Ep. 991 - Another Massive Big Pharma Scam Revealed
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Big Pharma has millions of people hooked on antidepressants but a bombshell new study reveals that everything they told us about the drugs is false. This is just the latest Big Pharma scam to be exposed. Also, speaking of Big Pharma fails, Joe Biden has been vaccinated three times and yet still contracted COVID. This was announced a day after the president seemed to say that he has cancer. What is that all about? Plus, AOC tries to defend herself against the charge that she faked being in handcuffs. Dave Chapelle’s upcoming show is moved to a different venue after trans activists complained. In our Daily Cancellation, a lesbian bar in Portland falls victim to the woke mob, in hilarious fashion.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, Big Pharma has millions of people hooked on antidepressants, but a bombshell new study reveals that everything they told us about the drugs is false.
This is just the latest Big Pharma scam to be exposed.
We'll talk about it.
Also, speaking of Big Pharma fails, Joe Biden has been vaccinated three times and yet still contracted COVID.
This was announced a day after the president seemed to say, That he has cancer.
What's that all about?
Plus AOC tries to defend herself against the charge that she faked being in handcuffs.
And Dave Chappelle's upcoming show is moved to a different venue after trans activists complained.
In our daily cancellation, a lesbian bar in Portland falls victim to the woke mob in hilarious fashion.
all of that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
[MUSIC]
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If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know that I have been a long-time skeptic of the pharmaceutical industry.
Now, of course, pretty much everyone claims to be a skeptic of the pharmaceutical industry.
People on the left are predisposed, you would think anyway, to hate big pharma because it's a multi-billion dollar industry, which you can put the word big in front of, and that means that it's evil.
Many people on the right have become even more critical of Big Pharma in the last few years, especially because of how it has pushed the COVID vaccines.
A push that now, by the way, as of a few weeks ago, officially includes children as young as six months old.
So if you want to bring your baby in for a COVID vaccine, you can now do that, though I certainly wouldn't recommend it.
And yet, a large preponderance of both groups, even while usually assuming a kind of skeptical posture towards this industry, We'll let Big Pharma entirely off the hook when it comes to psychiatric drugs.
As of 2021, nearly 65 million Americans had been prescribed at least one psychiatric drug.
Think about that for a second.
65 million Americans.
Just five years before that, the number was 40 million.
40 million was already sky high.
In five years, it's gone up over 20 million.
20% of the country is on medication for mental illness, and that number is climbing by multiple percentage points every year.
Meanwhile, our health authorities, our so-called health authorities, tell us that the real crisis is untreated, read, non-drugged, unprescribed mental illness.
So they see the 65 million Americans on psychotropic drugs for mental illness, and they insist that the number is far too low.
We actually need to get it much higher.
It should be 100 million.
It should be 150.
It should be everybody.
And I'm not joking about that either because the DSM expands, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders expands with each new edition until every single human emotion, personality trait, proclivity, impulse has become a mental illness.
And we're already at the point with the latest DSM where you can open it up and find probably at least five or ten mental illnesses that would apply to you.
So, they The health establishment, the medical establishment, they demand that more and more mentally ill quote-unquote people, most of them suffering from things like depression or anxiety or ADHD, be identified and drugged immediately.
Never mind the significant and often dangerous side effects of these drugs, never mind that we're altering people's brains en masse.
Never mind that we're diagnosing conditions that we barely understand and drugging them based on poorly supported and sometimes demonstrably false medical theories.
Never mind all that.
Just keep the drugs, and most importantly, the money, flowing.
This is what Big Pharma, along with doctors and psychiatrists, have been doing.
And many people on both the left and right, who are normally quite eager to criticize the medical establishment, fall silent as that same medical establishment declares millions upon millions of Americans mentally ill, so mentally ill that they need psychotropic drugs in order to function.
On this point, many of Big Pharma critics are willing to simply take Big Pharma's word for it.
Well, they say we're all mentally ill, so I guess we are.
They might lie about everything else, these selective critics will say, but they would never lie about the best treatment for depression.
They would never lie about that.
Quite an odd claim when you think about it.
And on the subject of depression, the, quote, mental illness that accounts for a large portion of that 65 million figure, it's been taken as gospel for many years that drugs are necessary to treat it because the condition is caused by a, quote unquote, chemical imbalance in the brain.
This is an idea that people have absorbed from the culture, and especially from propaganda from the drug companies.
This didn't end up out there by accident.
