Ep. 867 - Why Multiple Personality Syndrome Is The Hottest New Fad
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, throwback edition, the hottest new trend on social media is multiple personality disorder. Lots of people, especially kids, are pretending that they suffer from this debilitating mental illness. How did this trend come about and why? We’ll talk about that today. And Aaron Rodgers has clearly earned the MVP award this year in the NFL but some sports writers say he shouldn’t be eligible because he isn’t vaccinated. Plus, Pope Francis condemns couples who have pets instead of kids, proving that even a broken pope is right every once in a while. And women at the University of Pennsylvania consider boycotting in protest of the dude who was allowed on their team. They consider it. Just consider it. Finally in our Daily Cancellation, I will once and for all finally cancel superhero movies. All of them. We’ll talk about all of that and more today on the Matt Walsh show.
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The hottest new trend on social media right now is multiple personality disorder.
Lots of people, especially kids, are pretending that they suffer from this debilitating mental illness.
How did this trend come about and why?
We'll talk about that today.
Also, Aaron Rodgers has clearly earned the MVP title this year in the NFL.
But some sports writers say that he shouldn't be eligible because he's not vaccinated.
Plus, Pope Francis condemns couples who have pets instead of kids, proving again that even a broken pope is right every once in a while.
And women at the University of Pennsylvania consider boycotting in protest of the dude who was allowed to play on the swim team.
They consider it.
They consider boycotting.
Just consider it.
Finally, in our daily cancellation of a once and for all and finally cancel superhero movies.
All of them.
They're all cancelled.
We'll do that today on the Matt Wall Show.
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Well, welcome to the show today.
We're just at the beginning of what's supposed to be a major winter storm here in Nashville.
And by major winter storm, I mean like, you know, four or five inches or something.
But four or five inches counts as a major storm around these parts, especially because of the apocalyptic panic that grips hold of everybody on the roadways.
As soon as one single flake falls from the sky.
The flake doesn't even have to fall from the sky, actually.
I mean, the drivers around here, if they see a flake of dandruff fall from their own heads while they're driving, they'll still freak out and plunge right into the nearest ditch.
What all that means is that I can't get on the roads right now, because I value my life, and so instead of going to my normal studio, I am back in my original studio.
I'm getting in touch with my roots today, back in the car, Talking to my dashboard once again, thoroughly confusing my neighbor who just walked out of his house and was obviously confused about what's happening here.
Now, I could have recorded in my house, which I'm sitting right next to right now in the driveway, but the problem is that all four of my kids are home right now and the only way to keep them quiet for an hour would be to I don't know, lock them in some sort of soundproof box in the attic, but CPS generally frowns upon that kind of parenting strategy, and so this is what we're doing.
Also, it just felt right.
It feels right to be here again in the car.
So, we start with this.
If a lab in China has proven to be a factory for viral contagions in the world, then the internet, social media in particular, and especially TikTok, is a factory for a different kind of contagion.
Social contagion.
Destructive and degrading and, you know, behaviors and lifestyle choices, concepts, ideas can go from fringe to trendy to mainstream quite literally overnight, right?
What was unusual one minute might be ubiquitous the next, and people, especially young people, can get caught in the current and drown before they even notice that their shoes are wet.
Here is perhaps the latest example, and maybe the strangest.
Also a very instructive example.
Over on TikTok, there is apparently an intense interest in multiple personality disorder, or DID, dissociative identity disorder, is what they call it now.
Hashtags related to this topic have millions of entries.
I mean, hundreds of millions of entries.
That's how much interest it is.
That's how popular it is.
And many of them are from users claiming to have DID themselves.
The trend has grown large enough that even Good Morning America has noticed, and they did a report on it a couple of days ago.
Watch this.
Now to the rise in teens on TikTok who are self-diagnosing themselves with rare mental health disorders that they probably don't have after watching videos on the social platform.
It's a story we first saw in the Wall Street Journal, and Ariel Reshep joins us with more on this.
Ariel, good morning.
Good morning to you, Mary.
Yeah, those videos have been viewed hundreds of millions of times, and while experts say this may be elevating a conversation about mental health, self-diagnosis can be a dangerous slippery slope.
DID typically occurs between the ages of six and nine.
This morning, experts warning about what they call a troubling trend on TikTok that could leave some teens believing they have a serious mental disorder.
Hosts with the hashtag Disassociative Identity Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder viewed hundreds of millions of times.
Some of those videos listing possible signs to look out for and encouraging viewers to self-evaluate.
Right, so, now, in these videos, and again, there are many of them, the alleged multiple personality sufferer will usually refer to themselves as the system.
That's how these people are referred to, they are the system.
And the system is the word they use to describe the whole collective of personalities that they have in their heads, and then each individual personality is called an alter.
And they will then usually introduce each alter in their videos, each personality, and sometimes put on a different voice for each one, but that requires a certain amount of talent that most of these people don't have, and so most of the videos are kind of like this one.
Watch.
Hi, my name's Becca.
I'm the host of the system.
Hi, I'm Bella.
I don't really know what role I have in the system because I am a new alter, so... Hi, my name is Rosa.
I am the caretaker of the system.
What's up?
It's Jamie.
I'm the primary protector of the system.
We took our meds a while ago, so I'm groggy.
