Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the Cancel Culture claimed three victims last week. We’ll talk about the latest cases and discuss what might be done to put an end to this madness. Also Five Headlines including the most notable events from the Super Bowl. Speaking of the Super Bowl, the Washington Post is concerned that the Buccaneers mascot may normalize piracy. We’ll talk about that as well, and much more, today on the Matt Walsh Show.
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, the cancel culture claims three victims last week.
Prolific week for the cancel culture.
We'll talk about the latest cases and discuss what might be done to finally put an end to this madness.
Also, five headlines including the most notable events from the Super Bowl, if there were any.
Speaking of the Super Bowl, The Washington Post is concerned that the Buccaneers mascot may normalize piracy.
Yes, I'm not joking.
We'll talk about that as well and much more today on The Matt Wall Show.
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This past week was one of the cancel culture's busiest and most productive to date.
It began with the country superstar Morgan Wallen getting suspended by his record label, pulled from hundreds of radio stations, and disqualified from receiving country music awards after he was caught saying the n-word on tape.
And it ended with Donald McNeil Jr., famed science reporter, veteran journalist of 45 years, being forced out of his job at the New York Times after revelation that he had also used similar, quote-unquote, racist language.
And in between, old accusations of inappropriate behavior by another New York Times staff member, Andy Mills, prompted him to also resign in disgrace.
Getting into these specific cases, in Mills' case, he had apparently engaged in some inappropriate flirting with women at a previous job several years ago.
Now, this was all known, this was known and it was dealt with at the time, apparently, but after it was decided by some people on Twitter and some of his colleagues that Mills had not received his fair portion of the blame for a separate incident in which the Times had to retract key portions of a hit podcast that he had helped produced, These other unrelated allegations were made to, as they say, resurface.
As for Morgan Wallen, as we covered on the show on Friday, he did say the n-word, but it was uttered drunkenly, in jest, to a friend, and secretly recorded by a neighbor, and then sent immediately to TMZ.
Donald McNeil, used the same word, though it turns out that he said it one time two years prior while on a trip with students to South America, and he didn't so much as use the slur as refer to it.
Now, as he explained in his resignation letter, he, quote, was asked at a dinner by a student whether I thought a classmate of hers should have been suspended for a video she had made as a 12-year-old in which she used a racial slur.
To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title.
In asking the question, I used the slur itself.
Now, this incident was investigated internally by McNeil's employer right after it happened, and it was determined that he had no malicious or racist intent.
He was just referring to the word.
He was talking about it and trying to be understood, and in the process, he used the word, or rather referred to it.
But once this was all made public, two years after the fact, The Times brass quickly lost their nerve.
Adding to the pressure from the social media mob were 150 Times staffers who sent a letter to their leadership professing to be outraged and in pain.
Outraged and in pain because someone had referred to a racial slur two years ago.
They demanded his removal.
Quickly got what they wanted.
Executive editor Dean Beckwetz, who initially defended McNeil but collapsed like a folding chair the moment real pressure was applied, wrote a letter to his colleagues on Friday announcing McNeil's departure and stating that the company does, quote, quote, does not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.
This is the common thread between both Wallen and McNeil's cancellation.
The insane, unjust, wholly indefensible notion that intent doesn't matter in human communication.
All that matters to the cancel culture, and to the quaking, gutless jellyfish who cater to it, is how a word or action makes somebody feel.
Now, on second thought, I should rephrase.
It's not that the feeling matters more than the intent.
That would assume that those 150 staff members who said they were in pain because of a word that Donald McNeil said two years ago were being sincere.
If we say that all that matters is their feelings, then that is to assume that they were actually feeling in pain.
Is to assume that they are merely oversensitive, emotionally unstable babies whose psychological fragility has driven them close to madness.
But that's not the case.
See, one of the hallmarks of the cancel culture, what makes it distinct and also modern, is that the angry pitchfork mob is rarely angry.
They ruin lives, they ruin reputations, they ruin careers as a matter of course.
More indifferent to their victims than angry at them.
They're motivated by cruelty, callousness, ideological conviction, and they're empowered by the institutions that run our society.
That's the other thing about the cancel culture that must be understood.
It is inherently a left-wing phenomenon.
You cannot really cancel anyone, that is, ruin their career and turn them into social pariahs.
That's what canceling means, right?
Unless you control the institutions and the culture itself.
As covered last week, the right may complain, and justifiably so, about, for example, Nick Cannon calling white people animals and savages, but the reason he got his job back after a brief vacation is that the institutions don't really care what conservatives think or how they feel.
The institutions do care very much about what leftists think and how they feel, or pretend to feel, and this is a fact that the leftist mob is well aware of and uses to its advantage.
