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Aug. 31, 2021 - The Matt Walsh Show
57:24
Ep. 787 - Pledging Allegiance To The Pride Flag Of The United States Of LGBT

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the head of the LA teachers union admits that she doesn’t care about kids learning academic subjects. She just wants them to be properly indoctrinated. She may be the one saying it out loud, but this is how the public school system has operated for decades. Also, the CDC has expanded its interests beyond infectious diseases and is now fighting the scourge of gun violence. And can you now lose custody of your kids if you aren’t vaccinated? Things seem to be trending that way. Plus in our Daily Cancellation, a firefighter in Virginia is under investigation for making an allegedly racist movement with his fingers. The story only gets more insane from there. We’ll talk about 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

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Today on the Matt Wolf Show, the head of the LA Teachers Union admits that she doesn't care about kids learning academic subjects, she just wants them to be properly indoctrinated.
She may be the one saying that out loud, but that's how the public school system has operated for decades.
Also, the CDC has expanded its reach beyond diseases and is now fighting the scourge of gun violence.
What does that tell us?
Can you now lose custody of your kids if you're not vaccinated?
That seems to be the way things are trending.
Plus, in our Daily Cancellation, a firefighter in Virginia is under investigation for making an allegedly racist symbol with his fingers.
The story only gets dumber and dumber from there.
We'll talk about it today and much more on the Matt Wall Show.
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You know, I'm not sure if I've ever said this before, but I'm not a big fan of the public school system.
Maybe I've mentioned that.
Perhaps you've picked up on that in the past.
I may have mentioned it a time or two on Second Thought.
And for good reason.
There are about 70 million kids in our country, give or take, and 50 million of them are in public school.
So there's no other institution that claims this kind of a hold on this many kids, almost all of them, 70% at least.
As a society, we have trusted this institution To mold entire generations of Americans, to determine what they believe, what they think, what values they hold.
We've really handed our country over to it, over to this institution, the public school system, and said, here, you know, you make our country into whatever you want it to be.
This is totally up to you.
And we're suffering the consequences of that decision.
But even now, Many Americans like to imagine that they send their kids to public school only for academic enrichment and training, only to learn the facts about, you know, math and history and so on.
But the system considers facts to be secondary to its primary goal, which is to instill values.
It's not so much to tell kids about the world, but to control how the kids see the world and how they feel about what they see.
The indoctrination, the point here is the indoctrination is not a byproduct, it's not a side effect, but it is indeed the point of the system.
It's why the system exists, so that the state can form the younger generations into whatever shape it prefers.
It's not a conspiracy theory, that is why public school came into existence, for that reason.
So that the state would have control over the next generation and over molding the country.
And if you listen very closely to the people who run the system, you'll hear them admitting to this fact.
And actually, you don't even have to listen that closely because they practically will shout it into a bullhorn at this point.
So take this for example.
This is a profile in LA Magazine of Cicely Mayart Cruz, who is the head of the Los Angeles Teachers Union.
Here's the second paragraph.
Like I said, shouting into a bullhorn.
You don't have to listen even that closely.
But this is what the second paragraph of that profile says.
On a sunny May afternoon, Mayart Cruz is allowing a reporter inside her inner sanctum.
Or at least inside a glass paneled conference room down the hall from her 11th floor office.
And right away, she lives up to her reputation.
After settling into a swivel chair and slowly removing her zebra-print face mask, the 47-year-old lightning rod for controversy calmly sets her hands on the table and begins issuing a series of incendiary statements that almost seem aerodynamically designed to grab headlines and infuriate critics, like this one.
There is no such thing as learning loss, she responds when asked how about her insistence on keeping LA schools mostly locked down over the last year and a half and how that may have impacted the city's 600,000 kindergarten through 12th grade students.
Quote, uh, our kids didn't lose anything.
It's okay that our babies may not have learned all their timetables.
They learned resilience.
They learned survival.
They learned critical thinking skills.
They know the difference between a riot and a protest.
They know the words insurrection and coup.
She even went so far as to suggest darkly that learning loss is a fake crisis marketed by shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.
Yeah, it's, uh, learning loss is a conspiracy theory, she's saying.
Now, she's right in one sense, that there is no reason why kids should suffer learning loss just because public school has been shut down so that teachers can have an 18-month paid vacation.
Some parents picked up homeschooling during that time and discovered that their kids were learning more than they ever had before.
Real learning begins when you take your kids out of the system.
That's when the best learning, the real learning happens.
But unfortunately, many parents didn't replace public school with homeschool.
They instead plopped their kids down in front of computers for seven hours a day, hoping that their eight and nine-year-olds would learn from Zoom classes.
Just put your nine-year-old in a Zoom meeting all day and hope that he picks something up, and they didn't pick anything up.
Nothing absorbed.
Because nobody can really learn that way, or very few people can, and especially kids can't.
For many kids, therefore, public school was replaced with nothing.