Hi, my name's Vega.
I am the sexual protector of the system.
Hey, I'm Kai.
I am a trauma holder and gatekeeper for the system.
I work very closely with another alter, Nick, who is an internal caretaker.
He does not really front.
So, you see, that's how multiple personality disorder works, apparently.
All of the personalities are aware of each other, and they work together.
You know, they hold meetings and conferences, they send memos back and forth and emails and everything.
This is what happens, I guess, when you have 14 personalities and they're all boring as hell.
Though some members of the alleged DID community on TikTok, they do try to keep things a little bit more interesting.
So here's a guy whose personalities are more antagonistic towards one another, which makes it more interesting.
Watch.
Hey everyone, it's Asher!
The best alter!
This is a day in the life of somebody that has dissociative identity disorder.
Let's go!
Hi everyone, it's Annie, and I'm gonna be in charge of cleaning today.
That means I'm gonna be out, I'm gonna be listening to my music, and I get a nice couple hours just to myself.
This is really nice because I tried to get some time out yesterday and I couldn't.
And since I'm going to be out for a little bit, I changed into my clothes.
This is my necklace, and this is a shirt somebody sent me.
Hi everybody, it's Alex.
Annie got jalapeno in her eye, and then switched out immediately, so I had to switch in, and now I'm having to deal with the pain.
So, thank you Annie!
Hi everybody, it's April.
This is a before shot, and this is an after shot.
This is why I'm in control of what the body looks like, because the boys would make it look homeless.
Now, the impression of DID that you get from videos like this is that a person with this disorder has sort of a cohort of little gnomes or gremlins living in his skull, driving him around, fighting for control of the steering wheel.
And most of the videos are like this.
And they've been extremely effective in convincing other people on the site, mostly kids, that they too can have multiple personalities.
The problem, of course, Well, there are a lot of problems.
One of them is that this is how split personalities work in movies and TV shows, not in real life.
There was a best-selling book called Sybil back in the 70s.
I think they made a movie about the book as well.
And that's the one that first popularized this concept of multiple personality disorder.
Before that, it existed as a clinical concept, but it wasn't in the mainstream the way that it is now.
And in that book, the patient Sybil, real name Shirley Mason, has a condition that works kind of like what you see in the TikTok videos, kind of like what you see in the movies, in what was a M. Night Shyamalan movie, Split, where the guy has 15 different personalities and some of them are serial killers and some of them aren't.
And so Shirley Mason, Sybil, had something sort of like that.
Problem though is the book was based on a lie.
The whole thing was a hoax.
It was a fraud.
Even so, it's cemented into the minds of the American public and people this idea, and people have been convincing themselves that they suffer from this fake version of the illness ever since.
Now, of course, I say fake version of the illness as if there's a real version.
I don't think there is.
Now, this is very much a live debate in the psychiatric field right now.
Some so-called mental health experts will argue that DID exists, but it's very different from the cinematic portrayals.
And others will say that the whole thing is a category error, that it doesn't exist at all.
It's an invention of the psychiatric field itself.
Now, according to this argument, which I find extremely persuasive, There's only a very, very, very small number of patients who would even potentially qualify for this diagnosis.
And then among that small group, a certain portion of them are simply faking it.
That's the problem with a lot of mental illnesses, in fact, is that despite what you're often told or what you might think, with a lot of these illnesses, they have not located the illness in the physical brain itself.
Because if they had, they wouldn't call it a mental illness.
They would call it a brain disease or a neurological condition.
But those are distinct categories.
So if they're calling it a mental illness, it means that they have not, with any, they have certainly not conclusively located the illness within the brain.
And if you haven't located the illness physically, then it's really just theoretical whether it physically exists or not.
Um, and so that's, that's, that's another idea about multiple personality disorder, that it doesn't exist, that it's only a very, very small group of people who potentially would even qualify for it.
Many of them are faking it.
And then there's also another portion that have been convinced.
They're not faking it intentionally.
They've just been convinced through cultural and therapeutic influences that they have the disorder when they really don't.
So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Now, at any rate, it certainly can be said that those who believe in the existence of legitimate multiple personality disorder have never come close to actually proving that it exists.
All they could do is produce examples of people who claim to have it, which is far from the sort of proof that they would really need.
Is it even possible for a single mind to contain multiple distinct personalities, distinct minds within itself, which are separate from each other and not aware of what the other is thinking?
How does that even work?
Is it possible for a mind to be compartmentalized in that way?
It's an extraordinary concept, which requires extraordinary evidence to prove, and none of that evidence has been provided.
But that's all somewhat academic, right?
Whether split personalities exist or not, we can hopefully all agree that 10 million people on TikTok didn't all suddenly start suffering from the illness all at the same time.
This trend is without a doubt a result of both self-delusion And deliberate fraud.
And often kind of a mix of the two.
Maybe it begins as a deliberate fraud, and then people actually succeed in convincing themselves that they really have it.
I used to be very good at this kind of thing when I was a kid.
When I would pretend that I was sick so I didn't have to go to school, and then by late morning I'd actually start feeling sick because I was so good at acting the part.
And I think something like that happens sometimes with these mental illnesses.
Now, the more interesting and important question is why exactly so many people would want to convince the world and themselves that they suffer from what would be a debilitating mental illness.
