Ep. 580 - Dems Add 'Court Packing' To List Of Redefined Terms
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Democrats have made it clear that they absolutely will pack the court if they are given the power to do so, overturning a century of precedent and setting us down a dangerous path. They’re defense of this plan is to, as always, redefine the term “court packing,” claiming that Republicans are packing the court simply by filling vacant seats. Also Five Headlines including an unlicensed security guard apparently hired by an NBC affiliate shot and killed a Trump supporter. And Tucker Carlson talks about UFOs, and brings up a number of important questions. And in our Daily Cancellation, as is my custom on Columbus Day, I will cancel those who have been trying to posthumously cancel the great explorer.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, Democrats have made it clear that they absolutely will pack the court if they're given the power to do so, overturning a century of precedent and setting us down a very dangerous path.
Their defense of this plan is to, as always, redefine the term court packing, claiming that Republicans are packing the court simply by filling vacant seats.
All of that is crazy.
We'll talk about it.
Also, five headlines, including an unlicensed security guard apparently hired by an NBC affiliate.
Then proceeded to shoot and kill a Trump supporter, and Tucker Carlson talks about UFOs and brings up a number of important questions there, so we'll discuss that as well.
And in our daily cancellation, as is my custom on this glorious Columbus Day, I will cancel those who have been trying for years to posthumously cancel the Great Explorer.
All of that on the way.
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All right, well, you know, one of the primary tools of the left, one of their most effective tools, a tool that has helped them win the culture and crush their ideological foes, is that of redefinition.
We talk about this a lot on this show, probably so much that you get tired of hearing about it, but definitions are important.
We can't communicate without them.
To communicate, what does communication mean?
To communicate is to convey meaning.
If you control the definition of words, then you control communication.
You make it so that people are submitting to your worldview, advancing it, promoting it, agreeing with it implicitly, simply by speaking.
Even if they don't want to agree with it, they still are.
Perfect example, off-sited on this program, is the word gender.
The left took the word gender, which was always a grammatical term.
Words had a gender, not people.
That's the way it used to be.
And they invented a new use, a new definition of that term.
And for decades since then, even people who disagree with their gender theories still use the word gender in the context and way that the left wants, thereby agreeing with their underlying premise that humans have both sex and gender, which are distinct.
Many other examples can be mentioned here.
But the fascinating thing is to see this process play out in real time, which we do quite a lot now.
With the advent of the internet and 24-hour cable news, it can happen instantaneously.
You could wake up in the morning and have breakfast under the security and comfort of knowing that a certain word means a certain thing, and by lunchtime, when you're eating your sandwich, that word means something else entirely.
It's that fast.
Just like that, the word changes meaning.
So the latest example, not quite as far-reaching or culturally significant as the word gender, but still impactful in its own way, is the term court packing.
Now, as long as this term has existed, which isn't for very long in the grand scheme, but it has been in reference to any scheme to add more justices to the Supreme Court, add more seats, not merely fill a vacant seat, add more in order to seize ideological control of the Supreme Court.
That's what the term meant.
But now the Democrats clearly plan to do this themselves, and given the term's negative connotation, they've decided to, all at once, redefine it.
And just like that, court packing is not adding seats to the bench, but simply filling empty seats.
Many prominent voices on the left have adopted this talking point, as I said, all at once, just overnight.
Including Dan Rather, who tweeted, No, Dan, we can't recognize that because it's a fantasy.
It's false.
But it's a fantasy that Democrats are widely engaging in.
Here's Senator Dick Durbin on NBC.
And we can't recognize that because it's a fantasy.
Listen.
It's false.
But it's a fantasy that Democrats are widely engaging in.
Here's Senator Dick Durbin on NBC.
Listen.
Senator Durbin, did the fact that Vice President Biden used the phrase court packing.
Was that a tell of where the vice president stands on this, that he doesn't want to see this happen?
Well, I can tell you that we're getting this question.
It's a common question being asked because American people have watched the Republicans pack in the court over the last three and a half years and they brag about it.
They've taken every vacancy and filled it.
Did you know that they've sent us and we have approved only with their votes, I might Ten people who have been judged unanimously unqualified by the American Bar Association.
Do you know how many judicial nominees came from Obama who were judged unanimously unqualified?
None.
They've taken every vacancy and filled it, he says.
