Ep. 709 - A Nation Of Paranoid Lunatics Afraid Of Fresh Air
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the state of Michigan has expanded its mask mandates to include children who are two, three, and four years old. We have become a society of adults who fear breathing fresh air, and we are raising our kids to share in that phobia. Also Five headlines including a totally predictable crisis as police departments across the country struggle to find new recruits. I wonder why? And Lindsey Graham gets in trouble for saying that Obama’s election proves systemic racism isn’t real. In our Daily Cancellation, we’ll talk about the man who was doxxed and then fired from his job for allegedly harassing a dude in a prom dress. But, as always with these things, there’s a whole lot more to the story.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, the state of Michigan has expanded its mask mandates to include children who are two, three, and four years old.
We've become a society of adults who fear breathing fresh air, and we're raising our kids to share in that phobia.
So we'll talk about that today.
Also, five headlines, including a totally predictable crisis as police departments across the country struggle to find new recruits.
I wonder why.
And Lindsey Graham gets in trouble for saying that Obama's election proves systemic racism isn't real.
But isn't he correct about that?
In our daily cancellation, we'll talk about the man who was doxxed and then fired from his job for allegedly harassing a dude in a prom dress.
But as always with these things, there's a whole lot more to this story, and we'll talk about that and a lot more
today on the Matt Wall Show.
[MUSIC]
I think it was sometime in July or August when I first personally noticed the shift.
I've been traveling all throughout this past year, living my life basically as normal the entire time.
In the first few months of the pandemic, when I went out in public and especially on planes, I would see people fidgeting constantly with their masks, pulling them down under their nose, taking them off whenever they could.
I did the same.
I still do the same.
Whenever I'm in a situation where I have no choice but to wear one, like on an airplane.
But, you know, the tactic, one classic tactic now, for me anyway, is you, they say you could take the mask off to drink a bottle of water, so just have a bottle of water in your hand and maybe it takes you a while, maybe it takes you the entire flight to drink it, who knows.
But sometime in the summer, I noticed that most people had stopped doing this.
They'd put the mask on, keep it on without a break.
I flew across the country several times, five or six hour flights, and everyone around me kept the mask on over the nose without messing with it for the whole trip.
Even keeping it on to eat, as I've complained about, simply lifting the mask, inserting a pretzel or peanut one at a time.
Now, I guess we're supposed to see this as a positive change, but I found it deeply disturbing.
It seemed to me that people had gone from wearing the mask begrudgingly to wearing it because they wanted to and liked it and didn't want to be without it.
There was a psychological shift in a lot of people, and not a good one.
Say whatever you want about masks.
We shouldn't like them.
You shouldn't like wearing a mask.
We shouldn't want to cover our faces in public.
We shouldn't prefer the mask over fresh air or even recycled air on an airplane.
This psychological shift is why masking may never go away in many corners of society, even in situations where they're effectively pointless.
For example, vaccinated people are required in most situations still to wear masks,
even though the CDC itself says that point that only point zero zero eight percent,
point zero zero eight percent of fully vaccinated people have had breakthrough cases of the virus.
That's the CDC's data.
Only 1% of those, of the .008%, have died.
So, that puts your chance of dying from the virus, if you've been vaccinated, according to the CDC's data, at, if my math is right, and a lot of times it isn't, .0001%.
And yet, vaccinated people not only have to wear the mask, But many seem perfectly eager and willing to do so.
They want to.
The mask, for them, serves no medical purpose.
It serves a psychological purpose.
It fills an emotional need.
And it's a very disordered, deranged, unnatural need.
It satiates a fear, a fear of error.
There are people in this country, lots of people, Who, after the sustained psychological terror campaign from the media and health experts, quote-unquote, like Fauci, are now afraid of the air.
Now, speaking of the air, study after study shows that your chance of getting the virus outside, we read from the latest study on this front yesterday, your chance of getting the virus outside, especially from simply walking past someone briefly, is, from a statistical standpoint, nearly non-existent.
It's as close to non-existent as a chance can be.
But the fact that it's not entirely non-existent, the fact that there is a chance, however slim, however vanishing, a theoretical chance, is too much for some people to bear.
They've been broken.
Their minds have been damaged.
And nowhere is that more evident than with our approach to children.
As the CDC announced guidelines for summer camps calling for children and vaccinated adults to wear masks at all times, including outside, the state of Michigan imposed its own psychotic mandates, or rather added to the psychotic mandates already in place.
