Ep. 879 - Why The Modern Dating Scene Is A Toxic Wasteland
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, marriage rates in our country are plummeting to historic lows. This is partly due to the fact that the modern dating scene is a miserable, despair-inducing trainwreck. We’ll try to sift through the rubble today and figure out what has gone so wrong. Also, protesters across the world marched against vaccine mandates on Sunday. And more people on the center-left are finally coming out against draconian COVID policies. Is it too little too late, or should we welcome these converts with open arms? Plus, is war with Russia on the horizon? And in our daily cancellation, we’ll discuss the democratic lawmaker who tried to dunk on pro-lifers, only to have it backfire in hilarious fashion.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, marriage rates in our country are plummeting to historic lows.
This is partly due to the fact that the modern dating scene is a miserable, despair-inducing train wreck.
We'll try to sift through the rubble today and figure out what has gone so wrong exactly.
Also, protesters across the world marched against vaccine mandates on Sunday, and more people on the center-left are finally coming out against draconian COVID policies two years later.
Is it too little too late, or should we welcome these converts with open arms?
Plus, is war with Russia on the horizon?
And in our daily cancellation, we'll discuss the Democratic lawmaker who tried to dunk on pro-lifers only to have it backfire in hilarious fashion.
We'll talk about all that and more today on The Matt Wall Show.
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As a married man, you know, I look at the modern dating scene, like someone who ran out of a burning building seconds before it collapsed.
Somebody on Twitter recently said that married people these days must feel like they caught the last chopper out of Nam.
And perhaps that's the better analogy.
Whichever image you prefer.
The point is that I wake up every day grateful to be married, mostly because, you know, I love my wife and my family, but also because I simply could not be a single man in this environment.
I would have already become a monk or a hermit in the woods by now.
I don't say this to rub it in the faces of people in the audience who are single.
I say it more as encouragement, really, for any who are married.
Because even if you're struggling in your marriage, even if you and your spouse have hit hard times, consider that the alternative is to wander alone in this barren wasteland.
Realize that all you have is each other.
Out there it's dark and cold and you'll likely die shivering and alone.
So your marriage is your shelter.
Be grateful for it.
Stop screwing it up.
Do you really want to start over again in this environment?
Would you really prefer to be out there dating during the zombie apocalypse?
Again, I'm not trying to make single people feel bad.
It's more that I'm commiserating with you.
Now, many of the problems with modern dating and with modern culture in general, and dating in general, were highlighted by a recent viral phenomenon, which began on TikTok, as they often do, and then spread like herpes to other social media platforms, which is where I became aware of it.
From what I can tell, it began when a woman used her platform to vent her frustrations about a man that she'd recently met on a dating app called Hinge, which I didn't even know existed until I heard about this.
The man, Caleb, took her out on one date, And then never talk to her again.
Otherwise known as ghosting, as the kids call it now.
Other women on TikTok then chimed in with their own horror stories about the man who had quickly been dubbed West Elm Caleb, a moniker based on where he works.
And soon his name was trending nationwide.
He had been doxed all across the internet.
So here's just to give you an idea of what this is.
Here's a quick sample of one of the video testimonials.
And there are like hundreds like this.
But one of the video testimonials that you might find detailing the dastardly crimes of this Caleb character.
Here it is.
I matched with Caleb on Hinge and we started talking.
We talked for like two, three weeks maybe, like nothing serious.
I never met this man, like literally just texting, snapchatting, whatever.
Uh, same thing happened that everyone's talking about.
He was super weird, like, started getting very cryptic and concerning, and ghosted.
So, he ghosts me, we stop talking, I went my separate way, didn't think of this man, you know, was nothing really going on.
And then... Okay, so, I go on with my life, I'm minding my own business, until about a month ago, sometime during December, I see that I have an Instagram request, DM request, whatever.
And who could it be?
Who could it be?
It's him on his new Instagram account.
Not Caleb Hunter.
Okay.
Riveting.
Like I told you, I'm so glad I'm not dating anymore with people like this.
This is what you have to deal with?
And I'm talking about the woman, not even the guy.
Now, she went on in that video to post screenshots of the texts from Caleb, where he tries to get back into her good graces after ignoring her for a year.
She turns him down, and that's the end of it.
So far as I can tell, all of the videos are like this.
Caleb is guilty of being rude and tacky, and for that infraction, he apparently deserves to be doxed and publicly shamed by women who are all almost certainly at least as shallow and selfish as he is.
So there's a lot that can be said about the lack of proportionality when the internet mob sets its sights on someone, local news stories become global concerns, and stories that wouldn't even be fit to air on the local news or to be written on a note card and tacked to a bulletin board somewhere still turn into national affairs.
We could say plenty about that, but that's not what we're focused on today.
Dating is the issue.
And this story reveals its myriad pitfalls in our current climate.
The whole scene is one big pit that so many millions fall into and never manage to escape.