Which, admittedly, still might be an improvement.
But that's not the point that Ms.
Cruz is trying to make.
She's saying that it doesn't matter if our kids, our babies, she says.
And she does mean our, as in, like, mine.
But it doesn't matter if they didn't learn academic subjects.
Because, she says, they were still exposed to the right political messages.
They learned that when BLM burns down a city block, it's a protest.
But when people with MAGA hats on riot, it's an insurrection.
And as far as she's concerned, you know, if that's all they learned in 18 months, well, that's good enough.
Right-wing bad, left-wing good.
That, after all, is the main thing.
I mean, it's the only thing she wants kids to learn through 12 years of grade school.
In fact, the kids who learned the difference between a riot and a protest, quote-unquote, are probably ready to graduate as far as she's concerned.
No need for them to finish fourth grade, just send them all the way through.
Because for her, again, the indoctrination is the point.
Here's another example if you need it.
A teacher named Kristen Pitson posted some videos which have since gone viral, where she brags about how she took the American flag down in her classroom and now tells her students to pledge allegiance to the pride flag.
Now this teacher, after intense backlash from the public, has apparently been removed from the class, though they're not saying she was fired.
Permanently.
They're just saying she's not teaching in the classroom right now.
And keep in mind, And that's good, you know, that she's not in the classroom.
She should be fired.
This is a time when someone should be cancelled.
And there are a lot of people on the left reacting to this as, oh, I thought you guys were against cancel culture.
You misunderstand.
I'm not against people suffering consequences, the correct consequences for bad actions.
But that's not what cancel culture is.
But keep in mind, she was quote-unquote cancelled, maybe, But only because she admitted to this and posted it to TikTok, and then only because the account libs of TikTok on Twitter took it and put it on Twitter and then it went viral.
That's the only reason she's suffering consequences.
If she had just kept this to herself or just posted it to her own TikTok page and it hadn't gone anywhere else, she would still be in the classroom right now.
So that's all the backgrounds, and here's the video.
Watch this.
Okay, so during third period we have announcements and they do the Pledge of Allegiance.
I always tell my class, stand if you feel like it, don't stand if you feel like it, say the words if you want, don't have to say the words.
So my class decided to stand but not say the words.
Totally fine.
Except for the fact that my room does not have a flag.
It used to be there, but I took it down during COVID because And, um, I packed it away and I don't know where, and I haven't found it yet.
But my kid today goes, Hey, um, it's kind of weird that we just stand and then, you know, we say it to nothing.
And I'm like, Oh, well, you know, I got to find it.
Like I'm working on it.
I got you.
In the meantime, I tell this kid, we do have a flag in the class that you can pledge your allegiance to.
And he, like, looks around and he goes, oh, that one?
Hilarious.
But the American flag makes her uncomfortable.
Doesn't even bother explaining why.
We're just supposed to understand why it makes her uncomfortable.
And, hey, if you're uncomfortable with the American flag, you don't like this country, Well, join the club with all the other people that are in your boat and maybe actually get on a boat and go somewhere else.
In fact, I hear Kabul is nice this time of year.
Why don't you go there?
If you hate America so much that you're uncomfortable around the flag, this kind of sentiment would be inconceivable in almost any other country in the world, especially in the non-Western world.
To have someone professing to be uncomfortable around their own nation's flag.
But we not only have people who feel that way here, but they're teaching students.
And that wasn't the only video, there's another one too.
Here she is talking about all the pride flags in her classroom, and she's got about a million of them it seems, but here's that.
It's Pride Month!
I will never not be awkward.
That's fun for me.
Happy Pride, everyone!
It's June 1st, the start of Pride Month.
Here's what I got going in my classroom.
I got these flags from Target in the dollar bin, so that's amazing.
They didn't have all of them in the collection that they came out with, so I got all the ones that they had.
As well as the inclusive Pride flag.
I pledge allegiance to the queers.
I also got a really big Pride inclusive flag.
I need to put it up still, but it's gonna go up there and I need, like, a ladder.
So that's gonna come later, but it's here!
Yay!
So, I love you all very much.
For the people who are out, for the people who aren't out, you're appreciated, you're loved, you are enough.
I support you.
I got you.
Now think about the culture in that school and among the faculty.
That made Kristen Pitson think that it was okay not only to do what she did, but to brag about it on the internet.
Think about what's happening in that school.
Think about what's happening in the faculty lounges, what kind of conversations are going on.
That she was able to do that, and of course, again, if she hadn't posted this to TikTok, and then if it hadn't been picked up on Twitter and gone viral, there'd be no consequences at all.
And if it wasn't for the American flag, but the fact that she's draping her entire classroom in pride flags, that's not a problem at all.
She wouldn't get in any trouble for that.
Even though we're told we got to keep religion and school separate.
Separate church and state.
And this is, that's her church, that's her religious symbol.
