Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Jussie Smollett’s attacker has been sentenced to jail time. But the sentence was still too light, as Smollett’s insane behavior in the courtroom demonstrated. Also, our Big Tech overlords have gotten together and decided that actually it’s okay for you to call for the murder of certain people, depending on their nationality and ethnicity. Nothing troubling about that. Plus, Kaepernick compared the NFL to slavery a few months ago, and now he says he still wants to play in the NFL. And Rihanna is pregnant and speaking eloquently about the beauty of pregnancy and the preciousness of unborn life, which seems to contradict her previous pro-abortion activism. This is pretty common with pro-abortion celebrities. And a new poll says that Americans are under an “unprecedented” level of stress. Is that true? Are we more stressed out than anyone else in history? Is life that hard? Or do we just see it that way?
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, Jussie Smollett's attacker has been sentenced to jail time, but the sentence was still too late, I think, as Smollett's insane behavior in the courtroom demonstrated.
We'll talk about that.
Also, our big tech overlords have gotten together and decided that it's actually okay for you to call for the murder of certain people depending on their nationality and ethnicity.
Nothing troubling about that at all.
Plus, Kaepernick compared the NFL to slavery a few months ago, and now he
says he still wants to play in the NFL.
He wants to be a slave, I guess.
And Rihanna is pregnant and speaking eloquently about the beauty of pregnancy
and the preciousness of her unborn life, which seems to contradict her previous
pro-abortion activism. This is a pretty common thing with pro-abortion celebrities.
We'll talk about that in a new poll says that Americans are under an unprecedented level of stress.
Is that true?
Are we more stressed out than anyone in history?
Is life that hard or do we just see it that way?
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wahl show.
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So last night, the years-long saga of Jussie Smollett finally reached its exciting conclusion.
I feel a certain sadness, the same bittersweet feeling, you know, that you experience after watching the last episode of a great television series.
And this has been a great television series in its own right, certainly the most compelling thing that Smollett has ever starred in.
Although his performance, I think, still needs a little bit of work.
You know, the story of Smollett's hate crime hoax, it really has almost everything that you could want in a story.
It's got comedy, it's got drama, it's got action.
The action's a little bit too choreographed and also not that convincing.
There's no romance, which is probably for the best, unless you count Smollett going to a gay bathhouse with his fake attackers before the attack.
That's a subplot that we can hopefully leave out of the film adaptation, although who am I kidding?
Hollywood is going to turn that into a 45-minute sequence.
In any case, All of this culminated last night at Smollett's sentencing hearing.
Now, Cook County Judge James Lynn listened as Smollett's defense team presented the testimonies of a whole parade of character witnesses, a whole litany of people, all attesting to the fact that Smollett is kind and generous.
He's got a great heart.
He has an undying concern for social justice.
And the interesting thing is that tactic seemed to backfire big time when it was time for Judge Lynn to finally render the sentence.
Because the judge noted how Smollett's alleged activism and his alleged charitable endeavors only make his hypocrisy even worse.
Because if he's really so concerned with racial justice, then he would, of all people, know what sort of damage this hate hoax would do.
So Lynn pointed out that this only underscores Smollett's arrogance, narcissism, his callous disregard for the harm that he would cause.
The judge explained all this in an extremely long monologue where he went back over the entire case, offered his reflections and analysis.
Probably more detail than any of us needed, but the good thing is that it was all the more embarrassing for Smollett to have to sit there and listen to it all over again.
Now, before getting to the sentence...
My one qualm with Lin, the judge, is how he focused so intently on the way that Smollett's hoax would, as he said, denigrate and degrade real hate crime victims.
For him, that's the main point, right?
That's why this is so bad.
He said that hate crimes are the worst thing anyone can do, and it was sick and twisted for Smollett to exploit them for attention the way that he did.
Now, yeah, it's true that it was sick and twist, and no doubt about that.
It's true that hate crime hoaxes, like false rape claims, do have the effect of discrediting real victims, and that's a serious problem, and that's something you have to weigh as well.
But it's not true that a hate crime is the worst thing a person can do.
Okay?
I would say that crimes against children are the worst thing.
It's also not true that the denigration of hate crime victims is the most salient aspect of this case.
What the judge didn't mention, what almost nobody mentions, is that this hate crime hoax was itself a hate crime.
This was a crime targeting white people.
If any group is the real victim, that's it.
I mean, he was, for his own selfish reasons, trying to inflame hatred against whites.
He was furthering the false media narrative that white racists are patrolling the streets, even in Chicago, and attacking and trying to kill black people.
If that seems like a stretch or something, just imagine if a white actor had made up a story about two stereotypical black men assaulting him and yelling, die whitey or something in the middle of the night.
If that were to happen, everyone would agree that the hoax itself is anti-black and racist.
There would be no disagreement.
On that point.
Well, the same logic applies here.
Now, it's somewhat amazing that nobody, not the prosecutors, not the judge, nobody has mentioned the fact that if two white people had happened to be anywhere in the vicinity and had ended up getting blamed for this fake crime, Smollett would have absolutely let them take the fall and spend decades in prison on federal hate crime charges.
Now, of course, it was very unlikely That two white people would be, like, hanging around Chicago at that time of night, just walking around, and end up getting pinned for this.
We know that that's unlikely.
That's what made the whole story ridiculous.
But Smollett didn't think it was ridiculous.
He thought he'd get away with it.
