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Feb. 3, 2021 - The Matt Walsh Show

50:38

Ep. 650 - The 'Hate Speech' Trojan Horse

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the White House calls for Big Tech companies to censor so-called hate speech. But what is hate speech? And should we be censoring it? Also Five Headlines including Governor De Santis’s efforts to reign in Big Tech, and a Maryland school district’s efforts to instill “anti-racism” in preschoolers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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	Today on the Matt Wall Show, the White House calls for big tech companies to censor so-called hate speech.
	But what is hate speech and should we be censoring it at all?
	We'll talk about that.
	Also, five headlines including Governor DeSantis' effort to rein in big tech, speaking of big tech, and a Maryland school district's efforts to instill anti-racism in preschoolers.
	Plus our daily cancellation and much more today on the Matt Wall Show.
	[MUSIC]
	And I don't quite hate myself enough to waste my time watching White House press briefings.
	I do catch the highlights sometimes, though, and there was a highlight from the press conference on Monday that perhaps deserves our attention.
	One member of our illustrious press, always looking to ask the tough questions, to hold those in power accountable, to shine the light of truth Into the darkest corners.
	Democracy dies in darkness, after all.
	They took the time to ask White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki whether it's nice to not have Trump around anymore.
	Really tough question.
	Always the tough questions from this bunch.
	But there was something said in that exchange that was inadvertently interesting and important.
	So let's take a listen.
	As you know, President Trump has been barred from a lot of social media sites.
	I was curious whether you think his absence has made your job any easier or the White House's job any easier as it kind of goes forward on these COVID negotiations?
	In what way?
	He'd create a lot of noise, right?
	He would have certain gravitational pull with Republicans who may be more inclined to take a harder position.
	I wonder if that's been anything that you guys have thought about or kind of considered.
	This may be hard to believe.
	We don't spend a lot of time talking about or thinking about President Trump here.
	Former President Trump, to be very clear.
	I think that's a question that's probably more appropriate for Republican members who are looking for ways to support a bipartisan package and whether that gives them space.
	But I can't say we miss him on Twitter.
	Does President Biden support the continuing ban of President Trump on their sites?
	I think that's a decision made by Twitter.
	We've certainly spoken to, and he's spoken to, the need for social media platforms to continue to take steps to reduce hate speech.
	But we don't have more for you on it than that.
	Yeah, that's not true, first of all.
	The idea that they don't spend a lot of time thinking about Donald Trump.
	They spend a lot of time thinking about Donald Trump.
	I mean, Joe Biden issues 14 executive orders every day to undo Trump's policies, and has said that that's what he's doing, so I think they do spend a lot of time thinking about him.
	But that's not the point.
	They say, continue to take steps to reduce hate speech.
	The implication here, obviously, is that by their thinking, Donald Trump is guilty of hate speech and his ban was a way of reducing the hate speech.
	The implication is also, though she says it as an aside and moves on quickly, and of course there's no follow-up, that the administration is pushing the big tech companies to purge and censor those who are guilty of hate speech.
	No big surprise there, but it does highlight why hate speech is so dangerous.
	And when I say hate speech is dangerous, I don't mean that the type of speech they call hate speech is dangerous.
	I mean that the term is.
	The term hate speech, the labeling of certain speech as hate speech, especially when it's done by people in power and for political reasons, is dangerous.
	Conservatives made a massive mistake, I think, not the first by a long shot, when many of them tacitly went along with the formation of categories like hate speech and even hate crime.
	The difference between those two, hate speech and hate crime, is that hate crime is an actual legal category, though it shouldn't be, it is, while hate speech is not, but not for lack of trying.
	I mean, the left has long wanted to make hate speech a crime in its own right.
	They've so far run into roadblocks, mostly from the Supreme Court, preventing them from achieving that goal, but they're going to keep trying.
	Even so, other powerful institutions outside of the core system, namely big tech, also academia, have adopted their own policies of punishing so-called hate speech.
	And ultimately this is an excuse, a cover, a Trojan horse, by which conservative speech and thought, and really any speech or thought that does not comport with leftist orthodoxy, is silenced.
	I think it's therefore worth analyzing this idea of hate speech.
	And the main thing we should say, in analyzing it, is that it doesn't really exist, or at least it doesn't exist in any sort of objective way.
	Because to label something hate speech, just as to label a crime a hate crime, is to label not the thing itself, but the motivations behind it.
	So you hear someone say something, and you call it hate speech, because according to you, it was said for hateful reasons.
	But you, of course, have no way of knowing that.
	Unless the speech in question was someone literally saying, I hate you.
	Almost anything outside of that, Or many, many of the things outside of that.
	When you call it hate speech, you are merely labeling your own feelings about someone else's speech.
	So it reminds me of the scene in The Office when someone poops on Michael's carpet and he calls it a hate crime.
	Which it very well may have been, but Stanley says, oh, it's not a hate crime.
	And Michael says, well, I hated it.