That is analogous to Only the sense of being a religion is analogous, but it is like a Christian teacher putting the crucifix up in the public school classroom.
I guarantee if they did that, there'd be a lot of problems.
They'd get sued for it, and they'd get fired.
Why?
Because it's a religious symbol.
Now, does the Constitution actually forbid people, public school teachers, from expressing their religious views in class?
I don't actually think it does.
But that's the precedent, that's what the left always says.
And the pride flags are your religious devotion, that is your church, that's your religion, that you're hanging in the classroom.
But that would be okay, if not for all the other bits and the fact that it went viral.
We always have to remind ourselves when we see this, this is not an aberration, this is not an exception, this is the point of the public school system.
Things aren't going wrong here.
This is the public school system doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Which is why, you know what I'm going to say to end this off.
To end this.
Get your kids out of that system.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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We start here with Reuters as the United States on Monday completed its military withdrawal from Afghanistan after a huge but chaotic airlift that cost the lives of 13 U.S.
troops and left behind thousands of Afghans and hundreds of Americans still seeking an escape from Taliban rule.
In a first in the nearly 20 years since Al-Qaeda's September 11, 2001 attacks plunged the United States into war, not a single service member from the U.S.
military was in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon, which said this in an afternoon news conference.
Heartbreak was the word that U.S.
Marine General Frank McKenzie used as he described emotions surrounding the U.S.
departure from its longest war after dangerous and tireless efforts by U.S.
troops to evacuate American citizens and vulnerable Afghans.
It says more than 122, here's the number, more than 122,000 people have been flown out of Kabul since August 14th, the day after the Taliban regained control of the country, 122,000.
And we were told to begin with that there were, you know, a few thousand Americans that needed to be evacuated.
And there's still hundreds or even maybe thousands of Americans who have been left behind.
Who have been abandoned behind enemy lines by the Biden administration.
So what that means is that 122,000 people were evacuated.
Almost all of them were Afghan citizens.
And if the pictures and videos are any indication, a huge number of them were men of fighting age.
Who were evacuated and many of them are going to be brought here.
Many, certainly the federal government, many governors across the state as well, including Republican governors, have said, yeah, bring them in, bring them in.
And we're supposed to believe, by the way, that the hundred plus thousand Afghans who have been evacuated, that they were all, they all, what, they were all interpreters?
They were all translators?
Really?
I mean, how would we even know that?
That mass of people at the airport?
Were we sifting through them?
Was there some sort of real intentional and careful process to see who gets on the planes?
Doesn't seem like it.
I mean, there were people literally, as you recall, clinging to the outside of the planes.
This was anything but a careful process.
And that's all, of course, Biden's fault.
There's no reason to think that all of these 100 plus thousand Afghans who are coming here helped America in any way.
These are just people who wanted to leave the country for good reason.
I would want to leave it too if I was a citizen of Afghanistan.
But just think about this.
I mean, there's nothing that better encapsulates the ruling class's attitude and approach.
Then the fact that they're bringing 100,000 Afghans here while leaving Americans in Afghanistan.
Evacuate 100 plus thousand Afghans and leaving Americans there.
America lasts every single time with these people.
America and Americans last every time.
Next, this is from the Daily Wire.
It says, referring to people as elderly, uninsured, or in inmates is apparently dehumanizing and not inclusive, according to the CDC.
In what appears to be a recently published guide, the CDC lists numerous descriptors and phrases that it says aren't inclusive before providing a list of non-stigmatizing language.
The guide includes multiple sections grouping terms under banners like disability and homelessness before saying those words aren't inclusive enough.
Wait, hold on a second.
So, the guide uses those words?
And groups people by those categories and then says don't use those words while they're using the words?
Okay.
For example, under the disability heading, the guide says that words like disabled, differently abled, and handicapped are stigmatizing and should be replaced with lengthy phrases like people with disabilities or people who use a wheelchair or mobility device.
The guide says the CDC is aware that some individuals with disabilities prefer to use identity-first terminology, which means a disability or disabled status is referred to first.
For the purpose of these guidelines, CDC promotes person-first language.
Most of the guide is similar, suggesting the shorter identifier is wrong, but simply adding people with ahead of that to apparently make it more inclusive.
The guide's headlines are in alphabetical order, so the first section is titled Corrections and Detentions, and suggests words like inmate, prisoner, convict, offender, criminal, parolee, and detainee are all stigmatizing.
We wouldn't want to stigmatize convicted felons who are in prison.
You know, convicted rapists and murderers.
We wouldn't want to make them feel stigmatized.
I mean, we're locking them in a cell, right, for 23 hours a day.
But we don't want to make them feel weird when they're in there.
So what are the terms we should be using?
People slash persons who are incarcerated.
Partner slash child of an incarcerated person.
People who were formerly incarcerated.
Persons on parole.
Okay, so don't say parolee.
Say persons on parole.
Elderly is apparently wrong too.
You can say older adults.
