Ep. 757 - Yes Of Course We Should Legislate Morality
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, many people claim that we should not be “legislating morality” or “forcing our morality.” I disagree. I think that’s exactly what we should do, and I’ll explain why. And our Five Headlines. Jeff Bezos launches himself to space. The American Academy of Pediatrics calls for children to wear masks as the new school year start. New and damning revelations about that state representative in Minnesota who claims he was racially profiled during a traffic stop. NPR puts out a hit piece on the Daily Wire. And in our Daily Cancellation, we’ll discuss a viral video which shows that some Americans literally don’t know what century they’re currently living in. All of that and much more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
Subscribe to Morning Wire, Daily Wire’s new morning news podcast, and get the facts first on the news you need to know: https://utm.io/udyIF
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today on the Matt Wall Show, many people claim that we should not be legislating morality or forcing our morality on others.
I disagree.
I think that's exactly what we should do, and I'll explain why today.
And our five headlines.
Jeff Bezos launches himself into space.
The American Academy of Pediatrics calls for children to wear masks as the new school year starts.
As we remain stuck in this never-ending time warp, and also new and damning revelations about the state representative of Minnesota who claims he was racially profiled during a traffic stop, and NPR puts out a hit piece on the Daily Wire, and in our Daily Cancellation, we'll discuss a viral video which shows that some Americans literally don't know what century they're currently living in.
All of that and much more today on The Matt Wall Show.
[Theme Music]
Well, we celebrated our freedom as a country earlier this month.
At least some of us did.
Those of us who actually love America celebrated it.
And, you know, nothing says freedom like growing a thick, manly beard.
It is a God-given right that we all have.
It is right there in the Constitution somewhere.
We all have the inherent right to grow beards.
And does that mean that if you're not growing a beard, you're an un-American communist?
I'm not going to go that far, but yes, that's exactly what it means.
If you're one of these manly men that are currently growing or already have a manly beard, chances are you're in need of products to keep it looking thick and healthy.
If so, you need to go visit BeardSupply.com because for a limited time only, you can buy one beard oil product and get another one free.
You do need to have the upkeep.
I don't care about any other part of my appearance except the beard.
It's the one thing I care about.
And that's why you need Beard Supply.
It's a great deal, already affordable.
Top quality products and now you get the extra deal on top of it.
You cannot find this kind of deal anywhere else.
So go to Beardsupply.com today and order yourself two beard oils for the price of one.
You can mix and match different scents or stock up on an old classic like their bestseller Winter No.
1 for a limited time only.
Again, that's Beardsupply.com and buy one beard oil and get another one for free.
Now, we discussed yesterday the story of the self-proclaimed conservative porn star, quote-unquote, who has found many defenders on the right after she was kicked out of a conference for conservative high school students.
Today, it's apparently consistent with our values to have hardcore porn stars at events for teenagers.
In a few years, no doubt, these same conservatives will be insisting that just because someone is in a cannibal sex cult, that shouldn't preclude them from becoming a youth pastor.
Dems are the real cannibalfobes.
But I've already said all that needs to be said on that topic, and probably more than needs to be said about it, as is my custom.
Instead, I'd like to focus in on and analyze a claim that's been made in relation to this subject, and has also been made, of course, countless times before.
The claim that you're familiar with is that we should not be trying to enforce our morality, or legislate our morality, or impose our morality.
Instead, we should be advocates for freedom.
We should simply leave people alone and let them live as they choose.
You've heard this, I'm sure, over and over again.
Maybe you've said it yourself over and over again.
Never mind that this really has nothing to do with the porn star, the student conference thing.
It doesn't, but that's fine.
It's an interesting discussion nonetheless.
And it's important because it brings us back to some very fundamental questions.
So, should we want to enforce our morality or even legislate our morality, thereby imposing it on other people who may or may not agree with it?
The answer is, emphatically, yes, we should.
Definitely.
So here's a basic concept, and we can't get anywhere, really, until we've grasped it.
All laws are based in morality.
Every piece of legislation ever written, anywhere on earth, for all of time, has legislated morality.
Every law.
Everywhere.
Always.
represents an imposition of morality.
Everyone who lives in a country governed by laws lives, therefore, in a country where morality is being forced on them.
There are no exceptions to this.
You cannot escape it.
Laws against murder.
Everyone agrees with those.
Except if it's murder inside the womb.
But laws against murder are based on the belief that murder is evil.
If murder was not evil, then it shouldn't be illegal.
If murder was good, then we should be allowed to do it.
Nothing that is truly good should be illegal.
That doesn't mean that all evil things should be illegal, necessarily, but it does mean that only what is evil should be illegal, and all that is good should be legal.
Everyone basically agrees with this intuitively until it's pointed out.
See, what I just said there, that's how everyone operates.
You just assume that.
Until someone says it out loud, and then for some reason, many people become disturbed by the belief that they themselves have always held without fully realizing it.
This applies with the really important laws.
The big laws, like the laws against murder, goes all the way down to traffic laws.
The law requiring you to wear a seatbelt is grounded in the idea that seatbelts protect people from harm, and it's morally good to protect people from harm.
Every law either forbids people from doing something, Or requires them to do something.