The state has declared that its mask mandate is being brought in to include two to four-year-olds.
So children from the age of two Must wear masks now in Michigan, everywhere, in all public places, including outside.
Here's a local news report about the policy.
Let's watch.
Any parent who's ever had a child that age understands how challenging it can be to get them to comply with, well, anything sometimes.
For many parents, the notion of getting toddlers to wear face masks for hours on end seem utterly impossible.
Well, I spoke with the president of the Michigan chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and he says it is not only possible, but needed.
Even though data shows there is only a small amount of COVID spread in schools and daycares, experts believe we need to do everything we can to improve our numbers here.
In fact, the CDC has long suggested that people aged two and older wear masks.
However, some are concerned that teachers and daycare providers will have to spend too much time focused on keeping those masks on those kids faces and too little time on normal routines.
Again, this kind of goes back to if we're modeling good behavior and talking to them about it, You know, taking away that kind of dogma or stigma of it being bad, then they're more likely to wear it.
So put it on their stuffed animal, show, you know, pictures of other kids wearing it.
You know, and as they get older, they're obviously going to ask more questions and you can be able to explain, you know, like you're wearing this to, you know, help protect yourself and to help protect others and, you know, kind of doing your part and to kind of get through this pandemic.
Put it on their stuffed animal.
If you do that as a parent, you are a lunatic.
And that guy you just heard from there, that's... I'm not even sure who that guy is.
We're living under a tyranny of guys like that.
Dudes like that have been given incomprehensible power over our lives and over our children.
He's worried that there will be a stigma.
We don't want to have a stigma around masks.
There should be a stigma.
Okay?
It is bad.
It is bad to put masks on three-year-olds for hours on end or for any length of time.
It is bad.
It's shameful.
It's disgraceful.
It's abusive.
We know that children are not and have never been at any serious risk to contract or spread COVID.
The people supporting and imposing these mandates admit that openly.
There is no articulable and reasonable medical case for putting a muzzle on a small child.
Whatever minuscule risk it supposedly avoids is far, far outweighed by the cost.
And there is a cost.
A steep one.
First, you don't need to be a doctor to apply common sense to this.
Masks are going to restrict airflow.
They're over your face.
They weren't made to be worn as everyday items by everyone, including children, including during physical exercise and play.
And on top of the breathing problem, it's also unhygienic.
Kids are dirty.
Kids are kind of gross, frankly.
Young kids will wipe their noses with their shirts.
They'll pee in their pants.
It's a mess.
What kind of condition do you think that mask will be in by the end of the day?
That thing that's been attached to their face, that thing they've been breathing through for seven hours.
But the brainless sheep among us will simply shrug their shoulders and say, you know, that there's no way for us to know if it's unhealthy to have young kids breathing through a dirt and snot encrusted rag all day.
We can't possibly know until someone with public health expert in their title tells us, the sheep will say, as they get back to munching on the grass.
But the physical risk, as dire as it is, must be considered secondary, in my mind, to the psychological risk.
We know that many adults are now afraid of the air, afraid to walk down the street without a surgical mask.
Many adults carry on like they're living downwind of Chernobyl.
How do you think our kids feel?
Well, not our kids.
My own kids, the older ones, understand that masking is a silly thing that they have to do on occasion if we need to bring them into a store or something where it's required.
And I've told them this.
It's silly.
It's dumb.
We gotta do it.
Just because we gotta run into the store real quick.
My youngest, almost two, doesn't think anything about masks and has never worn one and will not wear one.
But many other kids in this country, kids whose parents have broken brains, are being raised to share in their parents' fear of the air.
We are raising a generation of children to fear walking down the street.
Children who think that, you know, they might get sick and die if they play on the monkey bars without a piece of cloth covering their face.
It's hard to even predict the long-term effects because no society on earth has ever done anything quite like this.
We are running a psychological experiment on our kids and on ourselves.
That's what this masking mandate stuff is.
And the results of that experiment are already horrifying.
And I'm afraid we'll only get worse.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
[MUSIC]
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So here's a shocker.
You're not going to believe this.
Number one here from The Blaze.
It says, following the Defund the Police movement and the Abolish the Police movement, constant negative coverage of law enforcement by the media, anti-police sentiment becoming mainstream, and the threat of riots have contributed to a police shortage across the country.
The Philadelphia Police Department currently has 268 vacancies and is expecting even more shortages in the near future.
