And now the answers to those questions are finally coming to light.
And, you know, it should not surprise us that the answers don't line up with the narrative as they So let's go through what we know.
First of all, according to Wisconsin media outlet, Madison 365, which obtained audio from the police scanner
on the night of the shooting, Blake's girlfriend had called 911
to report that Blake was at her home and was not supposed to be there
and had taken her keys and wouldn't give them back.
Police responding to the scene were informed that Blake had an open warrant for his arrest.
It had been previously reported rather quietly by the media that Blake was wanted for sexual assault,
trespassing and domestic abuse as well.
Now, this fact alone doesn't directly vindicate the officers, but the scanner audio is significant
First of all, it shows that the eyewitnesses who claimed that Blake was breaking up a fight were wrong.
Those eyewitnesses were apparently lying, or if we want to be generous and see the best in people, assume the best, we'll say they were mistaken.
The police were summoned to the scene because of, apparently, Blake's own actions.
Of course, it shouldn't be a revelation that eyewitness reports are often unreliable, especially where high-profile police shootings are concerned.
We should always keep in mind that the Black Lives Matter organization rose to prominence on the back of false eyewitness reports in Ferguson about Michael Brown putting up his hands and yelling, hands up, don't shoot.
If it wasn't for that original false report and false narrative, who knows where we'd be today?
Would we have all of this chaos in writing?
I don't know.
Unfortunately, there's even more reason, though, these days to doubt eyewitness reports as these shootings are not happening in a vacuum.
Witnesses on the scene know what sorts of things they should say in order to frame the narrative in an unfavorable light for police.
We don't know if the apparent false information in this case was intentional or not.
But the temptation to give false information in this intensely anti-police environment must be very strong.
This is only added on top of the well-established fact that eyewitness reports in general are incredibly inaccurate.
And that's something that we've known for a long time.
Also, the fact that Blake had apparently taken someone's keys Raises more critical questions about what he was doing when he walked to the car where his kids were reportedly sitting and opened the door with police guns trained on him.
Was he reaching for something?
Was it even his car?
Did he intend to drive away?
Now it seems there could have been, potentially, more than one reason why police would want to open fire, or would have a reason to open fire.
If he was going for a weapon of some kind, that would be clear justification for an equal response from police.
If he, as a wanted sexual and domestic abuser, was about to flee the scene with a van full of kids, possibly involving the children in a dangerous high-speed chase, that could be another reason for police to stop him by whatever means necessary.
Or if the police had reason to suspect, good reason to suspect, either of those Possibilities, and that could be a reason for them, too.
And then the other shoe dropped later on, yeah, later yesterday.
The Wisconsin DOJ finally released some information that filled in most of the rest of the puzzle.
We're told that when police arrived on the scene, they tried to arrest Blank.
He resisted.
They tried to use non-lethal measures, a taser.
He resisted that, too.
He told them he had a knife in his possession.
He went to his car while they screamed for him to stop.
He reached.
They shot.
Then they recovered a knife on the floorboard of his car.
So it's a review.
Wanted domestic abuser.
Girlfriend calls police on him.
Police come to make the arrest.
He resists, fights back, goes to his car, reaches in, knife is recovered.
Was he already holding the knife?
Was he reaching for it?
Was he reaching for something else and the knife just happened to be there?
There are still aspects of the story that remain unclear, but it's a very, very different story from what we were initially told.
Except none of that seems to matter to the left or the rioters, and we're going to talk more about that in a minute.
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Okay.
Now that the truth is coming out about the Jacob Blake shooting, You know, you would expect maybe, if you didn't know any better, that that would make a difference to the rioters.
Of course it doesn't.
It doesn't make a difference to them or anybody else on the left, because truth and conclusions drawn have no necessary relationship.
All they care about are anecdotes and stories.
It could be an out-of-context anecdote.
It could be a completely false anecdote.
None of that matters.
And the problem is that when people think this way, that generalized conclusions can be made based on random, cherry-picked anecdotes, it's almost impossible to reason with them because these are, by every definition, unreasonable people, either not capable of or simply not interested in engaging in any kind of critical analysis at all.
Here's a great example of that problem.
Lots of people have sent me a video which supposedly shows that the Blake shooting was racist.
It's not a video of that shooting.