And instead of saying underserved people, the guide suggests saying people who are underserved.
You see, the PC language just changes.
I mean, I can remember when I was a kid, there'd be a shift in PC language.
It felt like every seven or eight years, they'd come up with a new word for a lot of these different groups.
And even that was kind of annoying.
I remember people used to complain back in the 90s about political correctness going wild because every six, seven, eight years, they'd come up with a new word that we're supposed to use, which was political correctness going wild at the time, and which was absurd.
But now it's like every seven to eight hours they've got a new word.
A lot of these words, these are the politically correct words.
Underserved people?
I don't even know who that's supposed to refer to, but that is a politically correct term.
Differently abled?
Disabled?
I mean, what?
Differently abled, that is definitely, that's politically correct language.
But, no, you gotta change it up again.
And why?
The arbitrariness is the point.
Again, this is all about control.
It's all about controlling.
If you can control the words that people use, then you can control their minds.
I think there was someone at The Daily Wire who actually wrote a book about this, I think.
Now, another question you might have is, why is the CDC getting involved in this?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What in the world does this have to... Putting aside how absurd it is, what does this have to do with disease control?
Are people contracting diseases because we're referring to disabled people the wrong way?
Well, no.
The CDC is expanding the scope of their interests.
To include now, and this is part of that campaign, a focus on gun violence.
So this is supposed to be a big historic moment, we're told by CNN, but the director, Walensky of the CDC, sat down with CNN and talked about how now the CDC, again, they're expanding the scope of their mission, and that includes policing language, but also policing gun violence.
Let's watch that.
But now in a stunning turn, the current director of the CDC is announcing a plan to reduce gun violence, sharing it exclusively with CNN.
This is actually a stunning moment that a director of the CDC is even talking about this issue, is even using the word guns.
It hasn't happened in years and years.
Every day we turn on the news and there are more young people dying.
I swore to the President and to this country that I would protect your health.
This is clearly one of those moments, one of those issues that is harming America's health.
But there's a reason why your predecessors didn't address it.
One recent weekend in Chicago, we had 74 people shot.
That same weekend, a party in Florida, five teenagers shot.
That same weekend, a man in New York City, in Times Square, shot in the back.
And the list goes on and on, week after week after week.
Can anything be done about this?
Something has to be done about this.
So, 40,000 firearm-related deaths a year.
120,000 serious firearm-related injuries per year.
The scope of the problem is just bigger than we're even hearing about.
And when your heart wrenches every day you turn on the news, you're only hearing the tip of the iceberg.
There's a reason your predecessors didn't address it.
Well, what she was getting at there is that, well, they didn't address it because it's politically charged and they didn't have the courage to address it like Rochelle Lewinsky does.
Look, before we even get to what she's talking about here, the fact that she still has a job, the fact that anyone at the CDC still has a job, they are the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, preventing disease.
It would seem like the last 18 months, they haven't been doing a very good job of that.
Only in the government does it work this way.
She heads up an organization that's supposed to prevent disease, and hundreds of thousands of people die from a pandemic, and she doesn't have to answer for it at all.
Now, is it the CDC's fault?
No, but this is their organization.
Preventing disease.
They certainly didn't prevent this one.
This is a time when, I guess this is the way to put it, if the CDC has any function, if it serves any purpose, if we need the CDC at all, Then you would think the last 18 months would be the time when they would leap into action and, I don't know, do something.
I'm not saying they could stop COVID from existing, but maybe do something?
Where would we be right now in terms of COVID and the death toll if the CDC didn't exist?
What if the CDC didn't exist, Rochelle Walensky didn't have a job, or at least didn't have a job in public life?
Where would we be?
Would anything be different?
Would there be one person who's dead right now who would not be dead?
Would anything be different at all?
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Or maybe, are there people, you know, alive right now who are alive because the CDC prevented them from dying of COVID?
I don't think there's any evidence of that.
I think all the evidence suggests that if the CDC didn't exist, we'd be in the exact same spot.
We might be even in a little bit of better shape, because the conflicting messages, how badly they bungled everything.
It's hard for me to know how many people have died because of that, or if anyone has, but all the evidence suggests at least we'd be in the same spot that we are.
But, not only does she keep a job, and the CDC retains all of its power and everything, and is not defunded, not only that, but now they can expand.
This is how it works in government.
When you fail miserably, you are punished with more power and influence, and that's what's happening.
And now she's expanding into gun violence, which, just so you know, is not a disease.
So that answers the question, why didn't your predecessors address this?
Well, because it's not within their purview.
Because you're the CDC.
It's got nothing to do with you whatsoever.
It's true, though.
I'm talking about all the violence in places like New York and Chicago and in our cities.
I mean, it is a crisis.
It is an awful situation.
Lots of people are dying.
Our cities have become like these dystopian hellscapes.
But why is that?
You know, see, for me, the question is always going to be, yeah, you get a bunch of teenagers that were shot at a party.