I think there are a few answers to that.
One is the most obvious point that the mentally ill are a victim class.
Victimhood is power in our culture, as we know.
The more victim labels you can claim, the more power, the more social credit you accrue.
Also, too, many people lack anything approaching a real identity or a real personality, mostly because they've been staring at screens every waking moment of their lives and letting the Internet do all of their thinking for them.
And they have almost no internal dialogue.
They have no almost no internal life at all.
And because of this, You know, they tend to adopt a quantity over quality approach to personality.
Usually this will come in the form of adopting different pronouns, different sex and gender identities, but this latest thing is even better because it allows them to literally take on more than one personality.
All of the personalities are dull and uninteresting, but what they lack in substance they make up for in sheer numbers, I guess.
Three, related to this, mental illness in general is especially trendy in its own right, largely for the reasons covered by the first two points.
And four, this all stems from our fundamentally disjointed and essentially superstitious view of the self.
So we see the self, ourselves, the self generally, not as a continuous, holistic, coherent thing, But as an arbitrary amalgamation of our desires and our hopes and our preferences in any given moment, we're constantly in the process of uncreating and recreating ourselves.
Our self of five minutes ago doesn't necessarily bear any relation to our self of right now.
And our self of right now may be entirely different from the self that takes the field tomorrow.
We see ourselves in this culture today as these kinds of shape-shifting changelings lacking any concrete overriding identity.
And according to this view of things, really we all have dissociative identity disorder because it's easy to dissociate from an identity when you don't really have one at all to begin with.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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All right, I gotta hurry up and get through this show so I can go out and I can go out there,
out just outside my car here and hit the slopes.
And by that, I mean sled down the hill in the backyard in my kid's $5 plastic saucer sled.
I mentioned this on the show yesterday, that I like to go sledding when it snows.
And lots of people seem surprised and sort of taken aback and maybe slightly disturbed by this image of me going sledding and enjoying myself.
Because that's not really on brand.
I mean, sledding's not on brand and enjoying myself is not on brand.
Enjoyment is not part of my brand.
But I want to clarify, just to try to put an end to the PR crisis that has happened because of this rumor that I enjoy myself.
My kids know that this is not about enjoyment, okay?
My kids know that I always have to use the sleds first.
And I have to play with any cool toys that they get, I have to play with them first.
And I have to eat all their candy.
And I do that because it's about making sure that they're safe.
It's about making sure that these things are safe for them.
So this is a sacrifice on my part that I take on.
Like, for example, the other day my son took his allowance money and he used it to buy a remote control car for himself.
A cheap one.
Okay.
Believe me.
We don't, we don't give these kids much in the way of allowance.
So he had to save for about four years to buy a $12 toy.
But anyway, he brought it home.
And, um, I of course had to play with it first.
Just, just to make sure that it, you know, that it was safe, that it didn't explode or, you know, go haywire and start bumping into people's shins or whatever.
And, um, and then when I started chasing the dog around the kitchen with a remote control car, that was all about safety.
It was just making sure that it's safe.
It's all safety.
And my kids are so used to this now that every time they get a new toy or they have a new piece of candy or whatever, and I come into the room, they always ask me timidly, they say, Daddy, can you please not check if it's safe?
Can we just use it ourselves?
What do you mean?
You want me to forsake my fatherly duty?
No, children, no.
This hurts me more than it hurts you.
Believe me.
But I have to do what I have to do.
You'll understand when you're older.
This is what love is all about.
All right, so, first of all, we'll start here.
Today is January 6th.
You've probably heard by now.
The most important of days.
The most solemn of days.
The holiest, the most tragic, the most significant.
It's a day when almost every show will be talking about the fact that today is today.
And what today means, and what it meant a year ago, and what it means today, and what it'll mean next year.
Both right and left shows, we'll be talking about January 6th, on January 6th, and the fact that it is January 6th, which is why I will not say anything else about it.
Moving on.
Second, Aaron Rodgers is the odds-on favorite to win MVP this year in the NFL because statistically he's had a great season.
And yeah, he's playing well.
His team is playing well.
But some sportswriters have decided that he doesn't deserve to be MVP because he isn't vaccinated.
Chicago sportswriter Hub Arkush was on a local radio show yesterday in Chicago where he explained why he didn't vote for Rodgers.
And again, it's got nothing to do with play on the field.
It's all about his medical choices.
Roger.
Do you have an MVP vote this year, Hub?
I do, yeah.
I'm one of the AP, there's 50 of us who vote, and I am one of us.
Did you reveal that you're not voting for Aaron Rodgers?
Is that correct?
I did, yeah.
I mean, I've been pretty consistent about that all year.
I don't think you can be the biggest jerk in the league and punish your team and your organization and your fan base the way he did and be the most valuable player.
Has he been the most valuable on the field?
Yeah, you could make that argument, but I don't think he is clearly that much more valuable than Jonathan Taylor or Or Cooper Cupp or maybe even Tom Brady.
And so from where I sit, the rest of it is why he's not going to be my choice.
Do I think he's going to win it?
Probably.
A lot of the voters don't approach it the same way that I do.
Others do, who I've spoken to.