It's a different police incident.
And one tweet of this video sent to me, meant to debunk my take on the Blake shooting, has over 20,000 retweets.
And the caption says, I mean, here's a video of a white man doing the exact same thing and not being shot once, let alone seven times.
Let's take a look at the clip.
but watch.
He's trying not to use his gun.
Car. Yeah.
Yeah.
you Okay, so you have this supposedly revealing contrast there.
In one case, the white guy gets in the car, chases after the cop, gets in another car, doesn't get shot.
In the other case, the black man reaching into a car does get shot.
What does that prove?
Well, absolutely nothing at all of relevance.
All it proves is that, in the first case, that particular police officer didn't shoot.
In the other, those particular police officers did.
Now, if you could show me that the first officer in the first case has fired on black people in the same situation, then you might have something.
But what you would have there is only an indictment of that particular cop, not cops generally.
These are mere anecdotes.
Different people, different places, different times, different situations.
And two can play at this game.
That's the problem with drawing conclusions from anecdotes.
Anyone can do it.
And then it becomes an anecdotal battle, flinging anecdotes back and forth across the divide as we huddle in our trenches.
If I wanted to, I could show you the police shooting of Daniel Shaver, a white man, gunned down, unarmed, on his knees, begging for his life.
Um, I could juxtapose that against video of a black man being much more aggressive and not being shot by cops.
Maybe I could show you a rioter throwing a brick at police or something like that.
Remember that police officer who was bashed in the head with a brick by rioters in Kenosha on Sunday night?
You might not remember because it's already like it never happened.
We don't talk about it.
But the attempted cop killer in that case, um, didn't get shot.
I don't know what his race was, but it's a thing.
I don't even know if he's been arrested.
So, could I look at that and draw some kind of conclusion about the way cops responded?
No, I can't.
I've merely shown that in one case, something happened, and in another, something else happened.
To make more general statements and to form conclusions on a larger, less isolated scale, that's when you enter the realm of statistics.
And you need huge sets of data, and then you need to compare that data set against the other data set, and you have to make sure that you've set parameters and you've taken all the various factors into account that might skew your results.
Now, as it happens, I have done that. Others have done it too when it comes to the issue of
supposed systemic racism in policing. You can look at the number of black people arrested in
a given year versus white people. You can look at the percentage who wind up getting shot by
police. If you do that, you'll find the percentage is nearly identical between white and black
people. You can look at the overall number of unarmed police shootings every year for all races.
And when you do that, you'll find that it's quite a rare occurrence and most of the supposedly unarmed shootings, or many of them anyway, aren't really unarmed at all because the unarmed person was using some other weapon, such as a vehicle, to inflict harm or threaten officers.
You can do that.
I've done it.
It's the only way to confirm or disconfirm claims about systemic bias and racism.
One other brief point, since we're on the subject of knocking down anecdotes, let's do one more because this one is one that I see a lot and it's pretty annoying because it's so ridiculous.
And you've probably seen this too.
Here's an example, a tweet from a guy named Austin Duke saying, so the F what, Matt?
It still doesn't justify seven damn shots.
What's so hard to understand about that?
When a mass murderer is taken to Burger King in the country, in this country, but black folks dying over $20 in cigarettes, that's a problem.
Seven shots isn't acceptable and we won't accept that.
Now, this is a reference, of course, to Dylann Roof, who is the racist mass murderer.
The point being made here, again, a common point, is that Dylann Roof killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston and yet was taken alive, while, insert whatever cherry-picked example, Jacob Blake, George Floyd, et cetera, was killed or shot.
But what are the differences between these cases?
You might say, Roof was white.
That's the difference.
Okay.
Sure.
Maybe under normal circumstances they would have shot the mass murderer dead, but decided not to because he's white.
Maybe.
Or maybe he survived, Roof did, because he surrendered peacefully.
And maybe most, the vast majority of these high-profile police shootings end up being police shootings because the suspects in question do not surrender peacefully.
Perhaps that's the difference.
And that would explain why, for example, the Beltway snipers, black mass murderers, killed 17 people in a racially motivated killing spree, were also taken alive.
Because they also surrendered peacefully.
A great many black killers, white killers, Asian killers, Hispanic killers, all kinds of killers have been taken by police alive.