Neighboring New Jersey is facing a recruiting crisis, according to Pat Colligan,
president of the New Jersey State Policeman's Benevolent Association.
Colligan said that recent notorious police-involved deaths of citizens such as George Floyd, Tamir Rice,
and Breonna Taylor have impacted recruiting efforts.
Colligan also said the quality has really diminished in the last few years, in terms of the police officers.
Colonel Patrick Callahan said the state's largest police agency received a historically low number of applications this year.
In some years, the New Jersey State Police would usually receive between 15,000 and 20,000.
Listen to this, this year they've received 2,000 qualified applications.
From 15 to 20,000 to 2,000.
In fact, we have a local news report here from Philadelphia talking about their situation, which is especially dire.
Let's listen to that.
Local FOP President John McNesby says it's kind of like a perfect storm developing.
The eye of the storm revolving around several issues including a dramatic rise in the number of Philadelphia police officers filing for retirement, a diminishing pool of young people who even want to be a big city cop, and the suspension of new officer training because of the pandemic.
Under normal circumstances, there would be dozens of new recruits coming in for training every three months.
But the most recent class graduated last December, and the next one isn't even expected to begin until next month.
You've got to remember, too, that once you go into the academy, it takes you about 10 months to finish.
So we're not looking at putting any boots on the ground until maybe next spring.
Then you throw in the recent changes to the department's residency rules mandating all police trainees live in Philadelphia before they enter the academy.
Nobody's going to move to Philadelphia.
Richard Vona, Director of the Bucks County Police Training Center, says all of these issues are also inspiring younger officers from the city to seek employment in the suburbs and not just from Philadelphia.
I mean, the problem, it's twofold, that you're going to have a lot fewer, as we're hearing, applicants.
And right now, we've only talked about Philly and New Jersey.
This is the case everywhere.
And the applicants you do have are going to be worse.
They're going to have fewer police, and the ones that you have are going to be worse in terms of quality and their qualifications and skill level.
Because I think a lot of people who would make great police officers and are highly qualified for it, they're going to say to themselves, well, is there somewhere else where I can take these skills?
Maybe get into private security, something like that.
Why would I want to take these skills here?
Where even if I do my job correctly, if I follow the book to a T, my life could be destroyed.
This is, and you know, Republicans, to look at the political end of this, this is a problem that Republicans could be trying to address, could be speaking to, because it's a very, very serious problem.
And cities across the country are dealing with the effects of it, and that's only going to get worse.
Because it turns out that, yeah, despite what the abolish the police idiots have to say, And of course, the people, you know, the most prominent cheerleaders of that movement, members of the squad and so forth, they're all well off.
They're doing perfectly fine.
They're in safe neighborhoods.
They've got security.
They've got all that kind of stuff.
You know, when they go to their job, they're surrounded by armed men protecting them.
But just the average people, your average American living in a city, they're gonna feel the effects of that because it turns out you need police officers.
You do.
If you have laws, then you need people to enforce them.
And right now, the people who are making the laws are doing everything they can to undermine and attack the people tasked with enforcing the laws that they made.
Just think about that for a second.
It's the legislative branch of the government, people in Congress, Maxine Waters and all the other Democrats, who are the ones leading the charge against the police.
But they're also the ones making the laws that the police have to enforce.
So that's, you know, that's what's going on.
You're going to have more and more people say, of course, what's the point?
Why do I want to get into this line of work?
And Republicans.
So Republicans, they could be speaking to this.
But instead, you have Republicans lining up behind, oh yeah, we need police reform.
That's what we need.
You now have Republicans talking about ending qualified immunity.
This is becoming a popular talking point, obviously on the left, but even on the right.
And so what does that mean?
You end qualified immunity.
I'll tell you that.
You give her the qualified immunity and you're just, we're not gonna have any cops.
All the cops are leaving.
Because what that means is that every, if you're a cop, every person you try to arrest, anyone you have to tackle to the ground in the process of trying to arrest them, they can sue you now.
They can sue you personally.
Every single person you encounter, try to arrest them.
Maybe you put the handcuffs on, it makes their wrists a little sore.
Now they can sue you.
They can sue you personally.
So if you want a recipe for having zero cops, that's the way to do it.
And of course, idiot Republicans, rather than addressing that issue, they're, yeah, we need police reform.
No, police reform is not what we need right now.
That's not the problem.
There's a lot of reform needed in our cities, and it's not to the police first and foremost.
