Ep. 853 - The Jussie Smollett Saga Reaches Its Conclusion
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the Jussie Smollett trial has reached its dramatic conclusion. Today we’ll take a look back at this whole bizarre story and figure out what we might learn from it. Also, Bill De Blasio defends his new dystopian covid measures on the basis that, if New Yorkers submit to this one last infringement on their liberty, covid will be gone forever. And the trial of Kim Potter, the officer who shot Daunte Wright, begins this week. Wright has been made into another martyr of the BLM cause, but we’ll look at the real man, and his brutal and violent history. You haven’t heard some of this before. It’s pretty shocking. And Dallas Police brag about taking 100 thousand dollars from someone who did not commit any crime at all. It’s called civil asset forfeiture. And it’s the subject of our cancellation today.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, the Jussie Smollett trial has reached its dramatic conclusion.
Today we'll take a look back at this whole bizarre story and figure out what we might learn from it.
Also, Bill de Blasio defends his new dystopian COVID measures on the basis that if New Yorkers submit to this one last infringement on their liberty, COVID will be gone forever, he says.
And the trial of Kim Potter, the officer who shot Dante Wright, begins this week.
Wright has been made into another martyr of the BLM cause.
But we'll look at the real man and his brutal and violent history.
You haven't heard some of this before.
It's pretty shocking.
And Dallas police brag about taking a thousand, rather $100,000 from someone who did not commit any crime at all.
They just confiscated the money and that was it.
It's called civil asset forfeiture and it's the subject of our cancellation today.
All of that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
[MUSIC]
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As the Jussie Smollett trial comes to a close today, a spectacle that tragically was not filmed for our amusement, it might be worthwhile to step back and consider what we might learn from this bizarre circus freak show.
To do that, we should start at the beginning, all the way back to the freezing night in Chicago in January of 2019, back in more innocent times, when the only people wearing masks in Chicago were criminals.
Still, a lot of them are criminals, but there's also people who aren't.
It was also a time, according to Smollett, When a man might decide to walk out of his apartment at 2 a.m.
through the pitch black and the frigid air to purchase a Subway sandwich.
On the way back from this peculiar journey, Smollett says that he was assaulted by two white men.
Well, he initially said white men, and then he said that they weren't white but pale.
Turns out they were Nigerian, neither white nor pale.
And that these pale white Trump-supporting Nigerians noticed him in the dark and pinned him as the guy from Empire, a show that no Trump voter has ever seen.
Infamously, they shouted, this is MAGA country and began assaulting him while screaming racial slurs.
But the assault lasted 30 seconds and left no injuries except for a gentle bruise on his cheek.
And at some point during this attack, a rope was placed around his neck and bleach was poured on his clothes because the Trump-supporting white Nigerians were hanging around outside at night in January in Chicago with a random bottle of bleach and a noose just in case an actor from Empire happened to be making a run to Subway for a tuna sandwich.
I mean, it makes perfect sense.
Smollett called the police, not right away, but sometime later, when he was back at his apartment.
And he still had the rope around his neck.
We never found out if he ate the tuna sandwich or not.
This story was, of course, obviously fake from the start.
Occam's razor would have us select the explanation which requires the fewest assumptions.
With the Smollett story, there were two explanations.
One is that he was telling the truth, and the other that he was lying.
The truth explanation requires the assumption that Racist MAGA Trumpsters live in Chicago, and they hang out on street corners at 2 a.m., and they have bleach on standby just in case, and they would recognize an actor from a show they certainly don't watch, and so on.
The lying explanation requires just one assumption, which isn't really an assumption so much as a very reasonable conclusion.
Is it more likely that all of those implausible scenarios converged, or that Jussie Smollett simply told a lie?
Logic and common sense would seem to guide you to the latter conclusion.
And yet, we can't forget that the entire corporate media, that entire organism, rallied around Smollett, as did the entire Democrat Party.
Were they stupid enough to be fooled by the most far-fetched race hoax of the century?
I think the leftists in the peanut gallery, you know, really, really might have been.
The viewers of corporate media, the Democrat voters, You have to keep in mind that, as I've said recently, we live in a curated reality.
Corporate media are reality curators.
And if you rely on them for your information, and even if you don't consciously rely on them, still your impression of the world and your access to it is mediated by this entity which will only show you pieces that fit within a certain narrative framework.
The effect is that many Americans live in a world, or think they live in a world, where it is actually not implausible that a Hollywood celebrity might be assaulted by a roving gang of white supremacist Trump supporters who are lying in wait on the streets of Chicago with a bottle of bleach and a noose at 2 a.m.
They have bought into their curated reality, their matrix, to such an extent that this totally ridiculous fable seems not only plausible, but damn near commonplace.
To them, they probably think this kind of thing happens all the time.
Now, for the curators themselves, the media, Democrats like Kamala Harris and so on, they of course know better.
I mean, they have to have a grasp on the fuller picture of reality if they're going to decide which pieces of it to exclude from the picture they present to you in the public.
So they knew that Smollett was full of it, but his story was politically convenient and it was good for ratings, so they played along.
It was kind of a wink and a nudge conspiracy, which is how most actual conspiracies work in the real world.
Jussie Smollett didn't have to meet with Kamala Harris and the heads of all the major corporate media outlets and come to an agreement, right?
Instead, he just kind of winks to them, and they all understand, and they set out to spread this tale far and wide for mutually beneficial reasons.