But one of the ways we get to keep being voters is we're not allowed to say who we are voting for until after the award has been announced.
I'm probably pushing the envelope by saying who I'm not voting for.
But we're not really supposed to reveal our votes.
OK, so we're going to decide MVP based on personal medical decisions that Aaron Rodgers has made.
And as we've gone over a million times, the argument that, well, it's not really personal because it affects other people, because you can affect other people if you don't get vaccinated, that argument, that was weak.
A year ago, when these vaccines first came out, now it's not just weak, it's moot.
It's a moot point.
You can't make that argument anymore.
You can make it, but you're not going to be taken seriously.
Because vaccinated or not, everyone's spreading the virus.
So your whole argument about how it's reckless to not get vaccinated, you're not just being reckless with your own health, but you're putting other people in danger.
That is the argument that all this stuff is based on.
The mandates, everything.
It's all based on the idea that you're putting other people in danger if you don't get vaccinated.
Well, that never really made sense, because if the vaccines prevent transmission, then as long as you're vaccinated, you have nothing to worry about.
But now we know they don't.
And so everyone's in the same boat.
But, you know, part of this is also just... This is also... When we look at the politicization of sports, Um, and when they're lecturing about vaccines or whatever, you know, part of this is the fact that a lot of these sports writers are dyed in the wool lefties.
So we know that, but also I think at a deeper level, psychologically, they want their job to be a lot more important than it really is.
I think at a certain level, they, they realize, and they, they acknowledge that What they do for a living is really kind of stupid and frivolous.
And I say that as someone who enjoys sports.
I like watching sports and I'll listen to sports analysts drone on sometimes.
But even when I'm sitting there and I'm watching sports analysts or I'm listening to sports analysts argue about who's the MVP or whatever, you know, who played the best game yesterday, I'm listening to these arguments, I still recognize That this is very, very stupid, really.
It's one thing to watch the sport, but the discussion around it, it's really kind of dumb.
And if this is what you do for a living every single day, then I think some of these people, that's fine.
Like, if this is what you do for a living, you talk about sports.
And you embrace that.
Like, this is what I do.
It's entertainment.
I'm an entertainer.
And that's fine.
Then I say, well, that's perfectly noble.
That's perfectly fine.
Okay.
I, I do a podcast for a living here.
I am in my car right now.
How important can I be?
So as long as you will embrace that, that's what it is.
It's just entertainment.
Sports is entertainment.
And if you're a sports writer, then you also in effect are an entertainer because that's all that this is all about.
Um, but I think that there are some sports writers, sports analysts who, who want to be more important than that.
And when you think about the discussion, what this guy... What's this guy's name again?
Hub Arkush?
He's brought on to talk about MVP.
What is that?
The most... Let's have a discussion and let's debate for months on end who the most valuable player is.
Which is totally arbitrary.
It doesn't even make really any sense.
The most valuable player to his own team?
Well, each team has their own most valuable player.
So, who's the most valuable-est of all the valuable players?
What does that mean?
Why does it matter?
Who exactly put you in charge of declaring that?
Who cares what you declare?
It's all arbitrary, but they want to find some deeper social significance to what they're doing because of their own ego, their own narcissism, their own vanity.
They don't want to admit that, hey, we're just entertainers.
This is all entertainment.
That's all it is.
And so I think that's what a lot of this politicization is all about.
OK, meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg has been gone from The View because she got COVID, even though she's been vaccinated three times.
And she came on The View yesterday to talk about how shocked she is that she did everything right and she still got COVID.
I left a couple weeks ago, just before the break, because somebody I had been around tested positive for coronavirus, so I left.
So I've been gone a long time, I feel.
And I was all excited, and, you know, they have to test us.
And so they sent people to test me.
And they tested me, and it was like, oh, no, you're not coming back.
We're not sending anybody to your house.
You have corona.
And it was like, wait, what?
It was a shock because, you know, I'm triple vaxxed.
I haven't been anywhere.
I haven't done anything.
But that's the thing about the Omicron.
You just don't know where it is.
You don't know where it is, who's got it, who's passing it.
So, you know, it's one of those things where you think, I've done everything I was supposed to do.
Yeah, it doesn't stop Omicron.
And that's the problem with a variant, because it gets stronger and does different stuff to you.
So, you know, unless everybody gets vaccinated, this is what we're going to be facing.
Okay, first of all, it's really cold in this car.
I didn't really think about that.
It's about 20 degrees outside and I can't have the car on because that'd be a distracting noise.
So I'm just sitting here freezing.
Anyway, Whoopi Goldberg is really shocked and appalled and almost sort of offended by the universe that it's put her in this position.
She says, I did everything right and I still got it.
Well yeah, now maybe connect the dots on that.
You've spent years doing it, you have adjusted your life, your life has revolved around this for years, you've been wearing masks, you've been injecting everything they tell you to inject every time Big Pharma comes out with another vial of of drugs and they say, inject this into your body.
You say, Oh, yep, here's my arm.
You present it dutifully to be injected with it.
And you do all of that.
And you've secluded yourself from your family, all of that, and yet you still got it.
Okay, so you've you've realized that.
Now connect the next stop.
Just what does that mean?
Does that mean that, well, now you've got to double down and inject yourself with even more stuff and wear five masks now instead of four and isolate yourself even more?