	That is essentially how both hate speech and hate crimes are judged.
	The person doing the labeling is using the standard of their own feelings about the speech or the act in question.
	As for the feelings of the person who actually said or did the thing, nobody but that person really knows.
	This is why the hate speech label has always been and always will be political.
	The left hates conservative speech and labels it hate speech, which is a statement not about the speech, What about their perspective of the speech?
	They feel that the speech is motivated by hatred.
	Whether or not it actually is, how could they possibly know?
	Unless you're inside the mind and the heart of the person doing the speaking.
	Besides, even if speech is motivated by hate, who is to say that that's a bad thing necessarily?
	Yes, I will say this right now.
	Sometimes hate speech is good.
	There are plenty of things in the world worthy of hatred.
	You may express your views about those things, and in so doing, you are speaking, at least partly, out of hate.
	So, in a literal sense, it is hate speech.
	It is hateful speech.
	I get hit with the hate speech label all the time, and often, I must admit, quite accurately.
	For example, recently I said something on this show, as I have many times in the past, about drag queen story hours.
	And I'm against them, if you haven't heard.
	And I was afterwards accused of hate speech, as usual.
	Not the first time for that.
	And yeah, you know, you're right.
	I do hate Drag Queen Story Hours.
	I absolutely hate them.
	It is hateful speech.
	I absolutely hate them.
	And if you picked up on that, I'm glad, because that was the message I was trying to send.
	I hate the sexual exploitation of children.
	Call me crazy, I just hate it.
	Hate speech?
	Sure, I guess so.
	Now, if by calling it a hate speech you mean to accuse me of hating the actual people themselves who host and stage these drag shows for children, well, again, you're not far off the mark.
	I mean, I try not to hate any individual person, hate the sin, not the sinner, but because I am a Christian, we are commanded not to hate people.
	But I will admit that I fail to live up to that edict sometimes, and yes, I lapse into actually hating the individual people who sexually exploit children.
	I will admit that.
	But what about the bad kind of hate?
	That certainly exists, just as with hate crimes.
	I don't think the hate crime label should exist, but the things that are legally labeled hate crimes are, of course, very bad.
	Physically attacking someone for their race or ethnicity, for example.
	That's hateful.
	Yeah.
	It's obviously bad.
	You should go to jail for it.
	There is speech that is hateful in a bad way.
	Though it isn't a crime and should not be, it's still worthy of our condemnation.
	I, myself, am the target of quite a lot of deeply hateful speech.
	Often I know it's hateful because the person will say something to me like, I hate you and want you to die.
	Kill yourself.
	You know, that sort of thing.
	Okay, I think I'm safe in assuming that's hateful.
	They hate me.
	But the implication is that really hateful speech is the worst kind of speech.
	Just as we're supposed to believe that really hateful crime is the worst kind of crime.
	The person who physically assaults another person for their race will get a harsher penalty than someone who physically assaults another person out of, say, greed, because he wants their money, or just out of general indifference, just for the fun of it.
	But I think this is wrong.
	Crime motivated by hate is bad.
	Is it worse than crime motivated by indifference or greed or envy?
	I don't see why that's the case.
	I mean, at a minimum, they're all equally as evil.
	But really, it seems to me, people who commit violent crimes indifferently are the worst of all.
	They're the worst of the worst.
	They're the most dangerous.
	If anything, indifferent crimes should get the kind of emphasis that hate crimes do.
	Think about serial killers, sociopaths, school shooters.
	Most of these, indifferent.
	They're committing violent crime indifferently.
	They don't hate the people they're victimizing.
	They don't feel anything towards those people.
	That's the problem.
	And they are the most dangerous.
	Same thing with speech.
	People who say really hateful things are bad.
	Or maybe I should say people who hate things that should not be hated.
	But what makes the internet especially miserable are the trolls who say vile and horrible things indifferently.
	Merely to get a rise out of people.
	Or to experience whatever thrill they get out of it.
	Which I don't quite understand, but they get some kind of thrill.
	That's the problem with hate speech.
	It's an obscure category.
	It doesn't really mean anything.
	And even if it does mean something, it doesn't deserve the attention we give it.
	But this is all academic.
	None of this matters to the left, of course.
	They're not worried about hate per se.
	They're worried about the ideas they hate.
	And this is their way of shutting all of that down.
	Let's get now to our five headlines.
	Florida Governor Ron DeSantis launched an offensive against big tech on Tuesday, warning that the social media platforms are targeting politicians like former President Donald Trump now, but will soon be coming for regular American citizens, vowing to combat the threat.
	He said in a news conference, quote, today, they may come after someone who looks like me.
	Tomorrow, they come after someone who looks like you.
	And he was announcing the Transparency in Technology Act.
	As part of his measure, DeSantis suggested fines of $100,000 per day for deplatforming political candidates, as well as daily fines for any company that, quote, uses their content and user-related algorithms to suppress or prioritize the access of any content related to a political candidate or cause on the ballot.