What nobody expected, and what I didn't expect either, is that the police and the prosecutor in Chicago would decline to participate in this choreographed production.
Usually with these hoaxes, local authorities will pretend to hunt for the imaginary racist hate crimer, and when the search comes up empty, because the person they're searching for doesn't exist, they'll throw their hands up and say, oh darn, you know, I guess he got away.
That's exactly what happened in Madison, Wisconsin, when a woman claimed that she was assaulted and set on fire by a group of white supremacists while sitting in her car at a traffic light.
And her story somehow managed to be even less plausible than Smollett's, and there was even more evidence disproving it, because she was at an intersection in the middle of a city with security cameras all around, and they could look at the security cameras and say, like, this never happened.
These people don't exist.
But the cops went along with the program.
They pretended to search for the invisible assailants, and waited until everybody stopped watching them, and then they quietly closed down the investigation and moved on.
No charges were filed against the hoaxer in that case.
They almost never are, except here.
Smollett was not so lucky.
He was also pressing his luck quite a bit by attacking the police for not finding the people, the attackers, that he knew didn't exist.
And I think when he did that, maybe that's when even a liberal prosecutor has to say enough is enough.
And that's what landed him on trial, where yesterday he made the radically stupid decision to take the stand in his own defense.
It might have been a desperation move by his defense team, realizing that they have literally no defense to offer.
Or it may have been a decision entirely made by the actor himself and motivated by his own psychotic narcissism.
Or maybe it was a bit of both.
Whatever the case, he sat in the hot seat for two days, throwing out a whole deck full of victim cards, calling upon all of his training as a thespian, and trying to bury the case under irrelevant and pretty gross details about bathhouses and drug use and masturbation.
The major problem Smollett has, aside from the glaring absurdity of the hoax that he perpetrated, is that his accomplices, the Nigerian Asindario brothers, have long since admitted that he paid them to beat him up so that he could pretend it was a hate crime.
They even have the check he gave them for their hate crime services.
That puts Smollett in the position of having to provide some reason why his friends, one of whom he said he had a sexual relationship with, would hide out on a street corner and beat him up while screaming anti-black slurs.
His theory that he's given is that maybe they wanted him to hire them as bodyguards, and this was their way of convincing him.
Even though he was already paying them money for other services, he said, well, maybe they wanted to be a bodyguard, and that's why they staged this whole thing.
I guess it's kind of like your mechanic cutting your brake lines so that you'll come back for more repairs in the very near future.
That's the theory he presented anyway, but the real point Smollett was trying to make on the stand And the reason he took the stand to begin with, the reason he took this to trial rather than accepting a plea bargain and putting an end to this spectacle before it began, I mean, he could have taken a plea deal at any point and he wasn't going to go to jail.
But the reason he didn't do that is that he is a gay black man and thus a victim in general, even if he wasn't a victim of a hate crime that night.
Smollett knows that his identity affords him privileges.
And now he's trying to cash in those chips.
That's the wager that he's making.
And this really came through during one interesting exchange between the prosecutor and Smollett.
The Daily Mail has details.
It says, Smollett also became defensive when asked why he sent Instagram private messages to Abel Asindario in the hours before the attack, with prosecutors suggesting that he was filling him in on the fact that his flight from New York to Chicago was delayed, which would delay the plan.
And that's, by the way, that's a detail I don't think we knew until this time, but he actually, he flew from New York to Chicago to have this fake hate crime perpetrated against him.
Anyway, then the messages said, N, N word, he wrote it out, this is brutal, still on this damn runway.
And then another one said, N, finally made it.
In the messages, Smollett repeatedly used the N-word, but on Tuesday, he told Webb, the prosecutor, not to say the N-word while reading the text out loud, out of respect for, quote, every African-American person in the room.
Webb, who is white, apologized, and Smollett quipped, apology accepted, but it's been used a lot.
Yeah, it's been used a lot because you used it, and they're reading your messages.
So the prosecutor read Smollett's text messages back to him, verbatim, but Smollett scolded him for reading his own words.
Smollett's privilege as a black man is such that he is permitted access to certain language that the prosecutor, a white man, cannot use even while quoting Smollett himself in a courtroom where precision and specificity of language is important.
Why did the prosecutor say the whole word, rather than saying the N-word?
Well, because he was quoting, and the person that he was quoting, Smollett, didn't say the N-word, he said the word.
Also, we all know the word, and we've heard it many times, almost always from people who look like Smollett, and not the prosecutor.
What exact damage is done by hearing it in this context?
The word is given, you know, this mystical power.
It is the only combination of syllables in the English language, or any other language, which is considered outrageously offensive, no matter the context, depending on the skin pigmentation of the person saying it.
It's the only word in existence, in any language, where one person with a certain skin color can say it to you, but you are not allowed to say it, even when quoting what they just said.
And not only that, but the person who said it can claim to be offended by his own words when they come out of your mouth.
But this again speaks to privilege.
And that's what this story is really about.
It's a story of privilege.
True privilege.
That's how privilege works in America today.
I mean, Smollett was a man drunk on his own privilege and desperate for more.
And these are the lengths to which you will go.
Now we'll see if he'll pay the price for that.
that. Now let's get to our five headlines.
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All right.
Don't mind me, by the way.
I was just drinking from my wonderful Sweet Baby Gang coffee mug here, which you can get at the dailywire.com slash shop.
If you go to my shop, this is this is this is a high quality mug, I have to say.