No, it means that it's futile.
That there's no reason to do it.
That you're going to get sick.
Everyone's going to get sick.
And then you're good.
And then most likely you're going to be fine.
And then you're gonna go back to living your life, and down the road from now, maybe a year from now, maybe two years, maybe five years, you'll probably get sick again.
With COVID.
And then eventually you'll get sick with something, probably not COVID, that will kill you.
And that will be it.
So live your life.
Okay.
And then there's this, one more thing on COVID.
Here is user thatdarnchat on TikTok, giving her reflections on the last two years.
And she is by far not alone, I think.
In feeling this way, unfortunately.
Listen.
I usually have no problem finding words for things.
But lately I just, I'm at a loss.
Every single person I talk to is drowning.
And for me, the day to day, it's fine.
It's not fine, but it's fine.
I'm getting through it.
And I feel like I've been in a state of grief now for, what, two years?
Grief that my kid will never go to a story time at the library.
My kids haven't had birthday parties.
My grandparents have never met my two-year-old.
There's grief around what I've had to face through difficult conversations with loved ones.
Learning that there is a drastic difference between my values and theirs.
Grief in having to face that we are only cogs in a machine, that despite the fact when capitalism failed, early pandemic, and so many people stepped up to care for each other, the systems that be want to continue to make survival an individual effort.
I feel grief over isolation.
I feel grief that my kids have to grow up with a mom in survival mode and morning routine and access to dreams because it just feels like there's no end.
Every day as a parent, Is assessing risk and trying to figure out what fat to trim.
Yeah, it is really cold in here.
Can you see my breath yet?
It's very cold in this car.
Anyway, what was she talking about?
Yeah, this is, unfortunately, she says she feels all this grief and everything, and these are all things that she has done to herself.
These are all choices that she has made for no good reason whatsoever.
She has decided to destroy her life, and that's her own decision, but unfortunately, she has kids, and it's not their decision, and she's destroying their life as well.
What we have to understand, unfortunately, is that You know, there's no rescuing these people.
I mean, that woman there, her brain is broken.
I don't think there's any way to rescue her now.
As I've been talking about, part of what this has been about from the beginning is that people like this woman here, who had been living in this kind of psychological bubble and had insulated themselves In their luxury, had been insulated themselves from the reality of the human condition, and from the reality of their own mortality, finally forced to confront the reality of human mortality, they just, in that confrontation, something snapped in their heads.
And they weren't able to face it.
Because that's all this has been about.
Someone like her, she's young, she appears to be healthy, COVID has posed almost no threat to her at all this entire time.
But it is a threat.
I mean, it's out there.
It could kill you.
And there are many other things that could kill you too, but this is being shoved down your throat every second of the day.
And so it just, it made her realize, her along with millions of other people, very early on, it was like this moment for them where they realize, oh my gosh, I'm a human being.
I'm mortal.
I could die.
I am totally vulnerable and naked and exposed in the human condition.
I am this frail, pathetic little thing here for only a temporary period of time.
And everything out there could kill me at any second.
Now, some people who are a bit more reflective have always known that.
And have lived every day with that awareness.
And we've learned how to just cope with it.
But she never did.
She never learned how to cope with it.
And all of this came on all at once.
And it broke her and so many others.
And I'm not sure that there's any rescuing them now, psychologically.
And that's a great tragedy, because again, if we can't rescue them, it means that's going to be very difficult to rescue their kids.
All right, moving on.
This from the New York Post says Pope Francis, 85, had some choice words.
Pope Francis, 85 years old, by the way.
That's not his name, Pope Francis, 85.
Pope Francis had some choice words for the childless at the Vatican on Wednesday.
In remarks to a general audience, the Catholic Church had called out couples who have chosen not to have children and opted to have pets instead.
The Pope said, quote, today we see a form of selfishness.
We see that some people do not want to have a child.
Sometimes they have one and that's it, but they have dogs and cats that take the place of the children.
He suggested that couples who can't bear children should look into adoption, the cost of which can tally up to $70,000.
The Pope went on, went on, how many children in the world are waiting for someone to take care of them?
It's a risk, yes.
Having a child is always a risk, either naturally or by adoption, but it is riskier not to have them.
It is riskier to deny fatherhood or to deny motherhood, be it real or spiritual.
Well, it's not very often that I get to say that I agree with Pope Francis about something.
As I said, even a broken pope is right.
Well, he's certainly not right twice a day, but maybe twice a decade he's right about something.
And so this is one of those times.
It almost sounds like Pope Francis has been listening to the Matt Walsh show.
Maybe he listens to my podcast.
I don't know.
Because this is something you've heard me rant and rave about many times.
Look, and we need to clarify for the people who struggle with this for some reason when we talk about this.
Nobody is saying that you have some kind of moral failing if you're not able to have kids.
Obviously.
Nobody's saying that it's a moral failing to have pets.
Well, I would almost go that far, but I'm not going to go that far, especially because, unfortunately, we have pets.
So that's not the point.
The point is when a choice is made by couples who could be parents, when a choice is made to be the parent of animals rather than human beings, that's when it becomes a moral failing.
That is selfishness.
That is you giving up on the human species.