I can't really think of any law that doesn't do, in effect, one of those things.
Why are we forbidding people from doing that thing, whatever it is?
Well, because that thing is bad.
Or so the government claims.
Why are we requiring them to do something?
Well, because that thing is good.
Or so the government claims.
Obviously, the moral code that informs any given law can be wrong, horribly wrong in some cases, but there must be some kind of moral code.
If you dig to the bottom of any law and you find that there is no moral code or moral claim informing it, then that law by definition would be arbitrary, which would make it tyrannical, and it shouldn't exist.
I mean, what would an amoral or non-moral law even be?
How would it be justified?
What would that look like?
What would it sound like?
A legislator would say, I'm introducing a bill to make it illegal to wear a red shirt on Tuesdays between 3 and 4 o'clock.
And the public would say, would ask, why?
Why that law?
Is it harmful?
Is it bad to wear a red shirt during that time?
Where is this coming from?
No, no, no, it isn't bad, but still, it should be illegal.
At least I'm not legislating morality.
Even the people who say they don't want the government to legislate morality would have a problem with a law like that precisely because it doesn't legislate morality.
Whenever a law is proposed, the first thing everyone wants to know is whether that law has a moral basis.
That's like the only thing anyone cares about with any law.
That's what every argument about every law is really about.
If a law doesn't have a moral basis, or if the moral argument for it is not persuasive, then we oppose the law.
This is how everyone operates, even as most of us claim that we don't want any laws to be based on morality.
And that's because we're very confused.
And we haven't taken even 15 seconds to figure out what we actually believe and why we believe it.
Now, the way people try to get around this is by saying, well, I don't want laws that are moral or religious.
I just want the law to protect my rights.
That's all I want.
Now, people should be able to do whatever they want, as long as they aren't hurting me or taking my rights away.
There are a number of serious problems with that logic, starting with the fact that the whole idea of your rights is a religious idea from the start.
I hate to tell you.
It is, well, I don't hate to tell you, but you might hate to hear it.
It is almost entirely based on the belief.
Human rights, I mean.
Entirely based on the belief that we are created by a supernatural power and imbued with these human rights during that process.
That's what it says in the Declaration of Independence.
And that's really the only basis for inherent human rights that anyone has ever come up with.
The doctrine of human rights is just that.
It's a doctrine.
Human rights were not discovered by science.
They aren't a fact that can be seen.
You can't open up someone's body during an autopsy and say, well, that's where the human rights are, right there.
Doesn't work that way.
They don't exist, human rights, in any physical sense, except written in the law.
But we all believe, or claim to believe, that the law doesn't invent the right so much as protect what is already inherently, though invisibly, present.
If the government invented rights, if the government decided who has rights and who doesn't, then you'd never be able to claim that the government is infringing on your rights.
Because they're the ones who decide.
So if you have ever claimed that the government is infringing on your rights, then you are claiming that human rights are this inherent, invisible, supernatural thing.
Which is a religious idea.
A spiritual idea.
If you believe in inherent human rights, you are religious.
You are.
And aside from that, wherever these rights come from, why exactly shouldn't someone take them away from you?
Why shouldn't someone harm you?
I don't want anyone to legislate morality.
I just don't think you should be hurting me.
Well, why not?
Why shouldn't I go up and punch you right in the nose?
Why shouldn't I shoot you in the head?
Yeah, because it hurts, I imagine.
You don't like it.
It would make you sad.
And then you'd be dead.
Okay, but why should I give a damn about that?
Why does that matter?
See, eventually, whether you like it or not, you have to say that your rights should be protected, and you should be preserved from physical harm, because it's evil to take your rights away or cause you harm.
Whatever it is that you think should be legally prohibited, Your reason for holding that position is that you think that thing or that act is morally wrong.
What is the point here?
Is this just semantics?
No, this is as far from semantics as it gets.
What we're talking about is the nature of law itself.
I would call that anything but semantics.
And we can't really have a coherent and fruitful conversation about laws unless we all understand what they are and why they exist.
That's why we don't have any fruitful conversations or debates in this country at all, because no one knows what they believe.
We're using a lot of terms, laws, rights, equality.
Very few people have stopped to even think about what they're saying or what any of that means or where it comes from.
Now once we do understand these things, once we've all acknowledged that laws are moral constructs by definition, and we've dispensed with this don't legislate morality silliness, this childish garbage, then we can talk about the morals themselves.
Because just because all laws have a moral basis, that doesn't mean all laws are moral.
Obviously not.
The morals that the laws are rooted in can be wrong, sometimes horrifically, murderously wrong.
Going back to abortion, the people who argue for the laws that protect abortion rights, they're making a moral argument for those laws.
Saying it's wrong to infringe on a woman's bodily autonomy, so on and so forth.
It's just that the moral argument they're making is bad and wrong.
See, our criticism of the law in the case of abortion, for example, is not that it has a moral basis.
It's not that, oh, you're imposing morals on me.
It's that it has a bad moral basis.
We want a law, a system, a country, a society grounded in good morals, correct morals, not bad morals.
Not to oversimplify, but that's it.
We certainly don't want a country grounded in no morals at all.
We're not nihilists.
