Ep. 808 - Ron DeSantis Is Accused Of Not Being A Tyrant
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a left wing group puts out the most unintentionally hilarious political attack ad of all time, hitting Ron DeSantis for not being a tyrant. Also, there’s another alleged scandal involving Kristi Noem. And Netflix’s most popular show right now is gratuitously violent Korean torture porn. What does that tell us if anything? Plus, YouTube moves to ban all anti-vaxx content. But what even is anti-vaxx content? And in our Daily Cancellation, I must cancel dating apps. And I’ll explain why.
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, a left-wing group puts out the most unintentionally hilarious political attack ad of all time, hitting Ron DeSantis for not being a tyrant.
Also, there's another alleged scandal involving Kristi Noem, and Netflix's most popular show right now is gratuitously violent Korean torture porn.
What does that tell us, if anything?
Plus, YouTube moves to ban all anti-vax content, but then what is anti-vax content exactly?
In our daily cancellation, I must cancel dating apps, and I'll explain why.
All of that and more today on The Matt Wall Show.
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So I was on a plane yesterday flying from my home state of Virginia back to my old stomping grounds of Tennessee.
It's great to be back here.
Kind of nostalgic.
Giving a speech.
I'll be giving a speech in Memphis tonight.
I'll be at the Faith Baptist Church Bartlett to give the keynote speech at the Confidential Care Mobile Ministry 25th Anniversary Banquet.
Doors open at 7.
Anyway, on the plane, on the way over, I had the wonderful experience of being lectured three times in the first 30 minutes of the flight for improperly wearing my mask.
I was wearing it, but improperly.
And the first couple of lectures, I had my nose exposed.
And you don't want to have your nose exposed when you're wearing the mask.
No one's ever been able to explain why that's the case.
What does it actually matter to you?
If my nose is poking out over the mask, do you think that I'm going to infect someone who's wearing a mask, is probably vaccinated, just by breathing through my nostrils?
What's the likelihood of that?
But it doesn't matter.
At least it doesn't matter to the people who impose these policies.
The last lecture I got came after I took off my mask to drink the soda that had just been handed to me.
The flight attendant handed me a soda.
And I had only taken one sip before she was back, informing me that I can't take my mask off all the way to drink a drink.
So it has to be around my ears.
I can pull it down briefly for a sip, but then you have to replace it.
That's just science, folks, okay?
It's a very dangerous situation.
You gotta have the mask, even if it's not on your mouth, it's gotta be hanging around your ears.
And the act of hanging around the ears affords extra protection.
That is pure science right there.
Now, she pretended to be sort of apologetic about this, and she explained, as they always do, that, well, this is just the policy, sir.
It's just the policy.
Why is it the policy?
What sense does it make?
Well, those are irrelevant questions again, apparently.
I've done a lot of flying recently.
I can tell you that the mask enforcement on airplanes and in airports tends to vary wildly, not from airline to airline, but from flight crew to flight crew.
These policies have given power to people who normally have little power or authority in their positions.
So it's up to the individuals to decide how far they'll go with it, how controlling and tyrannical they want to be.
It's just a matter of whether or not they want to exploit this power.
So if they want to decide that you have to have the mask hanging around your ears for no reason, then they can decide that.
Even just like the guy stocking shelves at the grocery store can yell at you now if there's a mask mandate in the store and you aren't wearing yours properly.
Lots of people have been given power they didn't have before.
So we've learned quite a lot.
About our fellow Americans through this time.
And often, unfortunately, what we've learned has not been terribly encouraging.
Because there are plenty of people at every level, in the public sector and the private, who are eager to impose themselves on you, excited to capitalize on the power they've been granted, however small and limited in scope it might be.
This is not new with COVID, by the way.
This is something we noticed.
There's a tendency in people you've noticed, of course, before COVID.
Just the smallest amount of power could go to someone's head.
The most tyrannical person I've ever known or been around was a shift supervisor that I had at a fast food restaurant where I worked when I was like 17.
This is a person who had very little power in his position as shift supervisor at a fast food restaurant, but he was going to milk that for every drop that it was worth.
So we know about this tendency in people, and I think COVID has really brought that out.
And that's why those at the top, who've been granted the most power, are so hesitant to relinquish it.
Principal among them, of course, is Fauci, who this week has announced that in order to be fully vaccinated, I mean fully, fully vaccinated, you need three shots, not two.
Here's the post-millennial, says in an exclusive interview with The Atlantic, Joe Biden's chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, revealed that COVID-19 booster shots don't keep people alive, but can allegedly prevent severe effects from the virus.
According to Dr. Fauci, booster shots add crucial temporary protection against the virus and will become a standard regimen in the future.
He says, quote, it's likely for a real complete regimen that you would need at least a third dose.