And the reason is usually that they surrender peacefully.
Now, certainly there are some criminals who don't surrender peacefully and are still taken alive.
And if you have proof That black criminals who don't surrender peacefully are significantly more likely to die than white criminals who don't surrender peacefully?
Then show me that proof.
The burden of proof is on you as the person making the claim.
If you cannot meet the burden of proof, it is reasonable for me to conclude that the thing which most determines a person's fate when they're being arrested is how they choose to act in that moment.
And that really makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
But why do I waste my breath?
None of this matters to the people advancing the narrative, which is why they will continue to protest for Jacob Blake, raise him up as a hero in spite of whatever facts are known or become known in the future.
I mean, my God, they rioted in Minneapolis last night after a wanted murderer killed himself as police closed in, committed suicide.
Even that, somehow, is police brutality.
The truth is irrelevant to these rioters and insurrectionists.
They only want to destroy.
They are filled with hatred, envy, and aggression, and they will take any excuse they can find to let it out.
But the truth remains all the same, and we have to continue to speak it, and defend it, and let its banner wave, because someone in this country has to still care about the truth.
And that's the only hope we really have.
Let's get to five headlines.
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Today.
Okay.
So the RNC convention last night, night three, I hosted our all access watch party.
I think we had a good time.
Um, and I was really happy that our all access members had an opportunity, uh, you know, had the special treat of listening to me all night.
So that was wonderful for them.
And there were even a few good speakers during the convention as well.
I thought, um, now I'm, I'm biased admittedly, but I, I thought the star, Of the night, the best speech was from Sister Deirdre Byrne.
She's an army colonel, a doctor, and a nun.
It kind of sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it's all rolled into one, so she's all of those.
And she got up to speak, and she did not disappoint at all.
Take a listen.
While we tend to think of the marginalized as living beyond our borders, the truth is the largest marginalized group in the world can be found here in the United States.
They are the unborn.
As Christians, we first met Jesus as a stirring embryo in the womb of an unwed mother and saw him born nine months later in the poverty of the cave.
It's no coincidence that Jesus stood up for what was just and was ultimately crucified because what he said wasn't politically correct or fashionable.
As followers of Christ, we are called to stand up for life against the politically correct or fashionable of today.
We must fight against a legislative agenda that supports and even celebrates destroying life in the womb.
Keep in mind, the laws we create define how we see our humanity.
And we must ask ourselves, what are we saying when we go into a womb and snuff out an innocent, powerless voice's life?
As a physician, I can say without hesitation, life begins at conception.
That's awesome.
And you know I'm going to like that.
That is right in my wheelhouse.
And I have to tell you, just so you know, If you're not Catholic, what you just saw there, that's a real nun, okay?
She's got the habit.
She's defending the unborn.
She's very kind and gentle, but you get the impression that she could whoop your ass if she needed to.
So those are nun vibes, okay?
It's total nun vibes.
Contrast that with the fake nun at the DNC dressed like a secretary praying to the sky goddess or whatever she was doing.
So, you know, just all you need is that contrast.
And I know which nun I'm gonna choose in the celebrity deathmatch.
Other than that, I thought there were other good moments, some good speeches.
I also thought there were missed opportunities, and I think there have been some missed opportunities all throughout the RNC convention.
Now, yeah, they've talked about supporting the police, they've talked about the riots and chaos, they've talked about law and order.
I think there should be an even greater emphasis on that.
I mean, we are right now, the RNC convention is happening, they've got three hours of primetime coverage while Democrats are burning down the city in Kenosha.
And so I think that, I think there's a real opportunity there.
To focus intensely and show people what's happening with specificity.
Not just saying, oh, at this point when you say rioting, it almost doesn't mean anything to people.
We're numb to it.
I think you need to get into specifics and talk about specific things that are happening.
And then call out Democrats by name who refuse to condemn it or who have actually actively encouraged it.
There's been a little bit of that, some of that, I think there should be more.
Okay, number two, CNN has been a parody of itself, of course, for years now, but what I'm about to show you is so embarrassing and disgraceful that the phrase beyond parody scarcely begins to cover it.
Watch.
What you're seeing behind me is one of multiple locations that have been burning in Kenosha, Wisconsin, over the course of the night.