Even most nihilists aren't really nihilists.
If they were really nihilists, they'd be dead by now from suicide.
So this is what we have to get around to, especially as conservatives.
And it's a simple concept.
We are fighting for a moral society, moral laws, moral government.
And that's a good thing to fight for.
It's nothing to be ashamed of.
We should say it out loud and then get to work.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
And we currently have multiple open positions across the company, all of which can be viewed at dailywire.com slash careers.
This week, we're highlighting the paid media buyer opening.
I have no idea what that even is, but this member of the Daily Wire marketing team, oh, it'll tell us, will create and execute paid media campaigns for the Daily Wire We're looking for someone who is skilled with organization, time management, and attention to detail.
At least one year of previous professional experience in a paid media buyer or similar role is required, and Excel proficiency is crucial.
Once again, this is another job that they could have asked me to do.
All these jobs, just give them to me, even though I don't even know what they are.
I just want the extra money, is all I'm saying.
But they're not going to give it to me.
They might give it to you.
This is an in-office position in Nashville, Tennessee.
Qualified candidates should apply through dailywire.com slash careers.
So Jeff Bezos launched himself into space.
Today is the second billionaire in a week to do that.
Richard Branson was before him.
The Internet has reacted to this, and I think he launched this morning, and I'm pretty sure he came back down safely.
I never did check.
I assume if Jeff Bezos had exploded or was drifting off to Jupiter right now, I probably would have seen that in the news.
So, he launched into space and came back down safely.
And the internet has reacted to the news, as you'd expect.
Lots of people complaining that Bezos is rich.
There's a lot of that.
Lots of people laughing because the spaceship looks like a penis.
Typical, thoughtful type of analysis that you anticipate from social media.
And I'm okay with all that.
You know, the phallus jokes, the general Jeff Bezos hate, fine.
I mean, the ship does look kind of like a penis, and that is sort of funny.
And Jeff Bezos is pretty awful.
I'm certainly not a Jeff Bezos apologist or fan.
However, what I can't abide are the people acting like it's insignificant or boring.
That private individuals are now launching themselves into space.
It's a big deal, and it does matter, and it's a good thing, and it's also impressive.
As much as I don't like Jeff Bezos, it is impressive that he started this company in his garage 30 years ago, and now he's launching himself into space with a rocket ship that he funded with his own money.
I mean, I'd call that impressive.
We can acknowledge that, can't we?
But beyond that, beyond Jeff Bezos himself, it's a good development and it's exciting to be on the cusp of this.
As I explained last week, yes, right now suborbital space is a playground for billionaires.
That's true.
That's what it is right now.
But many new advancements start that way.
There was a time when a basic blender would have cost you the equivalent of like 500 bucks.
There was a time when only rich people had cars or microwaves or TVs, you know, and the list goes on.
But that's at the beginning.
So we're at the beginning of something, and with the government deciding not to push out into space and explore, because that's the other thing I've heard, that, oh, we went to the moon decades ago, and now he's just going to suborbital space, what's the big deal?
That's not impressive.
Well, again, I do think it's pretty impressive to go to space at all.
It's probably more impressive than anything you've done in your life.
But even more than that, the fact that we went to the moon and then just stopped going, well, that's the government.
And so now we have private individuals, private actors, who are pushing out, innovating, And sparking, perhaps, what will be a new age of discovery and innovation.
How is that not exciting to you?
I don't get it.
Be excited about this!
Damn you!
And here's the other thing.
You need, yeah, Jeff Bezos is an a-hole, but you need rich a-holes to do stuff like this.
History shows us that that's what you need.
Elon Musk wants to send people to Mars.
Is that insane to do that?
Maybe.
I mean, who would want to go to Mars right now?
Even way in the future, if there's actually some sort of colony built on Mars, who would want to go live there?
In this desolate wasteland, where you gotta live in a bubble.
Who would want to do that?
I mean, I don't want to do it.
I'm not signing up for it.
It's kind of a crazy thing to do.
And you could argue all you want that it's a massive waste of money.
Well, you need, if we want to push new boundaries and explore and discover and expand our horizons in a very literal sense, then you need people with lots of money at their disposal who are willing to do things that seem insane and suicidal.
That's been the case for explorers and discoverers going back centuries and centuries.
And now you've got billionaires stepping up to do it.
And I gotta say, of all the things they could be spending their money on, I think this is one of the best things they could be spending their money on.
I think it was Jeff Bezos also bought, I think he was the billionaire, maybe it was someone else, another billionaire, who recently bought one of the biggest yachts in the world with its own backup yacht that goes with it, its own support yacht.
You get a billionaire spending money on stuff like that, Um, which is nothing but pure vanity and nothing more and may vanity and luxury.
This might be vanity too, but it could take us, you know, in a, in a, in an exciting direction as a species.
And so I'm in favor of that.
All right.
This is from, here's something that I'm not in favor of.
This is from NBC.
It says, everyone older than age two should wear masks regardless of vaccination status when schools reopen in the fall according to updated guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics released on Monday.
The leading national pediatrician group said it recommends universal masking because so much of the student population isn't yet eligible for vaccination.