All right, number two, Tulsi Gabbard posted a video, which I want to play this for you just because she says a lot of things in this video that up until about five years ago would have been totally uncontroversial and cliched.
If you had heard this video five years ago, you would just yawn and say, yeah, well, of course, this is what all politicians say.
But now this is edgy and controversial.
Here she is, let's listen.
My dear friends, my fellow Americans, please, please let us stop the racialization of everyone and everything.
It's racialism.
We are all children of God and are therefore family in the truest sense, no matter our race or ethnicity.
This is aloha, and this is what our country and the world need.
The mainstream propaganda media and politicians, they want us to constantly focus on our skin color and the skin color of others because it helps them politically or financially.
Aloha means respect and love for others.
It's what enables us to see beyond our skin color and see the soul, the person within.
So let's do our best to cultivate this aloha in our hearts and see and treat others through this prism of love, not through the prism of race and ethnicity.
Please let us not allow ourselves to be led down this dark and divisive path of racialism and hate.
Where have we fallen to as a society that what you just heard there is controversial?
It should be totally cliche.
It should require no political courage at all to say that.
What's she saying?
She's saying, let's all be one happy family.
You know, we're all, we're all Americans.
Let's try to get along.
That's her message.
But these days that's, that's, that's edgy right there.
What you just heard.
So is this from Lindsey Graham.
He got into some trouble for this answer.
He was on Fox News Sunday.
He was asked about systemic racism.
And kind of impressively, when he was asked whether systemic racism exists, he said no.
And this was the reason he gave.
Senator, is there systemic racism in this country in policing and in other institutions?
No, not in my opinion.
We just elected a two-term African-American president.
The vice president is of African-American Indian descent.
So our systems are not racist.
America is not a racist country.
Within every society, you have bad actors.
Pretty reasonable answer.
There's a lot of statistical evidence that systemic racism against black people in this country, in modern society, is a myth.
Especially the claim that systemic racism in policing, there's a lot of statistical evidence, which we've talked about all the time on the show, that that's a myth.
But what Lindsey Graham points to, perfectly reasonable.
If our systems are designed to oppress black people and to keep them oppressed and keep them poor and so on and so forth, then how is it that a black man managed to become president twice?
If this is systemic racism, it's pretty ineffective.
This is the most incompetent systemic racism we've ever seen.
That a black man managed to get to the top of the system.
He was at the head of the system.
Does that in and of itself, by itself, prove that systemic racism against black people in modern America is false?
Not really, but it's... To prove it, you can look to all the other statistical evidence, but it's pretty good evidence against that proposition.
At least it's something that you would have to... If you are maintaining the theory that there is systemic racism against black people, then a black president is something that doesn't really fit into that theory.
And so you have to explain it.
Offer some kind of explanation.
How did that happen if there's systemic racism against black people?
But the people on the left who propagate this theory, rather than explaining it, what they'll do is they'll simply laugh at you and scoff at you if you bring this up.
It's the same thing with when someone says, oh, you know, I'm not racist, I have black friends.
And we're told that that's a really stupid excuse, that doesn't prove anything, that's so dumb.
Well, no, I mean, it is pretty good evidence, actually, that a person isn't racist.
You would think if somebody was racist against a particular race, they probably wouldn't have friends in that race.
At least, that's not what you would expect of a racist person.
But that's another one.
No one ever tries to deal with that.
They simply laugh at it and insist that that's a bad excuse.
They don't explain why it's a bad excuse.
All right, number three, LeVar Burton, who's the dude from Reading Rainbow, for some reason was being interviewed by The View.
I don't know why.
And that's what led to him being asked about cancel culture, especially as it pertains to books, like Dr. Seuss.
He's a guy who's read many a Dr. Seuss book to children during his Reading Rainbow days.
And here's what he had to say about cancel.
He says, it's not cancel culture, it's consequence culture, and it's actually a very wonderful, lovely thing.
Here's what he says.
I think we need to put things in perspective.
In terms of cancel culture, I think it's misnamed.
That's a misnomer.
I think we have a consequence culture, and that consequences are finally encompassing everybody in the society, whereas they haven't been.
Ever in this country.
So, I think that there are good signs that are happening in the culture right now, and I think it has everything to do with a new awareness on people who were simply unaware of the real nature of life in this country for people who have been othered since this nation began.
Consequence culture.
Yeah, because when you think of our culture, right, that's what you think.
Culture where people are held accountable, Culture of mature adults who understand there are consequences for their actions.
Is that what you think?
