Ep. 649 - AOC Finds The One Rioting Victim She Cares About
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, AOC tearfully describes the trauma she suffered during the Capitol Hill riot. But how much sympathy should we feel for a woman who encouraged and applauded rioting until it arrived on her front door? Also Five Headlines including Chicago teachers still bravely refusing to return to work, Dr. Fauci reverses himself again on masks, and Kamala Harris’ step daughter is hailed as a style icon. And in our Daily Cancellation, we will discuss HBO’s new documentary celebrating open relationships.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, AOC tearfully describes the trauma she suffered during the Capitol Hill riot, but how much sympathy should we have and feel for a woman who encouraged and applauded this kind of rioting until it arrived at her front door?
Also, five headlines including Chicago teacher still bravely refusing to return to work, Dr. Fauci, reverses himself on masks, again, and Kamala Harris' stepdaughter is hailed as a style icon.
And in our daily cancellation, we'll discuss HBO's new documentary celebrating open relationships.
We know that's got to be good.
All of that and much more today on the Matt Wall Show.
You know, all of us will take a thing more seriously, care more about it, when we or someone close to us is involved in it.
None of us are capable of absolute altruism or perfect empathy.
But if we have absolutely no concern for the tragedies that befall others, even while demanding vocal and unending sympathy whenever we are the ones suffering misfortune, then we've gone far beyond the universal flaw of fallen humans everywhere.
In that case, we're sociopaths.
We're even worse than sociopaths if we outwardly applaud and encourage bad things when they happen to others while still pulling the woe-is-me card should we ever get a taste of our own medicine.
Many of our politicians in D.C.
quite clearly fall into this second category.
Representative Alexandria Cesar Cortez has especially provided an illustration of what happens when that naturally imperfect capacity for empathy gives way to full-on sociopathy.
AOC was talking to her fans on Instagram.
Instagram Live last night.
The fact that she has fans to talk to on Instagram is a problem in and of itself, but she began describing in dramatic and tearful terms the trauma that she suffered during the Capitol Hill riots.
The description was replete with visual demonstrations, plenty of cinematic, dramatic pauses, and all the rest of it.
Let's listen to some of this.
Like, I'm here, and the bathroom door starts going like this.
Like, the bathroom door's behind me.
Or, rather, in front of me.
And I'm like this, and the door hinges right here.
And I just hear, where is she?
Where is she?
And, um, this was the moment where I thought everything was over.
Um...
And the weird thing about moments like these is that you lose all sense of time.
In retrospect, maybe it was four seconds.
Maybe it was five seconds.
Maybe it was ten seconds.
Maybe it was one second.
I don't know.
It felt like My brain was able to have so many thoughts in that moment between these screams and these yells of, where is she?
Where is she?
And so I go down and I just, I mean, I thought I was going to die.
And it gets even more dramatic from here.
Next, she began to describe And I had a lot of thoughts.
You have a lot of thoughts, I think, when you're in a situation like that.
her own mortality. It turns out she was thinking about the American people and comforted by
the knowledge that her work would be continued by those who come after her. Let's listen
to that.
And I had a lot of thoughts. You have a lot of thoughts, I think, when you're in a situation
like that. And like also one of those thoughts that I had was, you know, I just happened
to, you know, be a spiritual person and be raised in that context.
And I really just felt like, you know, if this is the plan for me, then people will be able to take it from here.
I had a lot of thoughts, but that was the thought that I had about you all.
I felt that if this was the journey that my life was taking, that I felt that things were going to
be okay.
Now, she also said that she simply cannot move on from this trauma, and anyone who demands that we move on is acting like an abuser.
She said that she has been sexually assaulted before in her life, and she compared those who wish to move past the Capitol Hill riots to her own sexual abuser.
And if all that wasn't enough for one Instagram live chat, AOC also threw the Capitol Police under the bus.
The very people who put themselves on the line to protect her.
She tells us about one of the police officers who came to take her to safety and she said that she was scared of him because he was being mean about her and he was yelling.
Yes, he was yelling.