	The governor also called for allowing people to opt out of content algorithms, requiring notification about changes in terms of service, and providing the right of citizens to take legal action if these conditions are violated.
	All of this is great.
	This is all exactly what Republicans... Republicans should have done this years ago, on the federal level, and they could have, at least tried, they didn't even try.
	Trump didn't try.
	None of them tried when they had the chance.
	This is exactly what needs to happen.
	And some of this should be totally uncontroversial.
	So, yeah, if you want to, we could have a debate about rules that stop social media companies from censoring political content or political candidates.
	I think there should be those rules.
	But something like Notification about changes in terms of service?
	Yeah.
	That's just, that is basic transparency that we expect and legally require of most any other company.
	And oftentimes companies that don't have nearly the kind of power and control over you that big tech companies do.
	That's all that is.
	What's the argument against it?
	If they're going to make a change, At a minimum, if they're going to make a change to the terms of service, you know, you signed up for the site thinking one thing, and then they start tinkering with it and changing it, they should have to tell you that.
	And again, at a minimum, if Twitter wants to decide that it's going to start purging conservative accounts, as they have been doing, which is why all conservatives are losing their Twitter followers, They should, at a minimum, have to tell us that they're doing it and explain why.
	Basic transparency that we require of any other company.
	DeSantis, we'll play some of the clips from this because I just think it's great.
	Here he is talking about some of the things that prompted this and discussing what Twitter did with the New York Post story and how that's motivating some of what he's doing now.
	Let's watch.
	Hunter Biden's story was true, okay?
	We now know it was true.
	And the typical corporate media outlets, they just chose to ignore it.
	Obviously, they wanted to beat Trump.
	They had a view on the election.
	They didn't want to give it any air.
	So we rely on social media to go around that, not let corporate legacy media outlets control the discourse and let us speak.
	So you had the New York Post to run it.
	And you couldn't get any traction, you couldn't get any reach on it because big tech put their
	thumb on the scale.
	So that was true.
	What they said at the time, "Oh, it's a conspiracy or it's based on hacked information."
	Are you kidding me?
	You're trying to tell me if there was hacked information that could damage me, you guys
	wouldn't print it?
	Give me a break.
	You can whiz on my leg, but don't tell me it's raining.
	You guys would print it every single day if you could.
	And big tech would allow it to proliferate every single day, 24-7.
	So it's not being done on a principled basis.
	There's threats on me.
	And it only gets taken down if law enforcement goes and tells them to do it.
	Otherwise, it just stays up.
	They're not moderating any of that.
	Oh, he's absolutely right, and if, once again, Twitter wants to shut down the New York Post story, and yes, that is influencing the election, now maybe you could argue That it wouldn't be influencing the election quite as much, at least not influencing it in a dishonest way, if Twitter just came out and said, listen, we're a liberal company, we're a left-wing company, this is how we run things, we're not interested in conservative content, the content that we're going to highlight and put in front of your eyes, that's going to be left-wing content, and if there's a story that we don't like for political reasons, we're going to get rid of it.
	At least if they came out and said that, then everyone would know where they stand and the bias would maybe be a little bit less harmful.
	That's why I tend to think that bias from, you know, from a news organization like CNN, if we can call them a news organization, but the bias from CNN is indefensible, but it's also not very harmful because everybody knows what they're getting with CNN, even if they don't admit it.
	Still, everyone knows.
	Now with Twitter, there are still a lot of people who use Twitter and are oblivious to this.
	They think they're getting an accurate reflection.
	You know, they, the way they, what they think is happening is that when they go to their news feed on Twitter or Facebook, that they're going to be exposed to news and they're going to find out what's going on.
	It's what most people think.
	So Twitter should have to be honest about that.
	And here's DeSantis touching on something that I also feel.
	I mean, we talk about the bias from Twitter, which is very concerning, but that doesn't even hold a candle to what happened to Parler.
	Let's listen to DeSantis on that.
	What really, I think, scared me was the decapitation of Parler.
	It wasn't just some of that stuff.
	It was the web hosting, the payment processing, take away your email, your text.
	You could totally neuter a candidate's ability To communicate and execute a campaign plan.
	So once we have that situation, they can't deplatform you without consequence.
	And look, I don't know that there has been in 2020, we'd have to look, I don't know that there has been a candidate that got wiped off the map.
	But you see the way this is going, and I think that protection is very well warranted, and I think it should be there.
	And just think, if you're in October of 2022, and you have a state senate race or something, and they deplatform one of the two candidates, that is not, that's going to have a huge impact on the outcome of the race.
	Yeah, Parler, they, they, we could talk about the bias from Twitter and Facebook.
	As I said, that's bad enough.
	But what they did with Parler, they just came in and He says decapitated.
	Good word for it.
	They just came in and wiped it out.
	They didn't like Parler and said, no, you can't have that.
	For years, we were told, oh, if you want your own kind of social media platform, then go set up your own social media platform.
	All right?