Marriage rates are plummeting rapidly and historically in this country, so that as of two years ago, as of just two years ago, less than half of the households in the U.S.
consisted of married couples and families.
Now, to put that in perspective, in 1950, that number was 80%.
So it used to be 80% of the households featured a married couple.
It was a family with a married couple.
Now it's less than half.
And the numbers are still trending downward.
There are numerous reasons for this catastrophic shift, but certainly one of the most prominent reasons is that our social system for matching people up, pairing them off, and setting them on the path towards marriage and parenthood and real adult life is fundamentally broken.
So for one thing, Everyone, of course, is using dating apps now, which are different even from the dating sites of ancient times.
Back in the early 2000s, when I was single, we had the dating websites.
And back then, you would fill out a lengthy profile, and you'd be given in return a comparatively small group of potential matches to contact.
But now those old-fashioned websites have been replaced by apps which are much easier to use and to peruse, and most people have more than one that they monitor at any given time.
It doesn't require any effort or commitment to use the apps, and the user sort of swipes through it very quickly, casually discarding potential matches based on nothing but a cursory glance at their photograph.
So all judgments are made visually, which already distorts the entire process because a woman's romantic attraction is not naturally as visually based as a man's.
And that's how a slovenly ogre like myself ends up marrying a hot woman.
Because a woman is attracted to personality, sense of humor, intelligence.
But little of that translates through an app.
Which means that many quality mates are sent to the junk folder just because they're bad at taking selfies.
Meanwhile, there are far too many choices.
So the modern dating scene is what happens when every beggar becomes a chooser.
Everyone is lonely and desperate for companionship, but the field is so flooded with options, there's such a surplus, that you begin to feel kind of like I feel when I'm in the condiment aisle at Walmart trying to buy mustard.
And there are 197 different types of mustard, and though all I want is just regular mustard, the overwhelming array of options paralyzes me.
And I'm just standing there slack-jawed, questioning whether I should be settling for just regular mustard when I could be getting gourmet Dijon, whole grain, honey French, yellow spicy brown, white yellow, German mustard instead.
All of modern life is plagued by this problem.
Everything is plentiful and can be obtained effortlessly and cheaply.
But it's too plentiful and too effortless and too cheap.
So you can turn on your TV and watch literally any movie that's ever been made, any TV show that's ever been produced, And yet, how many nights have you wasted scrolling through the infinite catalog and then settling on reruns of, you know, The Office because there's nothing else to watch?
Well, there's plenty to watch.
It's just that you can't settle on any one thing because your awareness that there are billions of other possibilities gives you anxiety.
And it makes it so that you can never be sure that you're choosing the absolute best option.
Which means that often you don't choose anything at all.
So dating is like this.
Whereas before you had only the eligible single people in your town to choose from, now you have the entire internet.
You're not confined by geographic boundaries or any other boundaries.
The result, ironically, is paralysis.
Now, on the complete opposite end of the spectrum are arranged marriages.
Instead of a boundless, never-ending buffet of options, a young person in a culture that practices arranged marriages will be assigned just one, and they don't even make the choice.
Their families just pair them up and say, here you go.
There's far less freedom and far less autonomy in a system of that sort, but it is without a doubt superior to our system.
We would be happier.
Every person in the dating scene right now would be happier if they were just matched up with someone against their will.
Actually.
Of course, even after you settle on a match and you meet them in person, a whole new set of problem arises.
It would be impossible to review the whole list, but one of the big problems is that if you're in the younger generations, you're meeting someone who was raised on the internet, just like you.
Having spent their formative years staring at screens, they oftentimes will not have developed the kind of interests and hobbies and rich interior life that could form the basis for conversation and for interpersonal bonding.
You also don't know where to go on a date or what to do because nobody wants to do anything but stare at their phones.
And as the relationship progresses, if it does, you'll find that the internet also interferes with emotional intimacy because there's nothing private or sacred between you.
Private life doesn't exist anymore, especially for younger people.
People live their whole lives in public, sharing everything with the world, and leaving no parts of themselves, emotionally or very often physically, that are special or exclusive for their significant other.
And then there's the biggest hurdle of all, one which has been standing in the way ever since the modern concept of dating was first invented decades ago, but which has only grown larger and more insurmountable as the decades have gone by, and that is there's no goal with dating.
There's no end point.
There's no resolution.
There's no logical progression.
So those women complain about getting ghosted by Caleb, but what are they really complaining about?
Did they see him as marriage material?
Were they even looking for a man to marry?
I'm guessing not.
And if not, then their relationship with Caleb was doomed to fall apart anyway, sooner than later.
Just as all of their other relationships, before and since, have.
What difference does it make if he disappears after one date, or if he sticks around and the whole thing dissolves after three months?
Who cares?
You're just hopping into one car after another, and each is going over a cliff.
Does it really matter if it tumbles over the edge after one mile or ten?