As opposed to what, Dick?
Leaving the vacancy open in the name of, what, good sportsmanship?
This really is the Democratic argument.
It's not a strawman.
They are arguing that Republicans should leave judicial seats open, not just the Supreme Court, but judicial seats in general should be left open in order to be nice to the Democrats.
That's their argument.
Here's Senator Chris Coons making the same argument.
Well, I'm going to be laying out the ways in which Judge Barrett's views, her views on reaching back and reconsidering and overturning long-settled precedent are not just extreme, they're disqualifying.
She has taught at a well-regarded law school.
She clerked for Justice Scalia.
But she has views that make her not qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.
President Trump has said he would only nominate someone who would overturn the Affordable Care Act, taking away health care protections for more than 100 million Americans in the middle of a pandemic.
And both President Trump and members of the majority on this committee have said they would only vote for a nominee who would overturn Roe versus Wade.
As I will lay out in my questioning this week, We shouldn't be having this hearing with two members of the committee infected with COVID.
It's rushed, it constitutes court packing, and her views are too extreme to qualify her to serve on this court.
And of course, Joe Biden, like a good, empty-suited, would-be presidential figurehead, is repeating this line himself and adding his own twist to it.
Listen.
The only court packing is going on right now.
It's going on with Republicans packing the court now.
It's not constitutional what they're doing.
We should be focused on what's happening right now.
And the fact is that the only packing going on is this court is being packed now by the Republicans after the vote has already begun.
I'm going to stay focused on it so we don't take the eyes off the ball here.
It's unconstitutional what they're doing.
Oh really?
How so?
Where is it written in the Constitution that presidents are only allowed to nominate justices for the first three and a half years of their presidency but then after that it's a grace period for the other party and the president has to pretend he isn't president even though he is?
Where is that?
Can you please, can you cite, give me chapter and verse here because Joe, I've looked and I haven't found it.
But I suppose we shouldn't expect coherence from the same guy who says that voters don't deserve to know his own position on the subject of court packing.
He was asked about this and said explicitly, no, they don't deserve to know.
Listen.
I've got to ask you about packing the courts, and I know that you said yesterday you aren't going to answer the question until after the election.
But this is the number one thing that I've been asked about from viewers in the past couple of days.
Well, you've been asked by the viewers, who are probably Republicans, who don't want me continuing to talk about what they're doing to the court right now.
Well, sir, don't the voters deserve to know?
No, they don't.
I'm not going to play his game.
He'd love me to talk about, and I've already said something on pack, he'd love that to be the discussion instead of what he's doing now.
They don't deserve to know, he says.
The voters do not deserve to know what the president's actual policy position is.
The voters do not deserve to know if the guy who is running for president will overturn over a century of precedent and reshape the court by force, setting off a court-packing arms race where every successive president will add seats until there are 600 seats on the court with no end to the expansion in sight.
We don't deserve to know that.
Interesting, coming from the guy who recently tweeted, the American people deserve to know what Donald Trump is hiding in his tax returns.
So to be clear, here's the deal, as Biden would say, the deal is that the American people deserve to know the personal financial information of the president, but they don't deserve to know about his public policy positions, even one as consequential as this.
So it looks like the word deserves has also been redefined.
Which I suppose had already happened.
It's been redefined a long time ago.
So to review now.
The Democrats have advanced two primary arguments to defend their view that Amy Coney Barrett should not have been nominated and shouldn't be confirmed.
One is that it defies the magisterial dying wish of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
That's one of their arguments.
The other is that any time a Republican fills a vacant court seat, it is automatically a court-packing scheme and is also unconstitutional.
Even though the Constitution expressly gives them the authority to do it.
These are their arguments.
You can decide for yourself whether they are persuasive or not.
Let's get to five headlines.
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Alright, number one, a Trump supporter was shot and killed at a protest in Denver over the weekend.
He apparently sprayed mace at the shooter, who responded by killing him.
You can see a photo of the fateful encounter here.
Mace is not a lethal weapon, so this would seem to be a disproportionate response.
Now, the man with the gun is named Matthew Doloff.
He was arrested for murder at the scene.
The interesting thing is that apparently he was hired as private security by a local news station.
It's NBC affiliate 9 News.
And here's the other interesting thing.