	We won't bother you over there.
	Isn't that always the trajectory?
	Isn't that always the theme with the left?
	They say, oh, no, we won't bother you.
	Just keep it to yourself.
	Keep it in private.
	And that's fine.
	We won't bother you.
	And so, people went to Parliament, and they said, fine, we'll start our own thing, we're gonna go over here to Parliament.
	And enough people went over there, and then the left said, nah, never mind, you can't have that either.
	Yeah, it is time for legislative solutions to this problem, so I'm glad that DeSantis is getting the ball rolling, and I say again, Ron DeSantis 2024, he's my, definitely my early frontrunner.
	Number two, the New York Times has an article, the headline is, How the Biden administration can help solve our reality crisis.
	We have a reality crisis.
	And among other things, it is suggested, I'm not satire, I'm not making this up, it's suggested that Biden appoint a, quote, reality czar.
	A czar of reality.
	Lord of all reality.
	I thought that was my job.
	The writer says, several experts I spoke with recommend that the Biden administration put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a reality czar.
	It sounds a little dystopian, I'll grant, but let's hear them out.
	Right now, these experts said the federal government's response to disinformation and domestic extremism is haphazard and spread across multiple agencies, and there's a lot of unnecessary overlap.
	And the way to solve that, I'm not going to read all this, but the way to solve that is to have an agency and an actual czar who's, I guess, now I did read all of this and before going on the air, it's not quite explained what exactly the reality czar would do, but I guess the idea is that we have a czar, we have an authority figure, To stand up and tell us what reality is.
	They are the official authority.
	If there's information circulating, they can declare if it's false or not.
	And you think this is so absurd.
	This couldn't happen.
	And even if it did happen, who would actually listen to the realities are?
	A lot of people.
	You look at these organizations that have just declared themselves fact checkers.
	They haven't had to prove why they deserve that label or anything like that.
	Organization comes along and says, oh, we're fact-checkers, this is what we do.
	And so if we say it's not a fact, because we're fact-checkers, means it's not.
	Many people fall for that.
	So I'm sure the realities are.
	All we need is the realities.
	We know on the left they believe in pregnant men, for example, so we just need the realities are to come out and say, yes, officially, this is reality.
	Men can get pregnant.
	The realities are has spoken.
	It is settled law.
	Number three, a CNN legal analyst reacted to Trump's impeachment defense, and she made a rather startling legal claim.
	Let's listen.
	So let me start with you.
	This is the 14-page brief filed by the president's lawyers.
	It says, number one, this is unconstitutional because he is a former president.
	It says, number two, that he has a First Amendment right to speak and therefore he said things at a rally and people attacked the Capitol.
	You can't hold him accountable.
	Yeah, those are wrong, and they're well countered by the very long brief the House filed earlier today.
	I mean, you don't have a First Amendment right to lie.
	You don't have a First Amendment right to put people in danger.
	And he did both of those things.
	And of course, we know the jurisdictional arguments were covered in about 40 pages of the House's brief as well.
	You know, it's not surprising that in only 36 hours with what are clearly not his A-listers of defense lawyers, they weren't able to come up with compelling arguments.
	But it also highlights that there really aren't any compelling defense arguments here at all.
	So, you know, the brief was mostly what was to be expected.
	There was one thing actually that did surprise me.
	That's a legal analyst.
	She's and she's a lecturer.
	I didn't see the body.
	Was it Columbia Law School?
	Lecturer, Columbia Law School, legal analyst, a lecturer.
	And her claim is that you don't have a First Amendment right to lie.
	Yes, you do.
	See, I'm not a legal lecturer at all.
	I don't have any job in any law school.
	I didn't go to law school.
	But I can say you absolutely have a First Amendment right to lie.
	That is, but keep in mind, we talked about hate speech to begin the show.
	These are the same people who, according to them, what they would like to see happen is that you don't have a First Amendment right to say things hatefully either.
	Who decides if it's hateful?
	They do.
	Who decides if it's a lie?
	They do.
	Alright, number four, the Montgomery County Public School District of Maryland spent more than $450,000 on an anti-racist audit for the 2020-2021 school year, which resulted in the district tentatively adopting policies that push anti-racist thinking in preschool.
	So we're talking about like three and four year olds, okay?
	According to a copy of the school district's tentative action policy obtained by the Daily Wire, the district will now provide a culturally responsive pre-kindergarten to grade 12 curriculum that promotes equity, respect, anti-racist thinking, and civility.
	I'm wondering, when do we get to the how to riot part of the lesson?
	Is that in the civility?
	How to riot civilly?
	The curriculum will also teach students that the impact of racism on mental health has been deemed a public health crisis.
	The school district, which is one of the largest in the nation, announced in November that it would partner with the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium for the $454,000 to conduct an anti-racist audit.
	The audit was designed to examine the district's systems, practices, and policies that do not create access opportunities and equitable outcomes for every student's academic and social-emotional well-being.
	Yeah, starting in pre-K.