It's not clear how quickly that will change or how likely parents will be to get their younger children dosed When the federal government approves shots for kids under 12.
Let me be one parent to step up right now and say, even though I'm not sending my kids to public school, my kids also certainly will not be in line to get dosed whenever that possibility opens up for them.
We will be respectfully declining.
Thank you very much.
Oh, you want to inject this drug into my children's arm to protect them from an illness that poses almost no risk to them already?
Tempting, but no thank you.
It continues, research consistently shows opening schools in person doesn't generally increase community COVID transmission when masks and other protocols are employed, and the emergence of more contagious variants, some of which are linked to more severe outcomes, poses a particular threat to people who aren't vaccinated.
And that's why we're going to put the masks on kids over the age of two.
So three-year-olds in preschool are going to be masked.
Forget about the studies that have shown that this is doing more harm than good because of all the bacteria and the grossness that's accumulating in these masks and these kids are breathing in all day to protect them from a virus that once again poses almost no risk to them.
And that was the case when this thing was raging out of control and there was no vaccine and very little herd immunity at all.
That was the case a year ago.
A year and a half ago, we knew that.
There was no reason to shut the schools down or put masks on kids last year.
And how much more is that the case now when hundreds of millions of adults have acquired immunity, either from prior infection or from the vaccine?
There is no getting around this.
It is just a fact.
That the flu poses a greater threat to young kids, especially now, than COVID ever has.
That is a statistical fact.
So if we're putting masks on the kids for COVID, then they should just be wearing masks all the time, everywhere, never ending.
And if you're proposing, if you support masking kids now, you should have been arguing for that five years ago, ten years ago.
You should have always been arguing for that.
There's no getting around this.
And so the people who advocate masking kids, how do they get around it?
They simply ignore this reality.
You can't get them to acknowledge it.
You can try to beat this into their skulls as much as you, metaphorically, as much as you want.
as much as you want, there's a resistance there.
They have their own immunity.
They're immune from reason and logic.
I've tried this so many times, I'm sure you have also, where they're talking to somebody in person or online, and they say, well, we need masks on kids, it's still out there, they're not vaccinated.
Yes, but it poses almost no risk to them.
The flu is a greater risk.
What don't you understand about, you grab them by the collar.
Why is this so difficult?
And it's a blank stare.
Their brains have been so warped by the panic porn being pushed on them that they can't, it doesn't sink in.
And it doesn't help when you got guys like Fauci who appeared on CNN yesterday saying that the American Academy of Pediatrics telling us to muzzle our three-year-olds, he says it's a reasonable thing to do.
Let's listen to Fauci.
Well, I think that's along the same lines as what we've seen with the health authorities in Los Angeles, which in the general population has said the same thing, that when you have a degree of viral dynamics in the community and you have a substantial proportion of the population that is unvaccinated, that you really
want to go the extra step, the extra mile to make sure that there's not a lot of transmission, even
breakthrough infections among vaccinated individuals. And for that reason, you can understand why
the American Academy of Pediatrics They just want to be extra safe.
I think, you know, it's important the CDC recommendations may be at variance with that, but in every respect, the CDC always leaves open the flexibility at the part of local agencies, local enterprises, local cities and states To make a judgment call based on the situation on the ground.
So I think that the American Academy of Pediatrics, you know, they're a thoughtful group.
They analyze the situation, and if they feel that that's the way to go, I think that's a reasonable thing to do.
Pure cowardice from Fauci.
You could tell from his answer.
I would almost prefer to hear him... I would prefer not to hear him at all, let me be clear, but it would be...
Not quite as bad, but still bad, if he was more aggressive about it and said, oh, absolutely, we need to have masks on kids.
You know, this is what we need to do.
And he was much more direct and aggressive about it.
But you could tell from his answer that he knows that the kids don't need to wear masks.
He knows that.
He's just trying the best he can to rationalize what the American Academy of Pediatrics is saying here for no reason other than, you know, he thinks they're sort of on the same team.
He's going to have their back.
He doesn't care about the kids, much less about the truth, but the American Academy of Pediatrics, maybe they go to the same cocktail parties, the people there, and him, and he doesn't want to upset them.
I don't know what the reasoning is.
But he knows that there's no reason for this.
It's thoughtful?
This is thoughtful and reasonable?
No, it's not.
It's the opposite of that.
This is the opposite of thoughtful.
Because the precedent that you're setting here, what you're saying, is that there needs to be zero risk of COVID.
There needs to be zero COVID and zero risk before we can take the masks off.
Because right now for kids, especially the age group we're talking about, the threat is as close to zero as it can get.
Can't get much closer without being zero.
The threat especially of severe reaction to COVID.
For kids.
Close to zero.
And if that's not good enough, then what you're saying is we need zero risk.
Which means never take the mask off because there's never going to be zero risk.
And even if there was, even if we could eradicate COVID completely, it didn't exist anymore.
COVID-19 is gone.
Which isn't going to happen.
That was never really in the cards.
It's always going to be there.
It's going to be around.
Probably more of a seasonal thing.
And there's a vaccine for it now.
But even if we could eradicate it, so now there's zero risk of that.
But there's not zero risk of it.
There are plenty of other things out there where the risk is above zero.