According to city officials, Doloff was not licensed as a security guard in the city.
So it would seem that a news channel hired, whether knowingly or not, an unlicensed armed security guard who then proceeded to shoot and kill a pro-Trump demonstrator.
This ought to warrant charges, I would think, not just for Doloff, but for Nine News as well.
Alright, number two, Keith Olbermann still exists, apparently.
It seems we haven't heard much from him in recent years.
At least, I hadn't heard anything from him.
I assume that he had returned to his lair deep in the earth somewhere, but he has re-emerged now.
He has been maybe summoned after somebody read a curse from an old book in an attic somewhere.
And now he's back on the scene, and he's about as reasonable and Coherent, as you remember.
Listen.
Trump can be, and must be, expunged.
The hate he has triggered, the Pandora's box he has opened, they will not be so easily destroyed.
So, let us brace ourselves.
The task is twofold.
The terrorist Trump must be defeated, must be destroyed, must be devoured at the ballot box.
And then he, and his enablers, and his supporters, and his collaborators, and the Mike Lees, and the William Bars, and the Sean Hannity's, and the Mike Pence's, and the Rudy Giuliani's and the Kyle Rittenhouse's and the Amy Coney Barrett's must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it and to rebuild the world Trump has nearly destroyed by turning it over to a virus.
Remember it, even as we dream of a return to reality and safety and the country for which our forefathers died.
That the fight is not just to win an election, but to win it by enough to chase, at least for a moment, Trump and the maggots off the stage and then try to clean up what they left.
Remember it, even though to remember it means remembering that the fight does not end November 3rd.
Yes, he says that Amy Coney Barrett, along with Bill Barr and of course Trump and a number of others, should be prosecuted, convicted, and removed from society.
First of all, when we're In the midst of, you know, the media's blaming Donald Trump for supposedly encouraging violence or encouraging white supremacists, which he's not doing.
But how about this?
You've got a prominent, I guess, I guess he's still prominent, you've got a prominent voice on the left, at least a well-known voice, saying that Amy Coney Barrett, Supreme Court nominee, should be removed from society.
Look, I understand that in the feverish, fantasy-fueled minds of leftists, Trump is responsible for all manner of crimes against humanity, and so that's why they're always calling for him to be arrested.
But what crime did Amy Coney Barrett commit?
Even in their feverish fantasy-filled minds.
What crime are you accusing her of committing exactly?
At least with Trump, I know what crimes they're accusing him of committing.
Like they're accusing him of being a Russian spy, okay?
So I understand that.
It's ridiculous, but I understand it.
What are you even saying that Amy Coney Barrett did?
Did she go 12 miles over the speed limit on the way to dropping your kid off for soccer practice?
Is that the crime?
We're at the point now where these people, they don't even bother making up a fake crime.
They just work themselves into a sweat and scream that everyone that they don't like should be in prison.
They don't even bother to explain why.
That's their argument style.
So you say to them, so here's my view on this subject.
Oh yeah?
Well, well you should be in prison!
Prison!
Go to prison!
What?
Dude, I was just telling you that I think Batman Begins was better than The Dark Knight.
That's all I'm trying to say.
The thing is, I also think, because I know you hear me talking about this and you're probably thinking, well, you're a hypocrite, Matt, because don't you often say that your political opponents and many other people should be locked in prison?
Well, yes, I do, but I'm a theocratic fascist, so that's my whole thing, right?
That's part of it.
If you're pretending to be opposed to fascism, then this approach doesn't work.
But anyway, glad to see that, uh, Olbermann is back.
Always elevating the national dialogue, doesn't he?
Alright, number three, Julie Borowski is a political commentator, more on the libertarian side of things.
Says she was kicked off a flight because her toddler wouldn't wear a mask.
Here's the tweet.
She says, we got kicked off a flight, our two-and-a-half-year-old wouldn't put on a mask.
We had practiced beforehand, but he wasn't having it.
And then she tags Southwest, so apparently she was on Southwest.
He says Southwest staff was apologetic.
I get they don't make the rules.
I hope airlines ease up the rules because this really limits families with toddlers.
Yeah.
Well, Julie here is being much nicer and more polite about it than I would be if that were me.
Yeah, kicked off your flight.
Two and a half year old won't wear a mask?
Of course he won't.
Of course a two and a half year old won't wear a mask.