	Now, you know what I'm going to say, because what I always say when we read a story like this, which is the first thing is get your kids out of the public school system.
	But I would add an addendum to that.
	And I would say this.
	At least, at least get them out of the public school system at these very early ages.
	Please, dear God, do not send your four-year-old to a public school system.
	Now, you homeschool them early on, send them to high school or something, maybe, you know, maybe that's a feasible plan.
	Because at that point, if your kid's 13 or 14, they've been raised, you've raised them correctly, and you've, maybe at that point, they'll have the fortitude and the formation to withstand the brainwashing that will still happen.
	But the point is, at four years old, forget about it.
	Four years old, there's just no chance.
	You send your four-year-old in, a four-year-old is going to believe whatever they are told.
	It doesn't matter what it is.
	Anything you tell them, you tell them that you rode to work this morning on a unicorn, they'll totally believe it.
	That won't even occur to them as an odd thing to say.
	Because talk about reality, they have no concept of reality.
	So when you send, much more than this is the case with the older kids, with younger kids, when you send your younger kid to school, that is an act of profound trust.
	You are putting so much trust in the people that will be in charge of your child at that school.
	Because the influence and power they're going to have over your child, it's difficult to articulate.
	The immensity of it.
	And if they decide that they want to brainwash your kid at the age of four into this anti-racist nonsense, into critical race theory, that's it.
	Your child's going to be brainwashed.
	There's almost nothing you can do about it.
	If they're being exposed to that for hours a day, at that age.
	So please, think twice about that.
	I beg of you.
	Number five.
	Big news yesterday.
	One of the great crimes of the century.
	Somebody changed the Hollywood sign to read Holly Boob.
	Someone climbed up there and they changed the W and the D and they made it say Boob.
	Okay, now that was the story yesterday.
	Someone changed the Hollywood sign, made it Holly Boob.
	And, of course, I think all people, our inner middle schoolers, are delighted by this story.
	But now the New York Post has the latest.
	And we're told that, here's what the New York Post reports, Julia Rose, who won fame for flashing her breasts on live TV during the 2019 World Series, apparently that's something you can win fame for now.
	I never heard of this person, but she's famous for this.
	She was busted along with five others for changing the famous Hollywood sign to read Holly Boob.
	She's a 27 year old model and apparently this was done in an act of protest because she was protesting that Instagram had locked her out of her account for posting nude photos.
	And I have to say, this is a very disappointing reveal.
	Isn't it?
	I heard this story about the Hollywood boob thing, and I hoped that these were some very industrious 12-year-olds who had managed, like, instead of writing it on the bathroom stall, like the rest of us had done, they had big dreams.
	I mean, they went for it all.
	And that would have been impressive.
	But then you find out it's a 27-year-old, they did it for Instagram, and, you know, they did it for social media clout.
	Not fun at all.
	This is one of the most disappointing endings I think I've ever seen in any story at all.
	So that's pretty bad.
	Alright, we're going to move on now.
	This is usually when we get to our daily cancellation, but before we do that, this is pretty exciting.
	I am debuting a new segment on the show today, and this will be a segment I figure, you know, One thing that I'd like to bring back into the show that I used to have early on and hasn't been as much is a little bit of viewer feedback, a little bit of interaction with the viewers and the listeners.
	And so what I'm going to start doing after the headlines every day.
	They say you're not supposed to read your comments, especially on YouTube.
	Talk about hatefulness, right?
	Don't read the comments, is what everyone says.
	But the dirty little secret about people in my position, anyone with a platform, is that we all read the comments.
	We always do.
	We're not supposed to say that because that only empowers the trolls, because they know that we will see the stuff they're writing.
	Yeah, we do see it.
	And it also hurts our feelings.
	We cry about it.
	We do.
	So think about that next time.
	So I'm going to read a few of the comments from the show on YouTube yesterday, just to get a little bit of the viewer interaction.
	And this is a segment that I will call reading the comments.
	Creative, I know.
	This is from Anthony.
	He says, I live across the street from that mattress store in Kenosha.
	I watched that mattress store crumble and collapse into the road from the extreme heat.
	I could feel from my front yard.
	It basically melted the brick building.
	It rained fire embers that night from the entire block burning.
	I thought it was a real possibility I could die that night.
	I also know the people and politicians responsible for inciting the $20 million in damages to my city and neighborhood will have to answer for what they did because God never forgets.
	I want to feel bad for AOC, but I don't.
	Now she slightly knows how I and so many Kenoshians feel about the night my life changed forever.
	We are still cleaning up the buildings which were burnt.
	I currently live in a construction where I am reminded every day what happened, what happens for a man who was a rapist and a thief, evading police and evading the responsibility for his actions.
	This is why you should read the comment, because that's a great comment.
	And these people like Anthony, completely forgotten.
	Have we gotten any, have there really been any follow-ups?
	With the people like Anthony, people in the community who lived in these neighborhoods that were reduced to rubble?