The problem is precisely that the consequences are not the same for everyone.
That's what cancel culture is.
That's the point.
It is wielded as a political cudgel.
And it's not the same for everyone.
Not everyone is held to the same standard.
And it's not enough to simply say, oh, it's a consequence.
You do this, people don't like it, there's a consequence.
Well, shouldn't we talk about what the consequence is or ought to be?
Yeah, if you want to say that cancel culture is a consequence, you do something or say something and then the mob comes after you and tries to destroy your life, you lose your job and everything.
We'll talk about a case of this, the most recent case.
We'll talk about that in the Daily Cancellation coming up.
But yeah, that's a consequence, sure.
In a certain sense.
But is it a proportional consequence?
Is it a fair consequence?
Because the consequence right now is that if you have an opinion, or if you share a perspective that's outside of the mainstream, the consequence can be that your whole life is ruined.
Sure.
It's a consequence culture.
Maybe called disproportionate consequence culture, unjust consequence culture.
Unequally, unevenly applied consequence culture.
I'll go with any of those.
And as I said, we got a great example of this coming up in just a minute.
We get to the daily cancellation.
All right, here's a story out of Oklahoma City.
Really important story.
So we're going to play this for you about a fugitive who has finally been found after years on the lam.
Really harrowing stuff here.
Let's watch.
First thing she told me was felony embezzlement.
So I thought I was going to have a heart attack.
It was a moment of disbelief for Karen McBride as she was talking to the Cleveland County District Attorney's Office this week where she learned she was a wanted felon for never returning Sabrina the Teenage Witch on VHS 21 years ago.
A movie she says she never even rented.
No, actually I had lived with a young man.
This was over 20 years ago.
He had two kids, daughters that were 8, 10, 11 years old.
And I'm thinking he went and got it and didn't take it back or something.
I don't know.
I have never watched that show in my entire life.
Just not my cup of tea.
Online documents show McBride was charged with embezzlement in March of 2000 but never knew about the charges until recently when trying to change her name on her license after getting married.
They told me that I had an issue in Oklahoma and this was the reference number for me to call this number and I did.
Meanwhile, I'm a wanted felon for a VHS tape.
Documents show the movie was rented at Movie Place in Norman, Oklahoma.
We've since learned that business closed in 2008.
So there you see.
First of all, what kind of video rental place?
Why is that?
It says Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
It's written, it's like handwritten.
It looks like this was, it was someone recorded it.
It was back in the day.
The kids don't know that, but back in the day.
We didn't have, you know, you didn't have Netflix, On Demand, DVR.
If you wanted to watch a show again, you had to get out a VHS tape and record it.
Get all the commercials and everything.
It looks like someone recorded it, and then just off their TV, and then wrote on the tape, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and then they rented it at a video rental place.
But now that place is out of business.
Whose fault is that?
Think about it.
You're stealing all these movies.
You could think of this as a, you might claim this is a victimless crime.
And that's why apparently this felon's, the charges against this felon have been dropped, which I think is unjust.
Remember, this is consequence culture.
There's consequences to this.
But before you think this is a victimless crime, I can remember, you know, 1995, 96, when I was a kid, going to the video rental place, I wanted to rent Mortal Kombat.
There were no copies in stock.
I came back every day to get a copy of Mortal Kombat, but people weren't bringing them back.
And so by the time I finally watched Mortal Kombat, all my friends had seen it, they spoiled all the good parts.
So this is not a victimless crime, in my opinion.
Consequences.
All right, let's move to reading the YouTube comments.
Um, William Baker says, Matt, I'm on a family vacation and convinced my family to watch you this week.
Please don't embarrass me.
Well, it's probably too late for that William, but also can I, I would never tell anyone not to watch the show, but you're on a, you're on a vacation.
We talk about some pretty heavy stuff here.
This isn't, this is not how I wouldn't be spending a vacation watching me talk about these kinds of issues.
Far be it for me to tell you not to.
Um, Jared says, I thought you were joking about the My Octopus Teacher documentary, but that actually sounds interesting.
It is interesting.
It's not everyone's cup of tea.
I mean, it's a documentary about a guy who formed a bond with an octopus.
If that sounds interesting to you, then go ahead and check it out.
It's also, I think, Kurt Eichenwald's favorite documentary.
If you get that joke, you get it.
If you don't, I'm not explaining it.
The Real Bridget says, look at Matt, it's White Dad Summer and I'm here for it.
White Dad Summer.
