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Jan. 18, 2022 - The Matt Walsh Show
58:00
Ep. 875 - A Generation Of Psychological Abuse Victims

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, we’re told that there is a “mental illness epidemic” among kids which can be attributed to the pandemic. But this is a lie, and a very nefarious one, and I’ll explain why. Also, the Supreme Court killed the vaccine mandate but some companies are enforcing them anyway. How should we respond? And a clip of Biden says that George Floyd’s death had a greater impact on the world than Martin Luther King’s death. He’s right, but not for the reason he thinks. Plus, a woman drives her car into a river by accident and then takes a selfie while the vehicle sinks below the surface. It is an image that perfectly encapsulates modern western culture.  I am now a self-acclaimed beloved children’s author. Reserve your copy of my new book here: https://utm.io/ud1Cb  Sign The Petition To Keep Matt Walsh on Saint Louis University Campus: https://bit.ly/3Dzeu1f DW members get special product discounts up to 20% off PLUS access to exclusive Daily Wire merch. Grab your Daily Wire merch here: https://utm.io/udZpp You petitioned, and we heard you. Made for Sweet Babies everywhere: get the official Sweet Baby Gang t-shirt here: https://utm.io/udIX3 Andrew Klavan's latest novel When Christmas Comes is now available on Amazon. Order in time for Christmas: https://utm.io/udW6u Subscribe to Morning Wire, Daily Wire’s new morning news podcast, and get the facts first on the news you need to know: https://utm.io/udyIF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on the Matt Wall Show, we're told that there is a mental illness epidemic among kids, which can be attributed to the pandemic.
But that's a lie, and a very nefarious one, and I'll explain why today.
Also, the Supreme Court killed the vaccine mandate, but some companies are enforcing the mandate anyway.
How should we respond to that as consumers?
And a clip of Biden Uh, saying that George Floyd's death had a greater impact on the world than Martin Luther King's death.
He's right, actually, but not for the reason he thinks.
Plus, a woman drives her car into a river by accident and then takes a selfie while the vehicle sinks below the surface.
It's an image that perfectly encapsulates modern Western culture.
We'll talk about that and much more today on The Matt Wall Show.
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The mayor of New York, Eric Adams, attended a Knicks game last night alongside 20,000 of his fellow fans, as is the case with almost all professional sporting events in the country.
Nobody was wearing a mask in the whole building.
This morning, though, every school-aged child in New York City and across the state wore masks in class, and in the bus on their way to class, and outside at recess or during gym.
Young children wore masks while they tried to learn how to read.
They wore masks to speech therapy.
They wore masks for hours at a time, like they do every day.
Millions of children around the country are, of course, in this position.
In some schools, they're forced to eat lunch outside, sitting on the cold ground and freezing temperatures.
For their health and safety, you'll understand.
They spent the previous year locked in their homes, attending school through a computer screen, and learned nothing in the process.
Many adults who run these school systems want to send them back to that, and maybe it doesn't matter.
It's hard to say that the current arrangement is much of an improvement anyway.
Children are, as we know, the least susceptible to COVID and have been from the start.
The current variant isn't a serious threat to almost anybody, except the most elderly, frail, or sick.
That's why adults don't worry very much about packing themselves into a stadium, 70,000 at a time, and spending hours together maskless.
And they shouldn't worry.
Yet their kids, far less vulnerable to the disease than themselves, have been wearing masks for so long that a lot of these kids don't even know what their friends' faces look like anymore.
Now, there have been many reports in recent weeks about the mental illness crisis among these kids.
A recent report in The Hill tells us that, quote, The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children's Hospital Association declared a national emergency for children's mental health in October, shortly after the back-to-school season.
But AACAP President Warren U. Key said that the situation has gotten worse since the declaration, with the scope being even larger than we imagined.
Children's hospitals recorded almost 38% more emergency department visits for mental health cases and nearly 54% more suicide and self-injury cases in the third quarter of 2021 compared to 2020, according to the Children's Hospital Association.
So that's what's happening.
What can we do about it?
Well, according to the article, quote, advocates and experts are calling for more support and recognition for both those struggling with mental illness and behavioral health professionals.
Now, NPR adds the caveat that, quote, the rise in children's mental health symptoms didn't start with this school year.
Recent studies show that the pandemic exacerbated an already growing crisis in youth mental health.
And there's an article on the American Psychological Association website warning us that, quote, after two full years of the COVID-19 pandemic, we're now faced with a situation where, quote, mental illness is at an all-time high.
Further, we're told, according to a survey, quote, 71% of parents said the pandemic had taken a toll on their child's mental health, and 69% said the pandemic was the worst thing to happen to their child.
A national survey of 3,300 high schoolers conducted in spring 2020 found close to a third of students felt unhappy and depressed, much more than usual.
That must be mental illness, right?
See, this seems to be the consensus, at least in the media and among healthcare professionals.
The pandemic has caused an epidemic of mental illness, especially among kids.
That's what we're told.
Or at least it has made worse an epidemic that was raging long before.
But both of these conclusions are wrong.
And wrong in very important ways.
First of all, the pandemic has not done any of this.
Okay?
It's not the pandemic's fault.
The pandemic itself has been quite mild for kids.
We can blame COVID for our children's mental health problem about as much as we can blame the flu for our children's mental health problems.
It's not the virus that has created these issues.
It's our response to the virus.
It's what the adults have done in response to it.
You know, if a boy is locked in a closet for three weeks because his paranoid, delusional mother wants to keep him safe from the invisible monsters in the house, we can't blame her son's physical state on the invisible monsters.