The other great thing is, you know, for those of you who are who have certain bigotries and you don't like the Sweet Baby Gang apparel and merchandise that has me in a diaper on it, this one is just my face.
There's no diaper there.
So, you know, you could you could buy that.
And that's that's If for some reason you don't want a bearded man in a diaper on your coffee mug, you don't want people asking questions, then at least you can get that.
Which maybe that's for the best.
I mean, I have thought about the fact that I'm going to have to live with this for the rest of my life.
Especially because we've sold so many of those damn t-shirts.
We've sold like a million of them.
Maybe not a million, but it seems like it.
And so they're everywhere.
And for the rest of my life, as my kids grow older, they're going to see these kinds of images and start asking questions.
And I'll have to live with that.
But you know what?
I commit myself to that and to that life of shame for the sake of the Sweet Baby Game.
All right.
We'll start here.
Bill de Blasio is still out defending his dystopian COVID policies and especially the newest policy that he just put in place.
Well, he put two things in place we talked about yesterday.
One was a vaccine mandate for employers.
So you're not allowed to have a job in New York if you don't get the vaccine.
And then the other one, most egregiously, is a vaccine mandate for children.
Not just a mandate, but a segregation policy now for children.
A kind of apartheid system put in place where children are affected, and if a child at the age of 5 or between 5 and 11 doesn't have the vaccine and cannot produce his papers to prove he had a vaccine, then the child can be kicked out of public accommodations, restaurants, movie theaters, so on and so forth.
Of course, schools, sports leagues, everything else.
So, Bill de Blasio is explaining this and defending it, but the worst thing is what he says at the very end of this clip.
Here in New York City, we were the epicenter of the COVID crisis.
We lost so many people in this neighborhood and neighborhoods all over the city.
We didn't have PPE.
We didn't have ventilators.
We were alone.
And then we started to fight back, and vaccines came, and we focused on vaccination.
It made all the difference.
We're now the safest place in this country, but we've got to go even farther.
Omicron's here.
Winter's coming.
We've got to go even farther.
Today in New York City, we announced a mandate.
All private sector employers must have their employees vaccinated by December 27th.
This is what's going to keep us safe.
This is the kind of thing we need to do now, not just here, but everywhere, so we can leave COVID behind once and for all.
Leave COVID behind once and for all, he says.
He is still pushing that.
That's still the carrot on the end of the stick that he's presenting to people.
We've been hearing this for two years from people like Bill de Blasio.
He's probably used that exact phrase 50 other times.
Just this one more thing, a little bit more of your liberties and your freedoms, and even more than that, your dignity as a human being.
Um, sacrifice a little bit more of that and we can leave COVID behind once and for all.
And, and, and allow us to do this to your children now.
And, uh, and soon there'll be no COVID and people in New York will allow it.
I'm not saying that everybody in New York is happy about this or necessarily goes along with it, but the little bit of time, which was too much time, that I spent in New York a month ago, two months ago, and before these latest policies were put in place, it's very disturbing and depressing to see that most people just go along with it, don't question it, don't argue it.
Few and far between are the people who register any protest at all.
And that's the kind of the dirty little secret here is that the reason why Bill de Blasio gets away with this kind of thing is that not only are most people in the city willing to go along with it, but they want it.
They want this.
They want to sacrifice their freedom and liberty and their dignity on the altar of safety.
It makes them feel better.
It makes them feel like they're doing something.
And it's also a giant virtue signal.
This is a virtue signal now on the left is to submit yourself to tyranny.
Submit yourself to it and then you're showing off your virtue and how much you care about safety, how much you care about others.
Unlike those, you know, those riffraff who talk about their freedoms and their rights, yuck.
That's the worst part about it.
There have always been tyrannical politicians, there always will be.
Positions of power attract those types of people by their nature.
Those kinds of people are always going to be megalomaniacs, like Bill de Blasio.
Especially talentless megalomaniacs who can't do anything else.
They can't go into any other line of work and find the power that they crave, because that would require them to have skills.
And you don't necessarily have to have any skills at all to be a politician.
So, positions of power have always attracted people like Bill de Blasio.
The problem, though, in these cities and why these cities are falling apart, it's not even just the politicians.
It's easy to blame the politicians, but really it goes down to the people.
If the people said, no, we're not gonna do this.
There's a really easy way around this mandate for five to 11-year-olds.
It's for the people of New York to say, hell no, you are not kicking my five-year-old out of anywhere because they don't show their papers.
I refuse to go along with it.
We're not doing that.
No, we're not playing that game.
Now you're coming for my kids?
I draw a line there.
And if every single New York, if even 50%, if even 20% of them said that, Then this policy would go away.
Because what's the other option?
They're going to start locking all these parents in prison?
Do they really want... Does Bill de Blasio want the spectacle of dragging?
Imagine what that's going to look like.
What's it going to look like in practice?
The first time a six-year-old goes to, I don't know, Chuck E. Cheese for his birthday, and is told, you have to... Show me your papers.
Oh, we don't have it.
Get out.
Does uh, does, does de Blasio, does he want that spectacle?
Um.
I don't think he does.
And so it wouldn't take much of that.
It wouldn't take very many incidents of that type to make this go away.
But he's betting on the fact that most parents will just, you know, they won't even put, they won't create situations like that.
They're going to go and get their kid vaccinated obediently, as they've been told, even if COVID poses no serious risk to their kids statistically.