Fauci continued, "I think we should be preventing people from getting sick from COVID, even if they
don't wind up in the hospital." Dr. Fauci said at the Atlantic Festival on Tuesday, "Skeptics of the
COVID-19 booster shots believe that boosters won't provide significant protection and will only act
as a temporary shield to the virus, contrary to the vaccines that were designed to prevent
hospitalization and death." However, Fauci said that he rejects skeptics' notions and insisted
it's beneficial to have temporary protection rather than no protection. So in summary,
bad news for the double-vaxxed, because you're about to find yourself back in the ranks of the un-vaxxed.
Three shots to be fully vaccinated.
So you got two shots and now you're back in the un-vaccinated.
You're an anti-vaxxer.
You got two shots and you're an anti-vaxxer now.
Three shots will do it.
That is until it becomes four shots and five shots and six shots and so on.
As long as they have another shot to push, which they always will, because apparently what they're telling us is that this, and this is not me saying this, YouTube, this is what they're telling us apparently, that the protection afforded by the vaccine is very, very temporary.
Or at least the full protection afforded by the vaccine is temporary, which is why they recommend you get the booster shot, which would mean that there's always going to be another shot.
And as long as there's always going to be another shot, and we can always be yelling at people who have not gotten the latest shot, the pandemic will continue.
At least they can claim that it's continuing.
And all they need is the claim in order to have the power.
And with all these people, from flight attendants to public health experts to governors, exploiting their power and clinging to it like Gollum grasping the ring, it becomes even funnier to see how guys like Ron DeSantis, who've declined the additional powers that the pandemic panic might have afforded him, are still somehow painted as the dystopian tyrants.
They've declined the power and that makes them the tyrants.
An ad airing in Florida right now, put together by a group called Remove Ron, tries to make this point explicit, but it only succeeds in highlighting all of the best things about DeSantis.
And also the ad is really just very funny.
Watch this.
Now that we're making our final descent, please watch this short message from Governor Ron DeSantis on COVID-19.
Thereafter, everyone on board will be required to comply with the state's forever purge.
We are not doing any vaccine passports in the state of Florida.
We trust people to make their own decisions in this state.
We are not going to be bludgeoning people with restrictions and mandates and lockdowns or any of that stuff.
As Governor DeSantis stated, while you're within state lines, you do not have to wear a mask.
You do not have to get a vaccine.
It is against the law for private businesses or schools to mandate masks or vaccines.
And you have the absolute right to infect whoever you want, whenever, and wherever, with COVID-19.
Thank you for traveling with us, and please, enjoy your floor-ever purge.
COVID-19 is surging again.
This is the time to double down.
The governor is doubling down.
He says students shouldn't be forced to wear masks.
If you are trying to lock people down, I'm going to stand in your way.
I honestly, when I saw that last night, I had to do some digging.
Because I really wasn't sure if that was actually supposed to be an attack ad or some kind of hype video.
It was not clear to me.
But apparently, yes, we are really supposed to watch that and come away from it with a lower opinion of Ron DeSantis.
And it only proves that you actually can't turn anything sinister just by putting creepy music in the background.
All the creepy music in the world won't make the phrase, we trust people to make their own decisions, suddenly seem evil or terrifying.
I mean, you could set the Jaws theme to footage of Mother Teresa walking down the street or volunteering at a soup kitchen, but it's not going to make people shake in their boots unless they're shaking from laughter.
And this ad really is, unintentionally, the most hilarious political attack ad of all time.
It has the exact opposite effect from the effect that was intended.
Because I like Ron DeSantis even more now.
I mean, I would love that.
If I landed, if I was flying into a state and I landed there, and that was like the welcome video we watched, where they said, hey, you'll make your own choices here, you have freedom here.
That would be fantastic.
What are we supposed to be afraid of here?
What are they attacking him for?
Well, freedom.
They're comparing a lack of vaccine mandates and passports And his refusal to shut down small businesses to a purge where people are running through the streets, murdering each other at will.
They want us to be afraid of freedom.
They want us to be afraid of leaders, what few exist, who decline to exploit their authority.
They want us to be afraid of leaders who value our freedom over their power.
And to the sane among us, we see that, and it's hilarious, Then it becomes a little bit less funny when you realize that for a lot of Americans, that message has actually worked.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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This book, back when they first wrote it and had the idea to publish it, it was obviously relevant.
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Yeah, the enforcement in the planes with the masking really varies, like I said, with flight crews.
In airports, too.
I mean, really everywhere you go in the country, and I've done a lot of traveling recently and throughout the whole pandemic.
And it's always been the case that it's not just city to city, but place to place, wherever you go, they've all got their own little version of what they're doing.
The little measures they've put in place most of the time don't make any sense.
And so there's just no coherent message at all.
If you didn't know anything about what was going on with COVID or
anything and you just traveled around to different places.