Someone walked up and just shot all these kids.
Or I go back to that we talked about a couple weeks ago.
I think it was in New York, a dispute over shoes at a shoe store, and someone gets shot in the middle of the street.
The guy who works at the shoe store gets shot in the middle of the street over shoes.
And we see this kind of stuff every single day in the city.
And the CDC and, you know, the Democrat Party, CNN, the media, They want us to just ask the question, well, how do you get his hands on that gun?
We need a law that would make sure that these people who are committing these crimes don't get their hands on guns to begin with.
Well, we already have those laws.
I haven't even looked into the cases that were just mentioned by CNN there, but I can guarantee you to begin with that almost all of them, the person firing the weapon, Was possessing it illegally.
So he was already committing a whole series of crimes simply by possessing that gun and then certainly by using it the way that he did.
So there are already a bunch of laws.
But let's add five or six more on top of that.
I'm sure that'll make a difference.
And let's get the CDC on the case too.
That'll definitely do something.
That's not really the question.
That's not the most important question.
The question is, why would someone, even if they have a gun, why would they do that?
What is going on with them that they have such indifference towards human life?
I mean, I own a firearm.
I own multiple firearms, legally.
And you don't have to worry about me.
I'm not going to walk up to any party and start shooting people.
I'm not going to shoot anybody over a dispute over shoes.
It's not going to happen.
So there's something here.
It's not just the gun, right, apparently?
Because I have one, I'm not killing anybody.
It appears that people have these guns and they make choices.
So the real question that we could be asking is why are they making these choices?
And if we want to narrow it down more, we could ask, in the city where violent crime is endemic, Why are there so many people making these kinds of choices?
And when you start going down that rabbit hole, pretty soon you're going to get to fatherlessness, you're going to get to the family, you're going to get to all kinds of things that the media and the CDC and the Democratic Party doesn't want to talk about.
Alright, speaking of the family...
Here's a man, we'll play this for you.
This is a guy plotting to take custody away from his ex-wife because she isn't vaccinated.
He's very excited about this plan.
He's announcing it to the whole world on TikTok.
Here it is.
Holy s**t. Holy s**t. Holy s**t. As a lot of you know, I have a five-year-old son who is with his mother, my ex-wife, and her entire family five days a week while he goes to school in her district.
Also, as many of you know, She and her family are all anti-vax, anti-mask.
Guess what she admitted to while I was recording in my car on my property?
I asked her point blank, are you COVID vaccinated?
She said no.
I said do you plan to be?
And she said maybe, I don't know.
She said maybe, I don't know.
I now have Hard proof of her admitting she is not COVID vaccinated around my son and takes no precautions whatsoever.
And I can subpoena video of her being in stores unvaccinated with no mask with my child.
I don't know for sure, but I think this could really help my case.
What a guy.
What a man.
Now, you may hear this and you think, well, I mean, that can't really work.
I mean, Is it not knowing anything else about this person's custody dispute?
I feel like we already know, just looking at that guy and hearing it, we already know everything we need to know about him, and none of it is good.
But you hear that and you think, well, that would actually work.
Could you take custody away from a parent based on vaccination status?
There's no precedent for that, as far as I know.
But apparently, yeah, it might work.
This, I believe, is a separate case.
But here's a report from Fox 32 in Chicago where, in fact, this kind of plan worked out exactly the way that this guy hopes.
Let's watch this.
A Cook County judge here at the Daily Center has stripped a Chicago mom of her parenting rights because she's refused to get the COVID vaccine.
He is a very sweet boy.
He's my whole world.
You miss him?
I miss him more than anything.
Rebecca Furlitt has been divorced for seven years and shares custody of her 11-year-old son with her ex-husband, what had been a 50-50 split in parenting time.
But on August 10th, in an unrelated child support hearing, Cook County Judge James Shapiro asked Furlitt whether she'd been vaccinated.
When she told the judge no because she's had bad reactions to vaccines in the past, Judge Shapiro stripped Furlitt of all of her parenting time until she agrees to get vaccinated.
I think that it's wrong.
I think that it's dividing families, and I think that it's not in my son's best interest to be away from his mother.
Ferlet is now asking the appellate court to stay the judge's order, her attorney saying the judge has overstepped his authority.
You have to understand, the father did not even bring this issue before the court.
So it's the judge on his own making this decision that you can't see your child until you're vaccinated.
We just wanted the mother to pay support.
The father's attorney, Jeffrey Leving, says while they were surprised by the order, he believes the judge is making the right call, given the seriousness of the pandemic.
Now, the update here is that the judge has reversed the decision that he made there because of public pressure.
Yet again, it's the right decision, just like with the teacher in the classroom, but it's only because of the public pressure.
It's only because this case went viral.
But the fact that it had to be reversed at all is very troubling.
This is where the trend is heading.
And there are many people, advocates for the vaccine and masking, who are really clear about this.