	I'm interested to know.
	That's why I'm glad to hear from Anthony.
	I'm interested to know what it's like to live in a neighborhood like that.
	How are things going?
	The media just completely ignores.
	They've been erased.
	Nick says, Beards looking thick, Matt.
	THICCC.
	I don't really know what thick means.
	I've always thought it had a vaguely sexual connotation.
	I hope not, given that this came from someone named Nick, but thank you, Nick.
	Miss Region Rat says, OK, this groundhog thing being so old school is actually really adorable.
	What a bunch of goofs.
	I did come out against the groundhog day yesterday, and I had time to think.
	Because my problem with it is that, as I said, we've gotten rid of all of our cultural traditions, pretty much.
	All of our shared traditions are out the window.
	You know, Thanksgiving, everything's going.
	The one thing we hold on to is the tradition where guys in top hats talk to a magical rodent who can tell the future.
	And I just think that's the one we keep?
	But as I had more time to reflect on Groundhog Day, I realized, well, okay, if that's all we got, then I guess I should have the opposite attitude, that we need to cling on to groundhogs.
	It's our last cultural tradition.
	It's all we have now is this stupid rodent.
	So, I think you're right, Diana.
	RG reacting to AOC's Instagram, where she was crying about her trauma from the rioting.
	RG says, OMG, what happened to politicians?
	Teddy Roosevelt was shot in the chest and still managed to give a speech.
	Babies everywhere, my god.
	I covered that in a Daily Cancellation, I think, recently.
	Teddy Roosevelt, this is quite literally was shot in the chest and still gave a speech.
	Compare that to politicians today.
	And what does that tell you?
	And David says, Matt, sounds like you're supporting this gradual acceptance of the Democrats view when you and others say, well, this is what we can expect and be ready for these changes.
	How about a plan to stop this?
	You're baptizing us slowly.
	The Dem put their deranged opinions in our face.
	It's time to spin this around.
	No, this is not this is not defeatism on my part.
	When I say, well, this is what we can expect.
	This is what this is what's going to happen.
	It's not defeatism.
	It's about.
	You know, I'm just like the realities are wants us to.
	It's about facing reality.
	And I think especially in recent months, conservatives spent.
	There was this kind of mass delusion that took hold of conservatives and not just in the last few months, but especially in the last few months leading up to the inauguration.
	Where conservatives were refusing to face reality and insisting to the very end.
	I mean, I don't know how many, but many.
	Insisting to the very end.
	Oh, no, Trump will still be in office.
	There's no way this is going to happen.
	And anyone like myself who said, no, look, Joe Biden's going to be president.
	We were castigated for it.
	And we were accused of being defeatist.
	I heard this many times.
	If I said, you know, Joe Biden's gonna be president.
	Oh, you're being a defeatist.
	No, I'm just being a realist.
	He will be.
	I don't like it, but he will be.
	So when I say things like that, it's all about facing reality.
	Because we have to first, if we want to do anything about What our reality is right now, if we want to make changes in reality, then we have to first face it, right?
	That has to be the first step.
	Alright, those are the comments for today.
	You know, whether you're in school or out of school, whether you went to college or you didn't, whatever your education level is, the point is that all of us, throughout our whole lives, we need to strive to know more information, to gain more knowledge.
	The thing is, it doesn't matter what your level of official education is, If you stop learning, if you stop pursuing knowledge the moment you get out of school, at whatever age that happens to be, you are not going to be the smart, well-rounded person that you could be, because this has to be a constant process of recharging ourselves with new information and more knowledge.
	And that's why you've got to check out The Great Courses Plus.
	I just watched The Great Courses Plus course on World War II, the Pacific Theater.
	They've got many history courses.
	I tend to Kind of prefer the history courses, but it's not just history.
	With Great Courses Plus, you get unlimited streaming access to thousands of video lectures on virtually anything that interests you.
	I mean really anything.
	If you want to learn Tai Chi or public speaking, if you want to know marine biology, which also I'm interested in, if you want to know how to read body language, that could be an important thing.
	Then, you gotta check out Great Courses Plus.
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	It's also good in my experience.
	I've been a Great Courses fan for a long time.
	I also, you know, I like to read as well, but what I find is Sometimes, especially at night when I have time to either read or watch a great course.
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	What purpose waits for you?
	Sign up for The Great Courses Plus to find out.
	I have a special URL to use, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash Walsh.
	Again, that's thegreatcoursesplus.com slash Walsh.
	You get a full month of unlimited access for free.
	Don't miss out on this, trust me.
	Again, that's thegreatcoursesplus.com slash Walsh.
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	Let's get out to our daily cancellation.
	Today for our Daily Cancellation, we must begin by discussing the drama of a woman who has been dubbed Courtside Karen.
	Her real name, in fact, is Juliana Carlos.
	She's apparently an Instagram influencer, which as far as I can tell just means that she's married to a rich guy and posts a lot of pictures of herself online.
	That makes her an influencer now.