That's how cancel culture works, and what it looks like.
It is cruel, it is callous, it is vengeful.
It is emotional only in a performative sense, and it is intensely ideological.
What cancel culture is not, what it is the opposite of by definition, is forgiving.
Merciful.
And that's precisely why the groveling public apologies from its victims are always so impotent, as they were in the most recent cases.
Morgan Wallen sent a statement to TMZ saying that he was embarrassed and sorry and apologizing and promising to, quote, do better.
McNeil published his own statement conceding that he originally thought he could defend the use of the word based on context, but now he realizes that context doesn't matter.
He now realizes how, quote, deeply offensive and hurtful his language was, and he's sorry to his colleagues and regrets letting them down.
But what McNeil should have said, and might as well have said, is the truth.
As an adult, a professional, and a human with a rational brain, he knew in the past and still knows that context matters when it comes to language or anything else.
In fact, when it comes to language especially, context is the only thing that matters, or it's one of the only things that matters.
You can't possibly know what someone is trying to say, what they're trying to convey, unless you do an honest assessment of the context of that language.
He also knows that his colleagues who lined up to stab him in the back and feed him to the wolves after nearly five decades in the business are not deserving of an apology.
They are the ones who should apologize to him for their wretched, callous, evil, manipulative behavior.
As for Wallin, The neighbor who filmed him was obviously not so traumatized as to prevent him from immediately sending the video to TMZ.
You know, traumatized people, that's not what they do.
They don't send videos to TMZ.
And the social media mob, if you read what they've been saying about Wallen, they don't appear to be upset or injured at all.
Their attitude is more of a, ha, we got another one, variety.
So, who was he apologizing to exactly?
You'll notice that ever since the advent of the cancel culture, there has never been one apology accepted.
There has never been one example of reconciliation and forgiveness.
And that's because the apology doesn't matter.
It's all part of the performance.
The mob does not listen to it.
They don't consider it.
They just claim it as a trophy and a scalp to nail to their walls.
That's all it is.
The apology is coerced under public pressure, delivered to parties who are not injured by the offense, if there even was an offense to begin with, and then gloated over or else snidely disregarded by the people who demanded it.
I can't say what will end cancel culture, or if anything ever will, but what I do know is that it certainly will never end and will only get worse as long as its victims keep apologizing.
As long as they keep laying down and offering themselves up as carcasses for the vultures to pick apart.
Now, I believe in apologizing in the correct context.
That is, when you've done or said something to actually hurt another person, and the apology is given sincerely and voluntarily to the injured party.
But this ritualistic public apology thing has to stop.
Even if you were wrong for whatever you did or said to provoke the mob, still you should not apologize to them.
Not to them.
Never to them.
You should be as indifferent to the mob's fraudulent displays of offendedness as they are to your whole life and reputation and career and existence.
They don't care about you at all.
They'd be fine seeing you destroyed.
They don't care if you go off and kill yourself.
They really don't.
And you care about their feelings?
Why?
The only way this ends, if it ever does, is if the targets of the cancel mob stand up for themselves and display the righteous indignation they certainly feel and have every right to feel.
And if they absolutely refuse to submit and kiss the feet of people who are the real villains here, the cancel culture mob, they're the real villains.
In the movie The Crucible, after John Proctor refuses to sign a false confession admitting to witchcraft, thereby signing his own death warrant, Right before he's taken off to be hanged, he kisses his wife and he says to her, give them no tears, show them a stony heart and sink them with it.
Those are his last words to his wife.
Pretty great last words.
And this is the advice that I give anyone targeted by the mob.
Show them no tears.
Don't pretend to care about the emotional well-being of sociopaths who want to ruin your life just for fun.
Many people in your life May deserve apologies from you for many things that you've done.
God knows, I know that's the case for me.
But not these people.
Never them.
So stop apologizing.
And this may not stop.
This may not stop your life from being ruined.
If your time comes up on that stage that nobody wants to be on, where you're getting torn apart, yeah, I mean, your career, your reputation, it might all be done.
And there might not be anything you could do about that.
So at least keep your dignity.
And respond the right way.
And if enough people do that, then eventually, maybe, this ends.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
We don't have much in common these days, but here's one thing at least.
We all love underdog stories, don't we?
We all love that.
And that's why you have to check out the True Underdog podcast.
Raised in a trailer park with no clear path to success, kicked out of high school multiple times, faced with becoming a father in his teens, Jason Waller is the definition of a true underdog.
After hearing the words no or you can't too many times, as we've all heard those words, he unleashed the power within to start three successful companies with his most recent venture, Power Home Solar, skyrocketing on a path to becoming a billion-dollar enterprise.