They're going to go and get the COVID vaccine anyway.
And if for whatever reason their kid doesn't have a vaccine, they're going to do as they're told, and they're going to keep their kid out of these environments.
And they're not going to cause any trouble.
The whole thing that I used to hear all the time about New Yorkers growing up is that New Yorkers, they're a headstrong bunch.
You don't mess with those tough New Yorkers.
That is out the window.
I used to think the same thing about Australians.
I was totally wrong on that one too.
There was probably a time when it was true.
I used to think, you know, you live down in Australia, there's spiders the size of Buicks walking around, crawling everywhere.
Everything is deadly.
Everything's going to kill you.
You gotta be a tough son of a bitch to live in Australia.
And maybe at one time that was true.
Just like maybe at one time it was true in New York, but it's not true anymore.
These are cowed, submissive people who have given into this.
And if you give into it where your children are concerned, then I don't know what to say.
Shame on you.
You're no American.
I don't want to share a country with you.
I don't want to share anything with you.
Very easy to make this go away if you don't want it.
Just say no.
Like we've been saying, our motto here, do not comply, say no, continue on your life.
Make them drag you out.
Make them drag your children out.
Make them do that.
Call their bluff.
And then the other thing though, he says, going back to it, the whole, we can leave COVID behind once and for all.
Once again, that is not going to happen.
That's a fantasy.
If you're still believing that, then you have been fooled.
You're probably beyond saving at this point, if you're that stupid, that you still think that just one more thing, one more policy in place and COVID will be behind us once and for all.
No, it won't be.
You don't need to be a scientist to see it now.
COVID is everywhere.
It's spread across the entire globe.
Hundreds of millions, billions of people have come in contact with it.
You're not going to escape it.
You're going to come in contact with it.
It's going to be with you for the rest of your life.
It is going to be a part of the environment now that you live in.
I don't like it.
It's not a good, not anything to celebrate.
But it is just one more risk that exists out there in the world, among many.
And as I've been trying to remind people for two years now, and it may sound scary, but it's true, and there's also a certain liberation that comes in confronting this and realizing it, that of all those threats out there in the world, most of them will never harm you.
But some of them will.
And one day, one of them is going to kill you.
One of those threats.
The cause of your death exists out there right now.
And no telling what it will be, but it will be something.
And so the decision you have to make is whether you are going to live your life in the meantime while you can, before you inevitably die, Or if in the name of preserving your life, you're going to forfeit your life ahead of time, almost as a preemptive strike against death.
Where you're saying to death, ah, you can't take life from me, I've already given it up.
It's kind of a, you can't fire me, I quit mentality that people are taking now.
It's pathetic.
Worse than pathetic.
Okay, this is from the... Let's see.
Okay, we'll start here.
The trial of Kim Potter began this week.
She's the Minnesota police officer who shot Dante Wright during a traffic stop.
Now, Fox News has some information about Dante Wright.
Some of the background on this guy.
And I knew some of this, some of it I've previously reported on this show, you've heard it before, but there are other details that had escaped my notice until now, and escaped I think most people's notice, and that's all by design from our reality curators, and this was not part of the reality they told us about.
Let me read this from Fox News.
It says, Justice for Dante Wright reads a marquee at Minneapolis's George Floyd Square, towering over what used to be a gas station across the street from where Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd's neck on Memorial Day 2020.
At the fortified police station in Brooklyn Center, someone installed letters to spell out Dante Wright in all caps on a barricade erected around the perimeter.
And prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump is representing the slain 20-year-old's family following his shooting death at the hands of former police officer Kim Potter, whose trial begins on Wednesday, but right before his death, left behind a trail of victims whose lives he upended with gun violence of his own.
Karma's a bitch, two such women told Fox News Digital on Monday, unprompted and in separate interviews.
The victims said that they would have preferred Wright face consequences for his actions in a court of law, while also arguing that his own decision in attempting to flee a lawful traffic stop contributed in part to his shooting death on April 11th.
Then we get into what Dante Wright did This, as Fox News puts it, this trail of victims he left behind.
And Dante Wright was only 20 years old, which makes him a grown man.
The left talks about him like he was an innocent child.
And as always, most of the pictures we see of him are, you know, pictures from when he was in fifth grade or something.
Pictures from the rare moments in his life when he was not violently assaulting someone.
Those are the pictures that we see.
But he was 20 years old, still pretty young.
And in that short life, the amount of violent crime he was able to cram in is like almost impressive.
So we'll read from this.
And also this is really unusual because we know that BLM martyrs are almost always violent criminals and scumbags who have victimized many people in their lives.
Yet we almost never hear from those victims.
And the reason is the media has no interest in talking to them, and also they probably have very little interest most of the time in saying anything publicly because there's nothing in it for them.
Now they're just going to be re-victimized.
They were victimized once by this guy, and now the guy is dead and he's turned into a martyr and you gotta see his damn mural and his face everywhere.
And if they were to speak out again, now they're going to be victimized once more for attacking the sainted George Floyd or whoever else.
But in this case, some of these victims have actually spoken out.
And two of them said, unprompted, karma's a bitch.
That's their perspective.
And you can understand why that would be their perspective, especially when you hear what this guy did.
So, reading on, it says, Caleb Livingston was 16 years old when Wright allegedly shot him in the head at the full-stop gas station on Minneapolis' Lowry Avenue.
Initially, doctors told Caleb's mother that he wouldn't survive surgery after the attack he pulled through, but he can't talk or walk.