Whether the monsters exist or not, it's clear that the mother's actions are the immediate cause of the child's condition.
Now, you might say this analogy is not fair because a child is more likely to be killed by COVID than by invisible monsters, and you're right.
But the statistical likelihood that any individual child should be killed or seriously hurt by COVID is so vanishingly small that, for most kids, the comparison hits very close to the mark.
The point is that kids are suffering at the hands of the adult authority figures in their lives.
You can blame COVID for plenty of things, but not this.
Second, this is not mental illness.
Okay?
Children who are depressed, or anxious, or stressed out, or angry, or some combination of all these things, are responding rationally and justifiably to the circumstances they have been put in.
It is perfectly natural for a child to be depressed if he's ripped out of his normal life, forced to walk around in a mask all day like some kind of contagious leopard, deprived of healthy forms of recreation, isolated, not even able to see his friends' faces or show his own.
Calling his depression mental illness is like starving him for a month and then accusing him of having an eating disorder.
What else is he going to do but starve if you won't feed him?
What else is he going to do but plunge into despair if you've removed all sources of hope and joy from his life?
Kids are being psychologically abused.
Okay?
They're being fed a steady diet of fear and paranoia.
They're being conditioned to treat fresh air like it's toxic.
So if you notice changes to a child's emotional and mental state amid all of this, it's not because they have a mental illness or a brain disease.
It's because they're humans.
And this is how humans respond when they're subjected to this kind of torture.
If anything, we should be concerned about the children who are unfazed by the circumstances.
We should be more worried about the kids who are not depressed.
I mean, it's terrible to think of the child who cries as he's physically abused by his alcoholic father.
It's even worse to think of the child who does not cry because he's gotten used to the treatment.
The abuse has settled into his psyche, deep down.
He thinks he deserves it.
So the parents who brag that their children handle, you know, isolation and masking without complaint, oh, my kids are doing just fine!
They're really bragging that their children have been broken.
Their spirits have been so thoroughly crushed that they can't conceive of a better life, and therefore don't desire one.
The health professionals, so-called, who clamor about a mental illness scourge among kids, they're the same ones who support and advocate for the policies that are causing the problem.
And so the mental illness label is a cover for them.
They're hiding behind it so that they're not held accountable.
You know, they throw up their hands and say, I don't know what's going on.
There's just a lot of mental illness going around, apparently.
That's not ill.
What's ill or irrational or diseased about being extremely upset and stressed out when your life is destroyed as a child?
What this means is that the totally justified and well-warranted despair, stress, and anxiety felt by these kids will be treated as the problem itself.
The kids will be counseled and then drugged, And then sent right back into the same soul-killing environment.
It's like prescribing someone diet pills and then handing them a McDonald's coupon on the way out the door.
So you're chopping away at the branches while watering the roots.
You're causing the problem that you're pretending to solve.
And the kids are left with the mess that you make.
As always.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
[MUSIC]
So our top headline today, the most important news of the week, month,
year, possibly decade, is that I'm going to be on Dr. Phil.
I was already on the show, actually.
We recorded the episode.
It hasn't aired yet.
It's going to air tomorrow.
I don't know what time, whatever time they air.
And tomorrow, Wednesday, is when it's going to air.
They dropped a brief little promo for the episode yesterday.
I think this gives you a good taste.
I don't identify exclusively with being a man or a woman.
I use they and them as my pronouns.
You don't get your own pronouns.
I don't identify exclusively with being a man or a woman.
I use they and them as my pronouns.
You don't get your own pronouns.
You think it's a delusion.
In school, our kids are being asked what their pronoun is.
This is a war on gender.
Babies are babies without a known sex.
When they were born, we did not assign a sex.
You think it's toxic to label the child one way or the other.
Now, you know, there's always a risk when you go on a show like this and it's pre-recorded.
Because it's live, that's one thing, it's out there, everybody sees it.
With pre-recorded, you're kind of at the mercy, especially when you sign all the release forms
and everything and basically if you read the pages, and nobody ever does, they're telling
you that we could chop this up in a million different ways and do what we want with it,
and you can't do anything about it.
So there's a certain risk involved.
It's calculated risk.
I'm not too worried about it.
I think that, I think the editing will be fair.
And I also think it's worth, because I've, you know, I put this, I posted this promo yesterday and most people are saying they're excited to watch the episode.
I have gotten some people messaging me and saying, well, you know, why would you go on a network like this?
Why would you be a part of this in the first place?
I think it's more than worth it.
To go into the lion's den, that's what we have to be willing to do.
You know, it's these kinds of conversations, the way that everything is sort of segregated right now, is that when it comes to something like gender, you know, if you're watching network TV, you're going to see one perspective on it, without it really being challenged, And if you want to get the other perspective, which is the truth, the rational sane perspective, you got to go seek it out by going to the Daily Wire or, well, the Daily Wire and maybe a couple other outlets can give you that.
But you got to go find it.
And then everything's in its own little corner.
The problem is that the left corner, well, it's not really a corner.
They have the entire house.
And then as it stands right now on the right, we have the corners.
And so we stay in our little corner and we don't venture outside of that much of the time.
That's a problem.
If you want to reach people who are not going to seek you out in your corner, then you have to go and find them and actually challenge these ideas.
So that's what I tried to do.
And, you know, sitting across from the bearded man in the dress and that sort of thing, It was a lively conversation, I'll put it that way.