I was actually trying to explain... I was trying to explain White Dad Summer and White Boy Summer to my wife yesterday.
Because she was asking me.
She'd been seeing these hashtags.
She's not as with it as I am.
And I'm not very with it either.
But she was asking me, what are these hashtags about White Boy Summer?
And I was trying to explain it.
And really, the whole point is that it doesn't... It doesn't mean anything.
It has no point.
And that's the point.
Alejandro says, hey Matt, how long do you think a self-described crow magnon like you would last in a show like Alone?
Sounds like you wouldn't mind just fishing all day long.
I love the show Alone.
It's probably our favorite show to watch, my wife and I. I think I would do pretty good.
That's the show where they send these, it's real survivor, where they send people out by themselves in the wilderness, they film themselves, there's no camera crew, and it's just however long you could survive.
Whoever survives the longest wins.
I would do okay with the psychological element of being isolated and alone.
It's the survival skill part of it where I think I might be lacking.
Stewart says, I'd love to try a Matt Walsh Big Mac, or should we call it a Big Matt?
Well, you know, without context, Stewart, this comment seems strange on a number of levels.
But I understand what you're saying.
And by the way, if I did make my own version of a Big Mac, the first change I'd make is to use beef patties.
Well, that are beef, first of all.
And then that are also thicker than a piece of construction paper.
That's the first change of many that I would make personally to the Big Mac.
Well, make sure to join us tomorrow for a special episode of Backstage.
We'll be watching Biden's first congressional speech.
I cannot tell you how excited I am To sit and watch it.
And we'll be giving our analysis in real time.
As Nancy Pelosi said, he's expected to share his vision for addressing the challenges of this historic moment.
So you know you don't want to miss it.
And by it, I mean our commentary.
I don't expect the speech to be very entertaining, but we'll try to make up for it as best as we can.
It streams tomorrow at 8.30 p.m.
Eastern, 7.30 Central on dailywire.com and on our YouTube channel.
For the Daily Wire, so make sure that you tune in for that.
Also, another high-energy episode of Candace is coming this Friday.
This week, Candace hosts political commentator and interviewer Dave Rubin, where they've obviously got a lot to discuss, including the recall election of California Governor Gavin Newsom and his new opponent, Caitlyn Jenner.
So you can subscribe now and stream Candace live on Fridays at 9 p.m.
Eastern, 8 p.m.
Central, only on Daily Wire.
And if you don't have a membership yet, then go to dailywire.com slash subscribe and get 25% off a new membership with code Candace.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Let's follow along with this story.
A man named Sam Johnson, who happens to live here in Nashville, has become the latest victim of a cancel culture mob that, according to the left, doesn't exist.
We just heard from LeVar Burton.
Doesn't exist.
It's consequence culture.
But cancel culture certainly seems real to the people whose lives are destroyed by it, people like Sam Johnson.
Now, Johnson is the CEO of a company called Visuel, was the CEO, I should say.
As the media tells it, he became the subject of national outrage and backlash and was fired from his job and had his life summarily ripped apart because he was caught on camera allegedly engaged in the, quote, homophobic harassment of two gay teenagers, one of whom was wearing a prom dress.
Now, in the story, the only one we've been told, the one that everyone, of course, automatically assumes is totally true and not in need of any additional context at all, in that story, Johnson is the bad guy.
The only bad guy.
And given that he's homophobic, quote-unquote, there is no consequence too harsh for him.
The video of this supposed harassment went viral yesterday.
Johnson's name was trending nationwide.
The left was calling for his head.
Accounts with millions of followers put Johnson's name and personal information out there.
Here's a tweet from Kathy Griffin, for example.
This is what she tweeted.
With the video of the incident.
She says, if this is Sam Johnson in Nashville, Tennessee, the CEO of Visual Healthcare Tech Growth Strategist, married to, and then she gives his wife's name, which I won't give, where they may reside in, and then she gives the town where he lives, which I won't give, it seems like he's dying to be online famous.
So, no problem there.
Just a celebrity with 2 million followers publishing a guy's name, his wife's name, and his town of residence, all because she's mad about a video of a dispute between him and two other people.
None of whom she knows personally.
Of course, many headlines in major news publications followed, many of them matter-of-factly stating that Johnson homophobically harassed a teen boy.
It didn't take very long with this kind of pressure for his company, Visual, to publicly condemn him and announce that he'd been fired.
I mean, they didn't even wait a day.
It took a couple hours and they were done.