He suffers from unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and requires around-the-clock assistance.
Livingston's mother, Jennifer LeMay, says, I pray for everybody involved because there's a loss of life.
I know what Wright's parents are going through because I lost my own son.
I almost lost my son.
Now, who Wright was before he was killed, it is what it is.
In December 2019, Wright and a friend, Emma J. Driver, stayed over at a young woman's apartment after a night of drinking and smoking pot.
The following morning, after Driver saw her slip $820 into her bra, Wright allegedly pulled out a handgun, choked her twice, and tried to rob her.
Stuck his hand into her bra, that's sexual assault.
After an ensuing struggle, Wright and Driver left empty-handed, unbeknownst to the victim, who believed they'd taken her hard-earned cash until she called 911 and found it still tucked away within her torn clothes.
The survivor told Fox News the person was evil.
That person, talking about Wright, was evil.
He didn't care about me in that moment.
Video obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital earliest year shows Wright playing with a handgun in her bathroom moments before the attempted robbery.
He recorded it himself and police seized it from his phone.
And then we continue.
Let's see.
There's one more.
Wright, an alleged gang member, was also accused of waving a black handgun near a Minneapolis intersection before ditching it and fleeing on foot, eluding responding officers.
When police pulled him over in April, they found he had an active warrant in that incident and attempted to arrest him.
And there was also one other incident where he's accused of... Oh, here we go.
There was another one, a robbery, and there's a few lawsuits against Wright's estate.
Um, from these victims and one is in connection with a carjacking that left a former classmate shot in the leg.
Okay, so that's what we've got.
We've got Dante Wright in his short life and these are just the incidents we know about.
Uh, we have him allegedly shooting somebody in the head and leaving them disabled for life at a gas station.
We have him robbing a woman at gunpoint after he was, he was at her house and she allowed him to stay over.
Invited him into his home, into her home, allowed him to stay over, and the next morning, he pointed a gun at her and sexually assaulted her to try to steal her money that she had earned from working.
And then we have another where there's a carjacking and somebody gets shot, and then another case where he's at an intersection waving a gun around.
So that's Dante Wright for you.
This is not youthful indiscretion.
These are not simply poor choices or mistakes or anything like that.
This is abject, psychopathic evil.
This is someone who has no concern for other people's lives, for their humanity.
He doesn't recognize other human beings as being human.
And that's how he lived his life.
Is any of that relevant to this case and what's going on now?
Yeah.
It's relevant for two reasons.
Number one, as always, it's not just that this is going into the court system and people are looking for justice that way.
They're going far beyond that.
They're also putting his name up and putting his face up in murals and expecting us all to mourn and weep over his lost life.
Treating his death and his now absence from the world as a national tragedy.
And because you have done that, that's where it becomes relevant for me to bring in his past.
If this was simply a court case, and we were leaving it at that, then it might be less relevant.
But when you tell me that we're all supposed to— This is a horrible person.
This guy's a scumbag.
What, I'm supposed to cry that he's no longer on Earth and victimizing people?
Shooting people in the head?
Sexually assaulting women at gunpoint?
You want me to cry over the fact that he's not around anymore?
See, when you tell me that I'm supposed to react that way, that's when it becomes relevant for me to say, well, no.
He's a horrible human being.
The fact that he was absolutely awful and a scumbag doesn't necessarily mean that his shooting was justified.
But it does mean that your reaction to this is not justified.
A lot of people die every single day in this country, many of them victims of people like Dante Wright.
And all of them.
I mean, if you want to look for victims of violent crime to weep over, any of them would be more worthy of your mourning and your sadness than this guy.
So that's why it's relevant, but it's also relevant because his life of violent crime is the reason why there was a warrant for his arrest.
And also his habit of doing whatever the hell he wants and being as violent as he wants and not facing any consequences, that is what led him to believe that he could fight the cops and get away and it would be okay.
Because when you see that and you think, again, this is a grown man, Might be a young man, but he's a grown man.
And you think, what the hell is your plan here?
There's a warrant for your arrest.
They know who you are.
You're in town.
So you're going to fight the cops and drive away, and then what?
You think they're just going to say, well, never mind.
He got away.
Fair is fair.
Let him go.
I mean, we might be getting to the point where they start saying that.
But at that point, that's not the way the cops operated.
So now you're just adding another charge.
That's all you're doing.
They're still going to get you.
Unless you are some sort of expert global assassin type criminal, and you've got your go bag on ready, and you've got contacts in other countries, and you're ready with a new social security number, and you're ready to change your name and everything, flee the country, start a new life.
Maybe then you'll get away.
But I doubt that was the case for Dante Wright.
He wasn't going to go anywhere.
He was just going to run away, and eventually they'd catch him, and now he's going to go to prison for even longer.
So you see they think, well, why would you respond that way?
They have you dead to rights.
You're wanted on an arrest warrant.
There's nothing to be gained from struggling.
Well, the answer is that he had grown accustomed.
I mean, he had committed all these crimes, allegedly, and he was still walking around free.
So he thought, well, I can do this.
And so that contributed to his response.
And so, yeah, I do think that the way that he lived his life and his history is very, very relevant.
All right.
You know, so we'll take a look at this.
You know how I feel about knocking down statues.
You know that I'm very much against it.
As I've said before, the war on history of going through the country, going across the land and tearing down all of these supposedly offensive statues, very much opposed to it.