Here, in fact, is what I'll say, and there may be some exceptions for this, but broadly speaking, if you have managed to scare your two-and-a-half-year-old to such an extent that he will actually keep his mask on for hours at a time, then I think it's very likely you're a horrible parent and person.
I just, I can't even conceive, I've got a three-year-old, almost four, And he won't keep his mask on, and I'm not going to force him to.
Most of the time when we're going in somewhere, I don't even give him a mask.
We just go in, and that's it.
Or I'll hand it to him, and then he'll immediately put it in his pocket.
Fine.
I tried to comply with the rules.
I did my part.
Two-and-a-half-year-old, though, that's just crazy to even expect it.
And so I'm just trying to imagine to get a two-and-a-half-year-old to do that.
I mean, it's possible you have a two-and-a-half-year-old with an extremely sort of obedient personality and extremely cooperative.
Maybe there are a few of those two-and-a-half-year-olds out there, but the vast majority of them are not going to do that.
In order to get them to do it, the psychological manipulation you would have to employ to convince them to do it and keep it on their face is unthinkable to me.
This whole thing is crazy.
This is absolutely insane.
And never mind the fact that it has been repeatedly shown that there's probably a very low risk of someone who's two and a half contracting or spreading the virus.
And on top of that, remember that What we're always told, right, is you wear the mask for me, right?
You wear the mask for me.
You don't wear it for yourself.
You wear it for other people.
And so when we are forcing crying, confused, scared toddlers to wear masks, we can't even pretend we're doing it for their sake.
Can we?
We're doing it for us.
We're doing it to protect us, to protect us from them.
That's what we're doing.
It's cowardly, it's disgusting, it's disgraceful.
Shame on Southwest for that.
And yes, they have the right to make whatever rules they want for their business, but that doesn't mean that if the rules are insane That doesn't mean we can't criticize it, and we can here, and we should.
Number four, speaking of insane, Gal Gadot is going to star in a movie about Cleopatra, and that's not the insane part.
That part, you know, is fine.
Because we live in the dumbest possible world, this has provoked backlash from people who are mad that Cleopatra's ethnicity or her ethnic identity is being appropriated.
One person leading the charge is Abdul El-Sayed, CNN commentator and public health doctor, self-described.
He says, so there were no Egyptian women to play an Egyptian queen?
Yes, very offensive.
Very offensive.
I'm also scandalized that they couldn't find anyone who actually was alive in the year 50 BC.
I mean, you're telling me that out of all the 2,000-year-old people on earth, you couldn't find one to play this role?
Someone who could speak authentically to the lived experience of people who lived 50 years before Christ?
Of course, looked at another way, this is all very stupid.
Very, very, very, very stupid.
For many reasons.
Not the least of which being that Cleopatra wasn't Egyptian.
Actually, she was Greek.
Second, are there?
Every time we hear this, oh, we couldn't find an actor or actress of this ethnicity to play this role?
Well, how do you know there are?
I mean, are there Egyptian actresses who could play this role effectively?
Who would actually be best for it?
Maybe there are, maybe there aren't.
I don't know.
You're just assuming it.
At the very least, if you're going to do this, put forward a person who you think would be better for the role.
Actual person.
Not an ethnicity or a skin color.
An actual person.
And then explain why you think they're better for it, going beyond their ethnicity or skin color.
But all of that is irrelevant because the third point, of course, is that the job of an actor is to pretend to be what they are not.
That is literally the entire job.
That is what they are paid to do.
And it used to be that the further an actor or actress was from, you know, the identity of the role, the more impressed we were with the performance.
In other words, the more unlike the actor is from the role, that just makes it even more impressive.
Think about Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, playing a paraplegic.
He's not paraplegic himself, and these days you could never get away with that.
Because it'd be said, well, what about a paraplegic actor?
How many of paraplegic actors are there?
Or are you just saying we can never tell this story until we have actors of that identity?
But back then, when it was saying 30 years ago, whenever that movie came out, everybody was impressed with the performance.
Because here's an able-bodied person, able to portray this role, even though he is not that himself, but he was able to effectively portray it.
And very impressive.
It was a great job acting precisely because he is so himself unlike that role.
All right, number five.
Finally, Tucker Carlson last week did a segment on his show where he discussed UFO sightings and specifically this new documentary that was just released called The Phenomenon.