The whole enterprise is so fundamentally hopeless and pointless that, if anything, the Caleb's of the world do you a favor by wasting less of your time.
So here's the reality.
There's no reason to be dating at all unless you're specifically looking for somebody to marry.
If you have no interest in marriage, then all of your romantic relationships are doomed before they start.
You're building sandcastles during high tide.
It's all going to be washed away before it can be finished.
You're making a series of bad emotional investments, pouring yourself into one leaky container after another.
It's no wonder that marriage rates are plummeting.
People are exhausted by romantic relationships and jaded by the whole enterprise before they even reach 25 years old.
Because they've been betrayed and heartbroken and dumped and humiliated enough for 50 lifetimes.
That's what happens when you take the courtship out of dating.
Only solution is to put it back in.
I mean, really forget about dating completely, in fact.
Replace dating with courting.
Don't waste your time on people who have no goal for their relationship.
Because marriage should always be the desired endpoint.
Courting is the trial period, the interview process that both partners are undergoing.
You're interviewing each other for the job.
If you approach dating that way, it will significantly reduce your options.
That's for sure.
But, as we've seen, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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We'll start with this.
Friday was what appeared to be, well, on Friday we talked about the March for Life, and it appeared to be, I don't know what the official turnout numbers were for the March for Life, but it was, if you look at the footage, it was incredible turnout, as always.
As we talked about on Friday, this is 40 plus years running with the March for Life, when they get hundreds of thousands of people out, and they do it also during the coldest part of winter.
And they do that because they want to match it up with the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
They could move the March for Life to April or May and you could double the turnout.
But these are all the people that are willing to go to D.C.
when it's freezing cold and be outside for hours at a time when it's freezing cold.
Oftentimes it's snowing, it's just sleet, whatever, all kinds of bad weather.
And that was on Friday.
And then on Sunday, also in D.C., another massive rally, this time marching against vaccine mandates and other forms of COVID-related tyranny.
And here, we have some footage of the crowd.
Here's what the crowd looked like.
So we're here to rise above that.
And I also want you to know that... This looks like even bigger than the March for Life.
This has got to be one of the biggest.
Look at this.
That's remarkable.
Certainly one of the biggest political demonstrations that we've seen in D.C.
in several years, at the very least.
But the left showed up as well, and rather a pathetic turnout, even more pathetic than the counter-protesters of the March for Life.
So let's just watch.
Here's a random smattering of some pro-Fauci protesters, and let's hear what point they have to make or what their position is.
Let's listen.
I love Fauci!
I love Fauci Okay, we can turn this off.
They would pretend to be, you know, part of the resistance.
They still consider themselves the resistance.
They're, you know, revolutionaries.
They're down with the system and all that kind of stuff.
They still affect that kind of posture, but they're chanting.
These are counter-protesters showing up to chant about how much they love a government bureaucrat.
How much they love the highest paid federal employee in American history.
This is what they've shown up to do.
And yet they pretend to be critics of the system.
And it gets worse than that, because some of these counter-protesters were even more aggressive.
And here's one woman who showed up in her van and she had a little bit more to say
and let's hear her out.
Are going to pay for the police to shut down the road so that these white supremacists can party
and have a (beep) time celebrating their loser president, loser Trump.
Go the (beep) home, stop invading our territory.
Go the (beep) home, take your loser president and shove him up your (beep)
White supremacists of course, and she's got, I don't know what's going on with her van.
She has, uh, she's like a, she's, she's literally in a serial killer van with handprints.
The handprints of all of her victims are on the, uh, you can see the, you can see the handprints on the windows of people clawing to get out.
And, uh, on her way to murder her next round of victims, she, she, she decided to stop and yell at all the, um, at all the, the protesters there, because of course they're all, they're all white supremacists.
And yet, Plenty on the left, this is how they feel about it, and they're sticking to this.
But there's been this shift as well that's happened, especially over the last few months, and in particular over the last couple of weeks.
So here's a clip from Bill Maher's show, Real Time with Bill Maher, that went massively viral over the weekend.
Barry Weiss, she's a former New York Times writer who was exiled and sort of excommunicated by the left.
For some of her views, but she's certainly still not, she's not on the right.
I don't think she would call herself a conservative.
But she showed up on Bill Maher and she's been getting a lot of credits from some conservatives for saying this.
Let's listen.
I'm done with COVID.
I'm done.
It's like, I went so hard on COVID.
I sprayed the Pringles cans that I bought at the grocery store, stripped my clothes off because I thought COVID would be on my clothes.
Like, I did it all.
I watched Tiger King.
I got to the end of Spotify.
Like, we all did it, right?
No, we didn't all do it.
A lot of us did do it.
And then we were told, you get the vaccine.
You get the vaccine and you get back to normal.
And we haven't gotten back to normal.
And it's ridiculous at this point.