That's what the drug companies want you to believe.
It's a chemical imbalance, so we'll give you a little chemical and a pill and fix it right up for you.
And it's a doctrine that is jealously guarded and defended.
I know from experience that if you question it, if you dare suggest That maybe there's more to it than a chemical imbalance?
You will be viciously attacked for your heresy.
People like the chemical imbalance idea because it seems simple.
And because it totally absolves the individual from the responsibility to do anything to help solve their own mental troubles.
It takes things like, you know, lifestyle, diet, etc.
It takes that out of the equation entirely.
It gives a simple cause, promises a simple solution, and one that requires almost no work on the part of the individual.
Just take the pill, that's it.
Take the pill and everything will be better.
That's Big Pharma's motto.
Take the pill, take the shot, everything will be fine.
You solve your depression with a magic pill, Big Pharma makes billions, win-win for everybody, right?
Well, wrong.
The problem with the chemical imbalance idea, the one that has led to millions of people being put on psychiatric drugs, the one that has put billions and billions, hundreds of billions into the pockets of Big Pharma, the problem with that idea is that there was never any evidence to support it.
It's a marketing slogan, it's not a medical diagnosis.
And a study that was just released this week, this is truly, I don't use this phrase very often in a non-ironic way, but it is a bombshell study, reported by The Guardian, finally blows the lid off of the whole scam.
Here's the headline.
Little evidence that chemical imbalance causes depression, UCL scientists find.
Reading now from the study, it says, Scientists have called into question the widespread use of antidepressants after a major review found no clear evidence that low serotonin levels are responsible for depression.
Prescriptions for antidepressants have risen dramatically since the 1990s, with 1 in 6 adults and 2% of teenagers in England now being prescribed them.
Millions more people around the world regularly use antidepressants.
Many people take antidepressants because they've been led to believe their depression has a biochemical cause, but this new research suggests that this belief is not grounded in evidence.
This according to the study's lead author, Joanne Moncrief, a professor of psychiatry at University College London and consultant psychiatrist at Northeast London NHS Foundation Trust.
Quoted, it is always difficult to prove a negative, but I think we can safely say that after a vast amount of research conducted over several decades, there is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abnormalities, particularly by lower levels or reduced activity of serotonin.
Thousands of people suffer from side effects of antidepressants, including the severe withdrawal effects that can occur when people try to stop taking them, yet prescription rates continue to rise.
We believe this situation has been driven partly by the false belief That depression is due to a chemical imbalance.
It is high time to inform the public that this belief is not grounded in science.
So it would seem that Big Pharma has made billions of dollars fixing a problem that does not exist.
Depression certainly exists, don't get me wrong.
But depression caused by a chemical imbalance is a myth.
And it is a mythical creation that the antidepressants are meant to fix.
It's something the pharmaceutical companies have made up, a problem they made up, and then gave us the cure for.
Reading more from this report, which is just more and more damning for the pharmaceutical industry as you go along, it says, In the new analysis, researchers said 85-90% of the public believes depression is caused by low serotonin or a chemical imbalance.
Most antidepressants are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, originally said to work by correcting abnormally low serotonin levels.
The review, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, looked at studies examining serotonin in depression involving tens of thousands of people.
One of the findings was that research comparing levels of serotonin and its breakdown products in the blood or brain fluids did not discover any difference between people diagnosed with depression and healthy people.
The authors also looked at studies where serotonin levels were artificially lowered in hundreds of people and concluded that lowering serotonin in this way did not produce depression in hundreds of healthy volunteers.
Other studies looked at the effects of stressful life events and found that the more stressful life events a person has experienced, the more likely they were to be depressed, showing the importance of external events.
Who would have thought?
Apparently, external events, you know, the things that happen to us in our lives, the events that we're a part of, the things that we suffer from, the things that we encounter, all of that, your everyday life, these have a deep and lasting effect on our moods and our emotions and our mental states.
Now, of course, even with this study, or rather without this study, debunking the chemical imbalance theory, which was never really a theory actually, but more of an unproven and arbitrary guess.
But before the study was even published, it was already obvious.
That the chemical imbalance idea made no sense.
For one thing, in order to diagnose an imbalance, we must first have some idea of what the correct balance is supposed to be.
And yet none, I would wager to say, none of the 90% of the public who believes in the chemical imbalance can articulately explain what sort of balance we're supposed to have in our brains.
Oh, there's a chemical imbalance.
Oh, really?