And you saw all of the competing, different, conflicting safety measures that have been put in place.
You would just have no idea what was happening.
You wouldn't have any clue what they're trying to protect us against.
And that's especially the case in airports.
In fact, in Reagan Airport in D.C., that's the first airport I've been to in many months where they actually enforce the mask mandate at all.
I mean, usually I just walk around the airport and I don't wear the mask and no one says anything.
But I got yelled at two or three times at Reagan Airport because the people working there are excited for that opportunity to yell at you for not wearing a mask.
In fact, just at the baggage claim, I was dropping my bags off, and as I'm walking away, the woman yells at me, where's your mask?
Where's your mask?
I said, it's in my pocket.
Are you going to put it on?
Yeah, sure.
Because I just walked away and didn't put it on.
This has been my general policy, and I've shared with you before.
And I think this is really important, and it's something we all need to start doing if you're not doing it already.
I'm not going to say, I can't say, that I simply won't wear the mask at all.
Because if I say that, that means I'm not getting on planes, I'm not traveling to the places I need to travel to.
So I can't say that exactly.
But what I will say is that, and this has been my policy all along, is I'm not going to volunteer to wear the mask.
I'm not going to walk into a place and choose on my own to put it on.
I'm going to at least make you tell me to put it on.
And then once you, depending on who you are, I'll decide if I care, you know, if you're just some random person with no position of authority at all, I'm just going to ignore you.
I don't care what you think.
But if you do have some position of authority in this establishment where I am, then I'll decide.
Maybe I want to leave because I don't want to wear the mask, or I'll put it on, but I'm going to make you tell me.
I'm not going to volunteer doing it.
It really is disturbing.
It's been disturbing to me this whole time to see how so many people have just Even if they don't like wearing it, they've gotten used to wearing it, and now a lot of people do like, actually like wearing the mask.
I noticed this shift in planes early on, like the first couple of months, when they had the mask mandates in planes.
And the flight attendants were prowling through the plane the whole time, telling people, put the mask back on, put the mask back on, yelling at people over the intercom and everything.
And you could see people around you, they're always fidgeting with the mask, pulling it down.
And then this shift happened, and it was pretty sudden from what I observed, a couple months into it, where people weren't doing that anymore.
They just put the mask on over the nose, didn't touch it, didn't fidget with it, and kept it on the whole time without any complaint at all.
I don't understand that mentality, but it's a pretty disturbing mentality that so many people have.
All right, so this is a report from the website American Greatness, and I'll just read the report to you.
This is what they are reporting.
We had the alleged scandal involving Kristi Noem yesterday that we talked about, where allegedly she used her position of authority to get a position for her daughter.
And, you know, kind of nepotism, using her influence to get a position for her daughter.
That was the story yesterday.
We got a new scandal, alleged.
This is from American Greatness.
It says, multiple sources have informed American Greatness That South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is having an extramarital affair with advisor Corey Lewandowski, who previously served as a campaign manager for Donald Trump.
The alleged fling reportedly has continued for months for months, sources say.
Lewandowski accompanied Noem across the country as she stumped for Trump's re-election last year.
According to South Dakota Republicans, former Noem chief of staff Joshua Shields left in part because of Lewandowski's butting in.
Lewandowski was married with four children, still has the former president's ear, which he reportedly uses to Noem's advantage.
American Greatness contacted Nome's office for comment on Tuesday.
No comment has been received at the time of publication.
We do have a comment from her now, which I'll get to in a second.
And Nome is a married mother of three and has been eyed as a possible running mate for a Trump presidential bid in 2024.
Then it goes on to say that this is allegedly one of those open secrets in Washington, D.C.
that everybody knows about.
That's the claim anyway.
Now, Kristi Noem responded to these claims, and here's what she said on her official Twitter account, her governor Twitter account.
She said, I love Brian.
That's her husband, I assume.
I'm proud of the God-fearing family we've raised together.
Now I'm getting back to work.
All right.
Conservative women are based on a falsehood that we can't achieve anything without a man's
help.
I love Brian, that's her husband I assume.
I'm proud of the God-fearing family we've raised together.
Now I'm getting back to work.
All right.
Here's what I'll say about this.
I don't know if it's true or not.
How could I possibly know that?
I didn't like the nature of Kristi Noem's denial yesterday with the nepotism scandal, where she said that, well, stop attacking my kids, but no one's attacking your kid.
That's not the point.
Your kid was an adult.
They're attacking you, and they're saying that you shouldn't have done this.
And I also don't really like this denial because, once again, this is like a reflex for her.
She did the same thing to me, as you recall, when all I did was criticize her policy choices.
She reflexively goes to the sexism charge.
These old, tired attacks on conservative women.
I mean, come on.
Give me a break.
So, conservative women are the only ones who get accused of sex scandals?