So for him, anyway, it was at least possible that two white people would be hanging out outside.
Now, you don't stage a fake hate crime unless you are prepared to let a fake culprit do the time for it.
And in fact, this is why it's significant that he said that the culprits were wearing masks, which means that he wouldn't be able to tell if two people end up getting fingered for this thing, and the cops go to Smollett and say, are these the guys?
Well, Smollett wouldn't be able to say, oh no, it's not them, because he didn't know what they looked like.
So he had specifically set it up.
So that if two people, innocent people, end up getting pinned for this crime, there's nothing he'd be able to do about it.
A hate crime hoax is like throwing a grenade into a room, you know, not knowing if there's anybody inside or not.
Maybe you think it's empty, maybe it's not.
Somebody might get hit with a shrapnel.
You may not have been intentionally targeting that specific person, but you know that someone might get hit, and you did it anyway.
That's the worst thing about this crime.
And nobody involved in the case pointed that out.
That's because all of them are beholden to the leftist racial narrative which says that non-white people are always the primary victims of everything, even of hate crime hoaxes perpetrated by non-white people.
Now, of course, as it happens, Smollett throws like a girl.
So, the grenade only made it about three feet and then rolled back in his direction, and he blew himself up instead.
But his intentions were the point.
So, with all this factored together, it was kind of hard to predict what the sentence would be from the judge.
What sentence would he pass down?
And then the time arrived.
Let's listen to the moment.
I'm fashioning the following sentence.
And here's your sentence.
I'm sentencing you to 30 months felony probation, and the probation is going to be to this court.
You're going to be allowed to travel wherever you want.
You do not have to live in the state of Illinois.
You can report by phone.
I know that if you're going to try to make a living and do some of the things you do, you may have to go to other places, New York and Los Angeles.
You can do those things.
You will pay restitution to the city of Chicago in the amount of $120,106.
You are fined $25,000, which is the maximum fine.
And you will spend the first 150 days of your sentence in the Cook County Jail.
And that will start today, right here, right now.
I do appreciate how he saved the jail time for the end because Smollett thought, because he went right and said, oh, well, you're going to have probation, 30 months of probation, whatever it was.
And so Smollett was thinking, oh, thank God.
And at the very end, he said, oh, yeah, by the way, you're going to jail for the next six months right now.
So I appreciate that.
That was a lot of fun.
But probation, first of all, is meaningless because he can still go and travel and do whatever he wants.
A small fine, minor restitution, you know, for him, that's not a lot.
150 days in jail.
Some people are calling this a stiff sentence or a harsh sentence, but the judge admitted before giving the sentence that the law technically allowed for three years in prison on each conviction.
He was convicted of five charges, which means he could have got 15 years in prison.
Now, the fact that he has, and he should have, he should have gotten 15 years in prison.
The fact that he has no remorse whatsoever, as we'll see in a minute, no remorse, Plus, the extensive premeditation that went into it, the callous disregard, the fact that he was prepared to send innocent people to jail, including his friends, by the way.
That's the other thing.
The friends that he roped into this thing is Patsy's.
After they turned against him, then Smollett's narrative changed and said, oh yeah, well, they attacked me, but I didn't tell them to.
So he was ready to send them to prison for this, even though he's the one who got them to do it.
So, the fact that he was going to send people to jail, now the brothers aren't exactly innocent, but still, the fact that he was trying to cause more racial tension in the country, along with the fact that hate crime hoaxes are an epidemic and somebody needs to be made an example of if we're going to stop this, all of this warrants the maximum penalty, as far as I'm concerned.
A few months in jail is about the minimum that could possibly be justified, and so Smollett got the minimum.
He got the bare minimum of what you could possibly expect.
And here is how he thanked the judge for it.
Listen.
No, I would just like to say to your honor that I am not suicidal.
That's what I was about to say.
Okay.
I am not suicidal.
Okay.
I am not suicidal.
I am innocent and I am not suicidal.
If I did this, then it means that I stuck my fist in the fears of black Americans in this country for over 400 years
and the fears of the LGBTQ community.
Your Honor, I respect you and I respect the jury, but I did not do this and I am not suicidal.
And if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself.
And you must all know that.
I respect you, Your Honor.
I respect your decision.
Jail time.
I am not suicidal.
Now this man cannot stop acting.
And he's so bad at it too, which is the problem.
He's in court, a convicted felon, going to jail, and he's still putting on a performance.
Like, he thinks this really is a TV show.
Obviously, the point of the whole I'm not suicidal thing was to suggest that there's some kind of conspiracy against him.
He might be killed in jail.
No one's gonna kill you.
They're just gonna laugh at you, you dummy.
In fact, this guy, he's such a damned attention-seeking narcissist that I wouldn't be surprised if he actually does hurt himself in jail.
He might even kill himself, just so that he can, you know, still be the victim in the end.
But the reaction from Smollett was interesting because you can tell That he's a man who has never been held accountable for anything in his entire life.
He's a man completely absorbed in himself, in his own sense of entitlement.
He's a spoiled rotten child.
Never faced any consequences for anything.
The fact that he must now face a real consequence, even though it's a much lighter consequence than what he should face, is just, it's incomprehensible to him.
The greatest part of that diatribe was at the end, where Smollett scoffs and says, jail time?
Jail time?
And he's speechless at the thought.
Well yeah, Jussie, you were convicted of five felonies.
Did you really think that there would be no jail time at all?