Here's a clip of the Carlson segment which includes some clips of the documentary.
Listen.
We used to be defensive on this topic, but there's no reason to be.
There is now an enormous amount of evidence, including physical evidence, that UFOs, whatever they are, are real.
Why don't we know a lot more about this?
Because the government has hidden that information from us.
Outrageously.
But now some of that information has come into public view, thanks to a new documentary called The Phenomenon.
We learned the Feds are hiding more than we thought they were.
All we're saying, nobody has to agree that why it's there, but shouldn't we at least be spending some
money to study all these phenomenon?
Shouldn't we study this stuff?
The answer is yes, and that's all this was about.
And why the federal government all these years has covered up, put brake pads on everything,
stopped it.
I think it's very, very bad for our country.
Are you saying that there's some evidence that still hasn't seen the light of day?
I'm saying most of it hasn't seen the light of day.
It's outrageous.
And it's not a partisan question, by the way.
That, of course, was former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat if there ever was one.
But that's not even the biggest claim he makes.
According to the film, Reid said that UFOs have actually and repeatedly interfered with our nuclear weapons capabilities.
So where are these UFOs from?
Some researchers told the filmmakers that their origins are becoming clearer.
Dr. Jacques Vallée has collected purported metal debris from UFO cases dating as far back as 1947 that experts are analyzing in a state-of-the-art laboratory.
He was astonished to find their composition was unlike any known metal.
This material was manufactured.
It's not natural.
It's not natural to the materials that we have around us in the lab or on the Earth.
Yeah, physical evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships visiting Earth.
Not a big deal.
It's nothing compared to, like, the fly on Mike Pence's forehead.
And he's right.
You know, the most amazing thing about all this is that so few people seem to care.
We've got photographic evidence, video evidence, physical evidence of these things and everyone just sort of shrugs their shoulders and moves on.
Now I watched the documentary myself after seeing the Carlson segment and as one of the weirdos who, myself, I'm one of the weird people where I've watched a bunch of UFO documentaries in my day, I can say that this one is by far and away the most credible and impressive of any that I've ever seen.
Even the narrator who you heard there, he's, I don't know what his name is, but I recognize that voice.
I watch a lot of documentaries in general and he, you know, this is a guy who does like Ken Burns
films and PBS documentaries, a mainstream
documentary narrator and the film includes, as you saw, former
prominent, very prominent government officials, politicians, former military officials, scientists,
These are credible people, for the most part.
I mean, Harry Reid, I don't know if I'd call him credible.
In fact, I wouldn't.
But even there, when it comes to ideological things, I don't think he's credible.
But that he's putting his name next to this?
Also, they've got supposed eyewitnesses, lots of photographic and video evidence, like I mentioned, all in the documentary.
The thing is, one objection you often hear to the UFO claims is that, well, if UFOs were real, and aliens were actually visiting, we should have very good evidence of it by now.
Why is it that, like with Bigfoot, somehow nobody's ever come forward with really remarkable physical evidence or video evidence of this?
Why is it that even in modern times, everybody who records one of these phenomena, you know, manages to get video of it, seems to be recording it with their grandmother's toaster oven?
Why isn't it that everyone's carrying around these really advanced videos?
You know, cameras in their pockets.
Why hasn't it ever been captured?
Well, the thing is, that's true of Bigfoot.
You know, that's a very good argument against Bigfoot.
There are a lot of good arguments against it, but one of them is just, we've never had, there's never been anything close to actual compelling evidence of that.
As far as UFOs, though, actually there has been a lot of really good evidence.
Photos, videos, physical evidence.
It just seems that nobody believes it.
Even the good evidence, nobody believes.
And so you start to think, what kind of evidence would the average person actually need to see in order to entertain the idea that maybe this really is extraterrestrial in origin?
Probably short of being personally visited by alien beings, the average person won't be convinced.
By the way, and not to say that I'm convinced, as in I'm 100% on board that I'm sure that these are aliens.
I'm just saying that a lot of this stuff is interesting.
And the photographic evidence goes back decades.
There have been very interesting photos of flying saucers from the 50s that have been investigated by various government commissions and so forth and have been labeled unexplained, as in they aren't obviously manipulated or staged.
None of the obvious explanations hold.