So join us as Waller, a four-time Entrepreneur of the Year, shares motivational tips and inspiring stories and also gives Tips on how to build a business from the ground up.
He shares his life experiences and that of his high profile guests to help others better themselves.
You can learn about failure, you can learn about entrepreneurship, learn about never quitting, never making excuses.
It's real, it's raw, it's motivational.
And so I think we could all use maybe some motivation in a time like this as well.
So check out True Underdog Podcast at trueunderdog.com or anywhere you get your podcasts.
OK, the Super Bowl happened on Sunday, in case you didn't hear.
Patrick Mahomes loses in a blowout.
I mean, it really might be time for the Chiefs to consider moving on from him.
I don't know.
I think that they tried it.
It's not working.
Probably offer him up for a trade.
Might be able to get a third and fourth rounder for him or something like that.
We'll see.
Meanwhile, Tom Brady wins his seventh Super Bowl, which I think definitely cements his status as the second best quarterback of all time behind Colin Kaepernick.
So he's right there behind him at this point.
But, you know, here's the main thing, though.
As I was watching the game and I was, you know, looking at some of the reaction on social media, because the game itself was not very interesting.
So, you know, you look for other things to be interested by.
The commercials also weren't great.
We'll have more on that a little bit later in the headlines.
But looking at some of the reaction and everything, and there's a lot of discussion about the game, everything associated with it, but for me, the thing that stands out and that I'm troubled by, frankly, is that a lot of very upset Chiefs fans are complaining about the officiating, right?
They're saying that the Bucs were getting too many pass interference calls going their way and so on.
And you hear this complaint any time Tom Brady's involved in a game.
There's always the claim that the refs are on his side and everything.
Well, I couldn't help but notice that this was also the first Super Bowl to have a female ref.
So, the sexism of Chiefs fans is just unbelievable here.
To complain about the job that the refs are doing only because a woman is doing it?
I mean, you're telling me this is a coincidence?
First time a woman is officiating and now all of a sudden people are complaining about the refs?
Never heard those complaints before.
Strikes me as sexist.
The sexism in Kansas City is really upsetting to me on a deeply personal level.
Alright, moving on.
Number two.
This is from KSL News.
It says investigators are struggling to build a federal murder case regarding fallen U.S.
Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick, vexed by a lack of evidence that could prove
someone caused his death as he defended the Capitol during last month's insurrection.
Authorities have reviewed video and photographs that show Sicknick engaging with rioters amid the siege,
but have yet to identify a moment in which he suffered his fatal injuries.
This according to law enforcement officials familiar with the matter.
Soon after Sicknick died on January 7th, prosecutors in Washington
opened a federal murder investigation dedicating a team inside the US Attorney's Office
to build out a case.
To date, little information has been shared publicly about the circumstances of the death
of the 13-year veteran of the force, including any findings from an autopsy
that was conducted by the DC.
's medical examiner.
It goes on a little bit later, it says, according to one, this is very interesting, according to one law enforcement official, medical examiners did not find signs that the officer sustained any blunt force trauma.
So investigators believe that early reports that he was fatally struck by a fire extinguisher are not true.
One possibility being considered by investigators is Sicknick became ill after interacting with a chemical irritant like pepper spray or bear spray that was deployed in the crowd, but investigators reviewing video of the officer's time around the Capitol haven't been able to confirm that in the tape, or at least they haven't been able to do that so far.
So this is a case that it's odd how little we've heard, at least When you consider the assumption or the reports early on, as mentioned here, that Officer Sicknick was, you know, in fact, you still see the way it's portrayed on social media, the way the media talks about it, you know, the phrase that we've seen is Brian Sicknick was beat to death by the rioters or something like that.
And you hear about that and it's, of course, awful.
Either way, it's a terrible tragedy because a police officer lost his life.
But if he was beat to death by a crowd in DC, you would think there'd be video of it.
I mean, hundreds of video cameras all around, people in the crowd filming, security cameras.
I mean, there's just cameras everywhere.
And it sounds like there's plenty of tape for the investigators to look at involving Sicknick, and they've been looking at it, and they haven't been able to find this particular incident.
So it's just, it's strange how little we've heard.
And then you consider, What makes it harder, at least for us in the public, to sort of sort through, is of course, we know how the media, we know what conclusion the media wants.
After all, the media, what they've done, is they've actually tied three officer deaths to the riot.
There's Officer Sicknick, and then two others that they've tied to the rioting, even though in those two other cases, those were officers who committed suicide in the days and weeks after the riot.
Now, to turn that into a riot death is just so cynical and misleading that it's almost unbelievable.
It's almost as shocking that you would have people doing that, with no basis.
I mean, what even is the insinuation there?