He did think that, because he's been coddled his whole life.
Why should it stop now, he thought.
Smollett really in many ways I think is the perfect mascot for our culture, for this generation.
I think that's the lesson we could take away at the end of all of this.
At the end of all things, at the end of all things Jussie, that's what we could take away from it.
It's what makes this story relevant, actually.
We know what makes it hilarious, and it is, but it's relevant because Smollett is the prototypical product and representative of modern American culture.
A self-entitled, phony, performative, pampered hypocrite who has lived such a comfortable and luxurious life that he's developed a fetish for oppression.
It is a fetish for him.
He's been given everything in life.
Except, he's been given everything you could possibly want.
Except for a genuine opportunity to be a victim.
That's the one thing he was not given.
That's the one gift that life never gave him.
And so he went seeking it out.
And when he couldn't find it, he created it for himself.
If you want to hate crime against yourself done right, do it yourself, he thought.
Except he can't do anything right because he has no skills or talents or abilities or intelligence of any kind.
And so he botched it and made a fool of himself.
The whole story is so quintessentially modern and western.
Smollett, he should replace the bald eagle as our national mascot because he's the sort of man that our culture produces.
When you think about it like that, the story isn't quite as funny anymore.
Though it's still pretty funny, let's be honest.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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Well, I think we should start with this.
I mean, this to me seems like a big deal.
You may recall how I've pointed out a couple of times there's a contradiction here, a bit of hypocrisy in the way that we are You think about Asian people after the China virus spread throughout the globe and killed 5 million people, or Muslims after 9-11, and how there's this intense focus in our country on making sure that people who had nothing to do with it are not subject to hate of any kind because of it.
So there was this real focus on Islamophobia.
We don't want to be Islamophobic.
We don't want to have anti-Asian hatred and all of that.
And then, Russia invades Ukraine.
All of that sort of goes out the window.
Now it's open season on Russians.
Literally now.
Okay, so this is the report from Reuters.
It says meta platforms, which is now the parent company of Facebook, will allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russian soldiers and Russians Not just the soldiers, in the context of the Ukraine invasion, according to internal emails seen by Reuters on Thursday, and a temporary change to its hate speech policies.
The social media company is also temporarily allowing some posts that call for the death of President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in countries including Russia, Ukraine and Poland, according to a series of internal emails to its content moderator.
You can call for the deaths of certain people depending on where you live.
This is all geographically based.
So if you live in these certain countries, then you are allowed to want these individuals to die.
If you live outside that country, then you can't.
Of course, any other individuals, you can't want them to die.
But these specific individuals, you're allowed to.
We're going to put that into the hate speech.
Policy now.
These calls for the leaders' deaths will be allowed unless they contain other targets or have two indicators of credibility, such as the location or method.
What?
In a recent change to the company's rules on violence and incitement.
Okay, so, if you live in these particular areas, you can call for these particular people to die, and there can be one indicator of credibility, but not two.
So you could say like, for example, hey, Vladimir Putin is in this particular location, someone should go kill him.
But you can't say, Vladimir Putin is in this particular location, somebody should go shoot him.
Okay?
Because then you've got location and methods.
You want to be more circumspect about one of those things.
Or you could say, I hope, or rather, someone should go poison Putin's breakfast.
And you can say that as long as you don't say where they should poison the breakfast.
Like, you don't say, oh, next time he's at Denny's they should do it.
Just be general about that part of it.
This is the policy now.
The email said calls for violence against Russians are allowed when the Post is talking about the invasion of Ukraine.
They said the calls for violence against Russian soldiers were allowed because this was being used as a proxy for the Russian military and said it would not apply to prisoners of war.
The temporary policy changes on calls for violence to Russian soldiers apply to, and then there's a whole host of Eastern European countries that you're allowed to do this.
And many major social media platforms have announced new content restrictions around the conflict, so on and so forth.
So, there are new restrictions because we want to make sure we don't have any of that Russian propaganda.
Now, Ukrainian propaganda, of which there's been plenty, that of course is allowed.
So we allow certain types of propaganda, not other kinds.
And you can call for the deaths of certain people, but not others.
It should freak you out that social media platforms, people running these platforms, they all had to sit... Think about... Imagine being a fly on the wall.
They had to sit down and have a meeting about this.
At some point, they actually sat in a room.
There were individuals sitting in a room talking about the policies for who you're allowed to want to kill.
And they sat around and agreed to this.
It should freak you out that our big tech oligarchs, our big tech overlords, are now putting themselves in the position of deciding You know, who is worthy of death and who is worthy of life?
And of course, again, this would never apply in any other circuit.
The only reason why this is being allowed is because Russians are perceived as white, even though a great many of them really are not.
But they're perceived that way, and so that's why this is allowed.
Would you be allowed to call for the death of You know, anyone in the Chinese government, of course not.
You wouldn't.
Because they're not what?
All right, Ron DeSantis once again is putting on a clinic for us and for other Republicans, showing how it's done.
This is like episode 500 of Ron DeSantis showing how it's done.
But this is worth really thinking about and looking at because it's very rare that we see this from Republicans.
In fact, we've seen Republicans many times, many examples, especially governors and especially in the last several months, caving.
Immediately, because of pressure from the left and especially pressure from corporations and especially corporations in their own states that donate money to them and their campaigns and whose business, you know, the powerful corporations in their own state.
Most Republicans are not, especially Republican governors, are not able to withstand that kind of pressure.