	Mrs. Carlos was at the Hawks game a couple nights ago, courtside seats with her husband, watching the home team take on LeBron's Lakers.
	At some point during the game, a brief argument or shouting match of some kind broke out between LeBron and the husband of Juliana Carlos.
	She, after the fact, described the interaction between herself, because she intervenes, she says, and she described the interaction with LeBron in a way that certainly does not engender any sympathy for her.
	Let's take a listen.
	So, I'm minding my own business and Chris has been a Hawks fan forever.
	He's been watching the games for 10 years, whatever.
	He has this issue with LeBron.
	I don't have an issue with LeBron.
	I don't give a f**k about LeBron.
	Anyway, I'm minding my own business, drinking my s**t, having fun.
	All of a sudden, LeBron says something to my husband.
	And I see this and I go, I stand up and go, don't f**king talk to my husband.
	And he looks at me and he goes, sit the fk down bch.
	And I go, don't fking call me a bch.
	You sit the f**k down.
	Get the f*** out of here!
	And I go, don't f***ing talk to my husband like that!
	Don't talk to my husband!
	And he literally was like, f* you, b*h!
	Sit down, b***h!
	And all of a sudden, now I'm getting kicked out.
	Excuse me, I have courtside seats that I pay for.
	F*** you, LeBron.
	You're a f*ing bh. Get the f** out of here.
	You're gonna let a 25-year-old girl intimidate you during a game?
	Bye, b***h.
	I wanted to send that to our editors.
	I know it was probably fun for them to get all that.
	My lord, why do rich guys marry women like this?
	Now, I know why they do.
	I'm not naive, but is it worth it?
	Is it worth the price of listening to that every day?
	Is it really?
	I don't know anything about her husband.
	I assume he's older.
	I assume he's like 92.
	And your final years of life, this is what you're listening to?
	Is it worth it to you?
	In any case, this woman later apologized for the argument and took full responsibility, which tells me, you know, which does make me doubt the part of the story where she allegedly was called the B-word.
	She seems to have backed away from that and is now trying to apologize and move on.
	Whatever actually happened, given what we know already about LeBron James and given what we know about this woman just from the 30-second clip there, it's safe to say that there were no good guys in the dispute.
	No one to root for.
	But today's Daily Cancellation has nothing to do with any of that.
	LeBron James, after the game, didn't have much to say about the whole incident, except this.
	He tweeted, "'Courtside Karen' was mad mad."
	Followed by a bunch of laughing emojis.
	I've already cancelled grown men who use emojis, so we're not gonna rehash that aspect of it.
	My issue today is with the pejorative use of the name Karen.
	Okay?
	That's what I'm cancelling.
	The Karen meme is officially cancelled because it's a racial slur.
	Now, to reiterate, I'm not defending the woman who seems to embody pretty much all of the things I loathe.
	Also, I'm not personally offended by the Karen thing.
	I'm not a white woman.
	Though, I could become one if I wanted to, of course.
	At least, that's what I'm told, anyway.
	So, for now, it doesn't concern me directly or apply to me, but I am a fan of intellectual consistency, and I do hate, with a burning, unyielding passion, here's some hate speech, I hate double standards.
	Hate them.
	And on that basis, I object to the name Karen being used in this way.
	Now, a couple things to establish here.
	First of all, Karen does absolutely have a racial connotation.
	Please do not embarrass yourself by claiming otherwise.
	Yes, sometimes, rarely but sometimes, non-white people are labeled Karens.
	But in its origination, and in its most popular usage, it refers specifically to obnoxious white women.
	And when a non-white woman is called a Karen, the insult is, you're acting like a white woman.
	Okay?
	A Time magazine article in July says that the Karen meme confronts the violent history of white womanhood.
	A Teen Vogue article from around the same time says that the archetypal Karen is a white woman.
	And that the Karen meme originated, quote, as an inside joke within communities of color.
	That is, it's an insult against white women, and it was created by non-white people.
	In fact, the Teen Vogue article takes issue with white women using the word themselves in reference to each other.
	The writer, Malavika Kannan, explains that non-white people have a right To use this slur against white people, and if you as a white person use it yourself, then you are appropriating your own slur.
	And you can't do that.
	A Daily Beast article from earlier this month says that, um, says, quote, Karen, like the once popular phrase Becky, became a moniker to describe white women who were problematic.
	In this case, the author wishes to stop using the term, but not because it's racist.
	He wants to stop using it because he fears instead that Karens are being normalized by the use of the word Karen.
	And if you prefer to go to Wikipedia for all your information, as most of The country does.
	Here's what that site says about the origins of Karen.
	It says, quote, there are several possible origins of the term.
	One theory is that it's an evolution of an African-American vernacular English term of referring to unreasonable white women.
	The term may have originated on black Twitter as a meme used to describe white women who tattle on black kids' lemonade stands.
	Bitch Magazine, that's the name of a magazine, don't blame me, described it as a term that originated with black women but was co-opted by white men.