You're assuming that they committed suicide because they were so upset by what happened at the riot?
I mean, that is quite an assumption to make without having any information.
There are unfortunately lots of reasons why people do this, and without knowing anything about these officers, to just assume that it was connected somehow to the riot is, as I said, cynical and totally dishonest and disgusting.
But this is what the media is doing.
They want to get the riot body count up, and they want to be able to say that it was a deadly riot, which is what they are reporting.
Now, we know, first of all, that no matter what, it was a deadly riot, because we do know for sure at least one person, we have video evidence, that at least one person was directly killed by violence in the riot, but that was Ashley Babbitt, who was a rioter herself, and she was shot and killed.
She was an unarmed woman who was shot and killed by a police officer.
But I think when the media calls it a deadly riot, they don't want that to be the only fatality they can directly connect to the rioting.
Then there were three other people who were at the protest, and I say protest because not everybody there was engaged in a riot, despite, again, how it's portrayed by the media.
There were three other individuals.
Who are at least part of the protest who died, and I believe we know in two of those cases, those were medical emergencies after the fact.
Someone had a stroke, there was someone with a heart condition.
The third case, I'm not sure, but that's sort of the point.
It's just, we're hearing five people died in the riot, but we're just not being told very much information about any of these cases.
Except for Ashley Babbitt, who's just sort of being ignored completely.
And it does matter.
I talked about this on Twitter yesterday, and there were some people getting upset for some reason and saying, well, how dare you ask these questions about Officer Sicknick?
Well, what do you mean?
Of course it matters.
Either way, it's a terrible tragedy.
Nobody denies that.
I least of all deny that.
Now, in fact, people on the left who are mourning Sicknick, In fact, I actually don't believe that they see it as a terrible tragedy because he is the only dead police officer that these people have ever mourned.
They have never shown any concern, ever, for any other police officer except him.
So I do actually doubt the sincerity of their feelings.
But as for me, I am supportive of the police, always have been, so of course it's a terrible tragedy.
But why he died and how he died, I would say that matters very much.
It would matter to me if I was the family, it matters legally, it matters in every sense.
And yet the way the media reports it is, well, he died, rioters killed him, don't ask any questions.
Okay, number three.
Let's see here.
Ibram X. Kendi, anti-racist expert, got himself into some hot water with the woke crowd, that's his crowd, because of some comments he made about gender recently.
This was during Stirring some sort of Zoom meeting or seminar that he was involved in.
Now, you all know, I've talked about it before, the victim hierarchy and how that works on the left, and even Rex Kendi, you know, his position on that hierarchy, that gives him the freedom to say a lot of things, but it does not give him the freedom to speak freely about gender, the way the hierarchy works.
So he's not at the top of the hierarchy, and that's how he got in trouble for saying this.
You know, obviously talking about race, even talking about gender.
You know, I think it was last week, my daughter came home and said she wanted to be a boy.
You know, which was horrifying for my wife to hear, myself to hear.
And so, of course, you know, we're like, okay, what affirmative messages about girlhood, you know, can we be teaching her to protect her?
from whatever she's hearing in our home or even outside of our home that would make her want to be a boy.
And I suspect it's the same thing with, you know, kids of color in which they're regularly hearing these messages that may want them to want to be white.
Or even white children who are like, I'm happy I'm white.
Right?
You know, what affirmative messages are we teaching them to break down those ideas?
Now the thing is, almost everything he said there was correct, except for the last part at the end.
I didn't quite understand what he meant at the end.
It sounded like he was saying that it's a problem for a white child who's happy to be white.
Taking that aside, everything else he said, you know, if your daughter comes home and says she wants to be a boy, yeah, that is horrifying.
That is horrifying because, number one, this is your child saying that she doesn't want to be who she is.
She's not happy with who she is at such a fundamental level.
As a parent, of course, that's a problem.
And that's what he's touching on here.
It's a very good point.
It's a point that I've made, many of us have made many, many times.
That if your child, you know, we hear so much about, well, we have to help kids accept themselves for who they are and be themselves and all these things.
And yeah, you're right.
But if a boy is saying that he's a girl, telling him that, yeah, you're a girl, that is not helping him accept himself.
That is helping him reject himself.
So the problem that he has is that he's not happy with who he is, or he doesn't fully understand who he is, especially if we're talking about a kid who's like four years old, a boy saying, I'm a girl.
This is a child who just doesn't understand, doesn't know what he's talking about.
He doesn't really know anything about the world and very little about himself and his own identity, so he's confused.
As you get older, a child comes home from public schools and middle school or high school and is saying this, well, this is a child who's dealing with something, dealing with despair, dealing with confusion, dealing with self-loathing, all of these things.