Now Ron DeSantis, on the other hand, Has Disney, the most powerful corporation in his state, and one of the most powerful corporations in the entire world, putting pressure on him because of this so-called Don't Say Gay Bill, and it's called that because of all the propaganda and lies being told about it, and he has refused to cave.
So here he is, this is a video from Fox, talking again about this and just showing, once again showing Republicans how they should handle these situations.
Let's listen to some of this.
So here's what I can tell you.
In the state of Florida, we are not going to allow them to inject transgenderism into kindergarten.
First graders shouldn't have a woke gender ideology imposed in their curriculums.
And that is what we're standing for because we're standing for the kids and we're standing for the parents.
And I can tell you this.
that I am going to back down from my commitment to students and back down
from my commitment to parents rights simply because of fraudulent media
narratives or pressure from woke corporations, the chances of that are zero.
When you have companies that have made a fortune off being family-friendly and
and catering to families and young kids.
You know, they should understand.
...that parents of young kids do not want this injected into their kid's kindergarten classroom.
They do not want their first graders to go and be told... I'm glad he got to that, because that's another good point about Disney.
...that is not appropriate for those kids.
So, there's Ron DeSantis.
Another good point about Disney is that they produce content for children, and now they have come out so strongly in favor of sexually grooming children.
And so if you let your children consume content from Disney, that might be something worth thinking about in the future.
Of course, we should have been thinking about it before, because Disney has been crazy leftist for a long time.
But that's Ron DeSantis.
I'll keep on saying it until it manifests and becomes reality, but he's got to be the guy.
I mean, it's crazy to consider anybody else at this point.
There's just nobody else.
He was on his level.
And that, of course, includes Trump.
Ron DeSantis, what you saw there, he's got all of the upside of Trump and none of the downside.
The only thing that Trump has that DeSantis doesn't have is all the name recognition.
Of course, Trump is one of the most famous people in the world, and he was even before he ran for president.
So DeSantis doesn't have that, to that extent.
But if he's the guy and he's the Republican nominee, then he's going to get a lot of that name recognition.
So that's a problem you can solve.
But when it comes to qualities as a politician, when it comes to that, like what he brings to the table in terms of his skill, he's got anything Trump has.
And there's a lot of downside that Trump has that he doesn't have.
And he's also able to, which I think is really important, you know, using the bully pulpit, as they say, being able to talk about these issues in, you know, you don't have to be Shakespeare.
And Ron DeSantis is, and he comes off like a basically a normal guy.
And that's good, actually.
But he's able to talk about these issues in a coherent way.
Like, he can focus You get the sense that you could sit down from across the table from Ron DeSantis and talk about an issue for 30 minutes.
And he could stay on topic and talk about it and offer some insight.
Whereas with Trump, it's all over the place.
He's not able to stay on message at all about anything.
And you just don't get the sense that he quite is engaged with these issues or cares about them the same way that you do with Ron DeSantis.
All right, Adam Schefter over at ESPN reports.
He tweeted out a little video of Colin Kaepernick out on the football field.
Kaepernick tweeted it saying, still working.
And then Schefter says, Colin Kaepernick is still working out and is said to be, in the words of one source, in the best shape of his life.
He wants to play.
He's ready to play.
He would be a great fit for teams with QB vacancies to fill who want to win a Super Bowl.
Now, it's always been the case that most of the people pushing the Kaepernick narrative, I mean, Schefter works for ESPN, but a lot of the people in the peanut gallery pushing this narrative and the ones who are still saying, oh yeah, why doesn't someone give Kaepernick a shot?
A lot of them have no idea, don't know anything about football, don't follow it, have no clue whatsoever.
And you would have to know nothing about football at all to believe any part of that.
To believe, first of all, that he's in the best shape of his life at 34 years old?
And he hasn't played in, what, six, seven years?
And he's in the best football shape of his life at 34?
Almost nobody is in the best, even the people that are star quarterbacks have been in the league this entire time.
It's very rare that someone is in the best shape of their life at 34.
Like Tom Brady is one example.
He was in the best shape of his life for like 10 years.
But 34 is where the drop-off happens, and sometimes a very steep drop-off for almost all, even the star quarterbacks who have been playing this whole time.
So the idea that this guy could come in at 34 hasn't played.
His last time in a league, he was a benchwarmer riding the bench behind Blaine Gabbert, and he went like 1-10 with the San Francisco 49ers.
The idea that he could come in six or seven years later and win a Super Bowl is absurd.
And everybody who knows about football knows that.
The other absurd thing is the claim that he wants to play.
Because here's the dirty little secret about Colin Kaepernick, which is not much of a secret at all.
He doesn't want to play at all.
He doesn't actually want to play.
That was clear a couple of years ago when the NFL actually held a workout for him specifically in the middle of the season, which they never do for anybody.
And he boycotted the workout because there wasn't enough media there and then held his own.
And then he spent the entire workout railing against the NFL and calling them a bunch of racists.
Like, this is not someone who wants to play for the NFL.
Also, if he wanted to play football, he could be playing football right now.
He could have been playing this entire time.
There are other professional football leagues out there.
They don't have the same star power or, you know, people don't care about them the same way they do about the NFL.
But if you're out of the NFL for any reason and you want to get back in and you want to play football, then you just go play for another league and you show people that you can still do it.
Not with an eight-second video of you running around the football field by yourself throwing a football.