What is our balance supposed to be exactly?
What's like the ideal balance?
I don't know.
I just know that it's imbalanced.
And even if we did know what sort of balance we're supposed to have, how exactly do they diagnose the imbalance?
I mean, do they diagnose it at all?
Out of all the millions of people prescribed antidepressants, were any of them given a brain scan or a blood test or any other sort of physical medical test to confirm that this imbalance existed before it was treated?
Like, these are drugs that are supposed to treat a physical problem.
Did they ever do anything to confirm the existence of the physical problem inside the individual before giving them the drugs for it?
No.
Never.
Well, that's odd.
If depression is simply biochemical in origin, then why isn't it diagnosed on a biochemical basis?
If it's a simple physical ailment, why isn't it confirmed physically before being treated as if it's simply physical?
These are the kinds of questions we could have been asking all along, but hardly anyone ever did.
I want to read one last part of this report because it's important.
It says, according to the research, there is also evidence from other studies that antidepressants may actually induce low serotonin in the long term.
It may actually create the problem it's supposed to fix.
Quote, our view is that patients should not be told that depression is caused by low serotonin or by a chemical imbalance, and they should not be led to believe that antidepressants work by targeting these unproven abnormalities.
Quote, we do not understand what antidepressants are doing to the brain exactly, and giving people this sort of misinformation prevents them from making an informed decision about whether to take antidepressants or not.
They don't understand exactly what these drugs are doing to the body, but they prescribe them anyway.
That's another thing that I've been saying for years.
People giving these drugs out don't actually know exactly what they do.
Because the brain, the human brain is a complicated place.
You know, putting people on drugs, putting things into people's bodies without really knowing what it's going to do, there seems to be a lot of that sort of thing going around these days.
A lot of it.
And this sort of half-blind approach is particularly terrifying as it relates to the brain.
Because the brain, again, is still a mystery to us in many ways, and yet drug companies are tinkering with it, messing with our minds, without really knowing whether what they're doing will work, or how it's working, if it does work, or what the long-term or even short-term effects will be.
One of the side effects of many psychiatric drugs is suicidal thoughts.
Which is morbidly ironic because, again, that's the problem that they're supposed to help treat.
And yet, they can cause that problem, apparently.
So, these are drugs which, according to the companies that produce them, may cause you to think certain thoughts.
They may put thoughts into your head.
Self-destructive, dangerous thoughts.
That fact alone should give us pause.
Now, does this mean that there is no physical aspect to depression?
Of course not.
I mean, we're physical beings.
Our brains are physical.
There's going to be a significant physical element to the problem.
I mean, to any problem that we suffer from, including mental problems, by definition.
But it's also multifaceted and complicated.
Depression is a feeling of emptiness, despair, hopelessness, meaninglessness.
If a person is feeling that way, it's almost always impossible to discern one simple cause.
That's what the drug companies sell.
One simple cause, but it's never that simple.
There are internal and external factors all tracing back to the universal human condition.
The fact that we are mortal beings living in a world of constant pain and suffering and death and misery with lots of aimlessness and boredom in between.
The depressed person is not crazy or sick because they recognize this fact about life.
In fact, here's the point that we always miss in this discussion.
There are a lot, actually, of very good reasons To feel pretty bad, living as just a human being in the world.
The world could be a really tough place.
It doesn't mean that we should feel bad.
It doesn't mean that if someone does feel bad, we should just leave them to their misery.
But the point is that these feelings are not crazy.
They're not delusional.
There are reasons for them.
And the person who's overcome with these feelings, their problem is that they are not able to sufficiently cope with our condition as human beings in this world.
They're not able to find meaning and hope and joy in spite of all the terrible things that come with being a human being in the world.
The way to treat the depression is to help them cope, which will involve everything from better lifestyle choices, to diet and exercise, getting outside on a sunny day and taking a walk, like things like that, even really, really simple things.
It's not the be all end all, but things like that.
In some cases, there may still be need for drugs temporarily, but they're going to be a band-aid, not a cure.
You can't cure despair with a pill, despite what the drug companies have told us.
And the drug companies have told us a lot of lies.
They have.
Especially recently.
And it's quite a statement, but this might be the biggest one yet.
Let's get to our five headlines.
(upbeat music)
All right, well, speaking of drugs not doing the job, President Biden, here's the breaking news.
President Biden has tested positive for COVID-19.
This is the statement from Press Secretary Karen Jean Pear says, this morning, President Biden tested positive for COVID-19.