It's almost like, you know, there was a mob of people this guy was trying to deal with and he didn't have time for pleasantries.
Seems understandable to me, but AOC thought and still thinks that it's quite suspicious.
And was happy to tell us about that.
The media, of course, ate all this up, insisting that her description of the riot was emotional and compelling, and that it was demanding of our attention and affirmation.
And under normal circumstances, I would have little problem with anything that she said, aside from the part where she smeared the men who were protecting her.
I have a problem with that.
But the rest, under normal circumstances, I would say, okay, well, if that's how she felt, that's how she felt.
But her description of the fear she felt, and so on, You know, it would provoke no protest for me if not for the fact that this same woman had spent the last several months ignoring, excusing, and romanticizing the very same kind of chaos that she in turn fell victim to.
Now, I've played this before, but let's remind ourselves.
I think it could be helpful to.
Let's remind ourselves what AOC said about BLM rioting back in May.
Let's listen to that.
If you're trying to call for the end of unrest, but you don't believe healthcare is a human right, if you're afraid to say Black Lives Matter, if you're too scared to call out police brutality, then you aren't asking for an end of unrest.
You are asking for injustice to continue and for your people to continue to endure the violence of poverty, the violence of a lack of housing access, the violence of police brutality, and not say a damn thing.
That's what you're asking for.
So if you're out here calling for the end of unrest, Then you better be calling for healthcare as a human right.
You better be calling for accountability in our policing.
You better be supporting community review boards.
You better be supporting the end of housing discrimination.
You better be standing up to for-profit real estate developers that are
intimidating people and trying to evict them from their homes, that's what you better be calling
for.
Because if you don't call for those things and you're asking for the end of unrest, all
you're asking for is the continuation of quiet oppression.
Okay.
Yeah, if you want rioting to end, it means that you just want oppression to continue.
You want quiet oppression to continue.
And you have no right to call for the end of unrest unless you call out real estate developers.
There's a whole list of demands.
But what she's doing here, of course, is she's completely ignoring and erasing the people in these communities, actual human beings, who are affected by this, injured by it, damaged by it, killed by the unrest, as you call it.
But for her, it's all academic.
So, sure, we could get around to caring about that, but first I've got a whole list of issues we need to discuss first.
Note that she said all of that only two days after a police precinct was invaded and burned to the ground.
And on the same day that she recorded that video, she also shared an image on her Instagram giving people advice on how to protest safely.
And this advice included things like wear nondescript solid colored clothing, cover identifying tattoos, She exhorted protesters to put their phone on airplane mode and not to bring anything they don't want to be arrested with.
The point of this advice, quite explicitly, was to help people commit crimes and to engage in mob violence without getting caught.
Or while at least limiting their legal liability if they are caught.
And this is the stance she had towards rioting all through the summer.
$2 billion in damage.
25 people killed.
The only people she condemned throughout all of that were those who wanted the violence to end.
Those who wanted to be safe in their own communities again.
But the shoe ends up on the other foot and she comes face to face with the kind of anarchy that she fomented and encouraged and she responds by crying and pointing fingers and demanding sympathy and understanding from the whole world.
What happened to her is the greatest crime in history, a staggering tragedy, because it happened to her.
As for the violence, death, and destruction visited upon average Americans, the convenience store owners who saw their businesses incinerated, the retail employees whose places of work were ransacked, the neighbors who were too afraid to leave their homes because of the mayhem outside, the cancer-stricken children huddling in fear in their cancer centers while BLM rioters smashed the windows downstairs, the woman in Rochester Who was beaten by two-by-fours while trying to stop looters from destroying her business?
The retired police captain shot dead?
Left to bleed out in the street?
Random pedestrians harassed and assaulted and so on?
As for all of them, AOC has no concern, doesn't care, never said a word about them, ever.
Still has not.
Never even acknowledged them.
In fact, she applauds their victimization.
She sits back at a distance and pontificates about their suffering and declares that their suffering is worth it because it's all in service to a good cause.
Because we're sticking it to those real estate developers.
Yeah, I mean, they burn down apartment complexes.