Alright, so the Supreme Court killed the private employer of acts mandate as we talked about on Friday, but that doesn't mean that there are no more private employer of acts mandates, because now some employers are choosing to keep them anyway, even though they have no excuse to, no reason to.
They have no reason to because they're not being forced to do it.
Also because there's no, as we've discussed, there's no rational scientific basis for it when we know that vaxxed and unvaxxed alike spread the virus.
So there's just no, there's nothing to grab onto here in terms of a reason for a vax mandate.
You have no foundation for it.
But employers are doing it anyway.
And Elijah Schaffer, a great podcast host over at The Blaze, has this screenshot, reportedly from an email from Carhartt to their employees.
And this is what it says.
It's gone viral today.
It says, Carhartt Associates, many of you have asked how the recent Supreme Court decision on the OSHA mandate for large employers will impact our associates, so we want to provide some clarity.
The ruling does not change Carhartt's mandatory vaccination program, which went into effect on January 4th.
As you know, we have extended the vaccination deadline for both RCV and Madisonville Associates to February 15th.
This date also remains in effect.
We put workplace safety at the very top of our priority list, and the Supreme Court's recent ruling doesn't impact that core value.
We in the medical community continue to believe vaccines are necessary to ensure a safe working environment for every Associate, and even perhaps their households.
Which doesn't make any sense at all, of course.
So Carhartt, they're still going to have their vaccine mandate.
Here's what I'll say about this.
I think these companies need to be held accountable for this.
But who holds them accountable?
Well, the consumers need to do it.
So I put the onus on us, primarily as consumers.
On myself.
I have been a Carhartt customer in the past.
As an avid fan of Bass Pro Shops, you know, you go there and you're gonna find plenty of Carhartt.
That's where I put the onus.
So I think that, and I do that much more than I put the onus on the employees, and this is an important point.
Because I think sometimes we're a little bit too blithe and casual about just declaring that employees should quit under these circumstances.
I hear that a lot.
I hear that in conservative media, for example.
Well, you should just quit.
That's really easy to say.
It's easy for me to say.
We don't have a vaccine mandate here.
Our employer is one of the ones that went to the Supreme Court to fight this.
So I don't have to worry about it.
I'm getting a paycheck, and I'm feeding my kids, and I'm bringing the bacon home to my family.
So I'm good.
So it's really easy for me to sit here and say, well, you should quit your job.
You out there watching this right now, just quit right now.
Today.
Go home and explain it to your wife later.
You'll be fine.
Now, if you can quit your job, then great.
If you can and you decide to quit your job in protest of something like this, to stand up for your rights, then I think that's fantastic.
I admire that.
But I know that I'm a father.
I have a family.
And that's my first responsibility.
And I put that responsibility over everything and everyone.
Really, I mean over conservatism, over liberty, over my country.
I'll choose my family over my country.
I'll choose it over literally everything and everyone except God himself.
Those are my values.
And what that means is that if I'm in this position, if I was put in the same position, let's say someone that Carhart's in, I'm not going to leave my job in a huff all at once and make my children go hungry.
That might be what you want me to do, for your own sake, but it's not what I'm gonna do.
Because I have my family, and I care about them more than I care about you.
And I care about them more than I care about your values.
So, what I would need to do if I was in this position, and I wanted to leave, and I would want to leave, but I would need to secure another job first.
And that takes time.
It's not something that I can afford to do, just leaving the job all at once, going out in a blaze of glory to prove a point.
That's not fair to my kids.
Okay, so I can go home feeling good, and I can say to my kids, well, I took a stand today.
Well, that's great, Dad, but how are we going to eat tonight?
That's my first responsibility, is to make sure my kids are eating.
Not to make a point about vaccine mandates.
Not that the point isn't important, but it's not as important as my duty as a father.
So, does that mean that we should just lay down?
Am I advocating that?
Not at all.
I'm putting the onus on the consumer.
Because as consumers, we could crush this.
We have that ability, much more than the employees do.
Because the other thing is, as an employee, you quit.
Again, I admired if you decide to do that, but if you do, they're going to replace you.
They're going to find someone who will cooperate with the vaccine mandate, and they'll just replace you, and that's it.
And continue doing what they want to do.
You can't replace consumers, though.
Or at least they're a lot harder to replace.
So, as consumers, if we say to Carhartt, you know, rather than pointing to the employees who have families to feed and saying, you all should quit.
Nah, just quit.
How about we make the decision not to buy Carhartt?
Until they reverse this tyrannical, senseless, irrational, immoral mandate.
Because here's the great thing.
We have nothing at stake.
We don't sacrifice anything.
I mean, literally nothing.
You sacrifice Carhartt.
Okay, just buy a jacket from a different company.
You're not going to freeze to death.
You'll find some company that doesn't have a vaccine where you can buy a jacket.
Plus, you probably already have 15 of them in your closet anyway.
So, we could do that, but here's what we do as consumers.
You know, we sit back and say, eh, all of you should quit.
And then we continue to patronize these same companies.
We could bring these companies to their knees by using the power we have as consumers, and it costs us nothing to do.
So think about the sacrifice of leaving your job when you have a family to feed Versus the sacrifice of just not buying crap from one company and buying it from another instead.
Who's making the greater sacrifice?
Who should we be pointing to and expecting them to, you know, expecting more from?
That's what gets me.
Especially a company like Carhartt.
I would guess the majority of their employees are going to be more of the conservative, blue-collar sort of persuasion.