He's fully vaccinated and twice boosted and experiencing very mild symptoms.
He's begun taking Pax Lovid.
Consistent with CDC guidelines, he will isolate at the White House and will continue to carry out all of his duties fully during that term.
He has been in contact with members of the White House staff by phone this morning and will participate in his planned meetings at the White House this morning via phone and Zoom from the residence.
Consistent with White House protocol for positive COVID cases, which goes above and beyond CDC guidance, he will continue to work in isolation until he tests negative.
Once he tests negative, he will return to in-person work.
Um, and he only works for three, four hours a day.
So, you know, that's the good news, I guess, light workload.
So this is a, so Joe Biden has, you know, got, got fully vaccinated.
So we got the first shot, then got the second shot, then got the booster shot and then got another booster shot and he still got COVID.
And so now he's taking a pill.
Made by the same companies that produced the shot that didn't stop him from getting sick.
Pretty amazing.
And this happens, you know, if we can recall, only about a year after Joe Biden claimed at a town hall, it was almost one year ago exactly, I think, that Joe Biden said that you're not going to get COVID if you get the vaccination.
Let's go back and listen to that again.
You're okay.
You're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
That's what he claimed.
You're not going to get COVID if you get the vaccinations.
But that's something that we've erased from our memory.
There are many things related to COVID that we're supposed to erase from our memory.
And one of them is that we were told in the early going that if you get the shots, you will not get COVID.
And then there was this enormous shifting of the goalposts when it turned out that whether you get the shot or not, you're still going to get sick from COVID.
And we're just going to pretend that none of that was ever said.
Oh, we never said that.
It just makes your symptoms more mild.
Unfalsifiable, by the way.
That's the great thing about that.
Somebody has the vaccine, has all the boosters, they get sick anyway, and then you could just declare that, well, they'd be so much more sick if they didn't have the vaccine.
Well, how do you know that?
I mean, how do you know what would have happened in this other theoretical universe where they never got vaccinated?
You don't really know that.
But you can declare it.
Another common theme here, especially where the drug companies are concerned.
Things that they can't really know and don't know, but they'll just say it anyway.
Never held accountable for it.
And I mean, just think, it's not to belabor the point, but this is four shots that he got in the span of what, 18 months?
Four shots to protect against this virus and he still got it.
And that's on top of all the other preventative measures that they do for the president.
Still got it.
Now the timing here is interesting and also concerning because it was just yesterday That Biden and cancer were trending.
Today on Twitter, Biden has COVID is trending.
Yesterday was Biden has cancer because during a speech, he seemed to say that he has, he seemed to announce that he has cancer.
Let's go back and watch it.
This is from yesterday.
You had to put on your windshield wipers to get literally the oil slick off the window.
That's why I and so damn many other people I grew up have cancer and why I can't for the longest time.
Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation.
That's why I and many other people I grew up with have cancer?
What?
We've never really gotten a clarification from the White House on this.
Does the president have cancer?
Is that something we should probably know?
Does he have cancer and COVID now?
That's not a good combination.
And he's elderly.
Shouldn't we know these things?
This is how bad it's gotten that The President said, the President of the United States said yesterday that he has cancer.
That is what he said.
And, but we're all kind of assuring ourselves, oh he doesn't really have cancer, he just has dementia, so he says stuff like this.
So either he has, either, this is either, him making that statement is either due to the fact that he really does have cancer, or, oh no, it's just dementia flaring up again.
Not a good situation to be in, as a country, when this is the guy leading things.
All right, let's move to this.
This is from the Daily Wire.
Iconic music venue First Avenue caved to backlash on Thursday, canceling comedian Dave Chappelle's show hours before his performance was slated to start.
The venue, located in Minnesota, has reportedly been receiving backlash for planning to host Chappelle.
The comedian leans left but has refused to play the politically correct game with his material, specifically when it comes to radical gender theory.
First Avenue posted on social media on Thursday evening, we hear you.
The Dave Chappelle Show tonight at First Avenue has been cancelled and is moving to the Varsity Theatre.
We know we must hold ourselves to the highest standards, and we know we let you down.
We are not just a black box with people in it, and we understand that First Avenue is not just a room, but meaningful beyond our walls.
The First Avenue team and you have worked hard to make our venues the safest spaces in the country, and we will continue with that message.
We believe in diverse voices and the freedom of artistic expression, but in honoring that, we lost sight of the impact this would have.