And in fact, as Pope Francis points out, if you're a couple and you can't have kids, again, not your fault, but that's when you are prime candidates to go adopt any of the many children out there who are languishing in the adoption system or in foster homes.
Now, adoption isn't for everyone necessarily.
I mean, that's something you got to reflect about and pray about.
But if you can't have kids, rather than going out and adopting 15 dogs or something, it's certainly worth considering whether one of these children right now who have... I mean, think about kids who are suffering in this way.
It's unthinkable.
Now, fortunately, very young children, babies, there's a wait list two miles long for babies who are up for adoption.
They're not going to be in the system for very long.
But a child who's a little bit older, six or seven years old, and ends up in the system, ends up in a foster home, ends up in the adoption system, there aren't that many candidates out there waiting to adopt kids that age.
And so that's a great thing that you could do, to become a parent of one of those children, something to consider.
But mainly, I think what we're talking about here is the choice, again, to forego Being an actual parent of human beings and instead you're going to be a parent of animals.
I do think that there's a fair amount of selfishness that comes into this.
Why is it that people love having pets?
And when you hear people say that they prefer dogs over people, you know how much that annoys me when I hear people say that.
Especially because I know why they're saying it.
Why do they prefer dogs over people?
Well, because dogs are not nearly as challenging as people.
Dogs don't require sacrifice of you the same way people do.
A dog is just going to sit there.
He's going to be very happy to see you all the time.
He has very little of his own identity.
You know, so he's not going to impose his own identity on you in that way.
He is there for you.
And his life revolves around you.
And that's why people love dogs that much.
Because it makes them feel better about themselves.
Because when you get a dog, that dog's life is going to revolve entirely around you.
Doesn't make it bad to have a dog, but that is why people like dogs.
Human beings are different.
You know, a human being, they're going to have their own identity.
And their life is not going to revolve entirely around you.
As very young children, that tends to be the way it goes.
But as they get older, they start to develop their own identity.
And that's when there's even more of a sacrifice required of you.
That also means that the love in that relationship is much more meaningful.
Because this is also a choice made by both people.
So, it's all self-serving, I think.
Okay.
This is from the Daily Wire.
Several women on the University of Pennsylvania swim team considered boycotting their final home meet in protest of transgender teammate Leah Thomas's physical advantages and dominance.
The women ultimately decided not to go through with the boycott, the Daily Mail reported, fearing that they would be banned from the Ivy League championship.
The women also discussed participating in a false start.
A source close to the team told the Daily Mail, they've been ignored by both Penn and the NCAA, and there's a feeling among some of the girls that they should make some sort of statement, seize the opportunity while they have a spotlight on them, to make their feelings about the issue known.
So, they were thinking about staging a protest, they were thinking about boycotting, they were thinking about refusing to take part in all of this, but then ultimately they decided otherwise.
Well, I have to say, it's good that they were thinking about it, but we need to graduate beyond the point of simply thinking about it and actually doing.
So I understand why they didn't go through with it, because they're worried about the consequences to their career.
They're worried about what will happen.
They're worried about being punished by the Ivy League or whatever.
So I get that.
But at a certain point, we need to be willing to make sacrifices in order to take a stand for what's right.
To take a stand for basic sanity and truth and moral decency.
If we're ruling that out, if we are ruling courage out, and we're saying, well, we want to solve all these problems in a way that will not require courage.
Well then forget it.
Pack it in.
Forget it.
None of these problems will be... Civilization is done.
Abandon all hope at that point.
If we're ruling out courage.
Because yeah, it would require courage.
It's not fair to these girls that they were put in this position.
It's not fair that refusing to participate in the charade of a swim meet where there's a guy competing against girls.
It's not fair that that could...
Create significant blowback for them.
None of that is fair, but that's life.
That's what they're faced with.
That's the reality.
It shouldn't be that way, but it is.
And so if you want to help make sure that it's not going to be that way for the next group, then you need to stand up and do the right thing.
Not just think about it, do it.
Yes, it may cause problems for you.
It may hurt your career.
It may damage your reputation.
But there are times in life when you're called upon to make those kinds of sacrifices.
This is one of those times.
I am at the point of victim blaming with this.
I really am.
You know, the people, the women who choose to participate In these kinds of events, when there's men involved, the parents who don't pull their kids out.
All the people who go along with it.
I mean, I think they all deserve some of the blame now.
Because there's something you could do about it and you're not doing it.
If all of these girls got together and said, we are not doing this.
We're not going to participate in this.
This is a farce.
Everyone knows that it's a farce.
Everyone knows that it's wrong.
And we're not going to play this game.
If every girl did that, or even half of them, then this problem goes away.
Time to step up.
Time to step up, ladies.
All right.
From the New York Post, it says, the pizza chain Little Caesars is bumping the price of its famous hot and ready pizza above $5 for the first time in a quarter century.
The price of the promotional pie, which was first introduced in 1997, is increasing by 11% to $5.55.
So inflation claims another victim.
But I do have to say, and this is pretty bad, because $5 is already way overpriced for what they're selling.
Little Caesar's Pizza taste-wise is indistinguishable from the box it comes in.
So it's actually kind of a nice deal because it's a two-for-one.
You can eat the pizza and then eat the cardboard box that it comes in and they're like the same thing.
They taste the same.