They think if you're not vaccinated, if you don't get your kids vaccinated, if you're not wearing a mask, if your kid isn't wearing a mask, then you're an unfit parent.
You're putting your child's life in danger.
You're basically killing your own children.
You're unfit and you shouldn't be allowed to have custody of your children.
That kind of rhetoric is very prominent among the mob and in the media.
And now it's seeping into the court system, and that's a troubling development to say the least.
Next we have this.
Olivia Rodrigo said, who of course I'm a big fan, we did a whole video on, I think Olivia Rodrigo was, she was the driver's license one, right?
She made that song.
Yeah, we did a video about that.
Just a tremendous, I think, masterful piece of art.
But she said in an interview that she didn't know that non-white people could be music stars.
This is from page six.
Olivia Rodrigo knows the impact she has on fans of color, revealing in a new Q&A that she herself once believed only white girls could be recognized as true pop stars.
When Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang asked the Brutal singer how her Filipino-American background factors into how she approaches her career, she said it's something incredible to think about.
She said, I sometimes get DMs from little girls being like, I've never seen someone who looked like me in your position.
And these are girls that apparently have never turned on the TV, which is great, actually.
"And I'm literally going to cry, like, just thinking about it,"
Rodrigo said in a V Magazine feature. "I feel like I grew up never seeing that."
Also, it was always like, pop star, that's a white girl.
These days, however, Rodrigo is grateful that the music biz no longer forces artists to be confined by certain genres.
At least not to the extent that she witnessed growing up.
What?
She's 18 years old!
She was born in the early 2000s.
When, at that point, and And for much of the history of pop music, some of the biggest stars were non-white people.
And that, again, has been the case since the advent of pop music.
So, this is someone who has absolutely no knowledge of anything that happened prior to the moment that she was born.
And apparently, even a lot of things that were happening when she was born and through her own life, she's been unaware of.
Which has led her to believe that she's somehow, in the year 2021, as an 18-year-old pop star, non-white pop star, she's somehow groundbreaking.
I think, you know, I hate to keep beating on a dead horse here, but this goes back to the public school system in a lot of ways.
Not that I really want them to be teaching the history of pop music, but this is another symptom of what we find among a lot of people, not just young people, but especially among young people today.
They have absolutely no knowledge of anything that happened prior to their birth.
And they don't think that any of that is relevant.
As far as they're concerned, the world As far as Olivia Rodrigo is concerned, the world came into existence along with her.
She basically created the world by existing.
Which is, you know, in some ways a very encouraging way of seeing the world because then you're constantly, since nothing happened before you, you're constantly setting new trends, breaking new ground, even if that ground has already been broken a thousand times before you existed.
All right, finally, this is a very important piece of audio, and really everything's been leading up to this.
I think this is the most important thing that we'll discuss and play today.
I'm sorry to get a little bit serious here, but something happened at a Henrico County School Board meeting a couple of days ago that I just think you need to hear.
Listen to this.
You guys work for us in this environment.
You answer to us, and I'm asking that you do not pass this policy in Virginia.
Thank you so much, Ms.
Thomas.
We do appreciate you.
Phil McCracken.
Phil McCracken?
Soak.
Sook.
My headache.
Ophelia McHawk.
Ophelia McHawk.
Eileen Dover.
Eileen Dover.
Don Kittick.
Don Kittick.
Wayne Kerr.
Wayne Kerr.
I don't know why all those people weren't there.
It seems...
You know, they all signed up and didn't show up.
I don't know if maybe there was some other party or meeting they were attending.
I'm not sure.
I can't believe that Mr. Hunt, first name Mike, wasn't signed up for that meeting either.
I don't know who did that, but they're a hero, okay?
They are.
And I don't know if it was an adult or a child who did that, but heroes either way, and artists.
And I hope it was a kid, actually.
I hope kids are still doing stuff like that.
That makes me feel better.
That's one glimmer of hope that I have now for future generations.
Because that prank, it never gets old.
It's always hilarious.
It never gets old.
And I don't see how that guy... I understand the first few names.
You don't really know what you're getting into.
But once you get to I leaned over, how do you not figure it out then?
That is... I'll tell you something.
That is much more important and powerful than any other speech or anything that's happened at these school board meetings, including the one that I gave.
I bow down to that.
Well, I don't bow down to it, but maybe that's the wrong phrase to use.
Okay, let's go now to reading the YouTube comments.
This is from The Fashion Assassin.
He says, My guess as to why Matt isn't on camera today is he attempted the milk crate challenge and failed miserably.
Now he looks like Tom Cruise from Vanilla Sky.
Trevor says, Matt isn't video-less today, he's just resting his eyes.
DH says, apparently Matt's fashion faux pas was so egregious today that the producers wouldn't even allow us to see it.
William says, I think Matt shaved his beard, but it looks so terrible that he won't go on camera until it's grown back.
Okay, lots of theories about why I wasn't on camera yesterday, but I'm going to tell you the truth.