We know that there are some who will not agree with this decision.
You are all welcome to send feedback.
This is always kind of mind-boggling, this sort of thing, because they got backlash for hosting Dave Chappelle and immediately caved.
It's not like they put up a fight, okay?
They didn't put up any fight at all.
They caved right away.
That's not the mind-boggling thing.
That's what we expect.
The somewhat confusing thing is that you must have known that this backlash would come if you're even slightly clued in.
If you haven't been living in a cave somewhere, Then you would know that it's going to be quote-unquote controversial to host Dave Chappelle at your venue.
Shouldn't be controversial, but we live in an insane society and so it is.
And so you obviously knew that going in, so weren't you, didn't you kind of batten down the hatches?
Weren't you prepared, girding your loins, ready for battle?
So you make this decision to do something that you know is going to upset people.
That part is great.
I'm all in favor of that.
Doing something, even though it's gonna upset the peanut gallery and they're gonna be crying about it.
Fine, I'm on board for that, 100%.
And you go in with your eyes open, but then immediately as the backlash comes, the backlash you knew was coming, when it does come, you give up right away.
And the thing about Dave Chappelle that I think we lose sight of is that, you know, Chappelle, I appreciate Most of what he says on the topic of gender, which is actually sex.
Most of what he says on the topic of biological sex, I appreciate.
I agree with most of it.
But Dave Chappelle is actually far less offensive than he's ever been.
It may shock kids today, but go back and watch The Chappelle Show on Comedy Central back when it was first aired almost 20 years ago now.
Early 2000s.
You take any single skit from that show, far more provocative than anything he's said at any point over the last eight or nine years.
And so he actually has, you know, he gets credit for standing up against the mob, and I give him credit for that too, but he actually has softened quite a bit.
And I don't know if that's just old age or what, or if he's trying to appease the mob a little bit.
I'm not sure what it is, but he has softened his approach quite a bit, and he's not nearly as controversial as he used to be.
And even when he talks about gender, the things that he says about it are, they're not anywhere close to what you're going to hear on this show, for example.
He doesn't go anywhere near that.
And he does often make a point of saying, well, I don't judge any trans people, and I respect their identity.
He says all that kind of stuff.
And then he gets into the rest of it.
So it's a sad day, not just when comedians are getting kicked out of venues for committing the crime of telling jokes, but when current day Dave Chappelle is the most controversial comedian On the national stage, that is a very sad statement.
All right, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Here's an actual funny joke.
This, I think, is a funnier joke than really anything Dave Chappelle's actually said over the last several years.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as we went over yesterday, she, along with other Democrats, showed up at this protest-slash-pageant, intentionally got arrested.
Because they were sitting in the street, it was a pro-abortion thing, they were sitting in the middle of the street, they were warned three times, you gotta get up, they didn't, so they were arrested.
Only arrested in the technical sense, if they were even arrested in the technical sense, which I'm not sure that they actually- I'm not sure if what happened to them qualifies as being arrested technically or not, but they were momentarily briefly detained by police officers, they were not sent to jail, they weren't charged with anything really, and they were not cuffed.
And yet, Alexandria Quezada-Cortez pretended to be handcuffed.
And we played the footage for you yesterday.
She wasn't the only one.
It was also Ilhan Omar.
Hands behind the back, being escorted by police.
That's not a way that people normally walk.
And so she was clearly pretending to be handcuffed.
We were waiting for her to finally defend herself against the charge that she was pretending to be handcuffed, and she has, and she hasn't disappointed.
So, she has offered kind of two excuses, and the first is this on Instagram, where she says that the claim that she was pretending to be handcuffed is a conspiracy theory.
Listen.
Republicans' favorite hobby is to make conspiracy theories out of everything to distract you and keep you from talking about what's actually important, which is the fact that they are trying to take away Well, I'd love to answer that question, AOC.
Thank you for asking.
It's a great question.
If you were faking having handcuffs, and yet you put the fist up anyway, why would you do that?
Well, because you're very stupid.
That's why you would do it.
Because you're a stupid person.
But it's not a conspiracy.
We're not alleging that you conspired with anyone to pretend to be handcuffed.
You totally did that on your own.
We fully know that.
We're not saying that this was some grand conspiracy between you and the police.
This is just you on your own, doing what you do best, and you still don't do that well, which is performing.
One thing that helps you clarify things is when you understand, and I'm not the first person to point this out, but it's an important insight anyway, that a great number of politicians, especially the ones on the national stage, the ones in DC, they wanted to be actors, most of them.