It's actually, thankfully, pretty rare, I think, for conservative women that their name gets tossed around with scandals like this.
It's much more common with male politicians.
And when it happens, the media makes a big deal of it, and it's a story.
I mean, the public loves sex scandals.
They always have.
It's one of the things that brings both sides of the aisle together.
So, trying to make it into a gendered thing, into a sexism thing, that's a lame move.
I don't know if that doesn't mean that it's true, but it's a lame form of denial.
And meanwhile, as far as the American public goes, Although everyone seems to share an interest in the sex scandal story, we are a bunch of rank hypocrites when it comes to how we respond to these sorts of stories.
Because obviously the relevance of an alleged affair, that's going to be judged entirely based on party affiliation.
So this is one issue where almost everybody is a total hypocrite.
You know, you look at party affiliation.
Do you like the politician?
Are they in your party?
Do you ideologically align with them?
And if you do, then the response is always, well, who cares?
It's their personal life.
What does it matter?
And if you don't like them, then all of a sudden it becomes an issue.
That's why the left has jumped on this story and are going after Kristi Noem about this, pretending now to have standards on these issues, to value, you know, the sanctity of marriage and everything.
So that's the way the game is played.
I try not to be a hypocrite on issues like this, as best I can.
So I will say, and I think I've been pretty consistent on this, I do think that these issues do matter.
If a politician has an affair, it's not just their personal life.
That's not the only implication here, because it can speak to their integrity.
And you have to wonder, right?
If someone is in a position of leadership, position of authority, and they're willing to betray their family, betray someone who they have made an undying commitment to before God, if they're willing to do that, then you have to ask, can I trust them on anything else?
I mean, if a politician is willing to betray their spouse, their family, their kids, what hope do we have in the public that they're gonna, what, stay loyal and true and be honest with us?
You have much less of a moral obligation, even as a politician.
You have less of a moral obligation to the public than you do to your family.
Your first and primary and most important moral obligation for all of us is to our own families.
And so if we're willing to throw that by the wayside, then it raises questions about, serious questions about integrity.
So I do think it matters.
These kinds of stories, they do matter.
I don't think we could just say, well, who cares?
It's a personal life.
The only question is whether or not it's true, and I have absolutely no idea, and I can't possibly know.
But it is a subject worthy of public discussion, I think.
This is also something, when you pursue that position of power, and you get into politics, this is part of the deal.
And you know that going in.
If you didn't know it, then you should have.
All right, next.
So there's this show on Netflix called Squid Game that Is apparently right now and Netflix is not very forthcoming with this sort of information about how many people are actually watching Their their programs.
I mean for all we know, you know Their top show has like 10 viewers and we would never know because they don't tell us But they have told us proudly that this show squid game is there I think right now their most popular show across the world on streaming.
Everybody's watching this thing.
Well, here's the Story from the Daily Mail, dubbing Squid Game the most twisted series on TV.
It says, a gruesome Netflix horror series about a fictional deadly game show in which poverty-stricken characters compete battle royale style to win a $27 million cash prize has come under fire from viewers over its unnecessary gore and violence.
Korean Made Squid Game, which is the most streamed show in the US and in the UK, features grisly scenes of characters being shot in the head and organ harvesting in the latest example of shock tactic programming from the streaming giant.
It's become a cult hit with fans.
I don't know if you can call it a cult hit when it's the most widely viewed show on streaming right now.
More of a mainstream hit.
With fans of the slasher horror genre who have dubbed the nine-part series Saw Meets The Hunger Games and reveled in scenes of torture and mass murder.
But some TV fans have been left repulsed by the excessive violence, with several saying they could not even make it through the first episode, and others recommending it be banned for viewers under 20 because it's too gory.
And then it goes into...
graphic descriptions I probably don't need to read.
"In each episode of Squid Game, characters take part in bloody versions of traditional children's games,
like Grandmother's Footsteps or British Bulldogs.
With the winners pro- uh, progressing to the next round of the game show,
the loser- losers are executed by a masked death squad standing by with machine guns."
But...
I guess...
does add some extra intensity to a- to a- to Jeopardy or to a game show if that's the way they're
doing it.
And then it goes into graphic descriptions of what the show depicts, and I don't need to get into that.
Having not watched the show, and I don't plan on watching it, it does bring up this conversation about violence in shows, and when does it go too far?
There's a tendency.
Among people, I think, on both sides.
Really.
To say that... We try to say this about entertainment in general.
Whether it's sexual content or violent content.
And we say, it's just entertainment.
It doesn't have any effect on anybody.
Come on.
That's silly.
What, so I'm going to watch Squid Game and then go out and join a death squad and start executing people?
You think that's what I'm going to do?
People do the same thing with pornography.
And this is really like a form of porn.
This is torture porn.
Which seems to be coming back into popularity.