That'll really show the real estate developers.
No, no, the problem is that there are people who are going to live in those homes.
Actual regular people.
AOC doesn't care about them.
She doesn't give a damn about them.
You know, it's all for a good cause.
But what is that cause exactly?
And how does this advance it?
Well, she can't say precisely.
Nobody ever could.
All she was sure of is that $2 billion of property damage and 25 people dead wasn't enough to earn condemnation.
Indeed, anyone who condemned it was racist.
And then one day she gets an up-close-and-personal look at what rioting is and what it feels like on the ground.
And she sees that it's not just unrest.
It's terrifying.
She was fortunate enough to get that look, have that experience as a heavily protected public figure with cops around to whisk her to safety, which they did.
Not that she has any gratitude for those people who protected her, of course.
But the fact remains that she had that protection.
You know who didn't have that protection?
How about the elderly man in Kenosha who went to stop the BLM rioters from looting his mattress store, only to be attacked, bashed over the head, and left lying on the sidewalk with a broken jaw?
He had no protection.
He had no defense after the fact either from people like AOC.
She didn't give a damn about him or anyone else, any of the thousands of others victimized in similar ways over the summer.
Quite the contrary.
She romanticized the sort of violence that he fell victim to, while her Democrat pals helped to bail out the rioters and put them back on the street to do it all again the next day.
She wants us now to forget all that and focus on her.
And her own alleged trauma.
That really is the motto she lives by, isn't it?
Forget all that and focus on me.
Hey guys, I feel like we're not talking about me enough here.
But sorry AOC, a lot of us are just not going to play that game.
We're not.
We have no doubt that what you experienced was quite unpleasant.
Not as unpleasant as being beaten or brutalized or shot dead as so many Americans were during the BLM riots, but unpleasant all the same.
Maybe if you admitted your role in normalizing and encouraging this sort of violence and apologized for it and held yourself to account, then we could make some progress.
We could get somewhere.
But you won't do that.
You aren't capable.
And so you just can't get the sympathy you desire.
Let's get now to our five headlines.
[MUSIC]
Well, I won't even count this as a headline because it's not worthy of it.
But I do have to mention that today is February 2nd, which means that it's Groundhog Day.
And that's when we pull the groundhog out, of course, and we see if it saw its shadow.
I still don't know, but we got the footage here.
And for some reason, I'm going to play this.
We'll play some of it anyway.
They pulled out Punxsutawney Phil to see what's going on.
Are we going to have more winter or not?
And let's play the footage.
Let's find out what Phil has to say.
Come around.
Hi.
What do you think?
Wait a minute, let me... This one?
Is it this one?
Okay.
Okay.
He's talking to the groundhog right now, by the way.
You look beautiful today.
Alright.
He's whispering sweet nothings in the groundhog's ear.
We think we have a prediction.
Shingle shaker.
Can you read the prognostication?
I've never seen this before.
I didn't know how this actually worked.
Okay, here's the prediction.
Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye!
Now, this second day of February, 2021, the 135th annual trek of Punxsutawney Groundhog Club.
Punxsutawney Phil, the seer of seers, the prognosticator of all prognosticators, was awakened from his burrow at 7.25am.
by his handler and friend on this quiet morning where few can attend.
In groundhog heese, Phil directed the precedent and the inner circle to his prediction scroll that reads, It's a beautiful morning, this I can see.
Okay, I give up.
I've listened to enough.
You know what?
We're just not going to know.
We're not going to know if there's going to be more winter or not.
We never got the prediction.
I mean, see, I understand you have to drag it out because you've made this tradition out of talking to a groundhog, and so you've got to figure out ways to add pageantry to it, but Just get to the point.
I have to... I've actually never watched that before.
My only experience with Groundhog Day, like everybody else, is the Bill Murray movie.
But I've never actually watched it live like that.
I've never seen the real thing.
And it's even dumber than I ever expected it would be.
It's kind of embarrassing to watch.
Can we be done with the whole Groundhog Day thing?
I get it, it's a... You know, it's a quaint tradition, I understand.