And if you really love them and care about them as a parent, then what you're going to do is help them to accept who they are.
Your daughter comes home and says, I wish I was a boy.
What's the correct message from a loving parent?
The correct message is, no, you're a girl.
That's a beautiful thing.
That's a wonderful thing.
It's wonderful to be a girl.
That's the message.
But of course, not allowed to say that.
Even Ibram X. Kendi isn't allowed to say that.
And he has participated in making this woke, brainwashed culture where those kinds of very common sense and important insights are not allowed to be uttered.
Number four, Biden, President Biden on Friday was talking about the need for another stimulus.
And I still think somehow that these people are missing the point.
Here's what he had to say.
There's only 6,000 private sector jobs that have been created, and at that rate it's going
to take 10 years before we get to full employment.
That's not hyperbole, that's a fact.
We're going to be in a situation where it's going to take a long, long time.
And I appreciate you all coming over because and the urgency with which you're moving.
This is about people's lives.
This is not just about numbers.
This is about people's lives.
People are really, I didn't tell any of you, they're really hurting.
People are being evicted.
Just look at all the number of people who are needing and seeking mental health services now.
Suicide's up.
People are very, really, really... Drug abuse.
Violence against women.
People are really feeling the hold.
They don't know how to get out.
You've given them a lot of hope.
A lot of hope.
And with the, as they say in Southern Delaware, the grace of God, the goodwill of neighbors, the creek not rising, we can really begin to do something consequential here.
Yeah, the way that the people who lead this country don't understand anything about human beings and human nature, it's troubling, to say the least.
I mean, he's right that suicides, drug abuse, all these things are on the rise.
Obviously, they're tied to the lockdown, the fact that people have been isolated, the fact that people have had their careers and businesses destroyed.
Or kids that we just ripped them away from their education, from their friends, from their lives, from sports?
You know, there's so many elements, especially to what we're doing to kids, that it's hard to focus, to give each specific element the focus it deserves.
But even just that, I mean, I've been talking about this for a long time, with what we're doing to kids with the lockdowns, and I realized that I hadn't thought much about this particular element of it.
Even just the sport part of it.
You take a kid who's maybe a junior in high school when all this started, been working at a particular sport, maybe hoping for a scholarship, they've been working for a long time, 10 years, they're starting in Little League or whatever it is, and Rec League, and then going in high school, and then we just take that away from them.
What happens now?
Can they still get the sports scholarship?
Can they go back and maybe the last one or two years playing the sport, take it away?
That's one thing.
Along with everything else we've taken from kids and from people generally.
Yeah, that's a huge problem.
But you're not going to solve that problem by simply continuing to give people money.
I'm in favor of giving financial help, the government giving financial help, to the people that it has financially ruined, because they owe that help.
I'm in favor of that, but that's not the solution.
Especially if you're something like despair, loneliness.
A $2,000 check is going to do absolutely nothing for that.
Not one thing.
The way to solve that problem is to open up the country again and let people get back to their lives.
That's the way you solve that problem.
Although you can never totally undo the damage.
That's been done.
Number five.
Okay, back to the Super Bowl.
A couple of the things I wanted to mention.
First of all, the There was a big deal being made about a show debuted on CBS after the game, a reboot of The Equalizer.
And that was originally a show, I think from the 80s, about a retired kind of ass-kicking guy who uses his special skills to bring bad guys to justice, to equalize things.
And then there was the film with Denzel Washington, and that film had a real gritty, kind of violent vibe to it, with Denzel as the no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners hero.
And now the TV reboot, And the person in that role, which debuted yesterday after the show, and I think I watched maybe 75 seconds of it before I turned it off, but in the reboot, the person in that role that was most recently filled by Denzel Washington is Queen Latifah.
And I know we're not supposed to say this, even though we all think it, But I cannot take a 50-year-old woman seriously in the role of a gritty, violent, ass-kicking action hero.
I just can't.
I'm sorry.
The woke PC stuff and girl power stuff, there's a limit with it.
And I think we've now reached that limit when Queen Latifah is stepping in for a role most recently filled by Denzel Washington.
In the preview, the first scene of the preview, She walks into a room with a bunch of gun-toting bad guys and beats them all up with her bare hands, this 50-year-old woman.
I mean, you know, I understand it's fiction.
Okay, I get that.
But the problem with putting women in all these roles is that when you do that, all semblance of reality must be removed from the story.
And yeah, it's fiction, but you want it to be, especially if you're going for gritty action kind of thing, drama and all that.
You want it to be related to reality in some way.
You want it to exist in a universe that's recognizable to the viewer.
Otherwise, it's hard to really get invested in the story.
And so in order to turn all of these things into girl power type shows and movies, you have to make them glossy and cartoonish.