And even if you find a statue where there may be an argument that it should be taken down because it's offensive in some way, I mean, there might be statues out there like that, but you should still oppose taking the statues down right now in response to the mob.
Okay, if we're taking down a statue, it should be a thoughtful, considered decision, and it should never be in response to or in submission to a mob.
So that's been my position.
But there are exceptions to every rule.
We know that.
So here is one exception.
We have Nashville seen on Twitter.
They report the Nathan Bedford Forest has fallen.
A widely mocked Nashville statue of the early KKK leader was removed Tuesday morning.
Um, and this was, uh, right here in Nashville.
I've driven by this thing.
I've seen it before.
And when you look at a zoom in on this statue, I tell you, this is why I make an exception here.
And I'm, and I'm happy this one was taken down simply because it is the ugliest statue I've ever seen in my life.
I've driven by this thing and I've seen it and I've been perplexed by it.
I honestly thought at first that it was put there to make fun of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
I thought this was kind of, it was meant to be a mockery.
He looks like something from, you know, like, he looks like a nutcracker or something, or maybe a combination of a nutcracker, maybe a combination of Goofy with a Civil War, if maybe there was a Mickey Mouse Club Civil War episode, and Goofy was a Confederate general, he would look like this statue.
It is the ugliest, most gaudy, hideous statue I've ever seen in my life.
And it's offensive, putting everything else aside, it's offensive aesthetically.
And so I'm fine with that.
I think that is the number one, if you're tearing down a statue, that should be the number one reason to do it.
Then the number one offense that a statue can commit is that it's ugly.
It's ugly.
It's supposed to be a piece of art.
And if the art is that we talked about the uglification of, uh, of our country yesterday and ugly things are offensive in a very real sense.
And so this, as a hideous, ugly statue, deserves to be torn down.
So I'm fine with that.
That one, I will allow.
I'm glad that it's been taken down.
My only fear now is that, in its place, we're going to get an equally ugly statue or modern art sculpture of some kind, or maybe there'll be a 50-foot, you know, monument to George Floyd or something.
That's my only fear.
I'd prefer just take that thing down.
It's hideous.
It's ugly.
Grow some trees in its place, and we'll just move on with our lives.
So I'm fine with that.
I am not so fine with this.
This is from the New York Times.
It says, the City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia, voted on Tuesday to donate a statue of Robert E. Lee to an African-American heritage center that plans to melt the bronze monument, the focus of a deadly white nationalist rally in 2017, into material for a new piece of public art.
The 4-0 vote by the council followed years of debate over the fate of the statue.
Four years ago, a plan to remove the statue drew scores of white nationalists to Charlottesville for a Unite the Right rally.
The New York Times continues, after taking it down, the city accepted proposals from bidders who wanted the Lee statue and a nearby statue of Stonewall Jackson, another Confederate general, that was also removed.
The Statuary Park at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania asked for both.
Well, okay, there is one destination that would make a lot of sense.
I'm not in favor of tearing most of these statues down, but once you've done that, and you have now these beautiful statues.
Now, that Robert E. Lee statue is also an equestrian statue, but that's the opposite of this one in many ways, because that's actually a beautiful work of art.
And that is one of the things that makes our campaign of tearing down statues so tragic is that we are destroying and discarding beautiful works of art, many of which have stood there for a century or more.
Another aspect of the war on beauty.
But what we were told is that, well, we're not, no, we're not destroying it.
We are simply relocating it, putting it in a different place.
And if you're going to relocate it, Gettysburg seems like a great place to put it.
But we continue here.
uh... lax art a los angeles based visual arts organization wanted both statues
for a planned exhibition uh...
and uh...
so there was there were bidding on this thing saying that they wanted a statue
and uh... various i think gettysburg made the most sense they have a
Since they have a statuary park, why not give it to them?
And you can put it there with all the other Civil War monuments, and if you've never been to Gettysburg before, it's worth a trip sometime if you're anywhere close by.
I've been to Gettysburg many times, and there are many Civil War monuments and statues and everything, of course, because it's Gettysburg.
But they decided, no, we're not going to send it to Statuary Park in Gettysburg.
We're not going to send it for any art exhibit or anything like that.
Instead, we're going to send it to the African American Heritage Center, and they're going to melt it down and destroy it.
So everything that you heard about, this is not a war on history, This isn't a war on history.
We're sending it to a museum, and museums are places for history.
So this is the opposite of a war on history.
We're just taking these things and putting them in their rightful place.
If you bought that, then here you go.
This was always going to be the case.
It was never going to a museum.
Now we're going to melt it down.
You know, they're going to make a bust of Dante Wright instead or something like that.
It's this almost religious kind of ritual.
This is an excising.
The way that they look at it on the left is that this is an excising.
This is an exorcism of America's sins.
There's a religious spiritual significance to it.
And so as part of the exorcism, you're not going to take this possessed, offending object and put it in a museum.
No, you're going to destroy it.
And then make something else out of it.
Something that is certain to be far uglier than what was there before.
We all have that one relative, especially as people get older, they have trouble hearing, and so you have to repeat the same thing over and over again to them.
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Now let's get to the comment section.
Gianna says, I'm convinced that the person at Amazon who put your book in the LGBT section is an undercover member of the Sweet Baby Gang, just doing his duty.
Well, we are everywhere.
Maybe we're even at Amazon.
I don't know.
We'll find out.
Mary B says, Matt, you'd be surprised by how many people want to see you do modeling shots.