I can remember when I was a teenager, that was a big genre.
Things like Saw, there's a movie called Hostel, and other movies where that was the whole attraction to the film.
You went and you watched people get tortured for 95 minutes and then you left.
There's really no plot, that's just all that happened.
It seems like those kinds of shows dipped in popularity, but are now surging back into popularity.
So it's a kind of pornography, it's torture porn.
And with actual sexual pornography, you hear the same kind of thing.
The people defending it saying, I'm going to watch porn, you think I'm going to go out and become a rapist?
Come on, that's ridiculous.
Yeah, if you want to be reductive about it, And try to draw these simplistic dots and connect them that directly, then yeah, it seems silly.
Like, no one is suggesting that you're gonna watch a show like Squid Game and then go out and kill people directly as a result.
That would be an absurd thing to suggest, but no one's suggesting it.
It's just as absurd to suggest that you're not influenced at all by the images and messages and ideas that you sit there passively Eating your Doritos and drooling and ingesting.
That is also absurd.
Of course it has an effect on you.
We're human beings.
We have minds.
We are affected by all of the messages and images that we come in contact with.
The advertising industry is bait.
If we're not affected by images and messages and ideas, then the advertising industry wouldn't exist.
And with advertisements, they can influence you in 30 seconds.
They can influence you with a billboard you see on the highway for three seconds as you're driving by.
That's how impressionable, how easily influenced we are.
And so I do worry about that.
With pornography, of course, and I worry about that with gratuitous violence in films and in shows.
And when I say gratuitous, that doesn't mean that every single show and movie we watch has to be rated G. I don't think that at all.
Some of my favorite films of all time, Saving Private Ryan, one of my favorite films, extremely violent.
I think what makes it gratuitous is when almost all of the entertainment value is in watching people be mutilated and killed in all of these gory and graphic ways.
When that is the entertainment, you know, if violence is part of the story, you're watching a war film, violence is part of the story.
You can't take violence out of that.
If you're gonna take violence out of a war story, you might as well not tell the story at all.
But when the whole story is the violence, and the entertainment value is in watching people Be ripped open and disemboweled, that's when it becomes gratuitous.
And that's when you have to worry about the kind of influence that has on us.
And I think the primary influence is not that it's turning people into murderers.
It's desensitization.
It's moral desensitization.
Which is also one of the primary influences of pornography.
It's not that it causes you to go out and do things.
Kind of the opposite.
It just turns you into this sort of blank slate.
And you become desensitized to these kinds of images.
And even though it's fictional, right?
If you're watching someone be disemboweled in Squid Game, it's fictional.
But if you're sitting there watching it and enjoying it, you do have to ask yourself, why do I enjoy watching this?
Even though it's fictional, what is it about this?
Because part of enjoying a fictional story when you're watching a show, part of the enjoyment aspect is to forget that it's fictional.
If you have in your mind the whole time, oh, this is fictional, this is fictional, then you can't enjoy it.
That's called breaking the fourth wall, right?
So you have to surrender your mind to this story and get into the mentality, sort of pretend that it's not fictional.
So then you have to ask yourself, what is it about that that I enjoy watching?
It is feeding a part of me That probably should not be fed.
All right.
Next, this is from MSN.
It says, YouTube is banning prominent anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content.
All anti-vaccine content is being blocked by YouTube.
But what does that mean?
Well, let's find out.
It says, YouTube is taking down several video channels associated with high-profile anti-vaccine activists, including Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who experts say are partially responsible for helping seed the skepticism that's contributed to slowing vaccination rates across the country.
As part of a new set of policies aimed at cutting down on anti-vaccine content on the Google-owned site, YouTube will ban any videos That claim that commonly used vaccines approved by health authorities are ineffective or dangerous.
The company previously blocked videos that made those claims about coronavirus vaccines, but not ones for other vaccines, like those for measles or chickenpox.
So now they're extending it to all vaccines.
And you cannot claim that the vaccine is ineffective.
Of course, the problem there is, well, what do you mean by ineffective?
Fauci himself, as we talked about in the opening, says that now you need a booster shot.
Which would seem to indicate, if you need a third shot six months after you got your first dose, your first complete dose of two shots, that would seem really to suggest that there is a certain lack of effectiveness in the first complete dose.
If it's totally effective, then you wouldn't need another one.
And we're also told all the time that even if you have the vaccine, you should still be wearing a mask and all of that.
Why do we need to do that if a vaccine is totally effective?
Does this count as anti-vaccine messaging?
Or is it anti-vaccine messaging when they say it or only if someone like me says it?
What I'm saying right now, is this anti-vax content?
I have no idea, but that's the way, that's the point, that's how this is set up.
We're not supposed to know exactly, because then it frees them up to just decide what voices they want to get rid of, kind of arbitrarily.