Look, I'm not trying to be a hater.
Well, I guess I am.
But isn't it a little bit too stupid?
It's a little bit too stupid.
Right?
Okay, I did just look it up and it turns out we're gonna have six more weeks of winter.
So, just bad news.
All we ever get is bad news anymore.
Even the groundhog.
Couldn't even do us a favor by giving us spring early.
All right.
OK, let's move on to real news.
A Chicago teachers union member was on CNN yesterday to talk about what it would take to get her back to work.
And here's what she said.
Your union says that agreements were reached on some serious issues like health and safety protocols, ventilation, contact tracing and safety committees.
What is outstanding?
What are your concerns that remain?
Well, my concerns that remain, the number one concern I have is that COVID is still spreading in Chicago.
Many of the communities in which we teach COVID is well above 10% community spread.
And I don't believe that we've reached an agreement on the question of how are vaccines going to be distributed to the people who work in the schools, let alone people in those hardest hit communities.
We really have not reached agreement on the question of accommodations for people like myself.
I live in a multi-generational household with my public school student, as well as my elderly parents.
My mother has very serious health concerns and disabilities.
We've come so far in COVID.
We see the vaccine like a light at the end of the tunnel.
And the idea of exposing her now to this virus is terrifying.
It's a really big issue.
Sorry, I was still just thinking about the groundhog actually.
I was thinking about Groundhog State.
These people, they put on a suit and top hat to go talk to a groundhog.
And the thing about it is that there's no, it doesn't appear to be any It's not like tongue-in-cheek.
They don't appear to be in on the joke.
They're really taking it seriously, it seems like.
Yeah, I say it's run its course.
They've been doing Groundhog's Day for over a century, I think.
Well over a century.
Of all the traditions, all the traditions are getting torn down all around us, this is the one we keep doing?
Talking to the groundhog?
I guess I should take the opposite approach, because we're getting rid of all the other traditions.
Let's cling on to any that we still have, and Groundhog Day is one of them.
Anyway, yeah, the teacher was just speaking there.
I did tune her out a little bit, because you know what?
I'm tired of the excuses.
She was asked, you know, what's it going to take to get you back in the schools?
And you notice she didn't say, well, I want to get back in the school to be there for the kids and educate the kids.
This is never about the kids.
You notice that with these teachers that are refusing to go back to work?
It's not about the kids.
The kids are just disregarded.
It's not even that they're worried about the kids getting sick.
It's not about the kids at all.
The kids are disregarded, are not a concern whatsoever.
It's all about them.
And so she's like, "Me, me, me, this is how I feel.
"This is what's gonna make me feel like."
And so she says what's gonna take to get her back in the school
is if there's no more community spread, which is another way of saying she's never going back
because coronavirus is going to be here.
It's gonna be with us probably forever.
To some degree or another.
And if it ever completely goes away, it could be years down the line.
I mean literally years.
It's already been one year.
So that's the standard she set.
Here's the great thing though.
You got to look at it from the from the other way.
Look at the kind of silver lining that The teachers at this point, who are still refusing to go back to work, are all of the worst teachers anyway.
These are all the worst ones.
These are all the ones that you don't want teaching your kid.
So fire all of them.
That lady, fire her, take her job away, fire the rest of them.
If that means you're firing thousands of teachers all at once, fantastic!
These are all the terrible ones.
The good ones want to go back.
And you know what you separate?
Here's the main way you separate the good teachers from the bad ones.
Okay.
Um, it, this is not the only thing, but this is a big part of it.
The good teachers care about their students and they actually want to educate their students and it matters to them.
The bad ones don't care.
And as I can tell you from experience being in the public school system for 13 years as I was growing up, you can tell when you're in the classroom with a teacher who doesn't care about you and doesn't care about the education and doesn't care about anything.
And it's just there because it's a, because you know, she wants to sit on her butt at the, at the desk, hand out busy work and make a paycheck.
At this, you know, as the students aren't stupid, they can tell the difference.
This is a great opportunity, really, because all of the sit-on-the-button, hand-on-busywork type teachers, they're all identifying themselves.