So he could be playing.
He doesn't want to play.
That's really, like, the best case scenario for him is that it's a lie that he wants to play.
He's actually just a con man.
And this is all part of the con, of course.
Because then you have to think, well, if he does really want to play, what does that say about him considering the fact that he just did a Netflix special where he compared the NFL to slavery and said that NFL owners are slave owners.
And now he wants to be a slave?
You guys are a bunch of racist slave owners.
Can I please work for you?
What does that say about him?
So no matter how you cut it, no matter how you slice it, this guy's a fraud and a con man.
If you're still buying into this, then I think there's just no hope for you.
All right, let's go here.
Rihanna.
Big music star.
Shows you how plugged into the culture I am that I can tell you that about Rihanna.
She's a big musical star, Rihanna.
And she's also pregnant.
So congratulations to her.
That's very exciting.
Here she is on some red carpet somewhere talking about her pregnancy.
Listen.
I do feel very beautiful.
It's from inside, you know, like all these changes that your body are going through is for, you're creating this person, like a life.
And even when I'm reading like all the apps and I'm finding out what my body's doing and what the baby's doing this week, it freaks me out.
Like God really does not make a mistake.
Everything is for a reason.
I'm enjoying it and I'm appreciating everything.
God does not everything she said there of course I agree with quite profound actually and it's a and you would like to say it's a wonderful thing to have women who have this kind of cultural credibility and a lot of legions of younger fans When they're pregnant, and they're proud of it, and they're out there talking about God.
She says God doesn't make mistakes.
She's referring to the child in her womb as a life.
You know, it's a precious, beautiful life.
All that is really great and wonderful.
But it raises some questions.
Like, for instance, a couple years ago, here she is tweeting about a law in Alabama which restricted abortion.
And here's what she said about that.
She said, Take a look.
These are the idiots making decisions for women in America.
Governor Kay Ivey, shame on you.
So, Rihanna was very upset about a law restricting abortion.
She's a pro-abortion.
She's a pro-abortion.
She's an outspoken pro-abortion activist.
And that's what she has been up till now.
And now she's saying, God doesn't make mistakes and it is a life in the womb.
Now, how can you possibly, how do these two things fit together?
I mean, if you're saying God doesn't make mistakes, which he doesn't, Then that means that and you're saying that the unborn child is a life.
Then that means that every child who is conceived is a human life that God has sent here to earth and he didn't make mistakes.
So you can't say anything about it was an accident or this is unwanted, this is a child who's not supposed to live.
You can't say that.
God wants all of these children to live.
That's why he created the life in the womb of the mother, in this miraculous moment of conception.
How can all these things fit together?
How can you think that, but also be in favor of abortion?
Because now, if you hold all of these views in your mind all at once, then that would mean, you know, it's not that you have convinced yourself that the unborn child is a meaningless clump of cells, but that would mean that you actually know that this is a human being, a precious human being created by God, and yet you still are in favor of killing 60 million of them since Roe v. Wade.
That's even worse.
So it seems like a contradiction and hypocrisy, and in a certain way it is, but in a certain way it's not, actually.
Because the view held by Rihanna And all of these celebrity, you know, these leftist celebrity women who get pregnant and they decide they want to be pregnant, thankfully.
And, you know, they say all these wonderful things about pregnancy, yet they're pro-abortion.
The view that they all hold, the view held by Rihanna, is that her baby has worth because it's her baby and she wants it.
So, everything she's saying, she does not mean that to apply to all children.
No, no, no.
This is my child, and I'm Rihanna, and I want this child.
And so, because it's me, and because I have a desire to have this child, that means that the child now has worth, and is a life given to us by God.
So really, it all comes back to me.
And this is something that the left, if you listen to them, they've been pretty open about this, in fact.
There was a famous, I think it was someone on MSNBC a few years ago, said that, you know, life begins whenever the mom wants the life to begin.
And that's how they see it.
It's actually not about God at all.
The woman is God.
And you can decide through your own desires, your own emotions, whether that life has worth or not.
It's worth is contingent upon how desirable the life is to you as the mother.
That's how she sees it.
Speaking of twisted and perverse, that's how she sees it.
All right, one other quick thing.
I have to play this for you.
I can't not play it.
Tess Holliday is a plus-size model, is how she self-identifies.
eyes.
And she also has recently, I think we mentioned this before a few months ago when the news came out, that Tess Holliday, who weighs, by the looks of it, she weighs 350 plus pounds.
But she's anorexic, she says.
And so she was on a talk show this week talking about her battle with anorexia.
And here she is talking a little bit about overcoming and the courage it took her to overcome anorexia.
Listen to this.
I feel immense gratitude and pride that I am able to sit here with you and talk about such hard things and know that there's somebody on the other side that feels less alone, that maybe says to themselves, I'm going to get help, asks for help, starts taking care of themselves in the way that they deserve.
Because plus size or not, everybody deserves food.
Everybody deserves to eat.
We deserve to take care of ourselves.
We deserve to live without judgment.
We do, we do.
That's the biggest thing in all of it.
Are you currently in therapy?
How often are you?
Yeah, so I see my dietician once a week, and then I have my therapist once a week.
And I have a lot of people in my life who lovingly just nudge me, nudge me along the right path.
and yeah I'm doing it.
She sees her dietitian once a week.
Might want to ask for a refund on that.