I'm a woman, so it's not weird for me to point it out.
Hopefully I'm not canceled.
Uh, okay.
Well, I guess we'll start working on the calendar now.
That'll be our next thing at, uh, at the Swag Shack, dailywire.com slash shop.
We'll have a, we'll have my modeling calendar.
And every single month will just be me staring blankly expressionless into the camera.
Confused Walrus, great name, says, Walrus Awareness Week is our holiest of weeks.
How dare you fat shame my people during this time of year?
I, a gay transgender walrus, cancel you, Matt.
You are banned from the show.
What are you talking about, Confused Walrus?
I did the exact opposite.
I was defending the walrus community against the fat shaming that was happening.
I mean, it's Walrus Awareness Week of all times.
Of all the times to body shame a walrus, to do it during Walrus Awareness Week is unconscionable.
And I was defending the community against those sorts of attacks.
I don't know what you were listening.
I don't know what show you were listening to.
Not this one.
Not one hosted by the author of Johnny the Walrus, which is available now at johnnythewalrus.com.
PacCast says, when is Matt going to cancel NFTs?
I heard that's all the rage with the Millennials and Generation Zs nowadays.
Yeah, well, I would cancel them if I had any idea what they were, if I understood at all what they were.
For, I mean, they're basically, it's kind of like with the Bitcoins.
Bitcoins, it's like, they're like Beanie Babies or something, collectibles.
And that's what an NFT is too, essentially, right?
It's a digital Beanie Baby.
And you buy this, like a collection of pixels that you buy, and then you keep it somewhere in cyberspace, and you spend a lot of money on it.
I don't even understand what it is.
I'm sure that it's stupid though, whatever it is.
I guess you're right.
There's no reason why I should have to understand something before canceling it.
I've never operated that way before, and why should I start now?
And let's see.
Alot says, the bench is la banca, not banco.
Banco is a bank, as in saving money.
Okay, well, I told you I didn't know Spanish.
I knew before I tried to do a little bit of Spanish in the opening monologue yesterday, to make a point, I knew it was a mistake.
And what I should have done is just Googled it, but I was too lazy, and so that's what I ended up doing.
But, perfect example.
I mean, bonko is a bank, that's a noun, it's a masculine, you know, it's a masculine noun.
So I guess that's another one.
If we're going to make the entire language gender neutral, then it would have to be bonkics.
Just put the X at the end.
You take the vowel out, you put an X in, and that's how you make everything gender neutral.
So the Spanish language is about to become very, very confusing, I think.
Last week, you know, Biden announced his winter COVID plan.
Not only did Biden announce that he is extending the federal mask mandate for public transportation, but the administration is actually considering requiring Americans to be fully vaccinated in order to fly domestically as well.
So if you want to visit your family over the holidays, you may need to drive across the country rather than getting on a plane, or you'll have to comply.
The Biden administration is working overtime to force you to do the latter, to comply.
That's why we filed a lawsuit against Biden's vaccine mandate for private employers.
The government does not get to make our private medical choices for us or dictate how we live.
That's not how it's supposed to work in America.
But we need your help.
If you haven't signed our petition against Biden's vaccine mandate yet, I need you to head on over to dailywire.com slash do not comply.
We have over 700,000 signatures.
We want to get to a million signatures.
That's when it really is something that they have to take note of.
So go to dailywire.com slash do not comply and sign that petition.
And also, um, Johnny the walrus at, uh, it's upside down.
Johnny the walrus, johnnywalrus.com.
Um, if you want to buy the book that is the literary sensation of the year and, uh, that it was written by the leading LGBT voice, then this is your opportunity to do it.
Uh, we've been in the top 10 on Amazon, you know, Well, we sold out.
We were top 10.
We sold out.
Then we got more copies and we sold out and we were top 10 on Amazon again.
But we want to get it all the way to number one.
Because why?
For a lot of reasons.
But as I've been saying, that's also just the funniest thing.
That's the funniest conclusion of this saga is to be number one overall on Amazon.
So help us get there.
Go to johnnythewalrus.com.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Today we cancel the Dallas Police Department for proudly bragging about committing felony theft.
Well, it would be felony theft if agents of the state were subject to the same laws as the rest of us.
As it happens, they are not, which led to this post from Dallas PD on Facebook showing a police dog named Ballantine standing near a massive pile of cash, $100,000 to be exact, And the caption of the post says, We need to get him some treats.
Canine officer Ballantine does it again.
On December 2nd, 2021, the Love Field Interdiction Squad seized over $100,000 with the help of Ballantine.
Good job, Ballantine!
This certainly does nothing to dissuade my prejudice against dogs, by the way.
This is why cats, I don't like cats, but they are superior in the end.
Because at least they aren't narcs.
They aren't tattletales.
Like, a cat's gonna mind their own business.
They see what you're up to and they're gonna say, you know, do your thing, I'm doing my thing.
The dog's gonna go tell on you.
Now, you might be wondering about the rest of the story.
What crime did this person commit?
Well, this person, a woman, didn't commit any crime.
Nor was she charged with or accused of any crime.
What she did was fly from Chicago to Dallas with a lot of money in her luggage.
It is not illegal to have your own money in your luggage, by the way.
That is not illegal.
And yet, through a little magic called civil asset forfeiture, the police can seize your money, along with any other property it wants, without charging you with a crime and without giving you recourse to any sort of due process.