I know that so many of my liberal and progressive friends are with me on this and they do not want to say it out loud because they are scared to be called anti-vax or to be called science denial or to be, you know, smeared as a Trumper.
I'm sorry, if you believe the science, you will look at the data that we did not have two years ago and you will find out that cloth masks do not do anything.
You will realize that you can show your vaccine passport at a restaurant and still be asymptomatic and carrying Omicron.
And you will realize, most importantly, that this is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.
The city of Flint, Michigan, which is 80%, I think, minority students, has just announced indefinite virtual schooling.
In the past two years, we've seen, among young girls, a 51% increase in self-harm.
People are killing themselves.
They are anxious.
They are depressed.
They are lonely.
That is why we need to end it, more than any inconvenience that it's been to the rest of us.
I think...
[Applause]
Applause for that.
She says we all did this.
We're spraying the Pringle cans.
First of all, we didn't all do that.
At any point did we all do that.
I can remember when this all first started, you know, March 2020, going to the grocery store.
And there was still, at that time, a lot that we didn't know about COVID, or at least in terms of what we had officially been told.
It wasn't very much.
So we were all kind of in the dark.
And that's used as an excuse by those who bought into the panic and the hype, even the ones who bought into it for two years.
You know, it's one thing if you were a little freaked out for a couple of weeks and then you kind of started to see what was going on.
But people, you know, there are people for years that were doing this.
But I can remember early on, going to the grocery store, and everybody's in masks, and, you know, people are, like, at the grocery store spraying down their produce and all this stuff, they got gloves and everything on.
And that was back when, and maybe there are people who still do this, where you're supposed to quarantine your groceries before you bring them in the house.
You know, you keep them on outside for a day so that the virus dies, you know.
And I remember thinking, you know, I doubt that it actually works this way.
I doubt that the virus is so contagious that you have to disinfect your groceries before you bring them in the house.
I doubt it.
I mean, at the time, I can't say for sure that it's not true.
I mean, I don't really know.
I doubt it.
But then I also thought, well, even if that's true, like if that's how deadly and contagious this thing is, that you have to disinfect your produce, you gotta spray down the Pringles, you gotta take out, open up your box of cereal and wipe each individual frosted flake with a Lysol wipe.
If it's that contagious, then we're doomed anyway.
There's just no point in even trying then.
Society's doomed, if that's the case.
So that was the calculation I made very early on and decided to basically not adjust my life at all, except in the ways that I was absolutely forced to because I couldn't go to a lot of places because they were shut down.
But other than that, I just lived my life as I always had.
And there were a lot of people that did the same thing.
And so now we're listening to people like Barry Weiss.
And first of all, it's a little bit frustrating because they try to frame it as, oh, we all did this.
We were all wiping down the Pringles can.
No, no, we didn't all do it.
That was you.
It wasn't all of us.
But it's two years later, and she's not the only one.
People on the, I guess we would call center-left, to the extent that the center-left even exists anymore, and really it doesn't exist because the left has, anyone that's still on the center, they consider you to be on the right.
If you're to the right of them, you're just on the right and that's all, and that's why they're gonna exile you, as they have with Barry Weiss.
But to the extent that she's on the center-left, she's had this awakening moment two years into it, which is good, right?
It is better late than never.
What she just said there is good and important, and I'm glad that it was said.
But it is frustrating to those of us who have been saying it all along, not just for ego reasons, where we want credit for being right.
It's not that.
It's that the damage has been done, you see, in so many ways.
Now, there's more damage that could be done if this stuff is continued.
And so it's good to stop the bleeding.
But a lot of blood's been spilled already, metaphorically speaking, and sometimes not so metaphorically, when you look at the suicide rate and everything else.
So a lot of damage has been done that is simply just done.
And in a lot of ways, it's probably true to say that our society is never going to completely go back to normal.
Because of how profoundly twisted it's been by this, and how people's brains have been and minds have been mutated by living in this environment of overwhelming, suffocating fear for years.
So the damage has been done, and in some ways, for some of this, it's too late.
You can't put a mask on a kid for two years, shut down school, do all of this, isolate them, For the people that have done that to their kids.
You can't do that for two years and then say, I've had enough of this.
I'm done with COVID.
Take the mask off.
And then say to little junior, everything's okay.
Pat him on the head.
Go, go, go be a normal child again.
Just forget about the last two years.
Doesn't work that way.
These are as formative years.
I mean, kids are, are sponges.
They pick up everything that's happening around them.
They pick up a lot of things you don't want them to pick up.
You know, I was driving with my two-year-old the other day, and I missed a turn, and I just, I muttered, like, it just came out, I muttered an expletive under my breath, because I missed the turn.
I didn't even say it loudly.
And it, one of those things, it happens as a parent.
It comes out, it was a, I muttered it because I was frustrated, and then what do I hear my two-year-old in the back repeating me?
And she was repeating it like ten times in a row.
Right?
This is what kids do.