Okay, there's not a lot of prissy leftists in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Manhattan walking around in Carhartt.
So, we could put an end to this.
We could.
If we choose not to, then that's our fault.
Don't blame the employees for that.
All right, yesterday was MLK Day.
Lots of Democrats, of course, using MLK to promote their agenda.
But this clip from Biden, which actually is from like a year ago, went viral again, as people were kind of reminiscing about it.
And Biden is criticized for saying what he says.
It's a brief clip.
He's criticized for this.
A lot of people on the right, of course, criticizing him.
But I actually agree with him.
Let's play the clip.
But even Dr. King's assassination did not have the worldwide impact That George Floyd's death did.
Okay, so there you go.
Martin Luther King's death did not have the worldwide impact that George Floyd's death had.
And like I said, a lot of people on the right are very upset about this and upset anew and criticizing him, saying this is a horrible thing to say.
He's actually 100% right.
Now, if you look at the full context and the point he's trying to make about it, he's not right.
Because he's not just saying that the death had a greater impact, he's also justifying it.
He thinks that it ought to have had a better impact, a greater impact.
And when it comes to the ought to, he's obviously wrong about that.
But as an observation, he's 100% right, like undeniably, that George Floyd's death had a greater immediate global impact than MLK's death.
Now, MLK is alive.
Of course, had a much greater impact than George Floyd's life did.
George Floyd's life had no impact on society except a negative one.
Had a bad impact for his community that he victimized, for the woman that he robbed at gunpoint when he forced his way into her house.
I mean, it had a bad impact for them.
But beyond that, it had no impact at all.
I mean, his life was inconsequential.
He was a violent scumbag criminal.
And that's how I'll always describe anyone who forces their way into a woman's house and points a gun at them.
They're all scumbags, right?
So, life is one thing.
Life had a great impact.
But death?
Absolutely, George Floyd's death had a greater impact.
And that only speaks to how insane the reaction to George Floyd's death was.
In fact, it would be hard to think of... If you were to make a list Of all of the prominent people who've died over the last century, and we're gonna rank the deaths that had the greatest impact, George Floyd is in the top three, probably.
I mean, you probably got JFK, and then I think George Floyd's probably number two.
And you might even be able to make an argument for putting him at number one.
When you consider just the way that the meltdown, I mean, the literal meltdown that occurred across society.
And the way that things were reshuffled and flipped on their heads.
Everything's upside down and backwards because George Floyd died.
Let's start with the fact that dozens of cities across the country were in flames for months.
And we're still dealing with the effects of that.
I mean, a total breakdown of law and order.
We'll start with that.
So the impact was negative from his death.
It was completely maniacal and irrational and insane.
But did it have a greater impact?
Yeah.
In fact, I think what the point he makes there, that's the point that we should be making as conservatives.
We shouldn't be disagreeing with that.
We should be pointing that out.
Because of how crazy, it only illustrates how crazy the reaction was.
All right.
Let's see, what else do we got here?
The Michigan Democratic Party put this out on Facebook.
Do we have this here?
Okay, so they put this on Facebook, and it said, not sure where this parents should control what is taught in schools because they are our kids is originating, but parents do have the option to choose to send their kids to a hand-selected private school at their own expense if this is what they desire.
The purpose of a public education in a public school is not to teach kids only what parents want them to be taught, it's to teach them what society needs them to know.
The client of the public school is not the parent, but the entire community.
The public.
Now, the Michigan Democratic Party, they put that up because these people never learn.
I mean, we're going into midterm elections, and the Democrat Party was eviscerated in Virginia because of this kind of thing, and these idiots never learn, which is great that they never learn.
I mean, I'm happy that they don't learn.
I hope that this is their motto going forward into the midterms.
I would love to see that.
Because it guarantees that every election where this is what they do, they're going to lose.
Um, but the Michigan Democratic Party, they actually took that down and, uh, and issued a very rare apology from anybody on the left saying, Oh no, no, no.
We, we believe in parental rights.
Of course we do, but, but they don't.
And you know, this, this right there, that, Is a reflection of what they actually think, even if they apologize for it after the fact because of the reaction to it.
Of course, if it had not been for that reaction, they would have just kept it up.
We know that.
It's also, of course, not at all true.
They say the purpose of public education in the public school is to teach them what society needs them to know, as if society is kind of like this monolith, this organism, declaring what kids need to know.
But it's not society, no.
It is, very specifically, the government.
This is why I always try, you know, we say public school because everybody knows what you mean, but really we should be using words like government school, state-run school.
The left, they're very smart about the use of language.
They do this very effectively.
The only difference is that for them, when they're adjusting the way that they use language, they're doing it in a dishonest way because they want to mislead you.
Here, this is about, we should be adjusting our language in order to make the meaning more clear.
In order to be more honest about what we're referring to.
Which is why this is something I think we should all do from now on.
Just stop saying public school.
Stop saying it.
That's not really what it is.
Public schools, because it's not about the public, generally speaking, doesn't run the schools.
And the schools, in fact, do not reflect what the public wants the kids to know.
Even if it did, by the way, that wouldn't matter to me as a parent.
I mean, I don't give a damn what the public wants my kids to know, or what the public needs my kids to know.
I don't care what society... Even if I could know what society thinks or wants my kids to be taught, it doesn't make a difference to me.
I mean, I'll tell society to piss off the way that I'll tell the government.
But as it stands, no, these are not society schools.
These are government schools.
So let's call them that.
Let's just... We can all pledge from this moment forward.
Stop saying public school.