They simply take the money and that's it.
This is ours now, they say.
Thank you for your contribution.
Civil asset forfeiture is extremely common and it's big business for the state.
Ostensibly, they steal the money because it might be connected to a crime, The problem is, they don't have to prove that it was connected to a crime or even officially accuse you or charge you with the crime.
They can still take it and they can keep it.
How do you get it back?
Well, in practice, you don't.
Few people ever do.
Due process has flipped on its head in a civil asset forfeiture case.
Now the person whose property was seized must prove that they were not committing a crime.
They must prove a negative.
If they can't, they're out of luck.
You also don't have the right to counsel in these cases, so if you don't have the time and money to fight it, which most people don't, then you're even more out of luck.
And if you really want to fight it out, then you better be ready for the long haul.
A guy named Jerry Johnson flew from North Carolina to Phoenix to buy a truck for his small business last year.
He was paying in cash about $40,000.
And he brought it with him rather than trying to withdraw the sum out of state.
Police at the airport took all of the money, claiming it was for drugs, but they didn't charge him with a drug trafficking crime because there was no evidence of it.
Johnson produced documents proving that he was trying to buy a truck, but the court said that his evidence of innocence was insufficient.
A year later, and the case is just now going to an appeals court.
We should also note that, in most cases, police aren't seizing massive amounts of money.
I mean, they aren't even trying to take down Pablo Escobar-type drug kingpins, which, again, ostensibly is what these laws are supposed to be on the books for.
Instead, on average, they confiscate a few hundred dollars at a time.
In my state, Tennessee, the average haul is about 500 bucks.
This means that the theft victim has little incentive to go through the bureaucratic hell to get their property back.
They'll probably lose more in the attempted recovery than they lost in the initial burglary.
This is all, as I said, big business for the government.
At the federal level, the Justice Department has massively increased its revenue through civil forfeitures.
On the local level, in many states, police get to keep 100% of what they take.
No conflict of interest there, right?
Altogether, the government makes billions and billions of dollars this way, just by taking it from citizens.
And that explains why there is not a bipartisan effort to repeal these laws on the federal level.
An effort that would be extremely popular on the right and left, among almost all voters.
But money is king, and the government makes a lot of money by stealing it.
Why would it ever give that up?
Money certainly trumps the Constitution, which explicitly and unambiguously forbids exactly this sort of thing.
You are guaranteed the right to be free from the seizure of property without due process.
It's right there in the Fifth Amendment.
You can look it up for yourself.
In fact, I'll read it for you verbatim.
No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.
Civil asset forfeiture defies every aspect of this clause.
Your property is taken with no due process and you're not compensated.
It would seem that this amendment must be changed to read, no person shall be deprived of property without due process, unless the government really, really wants to and promises they have a good reason, in which case, okay, fine.
Keep in mind, as I said, that there is bipartisan support for this system from both parties going all the way to the top.
As journalist Chuck Modi on Twitter pointed out, a very prominent politician was a huge proponent of state-sponsored theft for years now and was one of the leading figures responsible for codifying this into law in the name of fighting, quote, the war on drugs.
You may recognize this guy.
Let's watch.
We changed the law so that if you are arrested and you are a drug dealer, under our forfeiture statutes, you can, the government can, take everything you own, everything from your car to your house, your bank account, not merely what they confiscate in terms of the dollars from the transaction that you just got caught engaging in.
They can take everything.
We have laws in the last several years where we don't allow judges' discretion to sentence people.
Flat-time sentencing.
You get caught, you go to jail.
Well, all of these tools have been at the President's disposal for the last hundred weeks and more.
Now, if America's crime problem is worse than it ever was, it's not because the Congress has failed to give the President the tools.
It's done its part, but rather because the administration has failed to use the power given to it by the Congress over the last five years, and in particular the last hundred weeks, to bring this epidemic under control.
Now, he meant all of that in a good way, just to clarify.
He was talking about the government taking all of your stuff and doing whatever it wants, and expects us to be grateful for it.
In fact, his gripe at the time was that these laws weren't being utilized enough, and not enough private property had been unconstitutionally confiscated.
How did that all work out, by the way, Biden?
America's crime problem was worse than it ever was in 1991, Biden says.
Then we put all these policies in place.
How are we doing now vis-a-vis the crime problem?
Not too great from what I understand.
In fact, crime today, especially violent crime, is worse than it ever was.
It would seem that simply empowering the government to engage in armed robbery isn't a great strategy for crime reduction.
At best, you are shifting the crime from private citizens to the government.
It's a kind of nationalization of theft.
Though you may argue that the IRS already did that.
What we confront with civil asset forfeiture is the harsh reality that the Constitution is a piece of paper.
An artifact, really, speaking of things in museums.
Not a divinely self-enforcing edict.
The Constitution has no power on its own.
No law ever does or can.
It derives its power from the respect and deference paid to it by the human beings who run the country.
But the human beings who run our country right now have no respect or deference for it or for any other law or any other standard beyond their own whims.
We become then a fundamentally lawless country because there is nothing underpinning the actions of the state other than the arbitrary self-serving impulses of the individuals who comprise it.
Civil asset forfeiture is not the cause of this situation or even necessarily the worst example of it, but that is the situation nonetheless.
And that is why today, not only the Dallas Police Department, but civil asset forfeiture is also canceled.
And we'll leave it there for today.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
Also, tell your friends to subscribe as well.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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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 Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer Jeremy Boring, Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
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