There's another scene in the preview where Queen Latifah is standing up on a roof.
Where we know in shows that's where all the important meetings happen for some reason is on a roof.
I've never had a meeting with anybody on a roof ever, but I'm not sure I've ever even been on a roof really.
But she's on a roof and another guy comes up and she says to the other guy, well what are you doing up here?
Why'd they send you?
And he says to Queen Latifah, well you would just kill anybody else who came up here.
And you look and it's like Queen Latifah.
It's hard to take that seriously.
We're supposed to be intimidating.
We're supposed to be an intimidating sort of figure.
You can buy that for Denzel Washington.
Tough, no-nonsense guy.
Alright, that's the first part.
The other thing, that was after the show.
Before the show, Amanda Gorman, who's the slam poet, Who we were told was a sensation because she performed at the inauguration.
And now apparently we're doing slam poetry before Super Bowls, too.
And so she performed before the Super Bowl, and here's a little bit of that.
Today, we honor our three captains for their actions and impact in a time of uncertainty and need.
They've taken the lead, exceeding all expectations and limitations, uplifting their communities and neighbors as leaders, healers, and educators.
James has felt the wounds of warfare, but this warrior still shares his home with at-risk kids.
During COVID, he's even lent a hand live-streaming football for family and fans.
Tremaine is an educator who works non-stop, providing his community with hotspots, laptops, and tech workshops so his students have all the tools they need to succeed in life and in school.
So that's talking.
She's talking.
Good job with the talking.
It's not bad talking, you know.
As far as talking goes, pretty good.
I give it a solid B plus in the talking department, but you're talking with an emotional background music.
That's it.
That's just not poetry at all.
In no way is that poetry.
I don't know.
I continue to be flummoxed by this.
Yeah, like I said, pretty good talking, but I'm supposed to be impressed.
What am I supposed to be impressed by?
Maybe someone can explain it to me.
I don't quite see it.
I'm also not sure what I'm supposed to be impressed by here.
This is making a lot of waves.
Bruce Springsteen was involved in a Jeep ad.
And this is supposed to be, we all love the inspiring commercials.
A lot of inspiring statements made by the corporations.
Corporations always make inspiring statements.
They made a lot of inspiring statements during the Super Bowl.
For example, before we get to the Jeep ad, Anheuser-Busch The makers of Budweiser beer, they made a big deal before the Super Bowl that they were not going to play any, they were not buying any time for Budweiser ads during the Super Bowl because they wanted to make a statement about the severity of COVID-19.
They were going to dedicate all that money to raising awareness about the vaccine.
And so they weren't going to play any Budweiser ads.
And it was a great, great thing.
But they still had Bud Light ads.
And they also ran an ad for Anheuser-Busch.
And in the ad, it featured people drinking Anheuser-Busch products.
So, that might be the emptiest and most pointless example of corporate virtue singling I think we've ever seen, which is saying quite a lot.
Make a big deal about not running ads for this one product, but then the company that makes the product still ran an ad for itself and for its other products.
So, very inspired.
This too from Jeep and Bruce Springsteen.
I don't know.
You tell me if you're inspired by it.
Let's watch.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
There's a chapel in Kansas standing on the exact center of the lower 48.
It never closes.
All are more than welcome to come meet here in the middle.
It's no secret, the middle has been a hard place to get to lately.
Between red and blue, between servant and citizen, between our freedom and our fear.
Now fear has never been the best of who we are.
And as for freedom, it's not the property of just the fortunate few.
It belongs to us all.
Whoever you are, wherever you're from,
it's what connects us.
And we need that connection.
There you go.
Yes, it's what connects us.
We all have to come together by buying a Jeep.
See, that's the thing.
Even if I were tempted to be inspired, it always comes back to the fact that, yeah, well, they're trying to sell a Jeep, though.
That's really what this is about.
They're just trying to sell a car, a vehicle.
And so it kind of detracts from the inspiring message.
But also, This is, of course, nonsense, coming from Bruce Springsteen, from a corporation.
When they say, oh, let's meet in the middle, let's unite, let's come together, what they mean is, where we're meeting is not really in the middle, it's on the left.
That is always what it means.
They are inviting you, as someone who is wrong and backwards and stupid, they are inviting you to give up all of your wrongness and your backwardness and your stupidity and to come join them in all of their rightness, in the glory and light of their rightness.
That's what that means.
But then the thing is, even that is not really sincere.
Because we've found that even if you were to do that and abandon all of it and try to come join them, they're not really going to let you be part of the club.
Or at least before they'll let you, you have to express your... There's atonement that needs to be done for all of the horrible things you have done in the past.