Government school, state-run school.
That's what they are.
And so it reflects what the government wants your kids to know.
That's a really important point that we should always emphasize.
This is from Axios.
It says, Donald Trump is trashing Ron DeSantis in private as an ingrate with a dull personality and no realistic chance of beating him in a potential 2024 showdown, according to sources who've recently talked to the former president about the Florida governor.
And then that's pretty much all the information.
The article goes on for a while, but that's pretty much the entire report.
Now, of course, there's always a grain of salt when you hear anonymous sources and everything like that from the corporate media in general, but especially in reference to President Trump.
In this case, I mean, there's nothing about it that raises a red flag for me that makes me think it's not true.
I'm not going to sit here and say, oh, Donald Trump would never say that about a potential opponent.
The Donald Trump I know would never insult a potential political opponent.
Um, that doesn't surprise me.
I tend to believe it.
And Trump has already started a little bit gingerly by his standards.
Anyway, he's never, you know, he could ever be too delicate when it comes to criticism, but he has started relatively delicately diplomatically, um, to kind of criticize Ron DeSantis without, without naming names.
Just a couple of days ago, he was doing another interview where he started criticizing Republicans who haven't publicized their vaccine status, which is a total leftist talking point, by the way.
That is a leftist talking point that you have a responsibility for some reason to tell people what your vaccine status is, whether you've been vaccinated or not.
But we don't need to rely on anonymous sources to tell us that Trump said that.
He's on tape saying it multiple times.
He's been saying this frequently in recent weeks.
And he even said that it's cowardly.
It's cowardly for Republicans if they don't announce and advertise whether they've been vaccinated or not.
That would appear to me to be pretty clearly a thinly veiled attack on Ron DeSantis.
It's also, again, Off base, not true, and a leftist talking point.
It's none of your damn business.
It's nobody's business whether Ron DeSantis has been vaccinated.
Nobody's business whether you've been vaccinated, whether I've been vaccinated.
It's none of your business.
You don't owe that to anybody.
You don't owe your medical records.
So I think we're going to see this.
It's going to be more explicit in the months ahead.
I mean, I would give it like a month, maybe.
Before Donald Trump is naming names and coming after Ron DeSantis.
Coming after him hard.
Because that's how Trump operates.
He doesn't know how to do it any other way.
And this is my fear.
I believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that Ron DeSantis would be a much more formidable general election opponent for the Democrats, and also a better president.
And he's proven that with the way that he governs.
And let's start with the fact that Ron DeSantis did not hand his state over to the COVID cartel.
Donald Trump did that with the country.
He handed the country over to Fauci.
You make all the excuses you want.
Oh, he learned his lesson.
He's still learning.
He's a 78-year-old man.
Don't tell me we've got to elect him again because he learned his lesson.
You know, he tried.
He'll do better next time.
That's not good enough.
The country is at stake.
All I know is that with two potential candidates, we've got one who handed his government over to the COVID cartel, and one who didn't.
I'm gonna take the guy who didn't.
I'm not gonna take the guy who did, hoping that he doesn't do it again.
So, I think Ron DeSantis would make a better president and a better general election opponent, but I don't see him winning primaries.
And one of the reasons is that Donald Trump will try to destroy this man, not just Say, oh, I disagree with some of his views, or I think I'd be, but, you know, I really respect Ron DeSantis.
He's a great guy, great governor, everything, but, uh, but, uh, you know, I, I, I think I, I, I think you should elect me for this and that reason.
Now, if that's the way that Trump approached it, then it's not the end of the world.
I mean, Trump wins and then we could still have Ron, Ron DeSantis will survive to fight again.
And maybe he's the president in 2028.
But Trump doesn't do that.
He's going to try to rip you to shreds and destroy you forever.
Which, by the way, is a nice approach when you're going after your actual enemies.
But he does this with allies.
He does this with people who are important to the cause.
And so that's my fear.
That this will happen with Ron DeSantis.
He'll just be ripped apart and it'll be the early extinction of his political career, at least on a national scale.
All right, let's play this quickly before we get to the comments.
A moment of awakening on TikTok.
We play a lot of confusion, a lot of delusion on TikTok, and we play that for you.
But here, this video went viral of somebody just beginning to realize how screwed they really are.
A red pill moment, as the kids would say.
Let's listen.
No, I seriously think about this every single day, and I'm sorry if I sound stupid.
If somebody has $500 and they've already paid taxes on it, and they give it to me, so now just because it goes from them to me, I also have to pay taxes on it.
Even though they just did.
And then not only that, but anytime I spend one of those $500, I'm going to also pay another tax fee on whatever item I'm buying.
And then whoever I bought the item from will have to pay taxes on the money they just earned from what I bought.
So like, if a... So every single dollar...
If a dollar is 100 cents, hold on.
Just forget it.
No, don't forget it.
You're almost there.
You're almost there.
You're putting it together.
She's on the precipice.
And then she got confused and said, never mind.
But I know it's scary.
It's scary to think about.
The fact that every dollar is taxed down to about like 30 cents probably.
But that's true.
Every dollar you make is taxed 50 different ways.
Everything you do, every time you turn on a light, it's taxed.
Every time you drive your car, it's taxed.
When you go to the grocery store, it's taxed.
When you're taxed on the way to the grocery store, when you're using gasoline in your car, everything you buy at the grocery store is taxed.
Think about your average day, or just the process of You know, running errands or something, and how many times you're taxed.
You get up in the morning, you turn on the lights, you're taxed.