The truth is that I had a flare-up of leprosy, and it kind of comes and goes.
And it's hard to tell sometimes because my normal face sort of looks like it, but I didn't want to be seen and I hope you understand.
That's the real reason.
Dick Samarone, I don't know if I'm getting pranked by that name, says, are we being punished for making fun of Matt's outfit choices?
Gibberish says, Daily Wire, how do you expect us to enjoy the benefits of the bicep cam when you don't show Matt on the screen?
Andrew says, by not having the podcast in video form today, Matt has bravely demonstrated what a world without white people would look like.
This is performative wokeness at its best.
Well done, Matt.
Okay, so basically every comment is about the fact that there was no video yesterday.
Every single one.
Old school says, Matt didn't want to go on camera today because his wife forgot to do laundry and all there was left was his skinny jeans and polka dot shirt.
Well, that can't be it because I don't own skinny jeans, first of all, and the polka dot shirt I will wear proudly, as you know.
But thank you for all of those very useful comments, which have made for, I think, a pretty interesting segment of the show.
You know, it's never been more important to understand what's going on in the political sphere, and that's why we started our newest podcast, Morning Wire, the daily morning show which is dedicated to bringing you all the news that you need to know and also bring it to you in 15 minutes or less, because They value your time and also the truth.
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Now to our daily cancellation.
You know, if you still don't believe that there is a racism crisis in this country, then let me tell you a story that may change your mind.
According to an urgent and exclusive report from Fox 5 in D.C., a firefighter in Alexandria has been put on administrative leave because he made a, quote, controversial gesture while on camera during a recent news segment.
And this firefighter, it appears, moved his fingers in a way that may seem totally benign and incidental to the untrained observer, but the heroic investigative journalists over at Fox 5 know that quite often, the most insidious forms of racism can be hiding in plain sight.
So we'll play this report for you now, and it's a little bit long, but it's worth listening to every single moment of this.
And keep in mind as you listen to it, this is very real, okay?
This is not a parody, not a joke, at least not intentionally.
Listen to this.
Well, only on Fox five and Alexandria fire department members in hot water being investigated for possibly flashing a racist symbol on our air Fox five.
Stephanie Ramirez is live in Alexandria at Station four.
And Stephanie, how did this end up happening?
Well, Rob, this was during a live Fox 5 Zip Trip segment that we were doing last Friday.
We do these in the community to highlight different communities all across our region.
Well, during the last Friday event in Alexandria, a fire department member decided to flash what is the OK gesture.
As the camera was passing by, we confirmed with fire department officials today that that member has since been placed on administrative leave with pay.
Now, it happened so quickly it's kind of hard to catch here, but it is the last Alexandria Fire Department member on the right who first makes fists and then does that okay gesture just before the camera cuts to our two anchors.
A viewer email came into Fox Live shortly after with a screen grab of this member.
The emailer asking, Why there's a gang symbol on TV stating it needs to be addressed.
We asked the department about it.
Now we should note here the okay hand symbol.
It was used as part of a punching game if you flashed it.
It is used by scuba divers communicating underwater.
It's also listed by the Anti-Defamation League as a gesture of hate sometimes used to express
white power.
Now I did get to ask the fire chief today about it, if he knew the members intention
behind doing this.
Chief Corey Smedley told me no, that he has not talked to this member yet, but there will
be an investigation.
I also asked, what if it turns out that this was done out of some kind of joke?
A joke is only if someone is not offended by it.
And it's always in the eyes of the beholder.
And just because someone may have thought things were a joke, it's not something that is up to our values within the department.
So we have to first and foremost make every attempt to maintain the integrity and trust of the community.
And joking is not something that is part of our mission.
It's hard to know where to begin in sifting through this madness.
The anchor, reporting live from the scene of where a dude moved his fingers, says that the okay gesture, where you form a circle with your index finger and thumb, is a gesture of hate.
Well, more specifically, she says that it could be part of a punching game, or it's a sign used by scuba divers, or it could be a secret white power symbol.
Those are the options.
Son, you're either a scuba diver or a Nazi.
And we ain't under the ocean right now, so that kind of narrows it down.
A little bit of a Full Metal Jacket thing going on, I guess.
She does clarify, of course, that the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, has declared that the OK sign is a hate symbol.
What she doesn't explain, however, is why anyone should give a damn what the ADL thinks.
There's a handful of far-left political groups, the ADL, Southern Poverty Law Center, Principal Among Them, that have appointed themselves sort of arbiters of what is hateful and what is not.
And they get to decide which gestures and words and ideas and groups are valid and which are abhorrent and accursed.
We're not supposed to ask why, or rather where, they derive this authority or why we should respect or care about their opinion on these matters.
The media will simply say, well, the ADL says this is hateful.
So?
I care what they say.
Who put them in charge?
It's not unlike the groups that have declared themselves fact-checkers.