Little Caesar's Pizza is a pizza box with hot ketchup smeared across and a little bit of mozzarella cheese.
And that's the whole recipe.
Little Caesars is so bad that it makes dominoes seem edible by comparison.
That's how bad it is.
And now it's going to be $5.55.
Thanks a lot, Joe Biden.
Let's get down to the comment section.
Jesse Miller says, I could totally imagine Matt out in the snow taking sledding super seriously.
Well, I do take it seriously because, again, it's all about safety for my kids, and it's a very serious business.
Philip says, I've been in law enforcement since 1991, and I must say something.
If any of the Capitol Police officers who are present on January 6th are traumatized by that event, then they should probably seek another career because they're not cut out to be in law enforcement.
Uh, yeah, I think, I think what you're saying is valid, especially because we have not heard, um, any of the officers who were subjected to the BLM riots complaining about their trauma.
Von Ronken says the cry circle tradition was absolutely hilarious.
Hilarious?
This is my pain and suffering and that of my family.
And you find that hilarious.
These open, vulnerable moments that we have as a family where we sit around in a circle and weep?
Well, I'm glad to know that our pain is funny to you.
You're banned from the show.
Yes, I can still ban you from the show even as I'm sitting in my car.
And let's see, James says, Matt, I'm a mortgage loan officer.
Seeing how interested in my business you are and how much you truly appreciate it makes me happier than I can express.
Well, yeah, mortgages are one of my great passions in life.
Just like all of our advertisers, all of our sponsors.
You know, I'm passionate.
I think it really comes through in the way that I read the advertisements.
Constantine says, armed robbery should unironically carry the death penalty.
I think there's a much better argument that could be made for the death penalty for all armed robbers than misdemeanor.
That's what it is in Manhattan now, it's a misdemeanor.
And... Oh, there was a good one that I gotta read.
Oh, here it is.
Here's Johnny, he says, Hey Matt, I think you'll find this story interesting.
So yesterday I went into a department store while sporting my brand new Sweet Baby Gang t-shirt that I got for Christmas this year.
When it was my turn to check out, I approached the counter with my things.
As the cashier began scanning, he soon took notice of my shirt and asked me with a smile, so what does your shirt mean anyway?
As I started to open my mouth to explain, another store worker close by interrupted while laughing and goes, yeah, is that like a daycare center or something?
How dare he?
How dare he?
I was a little bit offended, but I just wanted to move on with my day, so I simply said back to him, no, it's actually more of an inside joke.
At that moment, the cashier asked me, so what's the joke?
At this point, I was pretty ticked off.
I then adjusted my posture, began to arch my shoulders back to assert my dominance, made close eye contact with both of them, and proudly said aloud, the first rule of Sweet Baby Gang is nobody talks about Sweet Baby Gang.
They both laughed loudly, and the co-worker began to walk away while shaking his head, saying, OMFG, man, wow.
The cashier, still chuckling a bit, then asked, Seriously, dude?
I looked him stone cold in the face, stared right into his eyes, and sternly replied, Yes.
He then seemed taken aback and even froze for a second before responding to me.
He then leaned over to the counter towards me and whispered in my ear, How can I become a member?
I have to say, normally, when someone tells me ahead of time how I'm going to respond to a story, oh, you'll like this.
Oh, you'll think this is funny.
Oh, you'll find this interesting.
Normally, when they do that, I'll react the opposite way, just out of spite, because I don't like being told what to do.
But in this case, yeah, I did indeed find that very interesting.
That was a far more interesting story than anything in any Marvel movie, for example.
And this just shows the beauty of the Sweet Baby Gang, I think.
Because it confuses people, and it makes them very uncomfortable, And it causes really awkward conversations, but then in the end, in the midst of the chaos, their defenses are broken down, and that's when we grab them, you know?
That's when we take hold of them.
And before they know it, they're in the cold too.
So masterfully done, John, my good and faithful servant.
Tomorrow's a huge day for The Daily Wire and the lawsuit against the Biden administration's tyrannical vaccine mandates.
Why is that?
Because it's the day the Supreme Court will convene to hear arguments on the legality and constitutionality of the Biden administration's descent into all-out medical tyranny.
That's why we need to make sure that we have as many signatures as we possibly can on our Do Not Comply petition.
And we've already got 1 million.
We want to add more.
Go to dailywire.com slash do not, go by dailywire.com slash do not comply and sign that petition now.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
You know, over the last couple of days, I've spoken about my experience watching the latest Spider-Man film over Christmas break.
As a father, I'm, again, called upon to make many harrowing sacrifices for my children, and taking them to see Spider-Man was just the latest.
In fact, many of my fatherly sacrifices have to do with enduring awful movies, you know.
And it's a burden that I carry with silent dignity, I think.
Well, maybe not silent, and not dignity, because I complain about it all the time, but still.
The point is that I watch Spider-Man, I didn't like it, to say the least.
And during the comment section of the show, I have briefly made my case against it.
But this conversation has provoked anger from the audience, and even dissension within the ranks at The Daily Wire.
My own producers, Sean and McKenna, are Marvel apologists themselves, and I'm told by a source that when I was making fun of Spider-Man yesterday on the show, the people in the control room were shaking their heads scornfully because they didn't approve of what I was saying.