You go take a shower, you run in the water, you're taxed.
You go eat breakfast on all the stuff that you're taxed on.
All the food is, you're taxed on.
Then you walk outside, you get in your car, you go to the gas station, tax, tax, tax, tax.
You go to the store, you're taxed on all that.
You go to your job, And every dollar that you earn is taxed.
In fact, the government is going to take the money, is going to dip their hands into your paycheck, and take what they want before you even see your paycheck.
So the government will come in and they'll take their bit, and then they'll give you the leftovers.
So you don't even get a paycheck, you get the leftovers after the government has taken it.
And sometimes they'll take more than they're owed, and they'll just hold on to it with no interest, and they'll give it back to you at the end of the year and say, oh, sorry, we took too much.
No interest on that.
Of course, though, if you owe us money, and you don't give it to us on time, you're going to owe interest.
But if we owe you money, and we don't give it to you on time, then we don't pay any interest.
And most people will get their tax refund at the end of the year, and they'll celebrate.
Oh, free money!
Yay!
I'll go buy a TV!
That's your money, you ignoramus.
This is not something to be happy about.
That could have been... You could have invested that.
Even if you put it in a savings account, it's going to earn more interest than you get from the government.
Put it under a mattress, you'd be better off.
So that's right.
And then you consider that the founding fathers You know, we don't want to go with the old elementary school version of the Revolutionary War and simplify it too much.
There were many factors playing into it, but they were certainly, we could say at the very least, one of the leading factors was a tax on tea.
That's one of the things that helped propel us towards the Revolutionary War and the formation of this country.
So our founding fathers, they didn't even want to pay a tax on tea.
I mean, we pay taxes on tea these days, and like literally everything else.
And I think that's one of the ultimate red pills, to realize that.
You go from there?
Well, that's the question.
Let's get to the comment section.
[MUSIC]
So we did unveil a brilliant, innovative new portion of the show yesterday,
where we are going to accept video comments, as well as just your standard, boring written comments.
You go to dailywire.com slash sweetbabycomments and submit your video comments.
We got a couple just to get us started and let's watch them.
Hey Matt, so one time in college they gave us an example of voter suppression and it was a news story of a 95 year old black lady in a wheelchair who couldn't find a ride to the voting booths and that was apparently an example of racial suppression so uh even at the time as a highly indoctrinated liberal i was like what so that's the only example they ever gave me and so there's one for you
Okay, there's one.
I mean, that reminds me of the other week when I went, I wanted to order Chinese food on Uber Eats, but the Chinese place that I wanted to order from, I was outside of the delivery area.
And that was a case of meal suppression.
I was being starved, in fact.
It was a violation of the Geneva Convention, actually.
It's a human rights violation.
Because if I cannot conveniently be given the food that I want, then, in effect, I'm being starved to death.
And that's what happens when you equate inconvenience with a violation of rights.
So you can't get a ride somewhere, that's an inconvenience.
No one's taking your rights away.
And by the way, do you know who's responsible?
It's not the government's responsibility to make sure that everybody has a ride to the voting booth on election day.
That's not the government's responsibility.
Okay, you know whose responsibility that is?
Well, if a 95-year-old woman, I'm certainly not going to say that it's her responsibility to get into a car and drive.
I am fully in support of 95-year-old women not driving.
But that's your family.
Your family should be doing that.
That's what we have families for.
It's not the government's job.
And we got one more.
Let's watch this.
I think we should all be obliged to say SBG for Life or Sweet Baby Gang for Life at the end of every video comment.
I think if we don't, we should be banned.
SBG for Life.
I like your idea.
It's good to get these ideas out, kind of brainstorming.
But I would also say that, you know, that's a good way to end the video, but you want to begin, and this is, I think, a policy I'm going to put in place.
Begin your video comment by stating your pronouns.
So I made an exception on the first day, but no more after that, because you know, you know me, this is a progressive show, and I need to know how to address all the commenters.
All right, this is from Tie My Shoe, as we go to the boring written comments.
Yuck.
Says, Matt, since every American making minimum wage is rich by world standards, does that mean we're all doomed from the perspective of Matthew 19, 24?
Also, does it reflect insanely bad on a pastor that's wealthy even if his wealth is only from his books?
Even if he's generous?
Yeah, I think the fact that we're all rich by historical standards.
I mean, most of us are.
We have wealth beyond the wildest imagination of almost everyone that's lived on Earth up until now.
And I think that that means that we should certainly all be a lot more generous than we are.
Because almost all of us have excess wealth.
And a lot of it, in fact.
And I think there are many people that would hear that and they would say, what are you talking about?
I don't have excess wealth.
Speak for yourself.
Well, when you consider how much money you waste, how much money we all waste and are able to waste and still survive, that speaks to excess wealth.
And we should be generous with that a lot more than probably all of us are.
We could all stand to be more generous.
And I think the thing that we do Because we kind of rationalize and we say, well, you know, I want to, I want to start giving more to charity.
I want to start being more generous, more charitable.
Uh, there are all these causes out there that I want to contribute to, but, uh, I'll start doing that when I, and then you set this kind of goalposts for yourself.
You say, well, when I get to this point financially, then I'll do that.
And then you, and then you, you get to that point and you say, oh yeah, I really don't have it in the budget.
So once I get to this point, because as you're, as you make more money, you end up with more expenses.
And you end up developing more expensive tastes as well.
You sort of expect more luxury and comfort in your life, and so you end up spending all of that excess and not giving it away.
So I would agree with you there.