I mean, in some ways, you know, it's inspiring, I think, to see someone who has so thoroughly beaten anorexia.
I mean, she has Dominated and crushed her anorexia.
This is like Mike Tyson in his prime.
That's how much.
This is a first round knockout of anorexia.
Man.
Now, look, everything she's talking about, she says that, you know, talking about eating disorders and it's okay to ask for help.
All of that is, of course, true.
And it is also true that you could say that she has an eating disorder in the sense that she's eating way, way too much, in quite a disordered way, in fact, in a self-destructive way.
But that's not what she means, okay?
She's claiming to have anorexia, which by definition, anorexia is not eating, keeping yourself away from food to the extent that it actually causes you to be famished, where you're starving yourself.
That's what anorexia is.
You can't judge a book by its cover, but I am pretty sure that Tess Holliday is not starving.
All right, I'm just gonna stop while I'm ahead.
Let's get to the comment section.
Let's play clip 11.
Hey Matt, I'm at work sitting in my car here, kind of memories of the old days.
Anyways, I wanted to ask a hypothetical question.
That as a Christian, do you think it is morally justified to have a desire or thoughts or, you know, a want to physically handle these sexual predators, people who are hurting children yourself, like wanting to take care of the problem yourself?
Do you think that is morally justified?
I have family members that seem to think that it's wrong when people, you know, like there was that recent case about the UFC fighter or whatever that hurt the guy that touched his kid.
What do you think?
Do you think that that could be a godly and righteous anger inside of a person, a justified action?
Or do you, you know, what do you think?
Sweet baby ginger for life.
Yeah.
So is it godly or is it right as a Christian to have violent anger towards sex predators?
I think probably part of the reason you're asking that question is we talked yesterday about, you know, the case at the Dunkin' Donuts where the customer was berating the Dunkin' Donuts employee and screaming at him, called him a racial slur, and then he got punched in the head and then he ended up dying.
And I mentioned how Turns out, not that the Doug Adonis employee would have known this necessarily, but that this guy, Vanell Cook I think was his name, was a sex predator and child molester.
And so that means that, putting everything else about the case aside, I don't care that he's dead.
It doesn't make me sad that he's dead, because that's how I feel about people who harm kids.
So, anyway.
Now, so is that all consistent with being a Christian, to feel that way?
And I would say absolutely yes.
The whole idea that we as Christians are never supposed to be angry about anything, that concept just doesn't hold up upon any deeper reading of the scripture or not even deep reading just pick up scripture and read it like any new testament old testament just just flip flip open the book sometime and uh read a few pages and you're almost certain especially in the old testament but in the new testament also you're almost certain to be given examples of righteous anger um which is which in fact is like all over the old test the the the bible including again in the new testament i mean jesus is shows anger
On several occasions and not just the, you know, famous case of clearing the temple, which in that case, he fashioned a whip.
I mean, he used physical violence and not in self-defense.
You know, it wasn't physical self-defense.
He wasn't being attacked physically, but he used violence himself.
And there's many other cases of showing anger.
So, there's nothing in and of itself wrong with being angry.
I think the question is, what do you do with that anger?
And also, why are you angry?
So if it's personal resentment, personal grudges, that's not good anger.
That's not holy righteous anger.
If it's your own pride that's been hurt or damaged, that's not righteous anger.
If it's just irritation that you're allowing to get out of control, you're flipping out because you're stuck in traffic and you're angry at everybody, maybe there's a traffic jam.
For all you know, the traffic jam is because there was an accident a mile up and someone's dead and all you're thinking about is yourself and you're getting angry.
None of that stuff is righteous.
The anger that you feel towards someone who harms children.
Why do you feel anger?
Because that anger is rooted in your love for the victims.
It's the same anger that I feel when I think about abortion.
The anger I have towards abortionists.
It's the anger I have towards these quacks who chemically castrate children, mutilate kids, gender-confused kids.
I feel intense anger towards them.
Because they're not doing it to me, right?
Like, you're not talking about someone who has preyed upon you.
It's because of what they're doing to innocent people.
And it's anger that is grounded in love.
It springs from love.
And so, yes, love can lead to anger.
In fact, I go farther than that.
I would say that if you don't feel angry, if you do not experience intense anger, When someone is being victimized, then you don't love that person.
All right.
Good question though.
Let's go to Robert.
He says, I've read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah a few times and have pondered how in the world a couple of large populations got to the point of mass sexual gratification hysteria.
Now the pieces are beginning to fall into place.
We're becoming ripe for destruction.
Kind of fits in with what we were just talking about.
Couldn't agree more.
Zachary says, Matt, I disagree with you on the Dunkin' Donuts story.
If the employee punched the guy for yelling and disrespecting him, that would be one thing, but punching him because of a single word, that's pretty pathetic.
Well, I'm not sure that you disagree because that's basically what I said.
I mean, the problem I have with the sentence, the guy got house arrest when he punched a guy and killed him, you know, the issue I have with that sentence is that it wasn't because The Vanell Cook, the child molester, was screaming and carrying on and everything else.
It wasn't that generally, it was because of that one specific word.
And so the precedent that you're setting in the court system is that if someone says a word, one particular word, one magical word, then you can kill them.
So that was my take on it.
So I don't know how much we disagree.
There was one other Okay, Ethan says, honestly, I bet Matt has never been in a fight.
Why else would he feel not only comfortable but justified in hitting someone who says something he doesn't like?
Sounds like a totalitarian response.