So what we should be doing is saying, awesome, you're all fired.
Thank God.
Literally nothing is lost.
All right, number two from Vanity Fair.
It says, in the past, actor and activist Evan Rachel Wood has spoken about the alleged abuse she was subjected to by an unnamed ex.
In an Instagram post early Monday morning, she put a name to the allegations.
She wrote, quote, the name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson.
He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years.
I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission.
I'm done living in fear of retaliation, slander, blackmail.
I am here to expose this dangerous man and call out the many industries that have enabled him before he ruins any more lives.
I stand with the many victims who will no longer be silent.
And apparently, so this has started a sort of a Me Too Thing with Marilyn Manson, other women have come forward and said he was abusive to them.
Now, you know, innocence will prove a guilty and all that kind of stuff, so we can't declare what is actually true and what isn't.
I will say that I find his accusations to be very credible, considering it's Marilyn Manson we're talking about.
There's nothing shocking here at all.
I mean, this is a guy, like, if you go back, apparently he's still making music, which, uh, that's, that's the only surprising thing to find out.
He was dropped by his record label.
The only surprising thing about that is that he had a record label still.
So he's still making music, but at least going back to the 90s, all the 90 kids, 90s kids know Marilyn Manson.
He used to, he would get arrested for committing sexual assault on stage.
And if my memory serves me correctly, this happened more than once.
Where he would commit sexual assault for everyone to see on stage, and he would get arrested for it, and then he would just be back out doing it again, so... Yeah, not a surprise there, and although it does make you wonder, like, why... So, Evan Rachel Wood apparently got mixed up in this when she was a teenager, so, you know... There was a grooming that went on, she was a kid... And so, you can understand that, right?
A lot of other women are coming forward.
I don't know.
You do wonder how a guy like this managed to have any women interested in him at all.
Or why anyone would come anywhere near this freak in the first place.
That's one of the mysteries.
Then again, there are serial killers in prison who end up getting married.
Buzz is not surprising after all.
Number three, we played the clip for you last week of Dr. Fauci saying that it's common sense to wear two masks, to double mask.
He said that's common sense.
Let's play that clip again.
Again, this is him.
He was asked about wearing two masks.
He said common sense, but let's play it.
So if you have a physical covering with one layer, you put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it likely would be more effective.
And that's the reason why you see people either double masking or doing a version of an N95.
Okay.
So he says, uh, common sense to wear two masks.
There you go.
Couple days later, this is, I don't know, three, four days later.
Uh, he, the, the subject of double masking is broached again.
And this is what he says this time.
There are many people who feel, you know, if you really want to have an extra little bit of protection, maybe I should put two masks on.
There's nothing wrong with that, but there's no data that indicates that that is going to make a difference.
Okay.
Okay.
So it's common sense to do it, but there's no reason to think it'll make any difference.
Probably won't make any difference.
There's nothing wrong with it, but it's common sense to do it.
I guess there's a way you could make all of that make sense together.
I mean, I guess there could be things that seem like common sense, even though there's no data supporting doing it.
I guess you could say that.
But that doesn't appear to be his... And here's the problem, that we get these messages that contradict, or seem to contradict, and it's never explained.
He doesn't say in that interview, oh, you know, I know I said this before about double masking.
Let me clarify.
Here's what I meant to say.
Let me give you the whole deal.
They just say one thing one day, something else three days later, and it's up to you to interpret and to figure it out.
A lot of people a long time ago threw their hands up and said, forget this.
I just don't trust these people.
They're telling me different things.
They're contradicting themselves.
I don't care what they say.
It's hard to blame people for taking that attitude when you consider this.
And you consider the fact that we're a year into this and we're still getting contradictory information.
So you can't even use the excuse anymore that it's early on and they're confused and they don't really know themselves.
They're trying to feel their way through it.
That excuse, I wasn't convinced by that excuse back last March.
I'm certainly not convinced by it now.
Number four, this is from the Daily Wire, it says, the news website of a Christian organization was suspended from its Twitter account last week for saying that Dr. Rachel Levine, the Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, and the former Health Department Secretary of Pennsylvania, is a biological male.