And as far as pastors who are obscenely wealthy, does it reflect poorly on them?
Yeah, of course it does.
Being a pastor is not supposed to be a position that makes you rich.
There's just, if you're looking for a justification in the gospel for pastors becoming rich from their preaching, and writing books also is preaching, so you're not going to find it.
History and headlines says, what should be criminalized but currently isn't?
Well, that's a question I've got to start with at the beginning of the show, because I could spend the entire show on it.
I mean, what should be criminalized that isn't?
My list is a mile long.
Of course, leaving your shopping cart in the parking lot, obviously.
Chewing with your mouth open.
Calling a meeting when you could just send an email, or making a phone call when you could have just sent a text message.
That should all be criminalized.
Small talk, obviously.
Bumper stickers.
All bumper stickers.
They're all annoying and should be prohibited.
We don't sell bumper stickers, do we, in our store?
If we do, then all bumper stickers except for those should be criminalized.
So that's just a very brief list.
David says, Matt, what was your reaction to Elon Musk name-dropping you?
I have no idea what you're talking about, but if anyone could fill in the blanks on that, I'd be interested to know.
Jonathan Swank says, sorry Matt, but my soul is the one thing I will not sell you.
Well, then you're not a committed enough member of the Sweet Baby Gang.
You gotta choose, your soul or the Sweet Baby Gang, okay?
Or your band.
Tipbia says, Matt, stay-at-home moms don't pay federal income tax, so your own wife wouldn't qualify to vote under your proposed rules for voting.
Shouldn't conservatives be encouraging mothers to stay home with their children instead of penalizing them for it?
That's why I said households.
Tax-paying households, not individuals.
I think you can make an argument.
My proposal all along is let's start with the very brief 10 question civics quiz before voting.
If we could put that in place, then I'll be happy for now.
I mean, that would be a great improvement already.
But in an ideal scenario, yeah, I think you could start looking at only taxpaying households.
Though some might argue that each household only has one vote decided by the incomer.
Some might argue for that.
I'm not saying I argue for it.
I'm saying some do.
Okay?
That's all.
I'm very excited to announce the release of the final trailer for our first original production, Shut In, a seat-gripping thriller that'll be available to stream in early February.
The film follows the story of a young mother who is barricaded inside a closet by her violent ex-husband, and as she's trapped inside, she uses nothing but her voice to guide her children on the other side of the walls to safety, all while the threat of her dangerous ex looms.
Pretty exciting stuff.
Here's the clip.
[MUSIC]
Your daughter, she's very pretty.
[MUSIC]
You're scared.
Well, go to shutinfilm.com to watch the full trailer and get ready for the film's release on February 10th.
The film is exclusive to The Daily Wire, so if you're planning on adding this to your queue and want us to keep making content to combat the over-politicized mainstream entertainment streaming on major platforms, head to dailywire.com slash subscribe to become a member today.
Well, the Daily Wire was one of the first in the nation to file suit against the Biden administration's tyrannical vaccine mandates.
And our case made it to the Supreme Court, who ultimately sided with us and blocked the mandates.
You can tune in tonight to catch an all-new episode of Backstage, where we discuss the outcome of the Supreme Court ruling and so much more.
Join me, Ben Shapiro, Jeremy Boring, Michael Knowles, and Andrew Klavan tonight at 7 o'clock p.m.
Eastern, 6 p.m.
Central on dailywire.com and on our YouTube channel, Daily Wire.
Now, let's get to our daily cancellation.
Our cancellation begins with a woman in Canada who found herself stranded in the middle of a frozen river, standing on top of her car as it sunk into the depths below.
Nobody quite knows why she was driving on the river in the first place.
Many jokes about female drivers might be made here, but I condemn those crass and sexist attempts at humor.
Just because one woman drives on a frozen river, that doesn't mean that all women are bad drivers.
Every woman in the world has earned that distinction through her own efforts.
Besides, we don't actually know if this is a woman based on that picture.
It's not totally clear.
We can only assume she's a woman because, you know, her car's in the river.
In any case, as a picture taken of the scene shows, the unnamed woman, as she stood on the hood of her sinking car, did have the presence of mind to take a selfie.
Hashtag oops.
Hashtag thin ice.
If the photo of six marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima captures and defines the greatest generation, then I think this photo of a woman smiling for the camera while her car sinks into the ice captures and defines ours.
If I had to explain modern Western culture to someone who, to an alien who just visited from Mars, and I only had one picture to do it, it would probably be this one.
So the point is, she's not anomalous.
Her first instinct, even in a moment when her very life is in danger, was to document the event with her face front and center, so that if she manages to survive, she can at least cash in for a few dozen likes and shares.
A risk well worth taking, I guess.
And this is where the selfie obsession ultimately leads.
And that's why today, I'm canceling not just this woman.
I mean, she's done a pretty good job of canceling herself, but all selfies.
In fact, to paraphrase Donald Trump, I am calling for a moratorium on selfies until we figure out what the hell is going on.
Now, it's hard for those in the younger generations to believe, but there was a time before selfies.
There was a time before people carried cameras around in their pockets everywhere they went.
You know, that was a time when, like, you had cameras, but you would have to specifically bring it because you thought you might need it.
And back in those ancient times, if you had an experience or an event occurred, or you witnessed something notable, usually your choice most of the time was to simply experience it in the moment, to store it in your memory inside an organ called your brain.
And if you wanted someone else to know about this event or occurrence, you would be forced to simply tell them about it using actual words, if you can believe it.