They pick up on everything around them in their environment.
They're very, very observant, especially in their formative years.
They have to be this way.
You know, biologically it's programmed this way.
And so think about all of the toxic messages that they have absorbed into their psyche.
There may be no way to reverse the effect for a lot of these kids, unfortunately.
So what do we do with somebody like Barry Weiss, people on the left, Bill Maher, you know, who are speaking some truth about this issue now.
There are some on the right who say, yeah, they're champions for our cause.
Let's celebrate them and put them on the chair and lift them up and dance around the room.
And then there are others on the other side, on the right, who say, well, no, it's too little, too late.
Sorry.
We got no use for you.
I kind of take a middle approach where I will embrace an alliance with someone.
On a particular issue, in order to achieve some worthwhile cultural goal.
I think that's a smart battle strategy.
But what we can't do is celebrate them as conservative champions, and that's the balance that we've often not been able to strike as conservatives.
And so this happens a lot when some celebrity... What was it with Nicki Minaj a few... For a period of time, for about 48 hours a few months ago, Nicki Minaj was the conservative champion.
And I don't even remember what it was, but she said something.
It might have been cancel culture, something like that.
She made some comment in like an Instagram video saying something that conservatives agree with.
And there were a lot of conservatives, yeah, let's invite her to CPAC.
Maybe she should run for president.
We'll put her on the ticket with Trump.
Because she said one thing.
No, the better approach is that she's right about this.
And guess what, Nicki Minaj, whatever this issue is, if you want to fight alongside us on this issue, fantastic!
On this particular issue.
But you're not a conservative hero because of it.
So that's what I would do with this.
It's the same thing with gender.
You know, after the Dr. Phil segment, I have heard from a lot of feminists, like left-wing feminists, Who are, and if you go to some of the, some people sent me links to some of these feminist forums and boards and stuff.
And it can be funny because they don't know what exactly to do about this.
Um, because they agree with everything I was saying about, about gender, but then they're looking into the other things that I've said about feminism itself and how it's a cancer and like the worst thing that's ever happened to human civilization.
And so they're not as sure exactly what to do.
But my approach to them is, Hey, if you want to work on, on, um, On beating back this gender madness?
I'm with you on that.
Great.
We're not friends.
We're not really on the same side generally, but on this issue, we can be, for a particular goal that we have in mind, good.
That's my approach.
One other note on this.
I want to play this.
Kathy Hochul, she's the governor up in New York, and She has not yet. She's not ready. She's not done with COVID.
She, of course, is not done with it.
And she says, hey, look, the kids can wear masks forever.
And it's no big deal because the kids, they can adapt. Let's listen. Regarding the mask
mandates, I want to know if the state has a particular number, whether that be like
a test positivity rate or a hospitalization rate that when we go under that the mask mandates will be
lifted or is the state playing that by year?
We're not playing it by year.
We're going to be driven by data and look at what our situation was prior to the mandates.
And assess, was that the right number to go back to?
I can't say with certainty, but that is a starting point to look at the number before we instituted these.
We instituted these because we saw the storm coming our way.
We watched the global trends.
We saw how quickly this escalated upward in other countries like England and South Africa, and we knew that could hit us.
That's why we took steps literally the day the first case arrived in New York State, which was December 2nd.
and announce these the first series of restrictions on going up for the next couple of weeks.
So I think about this a lot.
I'm not going to operate in a vacuum.
We're going to have data and experts and people who know a lot about what the next trends are, but I am really looking forward to lifting them.
I truly am.
I know people are tired, but I also I'll say one thing about the kids.
My daughter had a meltdown over having to put sneakers on to go to kindergarten.
She got used to wearing sneakers in school.
They adapt better than adults do.
And I'm really proud of the parents who made sure that their kids understood this is very safe.
They adapt.
It's like wearing, you know, the difference between a mask and shoes for kids at school is that shoes are necessary.
It's necessary to wear shoes.
And it's also it's also it's a real safety issue wearing shoes because you step on glass or a nail or something you'll be glad you had shoes on.
That's the difference.
Now kids that are wearing a mask without complaint And I've talked about this before, because I've seen it myself.
And we all have observed this shift taking place, hopefully not with our own kids.
I haven't observed it with my own kids, because my kids don't wear a mask, and I've never required them to do it.
But I've observed it kind of in society, where, again, early on, you go to the grocery store, you go around, and you see kids wearing a mask, and they're pulling it down, and they're fidgeting, and their parents are fussing with them and say, keep the mask on.
And these days, if you go to a place where they're still masking kids, you don't see that, for the most part.
You see the kids, they're wearing the mask basically how it's supposed to be worn, and they're not messing with it very much, and they just keep it on.
And you hear from parents who are very proud of this.
They say, I sent my six-year-old to school, and he wears a mask for seven hours, and it's not a problem.
Oh, he's adapted.
No, that's not adaptation.
That's damage.