And they ended up as politicians because either they were too ugly to be actors or they didn't have the talent.
So this is like a fallback option for them.
And once you come to understand that, some of this stuff begins to make sense.
She also responded to the charge on Twitter, and she was responding to a tweet from Nancy Mace, who most recently we saw, she's the Republican congresswoman who voted along with the Democrats to have the federal government redefine marriage nationwide.
So that's the kind of conservative she is.
But she accused AOC of performance art and faking the handcuffs.
And AOC said, no faking here.
Putting your hands behind your back is a best practice while detained, handcuffed or not.
To avoid escalating charges, like resisting arrest.
But given how you lied about a fellow rape survivor for points, as you put it to me, I don't expect much else from you.
Putting your hands behind your back is best practice when dealing with police.
First of all, since when does AOC care about the best practices when dealing with police?
And second, I can tell you right now that is most definitely not best practice.
That is quite literally the opposite of best practices when you're dealing with police, which is why you never hear a police officer shout to, like, a bad guy, Come out with your hands behind your back.
Hey, hey, put your hands where I can't see them.
Yeah, right behind your back.
No, no, right next to your waistband where people usually keep guns.
Right there.
Yep.
Keep them right there.
I don't want to see your hands.
That's not what police officers say.
You put your hands behind your back if they're going to cuff you.
But if they're not going to cuff you, then what they want is your hands out and up.
They want your hands visible.
They want your hands away from your waistband.
That's where they want your hands.
Best practices.
Still walk with your hands behind your back.
All right.
Yeah.
You know what?
Actually, best practice is put your hands in your pockets when dealing with the cops.
Cops have their guns drawn on you.
Best practice, put your hand right in your pocket.
Just kidding.
Please do not do that.
All right.
I want to play this for you.
Here's a teacher boasting about making her students... I think this is a her.
Can't be sure.
But making her students use pronouns.
I want you to listen to what she says.
I know I'm probably going to get a lot of s*** for this but I don't really care.
Who cares?
We're doing summer programming and this year I vowed to make a really strong effort to figure out how my students Want to be, um, acknowledged, uh, as far as their pronouns.
So naturally, I'm leading by example, right?
I've got my name, she, her.
That's how I identify.
Easy, simple.
So they know that they would call me Miss Kramer instead of, you know, Mr. Whatever, because, you know, the hair, there's still stigma, whatever.
On our first assignment, I asked them to put their preferred pronouns on their papers.
And not one kid protested.
Not one kid.
They were all super comfortable and super down with it.
But look at this.
I'm covering their name, but look at that.
I'm okay being called they them.
She her or he him.
They're totally down for that.
I can't help but feel like that kid now feels safe and comfortable being who they are.
Hmm.
You have to just think about how creepy it is to hear.
And we hear this excuse from the groomer so often.
But when they say, oh, it's OK because the kids are OK with it.
When we do this to the kids, they're OK with it.
So we can do it.
That's certainly not the first time we hear that from that excuse from groomers and child predators.
That's like the classic excuse.
From creeps like that.
Oh, not one kid protested.
Well, of course they didn't.
Of course they didn't protest.
Number one, they're kids.
So, they're just going to accept whatever you tell them.
And even if they don't, I mean, they might ask questions, they might, the kids certainly are capable of skepticism.
And any parent knows that kids will ask, they certainly will ask questions.
But here's what a kid's not going to do.
A kid is not going to, most of the time, question the underlying fundamental premise of something.
So usually what a kid, especially if they're being told something from an authority figure, they're going to accept the premise, right?
So the example that I always use is like, what's one of the most fantastical, and if you have kids that are listening right now, cover their ears, what's one of the most fantastical things that adults will tell kids is that Santa Claus exists.
And kids will have a lot of questions about Santa Claus, right?
They'll ask a lot of questions, a lot of really specific questions, and pretty good questions.
But what they won't do, at least until they get older, is question the whole underlying claim that there is a Santa Claus to begin with.
That part they'll accept, and then it's some of the claims that go along with that that they'll ask questions about.
So they're looking at the branches of the tree, but they're not going after the roots.
That's not what kids do.
And they shouldn't have to.
They should be able to trust the authority figures in their lives, especially an authority figure who's in the position of educating them.
So that's one reason why they're going to go along with it.
They're totally cool.
The kids are totally cool with it.