Of course, they claimed that they investigated the situation.
Only took them, you know, a few minutes to do it, but they investigated.
Okay, well, we'll play the infamous video.
But before we do that, I want you to hear how this incident was framed by the guy who did the filming.
Jacob Geitman is his name.
He recorded the altercation.
It was his boyfriend who was wearing the prom dress.
So here's Geitman on TikTok giving his version of events.
And I want to play this first because if you haven't seen the video of the incident itself, When you hear it being described, a certain image will be in your head, a certain expectation.
And then when we play the actual video, I want you to see whether it lives up to your expectations.
So here is Geitman in two short videos on TikTok giving his side of the story.
Here it is.
So TikTok has now removed the video of my boyfriend being harassed on our prom night two times for harassment and bullying, but I'm still gonna give you guys a story time, and I'm gonna have my friend Bri post the main video on her TikTok account, which I'll comment below if you guys want to go and watch it.
This is a long story, probably gonna have to make multiple parts, but I'm in college, my boyfriend's a senior in high school, and he decided that he wanted to wear a dress for his senior prom to kind of break the stigma around men wearing dresses.
He looked gorgeous, everybody loved it, nobody had a problem with it, right?
We went to this hotel close to where we lived and we got a lot of good photos.
We were there for about an hour and right as we were about to leave, we were standing outside in this little middle area with a bunch of buildings surrounding us.
This man comes up, stands about an inch behind my boyfriend, and he's like, what are you wearing?
And he's like, a dress.
Why?
And he's like, well, why are you wearing that?
You shouldn't be wearing that.
He's like, uh, cause I can and I want to and I really don't give a f**k what you think.
So this man starts going on and on throwing insults at him.
You look disgusting.
You look ridiculous.
You look like an idiot.
Men shouldn't be wearing this.
All of this homophobic banter.
So I grabbed my phone to start to record cause I knew I wanted to record the s**t from the get go.
So I grabbed my phone, started to record.
He slaps my phone out of my hand.
It goes flying over on the concrete.
Part two coming right now.
Part 2.
It was getting hot in my car, so I decided to come inside.
So he hits my phone out of my hand, it goes flying on the concrete, I go to grab it to start recording him again, and he tries to swing at me again, which you can see in the original video when the camera goes out for a second, you can see him swinging.
He tries to hit my phone out of my hand again, but he misses and he hits my boyfriend in the back.
So that's when all of the moms that were there, they're getting really involved now, they're like, you need to calm down, like, this is absolutely ridiculous, you were out of your mind.
And at this point, the hotel staff had gotten word from inside about what was going on.
So two other ladies come out and they're like, okay guys, what's going on out here?
He pretends like he has absolutely no clue what's going on.
He's standing there.
He's like, I've just been standing here the whole time.
I don't know what's going on. I didn't try to talk to them.
I didn't hit him. I didn't try to smack his phone out of his hand.
I'm like, dude, I have a minute-long video of you harassing us. You can't just blatantly deny it like that.
The staff was really great about everything.
They sent him back to the bar because he was pretty obviously drunk just because they were calling the police
and they didn't want him to freak out any more than he already was. And as we were
leaving, they told us that they were kicking him out and calling the police.
So...
Okay.
Now, Based on that you have a certain expectation for the video
of the incident You're expecting a drunken, a pretty obviously drunken, that's what we're told, probably screaming psychopath, yelling homophobic slurs.
That's how the altercation's been described, both by Geithman there in the video, and by the media, and by the cancel mob on Twitter.
But that's not quite what you see when you watch it for yourself.
So, here is what happened, as documented.
Here it is.
I told you that I wouldn't wear it, so you f*** off.
Okay?
Okay.
Is that right?
Think he looks gross?
Looks disgusting?
Yeah?
Yeah.
You look like... I look like what?
F*** off!
You look like an idiot.
Get the f*** away from me!
What does he look like?
Please stop.
No, sir.
No, sir.
I can f*** towards you all I want.
Keep talking.
Please, please, please, stop.
Look like a moron.
Get away!
Come on.
Please, please.
I don't want to listen.
Stop, stop, stop.
It's kids, it's a bunch of kids.
Come on, dude.
Just don't let one thing bother you.
Stop.
I'm sorry, I'm gorgeous.
Are you?
Yep.
Are you okay?
Let's go.
He's the one that followed us. We moved.
We moved from over there to over here.
Seriously, come on, dude.
Is it really worth it?