He's been damaged.
He's been beaten down.
I used the analogy before of a child who suffers physical abuse at home.
This is a form of physical abuse and emotional and psychological abuse.
But a child who suffers abuse at home, maybe an abuse victim gets to a point where he barely even reacts to the abuse, at least visibly, you know, externally.
Does that mean he's adapted to it?
No, it means that the abuse has settled deep down into his psyche, into his mind.
It means that that's how deep the damage is now for this child.
And it's the same thing with the masking stuff.
Alright, one other note.
This is from the Daily Wire.
We might be on the cusp of World War III.
So on this show, World War III goes down to like the last... It's in the middle of the show, at the end of a segment.
I'll just throw it in there.
Every other show you're going to lead with it.
This is one of the reasons why I mean, there are a lot of reasons why I don't want World War Three to happen.
Many reasons.
But, you know, on the list far down, but on the list is also that I don't want to have to talk about it every single day on the show.
And I also don't want to be the one show that just World War Three is happening.
And and, you know, I ignore it.
We're talking about dating, you know, instead on this show.
Anyway, this is from The Daily Wire.
It says Democrat President Joe Biden.
It's considering deploying U.S.
forces to Eastern Europe as Russia is reportedly preparing to invade Ukraine at any moment.
Biden is considering the deployment of several thousand U.S.
troops as well as warships and aircraft to NATO allies in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, an expansion of American military involvement amid mounting fears of a Russian incursion into Ukraine.
The move would signal a major pivot for the Biden administration, which up until recently was taking a restrained stance on Ukraine out of fear of provoking Russia into invading.
Okay, just a couple quick things I'll say about this.
First of all, the idea that a leader, a national leader, would send his country to war because his poll numbers are down, because he's unpopular, you know, that's not by any means a far-fetched idea.
History is replete with examples of that happening.
There's a long history of that.
There's a lot of precedent for it.
So, would Joe Biden actually get us into a war with Russia because he's sitting at 30% in the approval ratings and he wants to change the subject?
And he also knows, historically, what happens with the polls with presidents when they go to war.
Typically, they see a boost in polls, people on both sides rally behind the president.
So, would Biden actually do that?
Absolutely, he would.
Remember, for these people, the only thing they care about Is their own political future and their own power.
And they've also convinced themselves that that's for the greater good.
You know, they've convinced themselves, they've convinced themselves, the people, maybe not Joe Biden himself personally, because he's, he has lost his mind, but the people who are really pulling the strings, people in his administration and the Biden regime, they've also convinced themselves that the world needs them there.
And so whatever they have to do to remain in power, it's, it's really, it's for the greater good.
It's for everybody's sake.
And if that means that tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people have to die in a war, a pointless war, that's fine.
It's for the greater good, as long as it helps their political future.
That's the way they look at it.
So for me with Ukraine, I don't pretend to be a foreign policy analyst by any means, but for me it's pretty simple.
Ukraine is its own country, and it's not our country.
And so I don't want to go to war to protect it.
Like I told you, it's pretty damn simple for me.
You know, we have our own borders that we're not protecting.
And we have violence and we have all kinds of, we have our own war down at the border that we're not actually, it's really one-sided because we're not participating in it.
So the idea that we're going to go 6,000 miles away We're going to go six to a country that's on the other side of the world, 6,000 miles away, and send our own sons, and now daughters as well, to die on foreign soil to protect the borders of another country, of Ukraine?
I mean, one thing I've heard from people, I was talking about this a little bit on Twitter, You know, I've gotten the whole thing of, well, Ukraine, they want freedom and they want democracy.
And think about the people of Ukraine.
Okay, well then they can fight for their country.
They can fight for their own future.
That's fantastic.
What about the people here?
I mean, how many, maybe we could do a poll on this.
How many parents want to send their children to Ukraine to die on Ukrainian soil to protect Ukraine?
How many parents will feel like their children's lives were lost in the pursuit of something worthwhile, if that were to happen?
How many parents would be okay with that in this country?
As far as I'm concerned, this is Europe's problem.
If they don't have the will to protect their own borders, then that's their issue.
It is, it's insane to me that after all of this time, I mean, I get why the people in power, again, I understand why they want to do it.
I don't agree with it.
It's, it's evil.
It's terrible.
I understand though.
It's, it is for them, it's really self-preservation.
But if just normal Americans who are not in positions of power, and I would like to see the poll numbers on this.
I'm thinking that a war with Russia would be very unpopular and I'm sure there had been polling, been polling already done on it.
Maybe I'd look at that.
I can't understand how any Americans who have lived through the past several decades would still have any appetite for going overseas and losing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars to protect democracy in countries that are not our own.
All right, let's get now to the comment section.
[MUSIC]
And you can always leave us a video comment at dailywire.com/sweetbabycomments.
And I don't think we have, do we have any, we don't have any video comments queued up, do we?
Well, look, it's a Monday.