A second night since Jacob Blake was seen shot in the back seven times by a police officer.
And what you are seeing now, these images, came and come in stark contrast to what we saw over the course of the daytime hours in Kenosha and into the early evening, which were largely peaceful demonstrations in the face of law enforcement.
It wasn't until night fell that things began to get a little bit more contentious.
Things were thrown back and forth.
Police started using some of those crowd dispersal tactics like tear gas, even playing very loud sounds to push them out.
And then what you were seeing the common theme that ties all of this together is an expression of anger and frustration over what people feel like has become An all-too-familiar story playing out in places from across the country, not just here in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Fiery, but mostly peaceful protests, CNN says, as a literal fire rages in the background.
It makes you wonder if they were reporting live from the Titanic.
A pleasant cruise, but a little damp.
That's probably what they would say.
You know, people sometimes ask questions like, is there really anything new about biased media?
You know, having a media more interested in propaganda than truth, is that new?
I mean, has it?
And the answer is no, of course it's not.
As long as there has been anything like a news media, it's been biased and there's been propaganda.
I think the difference now between now and other periods in the past is that These days the media really just has no concern for the truth at all.
Period.
They aren't even worried about looking like they're telling the truth.
And this largely is a reflection of our post-truth culture where relativism reigns supreme and many of the people in this country I honestly believe that truth is fluid and can be whatever they want it to be, and the media reflects that.
I think the media, in fact, reflects it more than it drives it.
The media is a symptom of the underlying, you know, moral relativism, not more than it is a cause of that.
Let's go to number three.
As you probably heard by now, the 17-year-old who killed two rioters, Kyle Rittenhouse is his name, has been arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Now, we haven't seen... Here's what it comes down to for me.
First-degree murder is the charge.
We haven't seen, as far as I'm aware, any video that shows anything other than self-defense.
There are multiple videos out there of Rittenhouse and of the two incidents that occurred.
Now, if there's something floating around out there, evidence of an actual first-degree murder, I haven't seen it, and I've looked.
There's still a question mark here.
A pretty big one.
The second shooting, the one that was caught vividly and close up on camera, that, to my mind, clearly self-defense.
Non-controversial.
He's falling.
They're chasing.
One of the riders also has a gun.
He falls.
They try to pounce on him.
Then he opens fire.
Self-defense all the way.
I think that part of it, any defense attorney is going to have no problem handling that.
You could hire me as your defense attorney.
My legal education involves watching Better Call Saul.
That's all I got.
And even I could probably get you clear on those charges.
But then you have the first shooting.
And that's the one that wasn't clearly caught on tape as far as I know.
I think from what we have seen, there are strong indications of self-defense, but I don't think we fully know yet.
Here's what we do know, though, sadly.
Kyle Rittenhouse is screwed.
No matter what.
Even if he's innocent, which he very well may be.
But even then, he's still screwed.
Because our media and system is rigged against people like him.
And they're going to make an example of him.
All the people talking about problems in the system, they're right.
There are serious problems in the system.
It's just not the problem they're talking about.
Number four, the New York Post reports that a taxidermist in England has now unveiled his latest work.
It's called Potable High Five Machines.
And they're made using limbs from rodents, apparently.
And reading out from the article, it says, his inspiration came from wanting to help people who like to celebrate and greet each other with a high-five, but are concerned about doing so during coronavirus.
He said, they're called potable high-five machines and are made out of rat legs.
He said, I've been skinning rats to make other things, but I accidentally tore off one of the legs when I was making an abominable snowman, which have heads made from rat scrotums.
I don't want to waste it or just throw it into my tub of odd toes and scraps of ballsack, so I thought it might be nice to make a portable high-five machine.
Okay, well, that makes sense.
Personally, I don't know why you wouldn't take your tub of toes and ballsack and make, like, a nice stew or even a dip for your Tostitos to serve when your fellow serial killers come over for the game on Sunday.
Now, let's take a look at this creation here.
There it is.
There's the high-five machine.
Absolutely horrifying.
Imagine waking up tied to a chair in somebody's root cellar and you look around and you see that.
You see that right there.
What would you think?
And then you look to the other side of the room and you see little snowmen made from rat scrotum.
And then you say to the other person tied up in the room with you, hey, it looks like that snowman is made from a rat scrotum.