So we're left with, what is it?
So there is something going on here.
I think we could say at a minimum with certainty that we have proof of the existence of aircraft that far exceeds the known technological ability of modern man.
And when we say far exceeds, we mean stuff that is like hundreds of years or more beyond our known capabilities.
It's easy to speculate, of course, that some government somewhere has this technology and is testing it out.
But the problem is that, first of all, these sightings go back to the 40s and 50s.
If a world government somewhere had access to this technology 70 years ago, you'd think they would have used it by now in a very noticeable, significant way.
Is it believable that some other world power is that far ahead of us and yet hasn't used that power in any noticeable way?
I don't know.
Of course, when you compare that explanation, which seems implausible, with the idea that some intelligent civilization has visited, which both are implausible, which is more implausible?
And you could make a good argument that The alien civilization is more implausible.
But still, there's definitely something going on here.
And when we get to the point where you have government officials on the record saying, I don't know, this is weird, that should make us take notice, I think.
All right.
Of course, you always have to guard against wishful thinking with these sorts of things, because I would love for it to actually be aliens.
Just because that would be cool.
And even if they're coming here to invade the Earth and kill us all, All right.
Okay.
We had a good run.
I'm okay with that too.
There's a silver lining to that as well.
You have to guard against the wishful thinking when it comes to these kinds of things.
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All right, let's get to our daily cancellation.
Today for our daily cancellation, as it is Columbus Day, I will, as is my custom and has been for years now, deliver my defense of the great man Christopher Columbus.
As we know, Columbus Day has become primarily an opportunity for historically illiterate preening dimwits to spend their time screeching about a fictional version of history.
Where Europeans were the first to introduce rape, pillage, and slavery to the universally peaceful and noble inhabitants of the New World.
Of course, in reality, it would be quite impossible for the Spanish to introduce rape, pillage, and slavery to this part of the world, where rape, pillage, and slavery have been utterly commonplace for centuries, as it had been commonplace everywhere on the globe.
But don't tell that to the dimwits.
The dimwits who, you'll notice, say they hate Columbus and, you know, everything he stood for and represents, yet will still take the day off if it's offered to them.
They don't hate him that much.
And speaking of dimwits again, the dimwit capital, dimwittopia, as we might call it, Portland, saw another riot last night, this time under the name of Indigenous People Day of Rage.
And it was a chance for indigenous people, or those who claim to be, or the allies of such, or just people who feel like, you know, tearing stuff down, to go around destroying things, anything at random, Because they're enraged.
They have rage, you see.
They have rage over events that occurred over 500 years ago.
And because of this rage, they have, as you can see here, this photo, toppled an Abraham Lincoln statue and other statues.
They're mad about stuff that happened 500 years ago, so they tore down the statue of a man who lived 150 years ago.
Makes sense.
Actually, no, it doesn't.
And aside from the general historical literacy of the anti-Columbus faction, it must also be said that if you're experiencing actual rage over things that happened half a millennium ago, you are mentally ill.
It's not normal or healthy to be sitting around in the year 2020, stewing over stuff that happened in the year 1506.
But obviously, I'm being intentionally naive.
The people rioting, they're not enraged about anything.
They're just bored and numb and destroying stuff because they can.
And it's fun.
Now, getting back to the broader war against our national heroes, one that is largely led not by indigenous people, but by white liberals.
And you'll notice something about these self-hating, white guilt-ridden folks.
They would never suggest that the nightmarish brutality of many Native American tribes outweighs whatever they accomplished.
Even the propensity for cannibalism among some tribes must be understood in context, we're told.
Yet somehow, the sins of some European settlers automatically negates everything that European explorers achieved and discovered.
And besides, of course the modern critic will note, Columbus didn't even mean to discover America.
And he never set foot in North America.
And the Vikings got here first.
What an idiot.
What a moron.
Yes, those are all nice tidbits of information you acquired from Facebook memes, but they're irrelevant.
Of course Columbus didn't mean to discover America.
Nobody knew that America existed.
How does that undermine the significance of the discovery?
If some future team of intrepid astronauts accidentally discover a life-bearing moon on Jupiter on their way to exploring Pluto, should we dismiss their groundbreaking history-shaping discovery on the basis that they originally intended to make a different groundbreaking history-shaping discovery?