So is this the only risk we're worried about?
And once that goes away, we could get back to normal?
If you're saying zero risk of COVID, why just COVID?
Why not zero risk of anything else?
It doesn't make any logical sense.
It's not thoughtful in the slightest.
And this is why one of the great casualties, not just of the pandemic, but before that and beyond it, is that health authorities, so-called health authorities and the entire medical industry, has completely lost both its scientific credibility and its moral standing.
It has lost its moral and scientific credibility.
Again, that's not only because of COVID, These are the same people who tell us that we should, you know, start giving hormone pills and gender affirmation surgeries to minors.
So they would lose their scientific credibility and moral standing based on that alone.
But this is only speeding up that process.
Nobody cares what these people have to say anymore.
No one's listening.
Except the most deluded people.
Everyone else has tuned it out.
All right, moving on, an update to a story that we've covered on the show.
You may recall Representative John Thompson.
He's the Minnesota State Representative who was pulled over for a traffic violation and then immediately claimed that he was racially profiled.
It was a lie, of course.
He wasn't.
And they released the body cam footage and nothing inappropriate happened in the body cam footage.
He committed a violation.
They pulled him over.
The cop was nice and respectful, even as Thompson was belligerent and angry and accusing him of racism.
But it also turned out that Thompson had a suspended license, a suspended out-of-state license.
He doesn't have a license, and the license was suspended because he wasn't paying child support payments.
So the guy's a deadbeat dad.
Big surprise there.
But he doesn't have a license in the state he represents.
In fact, as it has developed over the last week or so, it's not clear that he's a resident at all of the state he represents, much less the district.
And he's been asked about this.
There was a video of someone who saw him at the airport and was saying, you know, Representative, are you a resident of your own district?
And he wouldn't answer the question.
And now this from Fox 9 in St.
Paul.
It says, in searching for State Representative John Thompson's residency, Fox 9 has uncovered four cases of domestic violence with allegations that Thompson punched, hit and choked women.
According to police reports from 2003 to 2009, in some cases, the assaults happened in the presence of young children.
Questions about Thompson's residency were raised after he was stopped by St.
Paul police on July 4th for not having a front license plate.
He accused them of racial profiling.
We know about that.
Okay, the domestic violence cases stretch back to 2003 in Superior, Wisconsin, when Thompson was arrested after he allegedly struck his girlfriend in the face with an open and closed fist.
The woman's five-year-old daughter witnessed the assault, which happened in a supermarket parking lot.
Thompson's girlfriend said she and her child were homeless and declined to cooperate.
Thompson apparently fled the scene in that case.
Thompson allegedly attacked the same girlfriend nearly a year later in August of 2004 at her apartment.
Police arrived after a 911 hang-up call.
She said that Thompson choked her, and then she said she ran out of the apartment screaming, but Thompson grabbed her and dragged her back to the apartment.
She said she tried to escape through a window.
She told police Thompson became angry when she dialed 9-1-1 from another phone and began hitting her in the head, punching her in the face, and then he grabbed her and threw her into the kitchen table, which broke.
All of her children witnessed the assault.
And then in September, what else do we have here?
In September 2009, St.
Paul police officers responded to a call of domestic violence involving Thompson and two women.
Thompson and the women were fighting about a cell phone he received from another girlfriend.
It's unclear from the report if it's the girlfriend from the previous case.
During that 2009 incident, according to reports, as the yelling escalated, Thompson pulled out his penis in front of his girlfriend and two young children and said, I'm the man you can all And then he had some sexually explicit things to say.
Um, and then he, there was another case of domestic violence as well.
So this is someone allegedly involved in, uh, allegedly a serial domestic abuser who's also, who's also exposed himself to children.
We know that part of it, the left has no problem with that whatsoever.
Um, and they really don't have a problem with the domestic violence either, especially when it comes to these BLM martyrs.
It is really incredible how consistent this is.
You know, I always point this out and I am continually pointing it out because it keeps happening.
These BLM martyrs and John Thompson tried to be, he wants to be one of them, tried to martyr himself.
Almost always, it turns out that these are violent abusers of women.
And yet again, it's the same thing here.
And no big surprise, actually.
Because here's John Thompson before he was elected.
This was back in 2020.
Before he was elected.
Standing outside of a white family's house where kids are present, screaming at them for having a Blue Lives Matter sign in their yard.
Let's listen to that.
I'm a black man being terrorized by this f***ing Klansman right here!
We are terrorized by the Grand Wizard!
Don't run now!
Don't run now, racist white people!
I'm here!
Oh yeah, we pull up!
We pull the f*** up!
And we're here!
Come on, let me hear what your blue lives matter say!
Blue lives ain't s***!
And if people in Hugo don't support black people, f*** Hugo, Minnesota!
I meant to say that!
Yeah, he's being terrorized by the family, those women.
It's all women out there, including kids.
He's terrorized by them because of, what, a sign they have in the yard.
And after that incident, which went viral, at least locally, he was elected.
And not in spite of that.
These voters elected him because of that.
They want these scumbag pieces of garbage representing them.
That's what they want.
And this is what you get when you elect people like this.
This is exactly what you get.