And they say to you, how can you so easily identify a rat scrotum?
And you say, because this is my basement.
And then you take out your axe and kill him.
Twist ending.
You didn't see that coming.
Got a little dark there at the end.
All right.
Number five.
Finally, a video has gone viral.
I'm not sure who this girl is or even if this is supposed to be a joke or not, but people are taking it seriously and are mocking this girl.
My perspective on it might surprise you a little bit.
I don't know.
But first, watch this.
I was just doing my makeup for work, and I just wanted to tell you guys about how I don't think math is real.
And I know that, like, it's real because we all, like, learned it in school or whatever, but who came up with this concept?
And you're gonna be like, Pythagoras!
But how?
How did he come up with this?
He was living in, like, the I don't know, whenever he was living.
But it was not now, where you can like have technology and stuff, you know?
Like, he didn't even have plumbing.
And he was like, let me worry about y equals mx plus b. Which, first of all, how would you even figure that out?
How would you, like, start on the concept of algebra?
Like, what did you need it for?
You know?
Because like, I get like addition, like, hey, if I take two apples and then add three, it's five, you know?
But how would you come up with the concept of, like, algebra?
Because what would you need it for?
You know what I mean?
Like, what would you need it for back then?
You didn't need it, so why would you come up with it?
Now, of course, people are sharing that and mocking her for being an idiot.
That seems to be the consensus.
But I'm going to unironically, and I have to say that because no one can ever tell when I'm being ironic or not.
So unironically, I will defend her here.
Because what she's posing is actually a very intelligent question, and one that philosophers and mathematicians have been debating for thousands of years.
In fact, the people that are calling her stupid have only revealed their own stupidity.
Oftentimes, you can tell how dumb someone is By how they react to an abstract point or question like this.
That's a stupid question.
No, it's just you're stupid.
So you don't understand why that's actually a really intelligent question.
Is math real?
That is not a stupid... Einstein wondered about the same thing.
Was he stupid?
There is a debate about whether math is innate to the universe, a fundamental facet of reality, or whether it's a human construct.
In other words, is math invented by people or did we discover it?
Entire philosophical theories have been built around the idea that math is not innate, that it was invented, which is what the girl here is suggesting.
And I don't happen to agree.
I think math is innate, and mathematics is just the process of noticing and sort of attaching symbols to these innate patterns in the universe.
So math is real but symbolic.
You know, we use a little sideways M to denote the fact that there are three units of something.
We could use any symbol for that, so that's symbolic, but it is still a fact.
And that there are three, or whatever word and symbol you want to use to denote it.
But what the girl is demonstrating here is a capacity for abstract thought.
Just the practice of taking something basic and questioning why it exists, or if it exists.
Or why it needs to exist.
That's a capacity that I think we should encourage in young people.
And I think one of the problems with the public education system is that it's not encouraged.
You know, if you're in math class and you're learning algebra and you raise your hand and say, you know, and start asking philosophical questions about whether this is, you know, a fundamental pattern of the universe or whether this was invented or what's, you know, there's not going to be time to get into that with you and you're just going to be told to shut up and do your assignment.
But these are exactly the questions that I think young people should be encouraged to think about and talk about.
I think most people never wonder about these things because they're not intellectually curious and their brains can't deal very well in the abstract.
But when you see this, I think when we see this in kids, we should encourage it and not go, you moron, what an idiot, and make farting noises in their faces.
I don't think that's the right response when young people are asking abstract questions.
That's just me though.
That's my thought.
All right.
We're going to get to our daily Cancellation right now.
For our daily cancellation, we're going to cancel the New York Times for a lengthy article, quite lengthy, must be 8,000 words or more, just published yesterday.
Here's the headline.
Convicted of sex crimes but with no victims.
An online sting operation to catch child predators snared hundreds of men, but what were they really guilty of?
Now, if you think that those of us who warn of the normalization of pedophilia and the sexualization of children are suffering from paranoid delusions, you should really pay attention here.
The article talks about sting operations conducted by law enforcement to catch sex predators.
And it focuses especially on Operation Net Nanny, which is the initiative in Washington State where sex predators are lured to a house to catch a predator, style, and arrested, although it's not on TV.
This is all just a law enforcement operation.