So they were suspended for saying that Rachel Levine is a biological male.
The Daily Citizen, which is a part of Focus on the Family, engaged in hateful rhetoric, supposedly, according to the social media platform, when they tweeted January 19th, this is what they tweeted.
On Tuesday, President-elect Joe Biden announced that he had chosen Dr. Rachel Levine to serve as Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of HHS.
Dr. Levine is a transgender woman, that is, a man who believes he is a woman.
Twitter suspended the account for that.
Now they did, apparently, after, I don't know, Couple days or several hours, they did reverse the suspension without explanation and put, after a little bit of a timeout in the corner, they let the account go back up again.
Never explained anything.
They never explained how this is hateful rhetoric.
And it's not.
What was said there, there was no value judgment, there was no insult, nothing like that.
They correctly observed That it's a biological male who believes he's a woman.
That's what it is.
That's what it is to be a trans woman.
That's what it means.
Now, I realize that people on the left, they don't like that definition.
But once again, the same problem we always go back to, they don't like that definition, but they've never given their own.
Just like they don't like the definition of woman, but they never told us what they think the definition should be.
Because they just want everything hazy and obscure and undefined.
And the great thing about that is, if a word and a term, if a concept is hazy, obscure, and undefined, then they can use it however they want.
And you can't criticize them, because it doesn't really mean anything anyway.
Now, although Twitter reversed the suspension, this to me is kind of... This would become sort of the final straw.
And we are heading to this point.
We're not quite there yet.
I think Twitter and the social media companies, they're experimenting.
They're kind of treading lightly and seeing what they can get away with.
But this is when it's sort of game over.
When you're at the point where you cannot even speak accurately about biological sex without being banned from the platforms.
As it stands right now, most of the time you can.
So for Twitter, the rule is, as far as I can tell, and it's not that they ever explain these things, but as far as I can tell, most of the time, if you go out and say, for example, this, a trans woman is a man who believes he's a woman, most of the time you'll be fine.
You can talk about, you know, you can even criticize the concept of transgenderism.
What they won't let you do is say this directly to a trans person.
You do that, you're gone.
You quote-unquote misgender a trans person, you're gone.
But as far as speaking in general abstract terms, they'll let you do that.
Not for long, though.
Eventually, you won't be able to do that anymore, and when that happens, it's just game over.
At that point, they've made it so that you cannot engage honestly on these social media platforms, and in order to be on the platform, you have to buy into and affirm a lie in order to even be there.
And that's when real decisions, I think, have to be made by conservatives on these platforms.
Not there yet, but that's where we're headed.
All right, this is from Yahoo.
It says, a week after turning heads at the inauguration in support of her stepmother, Vice President Kamala Harris, which her stepmother is Vice President Kamala Harris, of course, Ella Emhoff has landed a lucrative modeling contract.
So this is the 21-year-old stepdaughter of Kamala Harris, the daughter of second gentleman Douglas Emhoff, She signed on with a modeling agency, and we're told that she's the new style icon.
She's a modeling sensation.
I think we have a few.
Do we have some of the pictures?
I think we have some of the pictures of her modeling stuff.
I don't know if we could play those pictures.
I don't know.
I look at the images.
Okay, there's one.
Here we go.
So we got the armpit hair.
We've got like the, looks like a knitted pink eyebrows.
It's like blue and pink knitted sweater.
Kind of a weird perm thing going on with the hair.
I don't know.
I don't know what this, what this is here.
Black and white striped hat with little like dog ears and a bright, what is that orange or red?
I'm colorblind also.
That's the other problem.
I don't know.
I, once again, I have the same problem.
It's the same problem I had with the slam poet.
I'm not a poetry expert.
To me, I hear that poetry and I think, that's not real poetry.
I think anyone could do that.
And I look at these pictures and I think, again, look at me.
I'm not a style.
What do I know?
My whole style is I wear gray, blue, and plaid, if you haven't noticed.
That's all I have.