You know what apparently didn't count as anti-vax content?
Back in November, in October, when, and let's go back through memory lane here, this was not anti-vax content when Democrats were on TV saying stuff like this, watch.
As you know, President Trump has promised a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year,
or maybe sooner. Would you trust that vaccine?
No, I would not trust his word. I would trust the word of public health experts and scientists,
but not Donald Trump. First of all, I don't trust the president on vaccines.
I think it's going to be a very skeptical American public about taking the vaccine, and it should be.
He will push anything to get reelected.
Don't fall for it.
And by the way, I will take the vaccine after Ivanka takes it.
You would be hesitant.
I mean, if doctors and scientists like Dr. Fauci are taking that vaccine, of course I will take the vaccine.
But we also know that we can't trust the president and take his word.
I trust vaccines.
I trust scientists.
But I don't trust Donald Trump.
At this moment, the American people can't either.
I believe all across the country, you're going to need someone other than this FDA and this CDC saying it's safe.
These people.
Every time, I can't say I'm not shocked by it, but in a way, every time I go back and I watch a clip like that, you could almost be shocked by how Soulless and fraudulent these people are.
It is interesting to imagine an alternative history where Donald Trump is still in the White House serving a second term.
Where would the vaccine conversation be right now?
We could be in a totally different universe, potentially.
Because all the way up to Joe Biden, they were making it very clear that as long as Donald Trump is in the White House, they are anti-vax.
Everything you just, I mean, you heard them saying there, direct quotes, I wouldn't trust the vaccine if Donald Trump is in the White House.
And you can't, the stuff they said there, I couldn't, if I said that right now about Joe Biden, I'm done on YouTube, I'm off.
And on every other social media platform.
So what kind of alternative reality would we be living in if Donald Trump was still in the White House?
Well, here's one thing we know.
It wouldn't be an entirely alternative universe.
Because, say what you want about the anti-vaxxers on the right, and by that I mean, and here I'm referring to actual anti-vaxxers.
There are people who are actually against vaccines in general.
And then there are people who are against the COVID vaccine in general.
They don't want a part of it.
They don't think anyone should take it.
I think both of those points of view could accurately be described as anti-vax.
The problem is now we've broadened that category to include anyone who is anything less than religious in their fervent support of vaccination.
But anyway, the people that might be On the right, who might be accurately described as anti-vax, are consistent in that.
Because they were saying that back when Donald Trump was in office.
And those who are Trump fans, the fact is that this is one of Trump's great achievements, is that he got this vaccine out there.
And yet there are people who are big Trump fans, and still take a very skeptical attitude towards the vaccine.
So that's consistency, at least.
We can't say that if Donald Trump was still in office, all of the quote-unquote anti-vaxxers on the right would be majorly in favor of the vaccine, while the pro-vaccine people on the left would be against it.
I think the pro-vaccine people on the left would be against it, but the people on the right would probably still be where they are now.
Because they've shown that they're not coming to these conclusions based on who happens to be in office.
All right, here's just a headline from, and I gotta call this out when I see it, I gotta call this kind of hate out, this hate and misinformation.
This is from the Daily Beast, this is their headline.
It says, right-wing podcaster fakes address just to go on anti-trans rant at school board.
Says the Daily Wire star troll immediately ran to Fox News to brag about, quote, outsmarting the Loudoun County School Board.
I do appreciate, by the way, I do appreciate there at least being given the title of Star Troll of the Daily Wire.
But I do also have to humbly decline that title because I think we're a crew of trolls, very proudly.
And I'm but one member of a team of trolls.
But faked my address?
This, again, my trans-Virginian identity continues to be marginalized by the media.
Though I will also mention, since we're on the topic, that I was talking about it with my wife last night, and I think I'm ready to announce this, that we are considering moving back to Tennessee.
It's been a long journey here in Virginia.
And I've really come to know and love these people here in Virginia.
But I still also feel this deep connection to Tennessee.
So this is a conversation that's ongoing in my family.
I'm saying to my wife, look, I think we should just get all the kids together.
We should continue to live in this lady's basement in Loudoun County.
And she has an alternative viewpoint, and so we're going back and forth on that, and maybe more to come on that in the future.
but let's get now to reading the comments.
♪ This theocratic class's dictatorship is on its way ♪ ♪ Daily cancellations are the law and order of the day
♪ ♪ We the sweet baby gang ♪
This one is, I actually lied because this is not a comment on YouTube.
This is just a tweet someone sent to me, but I had to read it.
It says, my son's college music school is doing a full concert honoring a composer who is retiring from the college.
He's not invited because he's not vaccinated.
He can't be vaccinated because of his medical condition.
I thought masks worked.
Shameful for them to treat him that way.
So they're doing the concert for him in his honor and he's not allowed to come?
My God.