	Okay.
	So, again, just get the irony here.
	This is a pejorative of a certain race, of white people, but white people aren't allowed to use it.
	That's offensive for us to use it.
	The point here is that, without any doubt at all, this is a racial term.
	The people who first came up with it and first started using it say that it's racial.
	And they very much object to any attempt to de-racialize it.
	The next question, then, is whether it is a racial term, but is it a racist term?
	Is it a racial slur?
	Well, to answer that question, we need only engage in a thought experiment.
	Very simple.
	Let us imagine an exactly analogous situation.
	What if white people on Twitter started to refer to obnoxious black women using a stereotypical black woman name?
	Now, in order to properly frame this, let's use an actual name as an example.
	ABC News has an article from a few years ago listing what they call the top 20 whitest and blackest names.
	Now, if you have a problem with a phrase like whitest and blackest names, take it up with ABC News.
	One of the names at the top of their list for black women is Shanice.
	Okay, I'll take that as an example.
	What if white people on Twitter, a bunch of dastardly right-wing white people, let's say, started describing their encounters with black women by saying things like, oh man, so this chenise was up in my face, etc, etc, etc.
	Would there be any doubt about whether that qualifies as racist?
	Would anyone even dare suggest that it isn't racist?
	I certainly wouldn't.
	I mean, in my mind, it would be absolutely 100% clear to me that using a stereotypical black female name as a pejorative to refer to black women I don't like is extremely racist.
	Everything about it is racist.
	If that's not racist, then what could possibly be racist?
	You're taking a stereotypical name for members of a certain race and using it as a pejorative against them.
	What could qualify as racist if that doesn't?
	That's the stance I would have in the case of Shanice.
	And so would everybody else.
	Everyone.
	You, me, everyone.
	We would all agree that it's racist.
	Everyone would.
	And on the left, especially among the very people defending the use of the term Karen, well, they would be apoplectic.
	I mean, they would be writing think pieces with titles like, the Shanice meme is an attack on black womanhood, so on and so forth.
	We all know it.
	No reasonable person can deny it.
	So, does this kind of racial slur... So what that establishes is, this is race, this is racial, and it's racist.
	We've established those two things, I think, undeniably.
	Next question.
	Does this kind of racial slur, this kind of dehumanizing, degrading way of referring to people of another race, does it suddenly become acceptable if you apply it to white people?
	No.
	Objectively, it doesn't.
	Subjectively, according to our culture and the way the rules are now set up, it does.
	According to those rules, it's impossible to be racist against white people, so Karen is not racist.
	I mean, you could run up to a white person, call him a white devil, spit in his face and set him on fire, and you still would not be racist.
	Those are the rules now.
	But I object to those rules.
	And so should you.
	If it's so obvious, which it is, that Karen originates as a racial slur, and it's intended to be a racial slur, then why do so few white people, even white women, object to it?
	Why is it that, on the few occasions when I've brought this issue up, I've been met with backlash, mostly by white people desperately defending the slurs that are used against them?
	Taking it personally, that I think they shouldn't be slurred.
	The reason, I think, is that white people have Stockholm Syndrome.
	They think that they aren't allowed to object to this kind of thing.
	They actually think they might be racist if they object to racism targeted at them.
	They're at the point now where you could go up to them and pee in their cereal, and they would just smile and say, hey man, no problem, I understand.
	You know, I would never tell you to stop peeing in my cereal.
	I didn't want those Frosted Flakes anyway.
	Unless you want me to eat them, that's it.
	But you know, it would be really obnoxious on my part to object.
	Okay?
	And if I came up and said, hey, man, that guy's peeing in your cereal, that's kind of wrong.
	Maybe you shouldn't do that.
	You would say to me, hey, hey, you snowflake, mind your own business.
	Stop being a drama queen.
	What is this, cancel culture?
	Trying to cancel this person for peeing in my cereal?
	Come on.
	It's pathetic.
	I mean, have a little self-respect, for God's sake.
	You don't have to accept double standards.
	You don't have to go along with it.
	And you shouldn't.
	Now, I know that just by pointing out a double standard, that's not enough to make it go away.
	I get it.
	What's the other option?
	To just accept it?
	To cooperate with it?
	No.
	Absolutely not.
	We should take the stance that racial slurs are bad, no matter who they are applied to.
	And as it happens right now, There's really only one racial slur I can think of that is popularly used and can be used without any social consequence whatsoever.
	And so that should be the racial slur we focus on.
	Because all the others, everyone agrees, are bad.
	This one, even the people who fall victim to it, cannot bring themselves to say that it's bad.
	But it is.
	And that is why the Karen meme, and all who use it, have been cancelled.
	And we will leave it there for today.
	Thanks for watching, everybody.
	Thanks for listening.
	Have a great day.
	Godspeed.
	(upbeat music)
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	The Senate prepares for the pseudo-impeachment trial of former President Trump, AOC compares Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley to rapists, and BLM gets nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

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