If you go into my closet, I'm like a cartoon character, where it's just like the same outfit.
I just have 50 of the same outfit.
So I'm not a style expert, but I look at some of those pictures and I think, is that really?
Because I could do that.
It looks like you just were, you know, you didn't have anything clean that day.
You're just rifling through your dirty laundry and doing the smell test and grabbing whatever is not completely pungent and throwing it on.
And now we're told that's a style icon.
Well, all right.
What do I know?
That's style now.
If you want to be stylish, That's how you have to look.
Before we get to our daily cancellation, a quick word from our friends at LifeLog.
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They're gonna try.
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Some common scams include offers to get your payment faster, fake checks, or unsolicited messages by someone claiming to be from the IRS.
Links within these emails or text messages could be dangerous malware or phishing scams.
It's important to understand how cybercrime and identity theft are affecting our lives.
It's important to understand the methods they use to steal our information.
Every day we put our information at risk on the internet.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Today we're going to cancel open relationships.
Open relationships, polyamory, whatever you want to call it, all of that is canceled.
Now the catalyst for this cancellation is a new documentary soon to be released on HBO Max called There Is No I in Threesome.
Hopefully someone in the film points out that there's no I, but there is a me, and that's sort of the point.
A review of the film on the website The Wrap describes it this way, it says, After a few years of dating his actress girlfriend Zoe, New Zealand-based filmmaker Olly Lux decided to document the year leading up to their marriage.
But they aren't focused on invitations and flower arrangements.
There is no I in threesome tracks their attempt to open their relationship to others.
The likably awkward Ollie feels that he missed out sexually during his 20s, and he sees the next 12 months as his last chance to explore before committing to one person forever.
Zoe, a beguiling extrovert, is game.
So they establish a monogam-ish manifesto and set out to make the most of our bodies while they're still stretchy.
Okay, so the plan is to prepare themselves for marriage by whoring themselves out to random strangers.
I'm no Nostradamus, but I can safely prophesy that this probably will not end well.
And based on what I've read, it doesn't.
And when I say based on what I've read, I don't mean what I've read about this documentary.
I mean about open relationships in general.
It seems, here's a shock, very often they fall apart due to jealousy and resentment.
Who could have guessed it?
Yes, it turns out that when you love someone, it can be quite difficult to watch them become romantically involved with a third party.
And if it's not difficult, then you probably don't love them.
And there's the rub.
Pun sort of intended.
Now, I wish I could say that this topic is limited to a weird HBO documentary or to a small group of swingers and other assorted weirdos.
But surveys tell us that monogamy is increasingly unpopular among the younger generations.
You take these results with a certain grain of salt, but almost all the polls on the subject show an unmistakable trend.
So, for example, YouGov just last year did a poll on this, and here are the findings.
They said, quote, A January poll of more than 1,300 U.S.
adults finds that about one-third, 32%, of U.S.
adults say that their ideal relationship is non-monogamous to some degree.
Millennials, 43%, are particularly likely to say that their ideal relationship is non-monogamous, although an equal percentage, 43%, of this generation says that their ideal relationship is completely monogamous.
According to this poll, the number of Americans who desire monogamous relationships has dropped by 5% in the last five years.
That's a pretty steep decline in five years.
And this is actually a very serious problem.
Monogamous relationships form the foundation of the family, and the family is the foundation of human civilization.
You can't build anything of significance without a proper foundation.
And so again, this is a real problem.
I know we like to say that our consensual relationships are of no concern to anyone and can't harm anyone else.
This is my business, not yours.
I'm not hurting you.
That's not true, actually.
For one thing, if you have children, then your sexual relationship with a person who is not your spouse, even if it's consensual, even if your spouse is dumb or deluded enough to agree to it, will definitely harm your children, who are now being deprived of the stable, private home they need and deserve.
Also, if lots of people in a society give up on monogamy, and thus choose to stop reinforcing and stop strengthening that societal foundation that's so essential, then it's going to affect everyone.
I have to live in this civilization that you are helping to ruin by giving up on the family.
I would say the ruination of society has a very real impact on me.