And by horrible things you've done in the past, we mean just the fact that you have disagreed with them for so long.
So, that's the real message.
We're not meeting in the middle, we're meeting on the left.
You're invited to come over to the left, Maybe, if first you atone for all of your sins.
And even then, you still might not actually be allowed.
Not as inspiring when you put it like that.
Before we get to our daily cancellation, you know, gotta tell you about our very good friends over at Rock Auto.
This is one of the, I love all of our sponsors, this is definitely a sponsor that I find myself using quite often.
Maybe more often than I would want to, to be honest, just because one of our cars is sort of, is older now, in their senior years, and so we're having We have problems with it more often than we like, but what that means is that we need auto parts, and I'm grateful that we can go to rockauto.com rather than going to an auto parts store all the time, and the thing is, you go there, the selection isn't great, the prices are definitely not great, and oftentimes, they're not going to have what you want.
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Why do that when you have access to rockauto.com at your desk and in your pocket?
Rockauto.com always offers the lowest prices possible.
They're going to charge you as little as they possibly can, and that's what it comes down to.
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You can quickly see all the parts available for your vehicle and choose the brands, the specifications, and the prices you prefer.
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Well, one other thing to tell you about.
You've probably heard me talk about our All Access membership before, but for those of you who haven't heard me talk about it, it's our most elite membership base here at The Daily Wire.
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Okay, today for our daily cancellation, come on down Jamie L.H.
Goodall.
You're next up for cancellation.
Jamie Goodall is a staff historian at the U.S.
Army Center of Military History.
But what brings the cancel hammer down on her today is a piece she wrote for the Washington Post a couple days ago in the lead up to the Super Bowl.
The headline was, The Buccaneers embody Tampa's love of pirates.
Is that a problem?
And then the subheading, How brutal outlaws became romanticized.
Yes, Goodall is concerned that we're romanticizing and normalizing pirates.
She's, after all, an expert on this subject, as she has a giant tattoo of a sexy pirate on her arm.
And no, I'm not making that up.
She really wrote about the problem of romanticizing pirates with a romanticized image of a pirate imprinted permanently on her body.
But I'm not going to focus on that aspect of the issue too much.
After all, we can't expect her to have a consistent view on the crucial issue of pirate romanticization.
I mean, it's something we've all wrestled with and found ourselves on different sides of, I think.
I, myself, went through a heavy pro-romanticization phase.
I used to walk around with an eye patch and everything.
I told everyone to call me Captain Brownbeard.
Even spent a few years swashbuckling on the high seas.
Just a normal teenage phase.
And I have grown out of it, as so many kids do, but I still prefer to be called Captain Brownbeard, if you don't mind, for the record.
But in any case, Goodell writes of Tampa's pirate mascot.
She says, while this celebration of piracy seems like innocent fun and pride in the local culture, there is danger in romanticizing ruthless cutthroats who created a crisis in world trade when they captured and plundered thousands of ships on Atlantic trade routes between the Americas, Africa, and Great Britain.
Why?
Because it takes these murderous thieves who did terrible things, like locking women and children in a burning church, and makes them a symbol of freedom and adventure, erasing their wicked deeds from historical memory.
These were men, and women, who willingly participated in murder, torture, and the brutal enslavement of Africans and indigenous peoples.
Goodall then finishes with this thought.
She says, Perhaps time has dulled us to the atrocities committed by these 17th and 18th century outlaws.
Which, side note, I mean, yeah, it has.
It's actually really normal and healthy for the emotional impact of atrocities to be dulled after 400 years.
I mean, you really shouldn't be actively upset about anything that happened four centuries ago.
Which isn't to say that you should approve of everything that happened four centuries ago.
It just means that 400 years is a very long time, and it's not where we should focus our emotional energy.
Anyway, she continues.
Or perhaps it's the fact that if pirates of the Golden Age were bloodthirsty, so too were the nations who opposed them.
They willingly and purposefully massacred millions of African and indigenous peoples in the name of colonization.
Pirates then are seen as romantic heroes, the underdogs fighting the establishment, whom historian Marcus Rediker refers to as proto-democratic, egalitarian, and multicultural.
Should we celebrate their complicated legacy?
It's a question Tampa Bay has to contend with as we collectively contemplate other major sports mascots with dubious legacies like their Super Bowl rivals in Kansas City.
Okay.
No.
Tampa does not have to contend with that.
They really don't.
There are a lot of things that Tampa does have to contend with, like alligators and mosquitoes.
But the legacy of piracy?
No, not really.
See, there's a term we're starting to hear more and more often on the left, especially among academics, and the term is problematize.
Okay?
And what this means, literally, is to make something into a problem.