Voters in his district, you absolute morons.
You are bad people also for electing someone like that.
That is a moral failing to elect someone like that.
You elected him because you liked the way he screamed at white people.
What other qualifications did he bring to the table?
He's not even a resident of your district!
He doesn't even live with you!
But you really liked how he showed those white girls what's what.
We gotta stop acting like voters are innocent, helpless victims.
You went to the polls and voted for this guy.
You're not much better than him.
Just, this guy's a liar, a fraud, an abuser, a horrible, scumbag, garbage person.
And, uh, yeah, you know, elect him to represent you.
Well, he represents you.
You want him to represent you, and so he does.
He's garbage.
I don't know.
If the shoe fits, you want him representing you.
All right, moving on.
NPR has exposed The Daily Wire.
This is quite the expose.
So apparently The Daily Wire, of which I may shock you to learn I am employed by The Daily Wire.
So we do pretty well on Facebook.
And that's, that's a problem.
That's a, that's a big issue that people, people on Facebook like to engage with our content.
That's a big problem.
And so the NPR has this article expose written by Miles Parks and the headline is outrage as a business model.
How Ben Shapiro is using Facebook to build an empire.
Of course, we talk about all the irony of the media, the mainstream left-wing media claiming that we're using outrage as a business model.
I mean, they spent the last... Why is it that the ratings in the mainstream media and the audience is taking a nosedive right now?
Because their whole business model for the last five years has been nothing but outrage over Donald Trump, and now he's not in the scene anymore, and they got nothing else to talk about.
They have to find some other target for their outrage.
And their target, in this case, is us.
Ironically, as they accuse us of doing the exact same thing.
This is the same media that sent a lynch mob after some kids in D.C.
because they were smiling at a Native American man.
They made that into a national story.
And they're worried about outrage being used as a business model.
Okay.
Here's what Miles Parks has to say.
The conservative podcast host Ben Shapiro and author's personal Facebook page has more followers than the Washington Post, and he drives an engagement machine unparalleled by anything else on the world's biggest social networking site.
An NPR analysis of social media data found that over the past year, stories published by the site Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire, received more like, shares, and comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a wide margin.
Even legacy news organizations have broken major stories or produced groundbreaking investigative work, but don't come anywhere close.
Well, sucks for them.
What can I say?
Daily Wire articles with headlines such as, Book Review, Proof that Wokeness is Projection by Nervous Racist White Woman Who Can't Talk to Minorities Without Elaborate Codes, regularly garner tens of thousands of shares for the site, and Shapiro is turning that Facebook reach into a rapidly expanding, cost-efficient media empire, one that experts worry may be furthering polarization in the United States.
Well, if the experts are worried, then what can you say?
It continues, The Daily Wire has turned anger into an art form and recycled content into a business model.
In May, The Daily Wire generated more Facebook engagement on its articles than The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, and CNN combined.
This, all this is, blatantly, is jealousy.
They are jealous of the traffic we get.
And that's, that's all this is.
These are like the teenage girls, jealous of one of the other teenage girls and spreading rumors about her.
That's all this comes back to, really.
This is a mean girls thing.
And of course, in reality, Facebook is doing quite a lot to throttle our traffic and keep our engagement down.
Believe you me, Facebook is aware of this problem That people with unapproved opinions are having some success, you know, interacting with people and engaging with people on their platform.
And they are taking steps to address it, and that really is what this article is meant to do.
Even though as far as I read, and honestly I didn't read the entire thing, Um, I did skim through to see if my own name was mentioned, like a narcissist, and, uh, what I'm most offended by is that it wasn't.
I mean, I'm spreading hate and outrage, too.
I don't get a mention?
I think that's pretty outrageous.
But, um, as far as I can tell, they don't, they don't, they stop short of directly calling for Facebook to kick us off of their platform, but that is what they're calling for.
Very, very thinly veiled.
What they're saying to Facebook is, hey, hint, hint, nudge, nudge, this is a problem.
You've got these right-wingers that are using your platform and they've got an audience.
Maybe someone should do something about that.
I don't know, wink.
That's all this comes back to.
But what do they actually have a problem with?
I mean, why is it that The Daily Wire is so successful on Facebook?
Is it a conspiracy?
Is Facebook going out of their way to help us?
Clearly not.
That would appear to be the left-wing media.
What they're insinuating is that Facebook, what, has a right-wing bias and is trying to help us?
Trying to help Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire?
No, um, we do well on Facebook in spite of Facebook's, you know, algorithm and, and, and the things that they've done, the policy to put in place in spite of that, simply because, and I'll tell you what it is.
People like the content.
If you can believe it, people enjoy the content we're putting out there.
It speaks to them.
And so they engage with it.
That's our secret sauce.
I don't want to give away the whole business model, but that really is it.
People like it, and they engage with it.
And that is the media's real problem.
I hate to tell you, it's not us, it's you that they have a problem with.
They don't think that you should like this kind of content.
You should not agree with these kinds of opinions, you should agree with them.
And if they can't convince you, then instead what they want to do is knock out all the competitors so that their opinions are the only ones available and you have no choice but to engage with their opinions and to be exposed to their opinions.