It does affect me.
Just as it affects everybody else.
Now, all of that said, it's not hard to see why our culture finds the concept of open relationships so appealing.
The reason for the appeal is that, first of all, we, and I'm going to use the term we in a general sense here, we are perhaps the most self-centered society to ever exist.
We are self-centered both in practice and theory.
We are self-centered philosophically.
We have elevated self-centeredness to our highest ideal.
We're conditioned to think of everything and to judge everything in terms of how it makes us feel.
And this attitude is reinforced and encouraged everywhere we go, in pop songs, in advertisements, in school, even in church oftentimes.
And this is how we then approach relationships.
The whole concept of an open relationship becomes immediately absurd when you approach your relationship as an opportunity to love and serve the other.
Thomas Aquinas said that to love is to will the good of the other.
If that's your philosophy, then obviously you're not going to be even tempted towards open relationships.
It's clear that you're not willing the good of your spouse or your partner by sleeping with somebody else, right?
But these days, people tend to think that love is about willing the good of myself.
And so it starts to make sense.
The other reason why open relationships hold a certain attraction to so many is that we are materialists in this culture.
So, we see our bodies as just our bodies.
There's no deeper significance.
Our only job is to wring out of our physical frames all of the pleasure that we can before we die.
So, relationships are all about me.
My body is nothing but a physical vessel, empty of any deeper meaning or significance.
And with all that in mind, sure, I might as well go out and have sex with everybody in the neighborhood.
You know, that's the attitude.
But it doesn't work.
The open relationship inevitably gives way to envy, jealousy, anger, and all the other things you would expect.
Unless, you know, speaking of sociopaths, as we were earlier, If you're a sociopath, well, the only people who can really manage to have a successful open relationship are those who have little capacity for normal human emotions anyway.
We used to recognize such people as sick and get them treatment.
Now we call them polyamorous, and they have their own pride flag they can wave.
For everybody else, though, the experiment fails.
Why is that?
Well, because open relationships are a contradiction.
There is a fundamental tension that you can't escape.
The whole point of a human romantic relationship is for it to be closed.
The closing of it, the exclusivity, the intimacy, is the point.
And that's because the relationship has two basic functions, or purposes.
One, as I already covered, is to ultimately serve as the context through which and in which families are formed.
The other purpose of the relationship is to experience love, commitment, Closeness with another human being in a unique and intimate way.
And to experience this for its own sake.
To love another person for their own sake.
The ability to do this and to have relationships that are defined this way is literally what separates us from the animals.
This is what makes your relationship with your spouse different from the relationship between, say, a male rat and a female rat.
They're just bodies to be used by each other as a means to an end.
As humans, we strive for something deeper, something more, something more meaningful.
Why do we strive for it?
Because we can.
Because it's a depth and beauty available to us to experience.
Because it makes us better people.
Because it makes life more worthwhile.
Now, people these days who reject monogamy, they want to free themselves from meaning and beauty by behaving more like rodents.
And they think they'll find happiness there.
But they don't.
They won't.
At most, they find a fleeting good time, followed by heartbreak, followed by intense loneliness.
Especially as they get older, and now they're left alone, and their bodies aren't so stretchy anymore, and they don't have the same opportunities for those fleeting good times anymore.
But by then, unfortunately, it's too late.
It's too late to find, as they get older now, and they're alone, and they start to see the value and meaning in that close, intimate, monogamous, exclusive, committed relationship, for a lot of them, they find it's too late to form one.
And so they die alone, and there's no one there to mourn them.
If you want to avoid that fate, then don't take the advice of this HBO documentary.
Especially because open relationships are officially cancelled.
And that'll do it for us today.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review.
Also, tell your friends to subscribe as well.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, Michael Knowles Show, The Andrew Klavan Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Matt Walsh Show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, our technical director is Austin Stevens, production manager Pavel Vodovsky, the show is edited by Danny D'Amico, our audio is mixed by Mike Coromina, hair and makeup is done by Nika Geneva, and our production coordinator is McKenna Waters.
The Matt Walsh Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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