But it's quite clear that the writer of this article, Michael Winnerip, wants us to feel sorry for these men who get caught.
And he appears to see this tactic of trapping potential sex predators as unjust and unfair, and we should pity them for it.
I will say that throughout the article, he does raise a few interesting points.
One thing that he dwells on is the fact that in many cases, men who actually molest and rape children get lighter sentences than men who get caught up trying to molest kids in these sting operations.
And I would agree that men who actually molest kids should get longer sentences in the same way that a murderer should get a longer sentence than an attempted murderer, right?
But the answer, in my opinion, is extending the sentences for the child rapist, not shortening the sentences for the attempted child rapist.
So an example that he gives is of a man who raped a 13-year-old repeatedly over the course of a year, admitted to molesting two of his siblings, Also, his sentence was a minimum of 7 years.
Meanwhile, another man who got caught in a sting operation trying to meet with an 11-year-old for sex got a minimum of 10 years.
Now, yes, that's absurd.
The rapist ought to have gotten more than 7 years.
How about 70 years instead?
I don't think child rapists should ever see the outside of a prison ever again.
But a guy who tries to meet an 11 year old for sex, even if there is no 11 year old because it was an undercover cop the whole time, is undoubtedly a threat to society and should consider himself lucky to only get 10 years in prison for that.
This is the way the article is kind of set up, and it starts right off the bat giving us an extremely sympathetic portrait of a man who wanted to rape a 13-year-old girl.
Here is the picture of the man along with his mother, so I think that gives you a pretty good idea of how the New York Times wants us to view this guy.
And let me read a little bit of this to you.
Okay, it says, Jace Hembrick worked as an apprentice laborer during the weeks, renovating homes around Vancouver, Washington and at neighborhood gas stations on weekends.
Much of the rest of his life was online.
He was hardcore, amassing a collection of more than 200 games.
People told him it wasn't smart to be so cut off from reality, but his internet life felt rich.
As a dungeon master in Dungeons & Dragons, he controlled other players' destinies.
As a video warrior, he was known online by his nickname and was constantly messaging fellow gamers, particularly his best friend Simon.
Though the two had never met in person over the last few years, they paired up as teammates playing Rainbow Six Siege and Rocket League and grew close.
This is all crucial information that we need about this guy.
At 20, Hambrick was still living at home with his mother—big surprise there—to save money for college, where he hoped to study game design.
He was a voracious reader who could knock off a thousand-page fantasy novel in two days, blah blah blah blah blah, etc. giving us his whole life
story.
And then finally, one Friday after work in February 2017, Hambrick came across a casual encounters,
W4M, women searching for men post, that seemed meant for him.
Uh, just gamer girl sitting home on Sunday, it read.
We can chat as long as I'm not leveling.
I don't even know what that means, as long as I'm not leveling.
Hamburg emailed back, sounds like fun.
What game you playing?
I am hooked on Alien Isolation, Gamer Girl replied.
Forget sex, Hamburg wrote.
Let me come watch.
Let me come watch.
I haven't gotten that one yet, adding that he was 20.
15 minutes later, Gamer Girl replied that she was 13.
Hamburg was confused.
Why did you post an ad on Craigslist if you're 13?
You mean 23?
She asked for his cell phone number and they switched to texting, exchanging photos.
Gamer girl was beautiful, he thought.
If he wasn't being pranked, big eyes, cute white cap, soft smile, gazing up at the camera serenely with a really nice set of headphones.
They exchanged a few texts about sex.
I can be real bad if you're into bondage, he typed.
But he was already hoping for more than just sex.
I don't get out much, he texted.
I feel like if we get to talking, it might go somewhere.
You're beautiful and a gamer.
I might have no problem hanging out with you.
That's cool, gamer girl replied.
And then it gets into even more graphic stuff with the guy talking about what he wants to do to her sexually.
Do, that is, to a girl who told him that she's 13.
Now, back to the article.
It says, was this an elaborate game?
Again, she claimed to be 13.
The photo seemed to tell a different story, and the gaming chair she was seated in looked too expensive for a kid.
Well, parents could have bought it, you know?
She used slang a 13-year-old probably wouldn't know, like FTP.
It means F the police.
That originated in 80s hip-hop.
Oh yeah, I'm sure there's no 13-year-olds that know that.