And maybe if you're exposed to it for long enough, you'll be beaten down into submission and start agreeing with them.
That, ultimately, is the plan.
That's why we want more people.
We want more people so we can spread our outrage and our hatred even more.
So you can become a Daily Wire subscriber today using coupon code UMAD and you can get 25% off.
And that way, if Facebook does take the hint here and try to shut us down, if you're a Daily Wire subscriber, then you don't have to worry about it.
You don't have to use Facebook as the gatekeeper to access us.
So we would certainly suggest doing that.
All right.
I got to leave time for this because we have to move on to our reading the YouTube comments.
I'm very excited about what we have in store.
Kind of a special edition of reading the YouTube comments today.
This is something that was brought to my attention.
Um, it's a video from YouTube user Sloopy107, that's Sloopy107 as a YouTube user, who has written what I think is the Sweet Baby Gang anthem.
She was inspired by the Sweet Baby Gang to break out into song.
We'll play a short clip of it, but make sure to go to her channel.
You can see the entire thing.
It's certainly worth watching the entire thing.
And I wanted to experience this for the first time with all of you, my sweet babies.
So I haven't listened to very much of it, but here it is.
Let's all listen together.
[Music]
From sea to shining sea, we're denouncing propaganda.
We're the Sweet Baby Gang, we're the true sleeper.
We're the Sweet Baby Gang, ask why if you dare.
We get our five headlines and our daily cancellation.
With reality and brevity, we get the news of the nation.
From a heart that any abuela would love.
Speaking truth while searching for those aliens above.
We're the Sweet Baby Gang, and God bless America.
From sea to shining sea, we're denouncing propaganda.
We're the Sweet Baby Gang, we're the true slave pair.
We're the Sweet Baby Gang, ask why if you dare.
Discernment, perspective, evidence, and reason.
Cringy TikToks and Posacky's malfeasance.
The Sweet Baby Gang is no quarter for commies.
As far as we're concerned, you can run home to your mommies.
It's beautiful.
There's really a tear coming to my eye.
That I think is, and I don't want to overstate it, and it's not just because it's about me, but I think you can make an argument that that is the greatest artistic achievement, certainly in modern history, possibly of all time.
I don't think anyone has ever Picked up a guitar or any musical instrument and used their voice to create music more beautiful, more true and more profound than what you just heard.
Absolutely.
A stunning performance.
There's music that will live on in my heart for all time.
So, Sloopy107, I do not ban you from the show.
You are...
What's the opposite of banned?
I need something else.
I need a pause.
Ignited?
Canonized?
Whatever it is, I thank you for sharing that beautiful music with us.
As we discussed, NPR, you know, is using hyperbolic lies to accuse The Daily Wire of spreading hyperbolic lies and hate and outrage and sadness all across The establishment media tries so hard to dominate every source of information, and when they can't, they're sore losers, mean girls about it.
Unfortunately for NPR and other legacy media, but fortunately for you, we're hitting them again, this time on podcast.
Daily Wire presents Morning Wire, our daily news podcast that values your time and the truth.
Brought to you by Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and co-host Georgia Howell.
Morning Wire will wake you up with the latest developments in politics, sports, culture, and education, all with a heavy emphasis on the facts.
It's available right now, so subscribe to Morning Wire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere you listen to podcasts so you don't miss a beat.
And also, while the White House attempts to censor anything they deem misinformation, and this is extraordinarily upsetting, it accurately depicts all of the themes in Ben Shapiro's new book, The Authoritarian Moment, which hits bookshelves next Tuesday, July 27th, so it's almost here, and it will be a huge event.
Because Ben will be doing a live stream book signing next Tuesday.
So you can pre-order your signed copy now at dailywire.com slash Ben.
When you do, you'll be asked to type in a question at checkout and then maybe he'll answer that question and you'll certainly get your signed copy.
So get your copy at dailywire.com slash Ben right now so you don't miss out.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
So it seems almost cheap to play this video for a daily cancellation because these things are a dime a dozen, but the fact that they're a dime a dozen is precisely the point.
I'm not sure when this was originally filmed.
Seems to be recent, but it went viral yesterday.
This is conservative commentator Caitlin Bennett doing one of those trusty, always fruitful, dumb guy on the street interviews.
Again, you've seen these a million times, and that's the problem.
But this one is perhaps even worse than you might expect.
Just listen.
What year did America declare its independence?
Girl, July 1st, 1989.
Bad.
What year did Christopher Columbus discover the Americas?
Love Christopher, don't know.
I mean, I'm done.
Don't know.
Christopher... was it 1976?
How many years make up a century?
Isn't it a thousand?
What year was George W. Bush elected president?
The 1800s, I'm assuming?
I don't know.
Who was the last president of the 1990s?
1990s?
I actually have no idea.
Nixon?
What year was Barack Obama elected president?
I don't even know.
What century are we currently living in?
Let's just go 50th century.
America was discovered in 1976 and declared independence on July 1st, 1989.
Seems like a pretty quick timeline, but then again, we are living in the 50th century, so all that stuff happened, what, like 3,000 years ago?
This is, needless to say, some extremely dumb stuff.
You have to try to be this dumb.