Not everything is in proper working order at this point.
But you can leave those video comments.
We'll have to go, we'll have to stick with just the boring written comments for today.
EJ Jeremiah says, it's so insane how intolerant their side is.
They literally are saying how dare Dr. Phil not just be propaganda for their side.
Leslie says, Dr. Phil had three woke pro-trans people against one Matt Walsh.
How was that unfair?
Maybe unfair to Matt, except Matt won on all points.
Yeah, it is pretty incredible to think about.
I'm still not quite over that, that I was sitting there on stage And for much of the discussion, it was three against one, including a studio audience.
Really it was, uh, it was what, you know, 70 against one or something, whatever the studio audience was.
So three against one on stage, plus a studio audience that was not on my side.
And that is, that is really a hurdle in a debate like this.
When, when the other side gets all the applause lines, in terms of optics, it's hard to overcome the optics.
When someone says, this is one of the reasons why traditionally in sitcoms, they always have a laugh track.
Because it's easy, you could be influenced into thinking that a joke was funny if everybody else is laughing at it.
And it's the same thing with a debate.
If one side is getting all the applause, and then you make a point, and there's just silence.
You make a really good point, and then you look around, it's total stone cold silence.
Optically, that's hard to get over.
So, they had all of that on their side.
And yet, at the end of the debate, they're the ones complaining that they were ganged up on.
You know, 50 against 1, they were ganged up on, and they're the victims of bullying.
It is pretty incredible.
The other comment says, Matt, you have to admit that guy on Dr. Phil had great hair.
Yeah, the non-binary.
You know what?
Funny enough, when I was watching this episode with my wife, and I don't usually watch my own... I don't usually watch anything that I'm in.
With other people.
I'll watch it, but always by myself.
I'll watch it like a football player watches game tape, kind of picking myself apart, figuring out what I did wrong.
But I don't sit down with other people to watch stuff that I'm in.
But I made an exception in this case because my wife insisted.
So we sat down and watched it.
And my wife was disturbed.
Like everybody else, by the sight of the people that I was on stage with.
But in spite of that, the very first thing she said when the episode started, the very first thing that she made note of, was that the guy with the beard and the dress had really nice hair.
And so she remarked on that a couple of times, raving about his hair.
And that is really, it's another profound demonstration of the difference between men and women.
Because women will always comment on nice hair.
No matter whose hair it is, no matter the situation, it's biologically ingrained.
They can't stop themselves.
My wife, she could be in the process of getting murdered by a serial killer, by that woman in the van with all the handprints.
And if the killer had nice hair, my wife would still take a second to say, hey, sorry if this is awkward, but you have great hair.
What kind of shampoo do you use?
It's a good thing that Hitler didn't have nice hair because I think women would be getting themselves in a lot of trouble constantly kind of remarking on it.
And then I'm on the other end of the spectrum because I don't notice someone's hair could be on fire in front of me and I don't think I would notice it.
So yesterday we were going out somewhere.
And my wife was complaining that her hair looked terrible.
She was having a bad hair day or something.
And I thought it looked perfectly fine.
So she said, no, I got to take care of it.
So she went into the bathroom to go get ready.
And she was gone for two hours getting ready.
And she came out and she was so happy that her hair had been fixed.
And she said, look at my hair now.
And it looked exactly the same to me.
And I don't know what she was doing in there.
Did she watch each follicle individually with shampoo?
I'm not sure.
Looked great, just the same.
Let's see.
Igor says, I distinctly remember Matt saying he would write his own slam poetry when his channel reached 500,000 subscribers.
A few comments pointing that out.
I have no memory of making that promise.
I don't know why I would make, I promised to do slam poetry.
Why would I, why would I promise that of all things?
What was I drunk?
I might've been drunk during that episode.
I don't, I don't drink before the show, but maybe that one, maybe that's why I don't remember it.
Um, okay.
Well, here's the thing.
I said, once we reached 500,000, but we kind of blew past that and now we're at 550,000.
So it's too late, I think, now, unfortunately.
As much as I would love to, you know, as much as I would love to hold on my end of the bargain, it's really... I said once we're at... Didn't I say that?
Once we're at 500,000, I'd do the slam poetry, but now we're at 550,000, so I can't do it.
We'll look at 600,000, maybe.
You know what?
A million.
We're moving the goalpost.
Let's get to a million.
And I will have my own, my very own poetry that I will recite for you at 1 million.
Unless I think of another excuse not to do it.
If you haven't already, go check out our new comedy series, Truth Yeller, hosted by comedian and podcaster Adam Carolla over at dailywire.com slash watch.
In the next episode, airing this Thursday, Adam gets controversial by mocking Hunter Biden and the way that our overlords are attempting to crate-train your kids.
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So head to dailywire.com slash subscribe and use code Miller for 25% off your membership.