Yeah, that's one reason.
The other reason is that Even the kids who have learned to be more skeptical about the underlying claim, they also know that they're in an environment where they cannot voice that skepticism for fear of social ostracization, or from actual punishments and penalties from the administration at the school.
So, you've got a metaphorical gun to their heads, saying, this is the way now, and if you don't like it, then you're a bigot, and that's the worst thing you could possibly do.
You're gonna be socially ostracized.
And then all the kids just go along with it.
You say, look at that!
They went along with it!
I mean, you might as well go up to someone and put a gun to their head and ask for all the money, all the money in their wallet, and then they give it to you.
And then they say, look, they were willing to give me their money.
I wasn't stealing from them at all, actually.
They gave it to me.
All right.
A few other things I want to get to.
We'll try to go through some of these quickly, get to as much as we can.
Here is more environmental hysteria, which has been the theme of the month as the temperatures get hotter and so we start worrying about global warming.
This is a report from theday.com.
It says, the global extinction crisis underway may be more intense than previously thought as humans continue to tear up land, overuse certain resources, and heat up the planet.
New research led by the University of Minnesota indicates Nearly one in three species of all kinds, 30%, face global extinction or have been driven to extinction since the year 1500, according to the new survey published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Environment.
That's significantly higher than prevailing global estimates and the findings surprised lead author Forrest Isbell.
He said one of the reasons is that it takes more insects and other lesser studied species groups into account.
And there were other headlines about this, the global extinction crisis.
So you can add that to all of the environmental cataclysms and Armageddons that we face.
Another one, and they're all linked together.
And later on in the same report, he links this in to climate change and everything else.
But another one is the so-called extinction crisis.
But as we just talked about with kids, they never question the underlying premise.
Kids don't do that.
As adults, we should.
And even on something like this.
It's always heresy to do it, of course.
To question the premise any time the left tells you anything.
To question it is heresy.
Especially when it's something like this.
Well, they're saying it's a global extinction crisis.
The only appropriate response is to throw up your hands and scream and cry.
That's all you're supposed to do.
If you do anything but that, then you're a horrible sociopath who doesn't care about all these innocent species.
Well, the only thing that I will note And I'm not saying that there isn't necessarily some sort of extinction crisis going on.
I'm not saying there isn't.
I'm saying I need more evidence of it.
And I'm not just going to accept it because you claim.
Because here's something else that I know, which is that 99.9% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are currently extinct.
And the vast majority went extinct before human civilization existed.
So millions and millions of species came and went long before the Egyptians even built the pyramids.
So that's something that I know.
Which means that species go extinct.
This is something that naturally happens.
Species go extinct.
So even if we didn't have industrialized society, If we talk about from the year 1500 to now, that so many species went extinct.
Well, even if human beings weren't on Earth, a certain, at least large percentage of those species would have went extinct anyway.
So what we need to know is, without humans, how many would have gone extinct, and then we know how many we can blame on ourselves.
And once we have that information, I'm not sure what exactly we do with it.
I guess we just walk through the street, you know, whipping ourselves and crying mea culpa.
That's what we're supposed to do.
Let's see.
One other thing to know.
This is from cnsnews.com.
It says, a new poll.
This is, by the way, a new poll that some Christians have been trumpeting as kind of a success story, but I don't know if I see it that way.
So it's a new poll of likely Catholic voters found that 82% of Catholics support ending abortion outright or imposing various regulations to limit it.
Also, a majority of Catholics oppose pro-transgender policy in regard to their children's sports teams and school bathrooms.
Further, a majority of Catholics say they disapprove of President Joe Biden's job as president.
Likely Catholic voters were more aligned when it came to transgender ideology in schools.
67% said they opposed biological boys who identify as female using the girls' schools, bathrooms, and locker rooms.
Also, 67% said they opposed biological boys competing against girls on school sports.
33% said policies in their children's school related to gender identity made them consider alternative education.
Also, 63% of Catholics believe gender is created by God.
56% say trans ideology conflicts with church teaching.
I don't know.
Some people are seeing these as encouraging numbers because it's a majority, but I hate to be the guy always pointing to the dark cloud within the silver lining, but once again, I must do that.
Only 63% of Catholics believe that, quote, gender is created by God.
And we have to add the stipulation there that of course, you know, in a way gender was not created by God because gender is, you know, as a category is something that human beings made up.
Sex was created by God, but in the poll that's what they meant.
They're just conflating the two.