It must be exhausting to be so overwhelmingly moronic on a daily basis.
Every hour of the day, can you imagine?
If I had to carry this level of stupidity around with me all the time, I'd collapse and have a heart attack.
The coroner would say, yep, looks like you had a fatal case of the dumbs.
Third one this week.
It's an epidemic.
Now, all of the necessary qualifiers must be added that these were the dumbest of the dumb who made it into the clip.
Presumably, plenty of people answered the question easily and were summarily cut from the final edit.
But even so.
It is way too easy to go out and get content like this.
We know that these kinds of videos are the tip of the idiot iceberg.
There's been a great many surveys and polls with larger sample sizes that have come to similar conclusions.
Think of that C-SPAN poll a few years ago that found half of Americans can't name one sitting Supreme Court justice.
There was a survey in 2019 that found 20% of Americans can't correctly identify a single branch of government.
A poll in 2017 showed that almost 40% can't cite any of the rights protected in the First Amendment.
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation gave a basic history exam to 41,000 American adults a year or two ago and found that 60% couldn't pass it.
Another survey found that almost 40% of Americans think that Benjamin Franklin invented the light bulb.
12% thought Eisenhower was a Civil War general.
A civil war general, Eisenhower.
I could go on and on and on.
The point is that stupidity is a national crisis.
I believe that it is.
And what makes it worse is that there is no mitigating circumstance to let the stupid people off the hook.
No adult with a brain capable of basic functioning has any cover here.
None of them have an excuse.
Because everyone has access to the cumulated knowledge of all mankind right at their fingertips.
Everyone can find any information they want.
And accessing it is as easy as moving their thumbs across a screen.
It's not like it was in, say, 1890, when huge swaths of the population were never taught how to read.
And their only source of information about the outside world and current events was maybe, at best, a weekly newspaper that a lot of them couldn't read, and then whatever scuttlebutt you heard around town, if you were within a day's travel of any kind of town.
If they wanted to know something, if there was information that they didn't have that they wanted, there was obviously no search engine with which to find it.
Although I would like to interview those same people and ask them, when do you think Google was invented?
Oh, I don't know, 1573?
But if someone back in those days, you know, they couldn't use a search engine.
If they wanted to know something, they could ask someone, or they could try to find the information in whatever books were accessible.
And if the information wasn't there, if nobody around them knew it, and it wasn't in a book, then they just weren't ever going to know that thing.
They would have to say, well, I guess I'm not going to know that.
There were so many things about the world that a person in those days may have wanted to know, but simply could not know, because there was no way to acquire the knowledge.
Compare that today to today.
If I want to know, for instance, how many Earths can fit in the sun, 1.3 million, or how old the oldest living vertebrate, 500-year-old Greenland shark, is, or whether the pain in my back is a sign that I'm dying of a rare bone disease, yes, I could just look it up on the internet and have the answer in the blink of an eye.
And yet with this tool, with this vast expanse of knowledge readily available, still we choose dumbness.
It's like a guy in the desert collapsing and dying of thirst while wearing a camelback full of water.
It almost doesn't make any sense.
So how does this happen?
How do we end up snatching imbecility from the jaws of knowledge?
Well, part of the blame goes to the school system, which has utterly failed to do the one thing it is supposed to do, and which we're paying good money for it to do.
Part of the blame goes to the media, which muddies the water with lies and half-truths.
Part of the blame goes to the internet itself, which offers knowledge but also offers cheap and constant distraction.
It gives you the choice to feed your mind or numb it, expand your horizons or lose yourself in the fog.
Most people, it turns out, prefer the numb and the fog because it's easy, and it keeps you from thinking about uncomfortable things, like your own mortality, which I believe is the primary motivator that drives our screen addiction in the first place, is that we don't want to think about our mortality.
But notice the word choice.
The one thing about modern society, for all of its flaws, is that it offers a lot of choices.
More choices than anyone in history ever had.
Too many choices, it turns out.
But they are choices all the same.
Whether you use the internet to make yourself smarter and more interesting, which you can do, or dumber and duller, is a choice.
And that's why, after partial blame has been doled out this way and that, the rest, the majority, must fall on the ignoramuses themselves, whose obliviousness and foolishness is as much a moral failing as an intellectual one.
And that's why, and you knew this was coming back around, because it always does, everyone in that video, and all the videos like it, should not be allowed to vote.
It is a, we make a mockery of ourselves by allowing all of those people to vote.
And it's also why, and you definitely knew this was coming, they're all canceled.
Let's not focus on all those negative things.
Let us focus on the song, the Sweet Baby song, that is now in all of our hearts as we go about our day.
And we'll leave it there for today.
Are we going to let Sweet Baby play us out?
We are.
Have a great day, everyone.
Godspeed.
Don't forget to subscribe.
And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review.
Also, tell your friends to subscribe as well.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
We're there.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, Michael Knowles Show, The Andrew Klavan Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Matt Walsh Show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, 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.
The Matt Walsh Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.
John Bickley here, editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire.
Wake up every morning with our new show, Morning Wire.
On today's episode, the Biden administration links China to a massive cyber attack, Democrats move to open the door for government-funded abortion, and inflation rises at the fastest rates in decades.