As for the Vikings, again, how is Columbus's incredible feat diminished by Leif Erikson's exploits in a relatively small sliver of the North Atlantic 500 years prior?
You may as well say that it would be unimpressive for me to cure cancer because Jonas Salk already cured polio.
We should also remember, and it seems that modern people really have forgotten this fact, that Columbus did not have the benefit of satellite navigation.
He made his way by dead reckoning through uncharted waters.
Most of us cannot even conceive of what that would be like.
To go sailing over an ocean, you have no idea how big it is or where it leads.
Over the course of his voyages, he discovered many Caribbean islands, explored the coasts of South and Central America.
He didn't make it to North America, but he made it possible for future settlers to soon find it.
That's quite an achievement, I would say.
Or must he be blamed for only discovering half of the Western Hemisphere while recklessly neglecting to discover the other half?
That guy only discovered half of a hemisphere.
What a dope!
That seems a rather stringent standard, especially coming from people who can't locate their local supermarket without GPS assistance.
And what about the natives that Columbus encountered?
Yes, many of them were peaceful.
And we all agree that mistreatment of peaceful people is wrong, anywhere it happens.
By the same token, we should bear in mind that the sort of Rousseauian vision of the universally noble savage occupying the New World was incorrect and ridiculous.
Columbus was, for example, in the neighborhood of the Caribs, a violent people who would capture and consume other human beings.
Columbus heard stories about this tribe and, on his first voyage, bumped into them on his second.
Columbus was close to Aztec territory as well.
He never met them.
That civilizational clash would be saved for later, but it's worth noting that the Aztec Empire was not exactly a picture of peace and serenity.
Tens of thousands of people were captured and killed as human sacrifices every year in macabre religious ceremonies.
An offering was laid on a stone slab at the top of a temple, his beating heart was ripped out of his chest, his arms and legs were often hacked off and consumed by the priests, and his limbless carcass was rolled down the steps.
This process was repeated dozens or even hundreds of times in a single night, and thousands of times over the course of a year.
Now for a long time, historians and archaeologists assured us that the Spanish fabricated or exaggerated these stories of Aztec barbarism.
They say the same about the stories of Carib barbarism.
But then they discovered the skull racks buried in Mexico City.
Columbus never governed with the savagery of an Aztec king or a Carib chieftain.
But he did take slaves, that's true.
He was a man of his time in that way.
Although the Spanish would eventually outlaw slavery and beat almost every other culture in the world by hundreds of years in doing so, they cannot be absolved of their role in that ubiquitous evil.
Neither can they be uniquely blamed for it either.
That's the point.
We can wag our fingers about it, but we cannot wag our fingers selectively.
If we call the Spanish genocidal, we must say the same about indigenous people who participated in the same kinds of crimes.
If we convict the Europeans of stealing land, We must convict the natives for the same crime.
We must convict all of history, in fact.
And all people.
Because before the globe was settled, and we could all live comfortably in a country where the greatest threat to our survival, for most of us, is that the DoorDash guy will take more than 25 minutes to deliver our takeout sushi, before all of that, every inch of inhabited space was fought over and blood soaked the ground.
And a man could only claim what he was willing and able to kill to keep.
You did not own anything that you could not defend.
I am not saying the world should have been that way.
I'm saying that my ideas of what should have been are irrelevant.
I'm telling you what was, and it was that way, everywhere, for all people, for thousands of years.
The knife of historical moralizing, then, only cuts whoever tries to wield it.
So I suggest that we mature a little bit and learn to view history in its context.
Seen through that lens, Columbus appears before us as a deeply flawed but incredibly brave and ingenious man who is responsible for one of the great achievements in the history of mankind.
Perhaps you could have done better, but probably not.
You probably wouldn't have even tried.
And that's why Columbus gets his own holiday and you don't.
He earned it.
You might complain about him, but I take note of the fact that you still remain in this country, living off the fat of its land and enjoying fruit from trees planted by people greater and more significant than yourself.
So go ahead and scoff at those men as you feast on the bounty they provided you, but pardon me while I dismiss your criticism and offer a little toast to Christopher Columbus and to everybody else who has a balanced view of history.
To the people who don't, I say, you're cancelled.
Columbus is not.
You are.
And we'll leave it there.
Happy Columbus Day, everybody.
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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