And all of this changed with the advent of the cell phone.
Before the selfie craze took hold, there was the documentation craze.
Every semi-notable and entirely unnotable event had to be freeze-framed and shared.
All of modern civilization began to experience their lives through these little lenses so that they could look back and remember that time when they were only sort of there to see it in real life.
We were in this period, the documentation era, before it had fully transitioned to the selfie era, when my wife and I went on our honeymoon to Jamaica aboard a cruise ship.
And I remember one evening on the ship, leaving Jamaica, standing on the deck, watching the sunset over the ocean with the island, you know, in the distance.
And I recall the breeze and the sound of the water crashing against the hull and the smell of the ocean and the pizza buffet.
The sweaty, obese, sun-lotioned bodies all around, wafting through the air.
I remember the cocktail in my hand and the dread of realizing that I'd be getting a bill for all these drinks once we got back to Miami and that all of our wedding money would go to pay for the drinks.
It was a moment of many different layers, like all moments, but I lived every layer.
I lived that moment because there may never be another like it.
I wanted to be in it.
I wanted to be present for it.
But all around us, the throngs of the other passengers all stood watching the sunset, but watching it through their camera.
Hoping to get the picturesque shot of the sun sinking below the horizon.
It was a moment as big as the ocean itself, but these people all experienced it through a two-inch screen.
And for what?
Why?
To get a picture of a sunset?
There are a million of those online.
Google image search, ocean sunset.
Look at all the pictures.
Nobody cares.
Nobody cares about a picture of a sunset.
Pictures of sunsets are a dime a dozen, worthless.
Actual sunsets, those are priceless.
But these people sacrificed the actual sunset In order to get a copy of a fake one.
And for what, I ask?
For likes?
For the sake of making your friends jealous?
Well, they'll be jealous for a second, but then they'll move on because they don't care that much.
Nobody cares.
So put your camera away and be here.
Just be with us now.
There's only one now.
This is all you get.
Don't you people understand?
I wanted to scream that, but I didn't.
I just ranted to my wife later, and she went to sleep thinking, God help me, I'm married to a crazy person.
Which is the same thing she's thought before going to bed probably every night since for the past ten years.
But it's only gotten worse since then.
The world I mean, not my marriage.
Of course, we still obsessively document everything, but our egomania, unchecked and encouraged, has begun to consume the world around us.
Because now we're mostly interested in documenting ourselves, our faces, our bodies, us.
We take a thousand pictures a day, and 999 of them are of us.
We experience life with our back turned to it.
Think about that.
We turn our back to the world so we can capture the sunset, or the mountains, or the tiger at the zoo, or our car sinking into the ice, complemented by our smiling mugs.
These things aren't significant enough on their own, apparently.
It's not enough to simply document them.
No, we need them documented with ourselves at the forefront.
It's bad enough to live each moment through a small screen.
It's even worse to live it through a screen turned into a mirror where the event becomes mere background for our facial expressions.
So there are two categories of selfies.
One is one that you take when there's nothing special going on.
You're sitting in a Starbucks and suddenly beset by the narcissistic impulse to capture another image of yourself to add to a catalog that now numbers in the tens of thousands.
In that case, the picture is useless.
I mean, why do you need to capture the moment?
Are you really going to go back and reminisce about the, you know, the Tuesday afternoon when you drank a latte at a Starbucks in Cincinnati?
The other category of selfie is the one taken when there is something special happening, some event worth noting, some sight worth seeing, in which case you're ruining the picture by including your ugly face in it.
Imagine the narcissism it requires to make a, you know, you're on, you're a tourist or something, and you make the Grand Canyon into the mere backdrop for another picture of your stupid head.
Many people have fallen to their deaths at canyons, cliffs, volcanoes, because they were so focused on framing themselves in a picture, they forgot about the existence of gravity.
They died to take a picture that nobody cares to even see.
This is what people need to understand.
Nobody cares to see your selfies.
Nobody.
You can take pictures of your face all day long.
Nobody cares.
Nobody wants to see it.
I know you want them to want to.
You want everyone to care because you're you, and that's your face, and the very you-ness of you ought to be of great concern to everybody in the universe, but it's not.
You have people in your life who care about you and who know you and love you and want you to be happy, and they might even be interested in the things that happen in your life, but they especially don't care about your selfies because they know what you look like.
The rest of us are strangers, and your selfie is only another egoistic declaration amid a torrential downpour of them.
Another grinning mugshot in a never-ending collage of pointless self-portraits.
It's meaningless to us, and it's meaningless to you.
I think the world would be a better place if we all stopped taking pictures of ourselves.
Because then we'd be living, at least.
If we pulled the cameras away from our faces, and the phones, we'd be able to find meaning in things.
A meaning that extends quite a bit beyond, hey, this will get a bunch of comments on Instagram.
We've all had the experience of, like, sitting next to a booth full of women at a restaurant, Who spend no less than half an hour, sometimes longer, taking pictures of themselves and each other.
Precious time with friends wasted by a compulsive need to get extensive footage of the encounter.
Capturing memories of the time when they spent the whole time capturing memories.
It's a tragedy.
It's also really annoying.
And that, ultimately, is why today, this woman, but also all selfies, are cancelled.
And we'll leave it there for today.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
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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.
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On today's episode, the FBI reveals new information on the synagogue hostage situation, more fallout from Novak Djokovic's fight with Australia, and now-convicted Ghislaine Maxwell says she'll no longer protect the identities of her customers.
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