Look out for the new episode with TJ Miller dropping this Thursday.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
So today we cancel Forrest Bennett, who's a Democratic lawmaker in Oklahoma who had what he thought was a brilliant idea last week.
He tweeted out triumphantly, this week I filed HB 3129, which codifies that a father's financial responsibility to his baby and their mother begins at conception.
If Oklahoma is going to restrict a woman's right to choose, we sure better make sure that the men involved can't just walk away from their responsibilities.
Now, this was meant to be a dunk on the evil pro-lifers who Forrest believed only opposed abortion because of their deep hatred for women.
He believed this despite the fact that the pro-life movement is led primarily by women.
Just go watch the March for Life.
Watch the footage.
What about those women?
Well, they must all be self-hating misanthropes, he decided.
Because to the left, The self-hating women are the ones who oppose abortion, you know?
Not the ones who, say, cut their breasts off and try to become men.
No, they're not self-hating.
It's the women who don't want to kill babies.
They're the self-hating ones.
In any case, Forrest's attempted dunk, unfortunately for him, hit the back of the rim, bounced back out, while Forrest fell to the court, broke his arm, and the whole stadium pointed and laughed.
That the right would shake their fists violently and say, you know, damn you Forrest, you foiled our patriarchal plot.
But instead, conservatives all supported the bill.
Everyone on the right on social media, they were all saying this is great.
I love it.
Thank you.
After all, our position is that babies are human beings with rights and that parents should be required to care for their children or else find someone who will care for them.
You owe that to your child.
Your child is entitled to be cared for.
We have a lot of entitlements in our culture today.
We hear a lot about what people are entitled to.
Well, here's one example of an actual entitlement.
Your child is entitled to be taken care of.
You have that responsibility to your child.
And again, if you can't fulfill that responsibility or don't want to, then you find someone who will.
What you cannot do is abandon them, Or certainly kill them outright.
That's our position.
Now, of course, of course we think that this principle should apply to men as well.
In fact, a bill that codifies a father's financial responsibility to his baby in the womb also codifies that the baby in the womb is, in fact, a baby.
He's a person, a legal entity, who is owed certain basic legal protections.
Why wouldn't we support that?
Forrest could only look around in horror as the people he was trying to anger with his bill instead cheered him on, while the people he was trying to impress instead were angry.
So a day later he tweeted this follow-up.
He said, "Well, this has been fun.
I appreciate those who understood the message behind this bill and those who provided sincere
constructive feedback and pointed out serious issues with practical application.
Also a great way to be reminded that 280 characters isn't enough for some discussions.
I'm muting this now because I've read most, if not all, of the comments and I hear those
who came here to help me understand angles to this that I hadn't considered."
I also hear those who came here just to be mean or condescending.
And hey, it's Twitter.
What was I expecting?
Let me get this out of the way.
By the way, the mean people were all just the ones who said it's a good bill and they like it.
But that's mean because it's the wrong people.
He didn't want those people to be supported.
He continues, let me get this out of the way.
Obviously, I'm not moving forward with this bill as written.
I'm glad many of you understood the idea, but it clearly needs work.
So to actual constituents of mine who requested that I go back to the drawing board, I hear you.
Now, what can we learn from this?
Aside from the fact that Forrest Bennett is a stupid, pathetic, little, embarrassing goober who wrote a bill just to troll his opponents, but instead trolled his own side by accident.
I think the most important lesson is this, aside from the fact that he's stupid and embarrassing.
The second maybe is the fact that the pro-abortion side, and the left broadly speaking, has so thoroughly insulated itself, so completely hidden itself in its own cocoon, that the people on that side have come to actually believe the straw men that they've constructed.
They're buying into their own hype.
It's hard to fathom this as someone who lives in reality, but many pro-aborts do really think that the anti-abortion side is motivated by nothing but animosity for women.
Now, it's not that they've been fooled into thinking this by some outside force.
They've fooled themselves.
Forrest Bennett thought that pro-lifers would have a problem with requiring men to care for their children, even though we're the ones who are always talking about the problem of fatherless homes.
We're the ones always calling for men to take responsibility.
Our whole point, again, is that babies are people, and their parents have a duty to care for them.
So, how could the other side come to actually believe that the pro-life position is all just a smokescreen, and our real intention is to enslave women?
Well, partly it's stupidity and intellectual laziness, but also it's a kind of emotional self-preservation, I think.
Their own position is so morally hideous, and they are so clearly and deeply in the wrong, That they wouldn't be able to face themselves or sleep at night if they allowed themselves to engage honestly with the opposing viewpoint.
Their only choice is to make a cartoon out of us.
They have to retreat into fantasy.
Otherwise, they would notice the bloodstains on their hands and the mountain of dead bodies that they're standing on.
They can't handle that confrontation with reality until reality forces itself to be seen and to be known.
As happened to poor Forrest Bennett, who is today, of course, for that reason, finally canceled.
And we'll leave it there for today.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
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