To take something that is not a problem, or they would say is a problem but isn't seen as a problem, and get people to see it that way.
The left believes that it must do a lot of problematizing because we're all too stupid to see when something's a problem.
We're so dumb and so clueless that we go about our daily lives completely oblivious to the great threat posed by 17th century pirates.
And that's why we need them to explain to us that this is a problem in our lives.
Even if all evidence points to the contrary.
But in truth, of course, there is no problem.
Not until they create one.
Most people don't think much at all about pirates, I assume.
But if they do think about pirates, they're quite aware that pirates were humans, not actual cartoons.
They're aware that pirates were criminals and killers and thieves and so on.
People know this.
People might also be fascinated by the idea of adventure on the high seas.
People can be fascinated by that, While also intellectually recognizing the moral shortcomings of pirates.
These are thoughts that the average person can hold in their head at the same time.
It's not a problem.
And if the average person enjoys reading stories about pirates, it's because they're interested in that period of history, and yes, the people in it.
So what?
See, that's really the point here, and it's one of the big problems, real problems, I mean, not manufactured, problematized problems, with this never-ending effort to remove all popular reference to historical characters and historical periods.
The problem is that if anyone is actually influenced by a reference to a pirate, or let's say a viking, because we'll get around to the vikings of course, they were unsavory characters too sometimes, or a cowboy, or a civil war general for that matter, if people are influenced by these references, They aren't going to be influenced to imitate whatever bad things those people may have done.
If they're influenced, they'll be influenced to discover more about these people and the era in which they lived, and to learn more about them, and therefore develop a fuller understanding of history and their own place in it.
If there's any influence, that is what the influence will be.
The mascots, the monuments, the school names, all of these references to history, cartoonish or otherwise, for most people, you know, these things have no impact or resonance at all.
Most people pass by the monument every day without noticing it.
They see the mascot.
They don't think about it.
They attend a school named after a historical figure and never wonder who that guy was.
But for the 5% who do stop and look at the statue or consider the mascot or wonder about the dead guy whose name is on the building, they're going to be influenced to read, to research, to learn.
That's a good thing.
That should be encouraged.
You see, that's the opposite of a problem.
The problem is the absence of that, the lack of learning, the disinterest in history.
And the people who want to get rid of the mascots and statues and building names and so on, what they really want is a population that lives as though human history started five years ago.
They're trying to breed ignorance and disinterest, which might seem like an odd claim to make about, you know, the writer of this article, as she's a historian who apparently specializes in pirates.
But it seems that that wokeness has deluded her to the point that she Delete her so much to this point that she wants to reduce public exposure to the very subject she spent her life studying.
An even better example would be the San Francisco School Board, which recently voted to change the names of over 40 different schools, effectively canceling dozens of historical figures all at once, including Abraham Lincoln.
Well, the New Yorker has an interview with the head of the San Fran Board of Education, Gabriela Lopez.
And it's clear through the course of the interview That this woman, Gabriela Lopez, simply has no clue about the people that she wants taken off the school.
She doesn't really know anything about them or about American history in general.
And she wants to make sure that the kids in her schools are as ignorant as she is.
So here's a sample question and answer from the interview.
Question.
I think a lot of the commentary about the school names is focused specifically on Lincoln.
It seems to be the thing that a lot of people are the most upset about.
Do you have any thoughts about Lincoln and how we should view him?
Here's the answer from the head of the Department of Education.
She says, I think that the killing of indigenous peoples and that record is something that is not acknowledged.
It's something that people are now learning about and due to this process.
And so we just have to do the work of that extra learning when we're having these discussions.
And later she continues, I think Lincoln gets more praise than the, how can I say this?
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't think that, well, Lincoln is not someone that I typically tend to admire or see as a hero because of these specific instances where he has contributed to the pain of the decimation of people.
That's not something that I want to ignore.
It's something that I'm learning about and that I know is not spoken enough about.
Now, weeding through that, um, that, uh, just jumble of buzzwords and nonsense, the translation here is this moron doesn't know a damn thing about Abraham Lincoln.
And she's typical of the people waging this battle against American history.
They are utterly ignorant of the thing they want to erase.
And ignorance is the goal.
Disinterest.
Apathy.
Anything that makes history intriguing.
Any figure who committed the sin of being interesting or important.
All of that must be forgotten.
Just erase American history completely.
Of course, for schools and for historians, their goal should be the opposite of that.
But again, they've been so deluded by wokeness that they're now doing the opposite of what they should be doing.
And for that, the history cancelers are themselves cancelled.
And that's going to do it for us today.
Thanks for watching, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
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Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, Time Magazine acknowledges that elites secretly manipulated the levers of power during Election 2020.
And the New York Times fires a reporter for not being racist.