SBG, dude, but you have a ridiculous take on this fight story.
If you could call it a fight, more like a cowardly cheap shot.
Okay, Ethan, first of all, not a cheap shot.
Cheap shot is when you run up to someone, you know, and you surprise them out of nowhere and punch them.
It's not a cheap shot.
When you're squaring off with a guy and look at him in the face, and especially in this case, the Dunkin' Donuts employee warned him, said, you know, get out of here, he was warned.
And the child molester kept going.
So, you're squaring off, you're looking him dead in the face, you've warned him, like, I'm gonna hit you if you don't back away, and then you hit him.
Whatever else you call it, you cannot call it a cheap shot.
But yes, and also, by the way, you say it's a totalitarian response.
Well, I am a theocratic fascist dictator, so you shouldn't be surprised by that.
But also, so you're claiming that there's never an occasion where it's appropriate to hit someone unless they hit you first?
I just don't know where we get that.
And why is that treated as if it's self-evident?
And I don't even think that you believe that.
I mean, let me just give an example, Ethan.
I don't know if you're married, but what if you were out in public and somebody came up and was sexually harassing your wife?
Doesn't touch her, okay, but it's like sexually harassing your wife, and you're sitting right there.
Are you gonna go up and, excuse me, sir, will you please leave?
Sir, I do not appreciate, sir, I need you to leave, okay?
I do not appreciate this.
If you don't mind me saying, in fact, I'm a little bit peeved in the way you're treating my wife.
No, if you're a man, you're gonna walk up to that guy and punch him in the face.
Because that's what he deserves.
That is behavior that warrants violence.
I didn't say you're going to pull out a gun and shoot him.
Not all violence is the same.
There are gradations here.
So your response has to be proportional, but that is a proportionate response.
Are they a victim?
I mean, the way they're behaving, are you really going to say they're a victim?
They didn't have it coming?
They didn't bring it on themselves?
And yeah, putting everything about racial slurs and everything else aside.
When you go in and start screaming at someone, getting in their face and cussing them out because you're upset that service is taking too long, and you're getting in their face and screaming at them, yeah, you brought that on yourself.
You deserve to get punched.
And that's why I said if you're in a physical state where getting punched might kill you, or if you're so fragile that one punch to the head might kill you, then maybe watch your stupid mouth.
There's an idea.
Okay, let's get to the daily cancellations.
Well, a new survey from the American Psychiatric Association has led to some dramatic and startling headlines.
NBC News reports that Americans are besieged by stress, and The Hill says that we are experiencing alarming levels of stress.
And then there are the headlines from NBC and Yahoo, claiming that we poor souls in America today are afflicted by unprecedented levels of stress.
Yahoo reports, quote, Financial woes, coupled with a barrage of horrifying scenes from Ukraine as Russia continues its invasion, have pushed a majority of Americans to unprecedented levels of stress, according to a new report from the American Psychological Association.
The Association's annual Stress in America poll, published Thursday, found that U.S.
adults already weary from two years of COVID-19 are now overwhelmingly troubled by inflation and the war in Ukraine.
According to the results, 87% of those surveyed cited rising costs of everyday items such as groceries and gas as a significant source of stress.
The same high percentage said that their mental health was greatly affected by what has felt like a constant stream of crises without a break over the last two years.
84% said that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is terrifying to watch.
Now, I don't mean to get into semantics here, but I think it's worth pointing out a couple things.
And one is that our stress in modern times is certainly not in any way historic or unprecedented.
Americans have lived through actual world wars.
Pandemics also, we've lived through that many times.
And many of those pandemics have especially afflicted children, as opposed to COVID, which especially spared our children, thank God.
You want to talk about stress, how about hop in a time machine, go back to, let's say, 1862.
Ask Americans back then about the stresses of living through a civil war, where 600,000 Americans died, 2% of the population, the equivalent of losing 7 million people today.
In a war, can you imagine that?
A civil war, 7 million men are killed, if you look at it in proportion, 2%.
So you want stress, try living out on the frontier, out in Comanche country in the 1840s, or being a subsistence farmer during a drought.
Or really, try living in any time period before modern times.
Back when you actually had to try to survive, and you were surrounded by death all the time, and the child mortality rate was exponentially higher than it is now, and women died during childbirth all the time.
You know, if you were a 60-year-old man with eight kids, if you lived that long, it's almost certain that you've had two or three wives by now because the other ones died.
You've probably had two or three kids who have died.
Literally every aspect of life was significantly harder and more grueling than it is for us today.
Now, as I said, not semantics, but when we start talking about unprecedented stress, I think it's important to remember that history did not begin last week.
Perspective is what we're missing.
And I think our lack of perspective is one of the things that contributes to our stress.
We really think that everything we go through, every little or big thing that we go through, we think, well, this is the worst thing ever.
This is the worst thing that's ever happened to anybody.
And it can be helpful to realize that nothing we're going through is new.
People have been experiencing and surviving in spite of all of these sorts of things all through history.
There has never been a time of utopian peace and tranquility.
That sort of existence is simply not on offer.
It's not available to us.
It's not in the catalog, right, of when you're a mortal human being.
Life has never been easy.
The life that we're given right now is as close to easy as humanity has ever gotten.
And we can't stop complaining about it.
So what does that tell you?
I don't mean to dismiss all the sources of stress mentioned in the poll.
Certainly inflation, high gas prices, that causes stress.