Okay. So there you go.
Now, a few issues here.
First of all, this video, as always, picks up in the middle of a confrontation between these people.
There's quite clearly something that preceded it.
The guy filming says that Sam Johnson instigated.
Sam Johnson, for his part, gave a statement to Newsweek saying that he initially went over to ask the teens to quiet down because they were being loud, obnoxious, and vulgar.
And so this wasn't initially about the dress.
It had nothing to do with them being gay.
He was going over because they were being obnoxious, and he was talking to them about that.
I don't know what really happened.
I wasn't there.
But neither was anyone else currently calling for Sam Johnson's head on a platter, which they got.
They got exactly what they wanted, as always.
What I do know is that in that video, the only person screaming and cursing is the guy in the dress.
I also know that the guy filming is prompting Sam Johnson literally suggesting insults for him to say.
Did you notice that?
Do you think he's disgusting?
Do you think he's gross?
That was his words.
The guy filming said it.
That seems like odd behavior for an innocent person who's supposedly being harassed.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't know about you, but I've never... I can't remember the last time I was harassed, but if I ever was, I wouldn't suggest insults for my harasser to say to me.
I also know that Sam Johnson does not appear drunk, as was claimed.
He's standing there, hands in his pocket, smiling coyly.
This is not the demeanor and tone that you'd expect based on how Jacob Geitman described his behavior.
Remember, based on what he described, you're expecting a drunken, shouting guy shouting insults.
In fact, the person being harassed in that video seems to me, Sam Johnson's the guy being harassed.
Geitman is following him around, camera in his face, while the other guy screams and curses.
And homophobic?
The man does not say even one anti-gay thing in that video.
Why is it homophobic to say that a dude in a dress looks ridiculous?
Tell me exactly.
I want someone to explain to me exactly how that's homophobic.
I mean, he does look ridiculous after all.
Yes.
Men in prom dresses look ridiculous.
It is objectively absurd for a guy to wear a prom dress.
The dress literally was made for girls.
That's why it's made for girl body parts.
You're not a girl.
You're wearing something that doesn't fit you, wasn't made for you, and looks silly.
None of that's homophobic.
You can disagree.
It's a disagreement over style.
To call it homophobic is to claim that all gay people wear prom dresses, or like men who wear prom dresses.
Which, to me, seems like a rather degrading and insulting assumption.
Indeed, we're told by the boyfriend of the dude in the dress that he wore it not because he liked how it looked, but because he was trying to make a statement.
And when you're making a statement, you're calling attention to yourself.
He was looking to break the stigma.
Well, if you wear something to make a statement and call attention to yourself, you can't very well complain when you get exactly the attention you were hoping for.
You know, when the waiter brings out that giant heaping portion of attention you ordered, you can't get offended and send it back to the kitchen.
So we have to ask ourselves, were these two guys the victim of unprovoked harassment from a drunken homophobic bigot?
Or were they fishing for a reaction, literally trying to prompt a reaction, even verbally prompting one, and then ready to film it and ruin the life of whoever takes the bait?
Which version of events seems most reasonable and plausible to you?
Or was it something in between?
Whatever the case, what I can say is this.
This little petty exchange between a guy named Sam Johnson and a guy named Jacob Geitman and a guy in a dress is not national news.
Nothing that happened here, whatever provoked it, whoever's at fault, whatever the context, deserves to be in the headlines.
Even pretending that Johnson was fully to blame, let's just pretend that for a moment.
Pretend that he was the sole bad guy in the situation.
Let's pretend that everything happened exactly as it was described.
Does he deserve to have his life destroyed over that?
Does that warrant outrage from millions nationwide?
Does his wife deserve to be named and shamed publicly?
Does his family deserve to be doxed and harassed?
I mean, the answer from rational and decent people is no, obviously not.
But the soulless, mindless, bloodthirsty hordes who make up the cancel mob don't really have an answer.
They don't think these things through.
They have the brainpower and discernment of starving vultures.
They simply swoop down upon any carcass put before them to be consumed.
And yesterday, Sam Johnson was that carcass.
And for that, they, not Sam Johnson, are today cancelled.
And we'll leave it there.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
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The Matt Walsh Show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our supervising producers are Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling, our technical director is Austin Stevens, production manager Pavel Vodovsky, the show is edited by Sasha Tolmachev, our audio is mixed by Mike Koromina, hair and makeup is done by Nika Geneva, and our production coordinator is McKenna Waters.
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