Just as I'm worried about how people have been conditioned to enjoy wearing masks, which is an objectively unenjoyable experience.
You really shouldn't be comfortable wearing that thing across your face all day.
But as people have gotten comfortable with that, we've also just gotten used to treating people like garbage.
And that is by design.
When you create these two tribes, these two categories, the vaxxed and the unvaxxed, the clean and the unclean, that's by design.
And it gives people an excuse to just... If you're in that unclean category, there is no treatment for you that is too harsh.
You're not worthy of anything because you're refusing to get vaccinated.
This is from Stanislav, says, Matt Walsh has an acquired taste, to put it mildly, but I find him rarely annoying and simultaneously utterly intriguing.
I'm just not sure what to make of him.
I detest his shallow philosophies and medieval zealotry, but I admire the shit out of his rapt conviction and intellectual courage.
I'll keep watching, for now.
Well Stanislav, that was quite a journey.
That was quite a journey you took me on there.
And at the end, I'm not sure if you hate my guts or if you deeply admire me.
Maybe it's a little bit of both, but I'll take it.
As long as you're watching.
This is from Gibberish.
Says, Matt would be the guy to judge in the Judgment Free Zone at Planet Fitness.
Planet Fitness, one of our new sponsors, they are a Judgment Free Zone.
They make it very clear when you go in there.
No judgment allowed.
And no, the only thing I'll judge you for at the gym is if you're sitting on the equipment and using your phone, which is an epidemic in gyms across the country.
People sit there, like they do one set and then they sit there and they flip through Instagram for 17 minutes and then they do another set.
So I'll judge you for that.
And if you don't re-rack the weights correctly, I'll probably judge you for that.
And if you don't wipe down the equipment afterwards.
And if you're using bad form.
So yeah, I guess I am judging in the Judgment Free Zone.
I guess you got me pegged.
Ruthann says, Matt, you better show us a picture of that dog.
You literally confessed that there's hundreds of them.
No, I'm not.
Why do you want to see a picture of my dog?
Why do you need to see?
This is not.
No, I'm not.
The dog has already taken over my house.
It's taken my family from me.
My kids.
And what, now you want the dog to be the star of this show, too?
Not gonna happen.
Relaxed Straight says, Matt, technically speaking, should a hot dog be considered a sandwich?
You know, I get really tired of this debate.
You know, a hot dog is obviously a form of a Twinkie, which is itself a form of a calzone.
So that is the technical answer there.
Well, we were just talking about Planet Fitness, and Planet Fitness is a new sponsor on the show, and listen, Planet Fitness is the judgment-free zone.
Even if I'm not a judgment-free person, you at least get a judgment-free zone over at Planet Fitness.
For just $10 a month, you get tons of cardio, tons of equipment that's available to you, and with free fitness training and plenty of room to move, you can go at your own pace and get back to a routine that really works for you, all for just $10 a month.
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And there you go.
On that note, we'll get to our daily cancellation.
In one month, I will celebrate my 10th anniversary with my wife.
So far, I must give the marriage experience five stars out of five.
I must because my wife might listen to this.
But also because it's actually true.
You know, I had the good fortune of marrying a woman who's caring, faithful, intelligent, talented, good mother, nurturing, joyful, loving.
She also believes in me and supports me in my ambitions.
And that's one of those qualities in a wife that a man kind of takes for granted if he has it, until he realizes that lots of men end up in marriages with women who doubt them, cut them down, belittle their dreams.
I've never had to worry about that with my wife, which is a good thing because, as you've noticed, I come up with some pretty weird schemes sometimes, and she's almost always game for it.
In fact, sometimes she's the one suggesting the weird schemes and things I should do.
All of these are positive qualities, and on top of it all, I must say that my wife is actually also really hot, which, frankly, is a huge bonus.
Now, if you're looking at me and wondering how I managed to land somebody with all of those qualities, I have no answer for you.
I'm just as perplexed as you are.
But it's just one of the reasons why I thank God every day that I am married.
And another reason is that being married means I'm not involved in a dating scene today, which is great because that scene is abysmal in every conceivable way.
Now, dating was not easy a decade ago when I was still in the game, but it was a walk in the park compared to the situation today.
It's probably never been more difficult, in modern American history anyway, for a single person to find the right match.
And that may seem paradoxical because it's also true that single people have never had more choices.
And that's exactly the problem.
Case in point, a recent article on the website StudyFinds.org about dating apps and how people use them.
This is important because almost all single people today use dating apps.
Tinder alone has 57 million users.
That's just one app.
Overall, about 50% of the population consists of single adults, which is a staggeringly high number as marriage rates continue to plummet.
And about 40% of adults use online dating.
So you connect the dots there.
Granted, unfortunately, not all of those online daters are actually single, but we can hopefully assume that the vast majority are.