And now because they have fact-checker in their name, they're meant to be unquestionably trusted as the official adjudicators of truth.
But the funny thing is that If you go to the ADL's official website and their database for hate symbols,
It does list the okay gesture, and yet it admits that the whole white power connection is really a trolling campaign by 4chan.
So here's what their website says.
It says, "...a common hand gesture that a 4chan trolling campaign claimed in 2017 had been appropriated as a symbol meaning white power, used by many on the right, not just extremists, for the purpose of trolling liberals.
The symbol eventually came to be used by actual white supremacists as well.
Caution must be used in evaluating instances of this symbol's use."
Ah, okay.
So...
The OK gesture could be a white power symbol, allegedly.
Or it could be a scuba diver sign.
Or it could be a game that you play where if somebody looks at the circle, then you get punched.
That's what I was a kid.
That's what it usually meant when someone did that.
It meant that the punch was coming shortly after you saw it.
Or it could be a 4chan troll.
Or it could just mean OK.
Or it could mean a dozen other things.
Or it could mean nothing at all.
Not every movement a person makes with their fingers has some deep-seated reason behind it.
In fact, most movements don't.
Most are incidental.
If you were to stare at a person's hands long enough, And film it?
Looking for hidden meanings, you know, behind every twitch or gesture?
You'll come away thinking that they made white power symbols, they flashed gang symbols, they flipped you off, they, I don't know, they said the words train and dog and sign language.
I mean, all kinds of random things.
And the person will have communicated these messages to you without knowing that they communicated anything at all.
Kind of like the truck driver for a gas company in California last year, who was fired for making the same white power sign, when really it turned out he was just cracking his knuckles, which is a pretty, you know, you do this and you crack your knuckles.
Also, he's Mexican, but they still fired him for being an advocate of white power.
But somehow we haven't even gotten to the dumbest part of this alleged news report yet, because the dumbest part comes to us courtesy of the fire chief, Chief Smedley, A perfectly appropriate name somehow.
It's just, you hear Chief Smedley and then you see him and you listen to him and you think, well yeah, that's exactly what I expected from Chief Smedley.
So Chief Smedley says that even if the benign, probably incidental finger movement was actually intended as a joke, it doesn't count as a joke anymore if someone gets offended.
Exact quote, a joke is only if someone is not offended by it.
Which I guess that's news to many comedians.
Richard Pryor, he never told a joke in his life, his whole career.
We think of him as an iconic trailblazing comedian, but he's not at all.
He was not a comedian.
He was not a comedian because he offended people with every joke that he told.
But it's all in the eye of the beholder, Chief Smedley says.
And if someone hears or sees your joke and decides that they don't like it, then all of a sudden your joke isn't a joke anymore.
If they interpret it as something serious, then that means that your intentions were serious.
So they get to retroactively determine what your own intentions were based on how your joke makes them feel.
That's Chief Smedley's position.
That's the media's position.
Everyone on the left, that's how they look at it.
That's why he says, joking is not a part of our mission.
That's the most Chief Smedley thing anyone has ever said.
Joking is really not a part of our mission here.
But this idea, which has led to the unjust cancellation of many a person, This idea that your intentions don't matter at all in communication.
So when you're communicating something, what you intended in communicating it makes no difference.
All that matters is the person listening to it and how they feel when they hear you say it.
So even if you weren't trying to communicate anything at all, even if you're just standing there and moving your fingers randomly, And there's no intention, doesn't matter because someone felt differently and they get to decide what your intentions were.
Not you, them.
All of this is quite insane, of course, and it would be hilarious if not for the fact that an innocent man's life is being severely impacted by it.
Just imagine, imagine from the firefighter's perspective for a moment here.
Fox 5 shows up because they want to do some dumb filler segment and you have to put on your uniform and stand there for the b-roll shots and they probably did a whole bunch of shots and you're standing out there for, you know, 45 minutes.
Next thing you know, because some hypersensitive tattletale with no life and nothing better to do was offended by the movement of your fingers, now you're under investigation and suspended from your job and being smeared on television as a suspected Nazi.
And to make matters worse, it's being done by people who almost certainly know better.
They're not as insane as they appear to be.
Maybe the original person who reported it, the viewer who saw that and paused and said, what's that there?
What did he do with his fingers?
That person might just be a psycho lunatic or simply a loser with nothing better to do, as I said.
But the fire chief?
Well, he's a spineless coward.
The reporters are sadistic propagandists, perfectly willing to destroy a random person's life for the sake of a story.
Especially a story that advances the preferred narrative.
And for all of those reasons, that is why, of course, Fox 5 in D.C.
is cancelled.
And I have to say, most of all, and I never thought I'd have to say this, but Chief Smedley, you are also, sir, cancelled.
And that is no joke at all.
And we'll leave it there for today.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
Well, if you enjoyed this episode, 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 Knoll Show, The Andrew Klavan Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, our Supervising
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