When you can't afford to put gas in your car and go to work.
When it's financially back-breaking simply to fill your shopping cart at the grocery store.
You're going to feel stressed about that, and rightfully so.
And that's not a small stress either, that's a big stress.
And when we're being led by feckless incompetence who cannot fix these problems and don't seem particularly interested in fixing them, that's only going to add to the stress as well.
But should we be under intense stress because of Ukraine?
80% of Americans said that they're living in terror because of Russia's war in Ukraine.
Are they really?
I find it hard to believe because I have not met one single person in real life who appears to be terrified by what's happening 5,000 miles away.
But if they are, is that kind of emotional reaction justified?
Is it proportional to the risk that they actually personally face?
The same thing with COVID, which has been another big stressor, as the poll indicates.
Certainly, many of the things the government did in response to COVID caused stress.
Shutting down schools, not to mention the whole economy, is a stress inducer, yeah.
But the virus itself was not a fatal threat to most healthy people.
People were certainly more stressed by that than they ought to have been, as all of the outdoor mask-wearing indicated.
And still indicates.
I'm in D.C.
this week, and there are still people walking around, walking their dogs, jogging, while double-masked, alone, outside.
So, where does all this stress come from?
If we're so historically stressed out, is it because our lives are historically difficult?
Or is it something else?
And I'm thinking it's something else.
Two something-elses, specifically.
One, Our problem is that we don't know what to pay attention to.
This is a big problem in America.
This is a crisis-level problem.
A problem of attention.
Our attentional priorities are entirely out of balance and in disarray.
That is something that is unprecedented.
It's never been this bad.
When it comes to attention, not being able to pay attention to things, and it's not because we all have some mysterious mental illness like ADHD.
It's just the way that our culture is.
It's the world that we're living in.
Not being able to pay attention to important things, not knowing where to put your attention.
You have so many different competing claims on your attention.
Americans spend an average of seven or eight hours a day staring at screens.
Now, this fact alone would seem to contradict the claim that our lives are unprecedentedly difficult and stressful.
Most people in history would not have had the luxury to spend the majority of their waking hours sitting around and staring at screens, if they had any screens to stare at to begin with.
But the point about the screens is that our digital diet means that we're constantly having our attention directed towards whatever stressful thing the media and big tech companies want us to think about for whatever reason.
So our minds and souls are bombarded constantly every day with a barrage of information and misinformation and events and propaganda and everything else, which have the effect of blotting out from our minds the things that are actually closest to us, as we are immersed in these things that we cannot control and don't understand, and which often have little relevance to our actual lives.
This is how people end up stressed out by something happening a million miles away, only to forget about that same thing a week later.
So they can become overwhelmingly stressed out by something else that they'll then forget about.
The internet is a stress machine in that way.
But many of the stresses are essentially phantoms.
Two, finally, the other thing contributing to our stress is that we're so obsessively focused on our own stress.
We think about our stress all the time.
We talk about it.
We like to tell people.
We like to say to people, I'm so stressed out.
I'm so busy.
Here's what's happening in my life.
We go around telling people how stressed out we are.
You know, I said earlier that you should go back in time in a time machine and ask somebody in 1862 about their stresses, but actually you can't do that because first of all, you probably don't have a time machine, but also because the people in 1862 wouldn't have known what you were talking about.
Stress is a modern invention.
Prior to the 20th century, nobody talked about their stress.
They didn't have that concept.
To ask a person if they're stressed, they would have looked at you like, what does that even mean?
That doesn't mean that they didn't experience stress as we think of stress.
It just means that they didn't use the word or think of things in that way, which meant that they certainly weren't intensely focused on the subject like we are today.
In fact, the entire category of mental health would seem totally foreign and bizarre to pre-modern people.
That's not to say that stress and mental health don't exist or are myths or something.
Rather, it's just to point out how we've gone all the way to the other extreme end of the spectrum.
We are consumed by the thought of our own stress and our own mental health.
We are stuck inside our heads, constantly analyzing how we feel and how we feel about how we feel and how we feel about how we feel about how we feel.
This only exacerbates the anxiety and the stress.
It's a self-perpetuating cycle.
That's why perhaps the best thing to do sometimes, I think, and this is a good thing as we head into the week, turn off the screen, put down the phone, go out and get some exercise, pick up a hobby, do something.
I mean, engage in some kind of actual physical activity in the three-dimensional physical world and think about something else, literally anything else, aside from yourself and your feelings.
That's the other advantage that pre-modern people had, which probably gave them better mental health in the long run.
Though they didn't have that category, they didn't think of it that way, and their lives were much more difficult.
Still, they lived in the world, right?
They lived in the physical world, for better or worse.
They inhabited the spaces where they lived.
They actually inhabited.
They concerned themselves with what and who was closest to them, and spent most of their time thinking about those things.
So we should try that for a change.
It'll do wonders for your stress and your mental health.
Maybe something to do over the weekend.
And since I'm supposed to cancel something at the end of the segment, I guess I'm going to cancel our modern obsession with stress.
That's what's canceled today.
And we'll leave it there for today and the weekend, and talk to you next week.
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 Vodovsky, our associate producer is McKenna Waters, the show is edited by Robbie Dantzler, our audio is mixed by Mike Coromina, and hair and makeup is done by Cherokee Heart.
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Hey everybody, this is Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
You know, some people are depressed because the republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon's turned to blood.
But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.