Things have gotten very, very tense.
We just hired a new intern for the show this week, and I had to send her to my car yesterday to start my car for me in case somebody had planted a bomb or something, because that's how serious this is.
But one thing you know about me is that when people get upset about something that I say, that just encourages me to say it again, louder and longer.
I have, as you know, the maturity of a four-year-old, which means that I should actually be the target audience for Marvel movies, but they still don't resonate with me because although I have the maturity of a toddler, I still have the brain of an adult, which unfortunately precludes me from enjoying anything that Marvel has to offer.
And so today we're moving beyond just the latest Spider-Man movie.
And instead, we're going to expand the scope of our inquiry.
And finally, once and for all, cancel Marvel itself.
All Marvel movies.
They're all canceled.
Indeed, all superhero movies of all types are canceled.
And I'll explain why.
The first problem with superhero movies is that they're all exactly the same.
And they exist primarily to sell merchandise.
These films are basically 95-minute Mattel commercials, only with less plot and worse acting.
And I'm being generous when I say less plot, because that implies the basic existence of some kind of plot.
Now, superhero movies in the 90s were merely light on plot.
Superhero movies these days are entirely plotless.
And that's because of the advent of franchise filmmaking and world building, and that's turned every movie into a setup for the next movie, which itself is a setup for the next one, on and on, into the infinite abyss.
Nothing can ever really happen.
There can be no substantial progress, no final resolution, no real character development, no actual triumph or defeat.
Because it's always just setting it up for the next one.
Each installment, none of these installments exist on their own.
None of them stand on their own as films.
They just exist because they got to set up the next one and the next one and the next one.
You may as well pay $18 to watch Thor play Solitaire for two hours or something.
I mean, it's the same in the end.
10,000 years from now, as the next installment of Spider-Man is released to the screens that we'll all have permanently implanted in our eyeballs at that point, I think philosophers will be debating whether these superhero franchises even had a beginning at all.
They may well conclude that there was no prime mover, no first cause in the Marvel and DC universe.
These movies always existed, telling the exact same stories, with the exact same actors, since before the beginning of time itself.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I don't hate superhero movies as a concept.
I have nothing against a fanciful tale about a man in a rubber suit fighting bad guys, Bad guys who, through approximately 20 million story arcs, still have not thought to simply walk up to their nemesis and shoot him directly in the face.
Now, I'm no expert on the mythology of Marvel or DC, but I'm pretty sure a bullet to the face would dispatch almost all of the heroes in all of the universes.
Except for Superman and a few others, but the rest... I mean, Spider-Man?
Just walk up to him and shoot him in the head.
And that's it.
That's the end of that.
But these are issues with story, and superhero movies don't exist to tell stories.
They don't exist because someone really felt passionate about telling another story about Aquaman beating up a tiger shark or whatever.
They exist to perpetuate a brand.
Now, all filmmakers want to make money.
Every movie is supposed to make money, though lots of them don't.
But for these superhero franchises, that's the be-all and end-all.
That's the alpha and omega.
That's the only point.
The films are not inventions of storytellers, but of corporate focus groups.
They are things made simply to exploit a market.
Now, it's a very large market, and a profitable one, and it's one that I would sell my soul and exploit also if I could make a billion dollars doing it, but that's all this is about.
Now, when I talk about this, I'm often accused of taking the stories too seriously.
But that's exactly the problem.
I don't take them seriously because I can't.
I take them as seriously as I take like a Geico commercial.
And the problem is that the writers don't take the story seriously either, which is why they're at the point now of throwing everything into the mix just to keep the franchise going.
Superpowers, magic, miraculous technology, throw it all in.
Whatever is needed in each successive moment to propel it to the next moment.
And each moment is inherently meaningless because it only exists to set up the next one.
And then at the end, you can erase everybody's memory and do it all over again in the next movie.
The writers have no respect for the audience.
They aren't writers at all.
They're glorified content aggregators.
All of these Marvel scriptwriters, they should be writing listicles for BuzzFeed.
But instead, they're making Marvel movies.
Because that's what the movies really are.
They're kind of just like clickbait content.
In the era of content creation, that's what these movies are.
They're simply content.
It's Marvel saying, well, here's two and a half hours, you moron.
Sit down and have some of this.
They shovel more slop into the mouths of an ever-eager and compliant public, always ready to eat whatever is served to them.
That's why I don't just dislike these movies.
I reject them on principle.
I hate everything they stand for.
And I urge you to free yourself of their clutches.
I urge you to join me in saying to comic book movies, you are cancelled.
And my feet are officially numb now.
So I'm going to stop the show and go inside and warm up before I die of hypothermia right on camera, which would be, which would, speaking of content, would be interesting content.
That's going to do it for us 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 Wall 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 Vladovsky, the show is edited by Robbie Dantzler, our audio is mixed by Mike Coromina, hair and makeup is done by Cherokee Heart, and our production coordinator is McKenna Waters.
The Matt Wall Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2022.
John Bickley here, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief.
Wake up every morning with our new show, Morning Wire.
On today's episode, the Chicago Teachers Union votes to shut down in-person classes, Mayo Clinic fires 700 employees over its vaccine mandate, and new studies find that fewer Americans identify as religious.