So what is the actual experience of using these apps?
How do people use them?
Here's what the article says.
It says, online dating became a way of life for millions of singles during the coronavirus pandemic.
Dating apps like Match.com, Tinder, and OkCupid are responsible for 10% of the long-lasting adult relationships in America, which is actually pretty low considering how many people use these apps.
And as it turns out, these daters aren't wasting time when it comes to choosing who to swipe right on.
A recent study shows that users know within a second whether or not to express interest in someone else.
So, what makes someone choose to make the move on a profile?
Researchers say it comes down to judging the book by its cover.
The attractiveness of a person is primarily what compels another to swipe right, the study finds.
Within a split second, the user determines whether or not they will accept a date based on appearance and even race.
Now, there's nothing new or scandalous about people choosing mates based first on appearance.
Appearance is important, and it's not a small or irrelevant detail.
Yeah, they say don't judge a book by its cover, but the thing about a book is that you don't have to see the cover while you're reading it.
You just, you open the cover and that's it.
As for someone you're dating or married to, you have to look at that cover every day.
So it's good if you find it appealing.
My wife, as I already outlined, has many wonderful qualities, but I never would have learned about those qualities if I didn't find her attractive.
When you first meet someone, you aren't going to know about their deeper, truer selves, and whatever character traits, good or bad, may be lying under the surface.
Those things come out in time.
It doesn't take a long time, but it does take time.
Initially, you're going to be making more surface-level judgments to decide if it's worth investing that time, so that's not in itself the problem here.
The problem is the sheer number of choices, and how quickly the dating app user has been conditioned to swipe through them.
The problem is also the very act of swiping, I think.
There's something about swiping, through just doing this, through a series of human faces, that makes the whole exercise somewhat dystopian and dehumanizing.
Yes, the cover on the book matters.
Yes, physical attraction matters.
It is important.
But these days, people are reduced to just a postage stamp-sized picture on a phone, and potential matches will give them all of One second before deciding whether to relegate them to the junk folder.
It's all, it's quite degrading.
Not to mention fruitless.
Because there are so many people on these apps, and because they're designed in such a way to encourage these split-second decisions, all that means is that you have to browse through an enormous number of potential matches.
An article in Mashable a couple of years ago, quoting the editor of a trade publication called Global Dating Insights, says that the average dating site user has to swipe through 7,500 profiles before having a meaningful interaction.
Now, that's not 7,500 before finding a girlfriend or boyfriend.
That's just the amount of swiping needed to even have a meaningful human interaction with a person.
And worst of all, because these apps require almost no effort.
And no investment.
And no energy to use.
They only encourage more of the sort of meandering unseriousness that has already made the dating scene difficult and had made it difficult when I was single a decade ago.
Swiping left and swiping right becomes more of a game, an end in and of itself, and the people who are on these apps actually looking for meaningful interactions, for relationship, for commitment, have to somehow sort through this sea of people who only want to hook up or maybe don't even want that.
Maybe they want to keep swiping and have no real deep interest in human relationships at all.
Perhaps because they feel that their porn habit takes care of those needs.
It's instructive that even the words boyfriend, girlfriend, and dating aren't as common as they once were.
Instead of saying, you know, I'm dating this person, you'll hear people say things like, well, we're talking.
Someone said to me recently, when referring to the person that we would have once called his girlfriend, he said, yeah, I've been talking to this girl for six months.
Six months?
And that's how you describe it?
Just talking?
You haven't even graduated to any kind of actual human relationship yet?
After six months of dating my wife, at that point I was calling her my fiancé because we were engaged.
Fear of commitment, passivity, Men who will not take the lead in their relationships.
Single people kind of meandering along, floating on the tide.
Dating for no particular reason, with no end goal in mind.
Too afraid to even call it dating.
All of these have been major problems for years.
They've been problems increasingly ever since we came up with the idea of dating to supplant the idea of courtship.
That's really when the train went off the rails.
The dating apps have only, as I said, made all of this worse.
They've poured fuel on that fire, though I'm not sure that fire is the right analogy here, because that evokes something that's burning hot with passion and intensity.
But passion and intensity are the opposite of what most single people encounter out in the dating world right now.
And that is why the dating apps, at least the swiping dating apps today, are cancelled.
And we'll leave it there for today.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
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 Ali Hinkle, our audio is mixed by Mike Coromina, hair and makeup is done by Cherokee Heart, and our production coordinator is McKenna Waters.
The Matt Walsh Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2021.
Today on The Ben Shapiro Show, progressives threaten to kill the bipartisan infrastructure bill unless moderates go along with their budget-busting plans.
Joe Biden sneaks a massive fine into the Democratic budget bill for businesses that don't force vaccines on their workers.
And the Biden military infrastructure finally admits Joe Biden's enormous Afghanistan screw-up.