The vulgarities and snide tone seemed too adult.
Her texts were full of LOLs.
Was she an immature teenager or a sly adult?
Her driving direction seemed too specific for 13.
Hamburg texted that he would be driving a red Prius, his mother's, and Gamergirl replied that she would be wearing a gray sweatshirt and ripped jeans.
It was a 20-minute drive to the house.
After stopping for condoms, he arrived at 7 p.m., three and a half hours after their first email.
She came to the door, just as she'd said, in torn jeans and sweatshirt.
And then it goes on and then he goes inside and that's when Chris Hansen shows up or you know whoever's standing in for Chris Hansen.
You know the cops come out and all of that and they live happily ever after or the rest of us do and he went to prison.
as he should. And the New York Times wants us to feel badly about that.
Because after all, he was never actually talking to a 13-year-old.
And he didn't think that she looked 13, and she knew how to give driving directions.
What 13-year-old can do that?
And she uses LOL. Apparently, 13-year-olds don't do that.
Of course, none of this makes any sense.
She told you she was 13.
What, you thought this was a grown woman pretending to be 13?
And thus trying to attract child rapists?
Because she's into that sort of thing?
Now, I'm sure there are freaks out there in the slimy dregs of cyberspace who are into that, but that excuse just doesn't cut it.
And shouldn't.
A girl told you she was 13.
You came over to have sex with her.
End of story.
Goodbye.
enjoy prison. The article makes much of the fact that these guys who get caught
in these things aren't really soliciting minors for sex because they're actually
talking to undercover cops. It also tells us that a lot of the predators don't
have a criminal history and many of them don't have child porn on their computers.
We're supposed to be impressed by that, apparently.
And then it sort of skims over other things that seem relevant, like the fact that half of the men caught in this Washington sting operation were trying to meet children 11 years old and younger, which makes them pedophiles by definition.
Now, yes, there can be gray areas when it comes to who ends up on the sex offender registry.
You hear about cases, for example, of, say, an 18-year-old in a relationship with someone a few years younger than him ending up on the registry, even though they're so close in age they could have gone to high school together.
Now, that is unjust, I think most of us can agree, and wrong.
But that's not what we're talking about here.
A 20-year-old and a 13-year-old, no gray area.
No mitigating circumstances.
Grown men looking to meet 11-year-olds.
No gray area.
These are sex predators, plain and simple.
What about using these sting operations to catch them?
Well, you know, is there something unfair about that?
Does it matter that they aren't actually chatting with a real child?
No.
And no.
First of all, if you're told that she's 13, you're perfectly free and able to say, oh, never mind, you shouldn't be on this site, kid.
Go tell your parents.
And walk away.
There's no entrapment here because you aren't being trapped at all.
You're not backed into a corner.
You can walk away.
Second, catching predators and enforcing the law against child molestation and rape and sex crimes, that's very difficult.
These are not easy laws to enforce.
Precisely the problem here is that so often, the laws are enforced retroactively after the crime has been committed.
But then in that case, the damage has already been done to the child.
So now we're punishing a predator and protecting the next victim, but it's too late to protect the first victim.
So law enforcement tries to devise ways to protect even the first victim, to smoke these guys out and get them behind bars before they're able to successfully hurt a child.
This isn't pre-crime like the Minority Report.
You are catching people who are actively trying to commit a crime.
It's just that they're trying to commit it in, you might say, a controlled environment.
It's no different than a woman who gets a murder charge for trying to hire an undercover cop to kill her husband.
The point, obviously, is that if the undercover cop hadn't been there, she would have hired a real hitman, and then we'd be arresting her after the poor sap she's married to is already six feet under.
So, What's going on here?
Of all the problems in the world, of all the injustices to expose, why are we getting a novel-length article telling us about the trials and tribulations of men who tried to have sex with pubescent or prepubescent children?
Well, it goes back to what we said at the top.
There is, in my estimation, a noticeable effort underway in our culture to normalize pedophilia and sexualize children and to paint the men who prey upon children as victims of an overzealous and prudish system.
This is just another example of that.
Of many.
And the examples are only increasing.
And that is why, with great vengeance, we must cancel the New York Times.
Again.
Alright.
We'll leave it there for today, guys.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
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The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
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