So 63% of Catholics, only 63% say that sex is created by God.
And only a slim majority, 56%, say that trans ideology conflicts with church teaching.
This would be, if these were the numbers nationwide, culture-wide, if these were the numbers, then I would say that we're trending in the right direction.
But within the church, no, this is unfortunately a very bad sign.
All right, let's get to the comment section.
Who makes a Twitter mob fly off the handle with rage?
Who's to blame?
It's a Sweet Baby Gang.
Jimmy C says, "I'd love to see an 'I prefer not to play the preferred pronoun game' t-shirt."
Um, that's a little wordy.
Maybe something like a different idea.
More simple would be something like nobody cares about your pronouns.
We can put that on a t-shirt, something like that.
We'll work, we'll workshop it.
We'll work with it.
Um, David S. says, Matt, you should make more documentaries similar to What is a Woman, such as What is Marriage, What is a Person, and What is Truth.
I get these kind of suggestions all the time, and they're good suggestions, but what I would also say is, you know, maybe one day we do something like that, but also, someone else can pick up the mantle on some of these.
You know, I'd love to see, just like in the movie, What is a Woman, we cover a lot of ground.
And you could circle back and take any one of these avenues that we just sort of touched on and do a whole movie about it.
The Origins of Gender Theory.
That's five minutes in the movie.
You go back and do a whole movie about it.
Maybe that's something we end up doing, but I would also love to see other people do that.
Metfreak101 says, my five-year-old nephew is allowed to play VR all day long, which I could not disagree with more.
I don't think we really know the damage things like that could do to a young mind.
Yeah, to a five-year-old?
Well, I'll disagree with you on one thing.
We do know some of the damage anyway.
There has been research on this.
Now, it's true that we can't know the full extent of it.
There are a lot of things that are happening to kids right now that are relatively unprecedented, and so we can't know the full extent.
We can't know for sure how this is all going to manifest itself 20 or 30 years down the line.
But we know enough to say that having your kid using any screen at the age of five for long periods of the day, every day, is a really bad idea.
And to have that screen right up against his eyes and wearing a headset blocking out the whole rest of the world?
Absorbed in this virtual reality fantasy world?
Yeah, not good.
I mean, at the age of five... Your kid is... This is what frustrates me so much.
He's a five, right?
He's a five-year-old boy.
Five-year-old boys are so easy to keep entertained.
You don't need all the fancy gadgets.
You don't need that.
You can...
One of the most classic examples, everybody knows, an empty box.
You give a five-year-old boy an empty box that is a large empty box that is hours of entertainment.
Or like a stick.
Both of my boys are older than that.
My oldest boy is nine years old and can still be vastly entertained by a stick.
I don't know, all the things that he, you know, pretending it's a sword, doing all this, whatever.
The thing is if you have a five-year-old boy who is not able to entertain themselves with a box or a stick or some other just random object who can't go run outside and have fun, then that's a sign that he's already absorbed too much of the screen time and become dependent on it.
So now I think that this calls for some cold turkey.
Take it away, force him to go out and use his imagination to have fun.
It's for his own good.
Let's see, Cody says, I agree with a lot of what Matt has to say, but he's severely out of touch with Americans' perspective of gay marriage.
This could be a unifying issue, and you continue to widen the gap between Americans.
Well, why would you think that I give the slightest damn about Americans' perspective?
I don't care.
Yeah, I'm fully aware, Cody, that when it comes to the marriage issue, I am in the minority.
Fully aware of that.
I know that.
That means nothing to me.
I don't care.
The truth doesn't become not the truth anymore because fewer people are saying it.
And something that's untrue doesn't become true just because more people are saying it.
The truth is not decided democratically.
Truth is not a democratic pursuit.
It just is.
Right?
You could have a genocide and wipe out everyone who is proclaiming a certain truth, which we may eventually reach that point in our society.
And now there's nobody left who's saying it, but it's still true.
Every single person on earth could ignore it and deny it, and it's still true.
So I'm not convinced by numbers when it comes to fundamental moral issues.
Or scientific issues, or frankly any issue, any kind of issue.
I'm not convinced by numbers.
I am convinced by arguments, if they're good.
And so I would say to you what I said during the show yesterday.
Which is that, you know, for thousands of years, for millennia, we had a certain idea of what marriage is.
It is an in-principle procreative union, serves as the foundation of a nuclear family.
Like, that's what marriage is.
It's the function that it served.
And then people like you came along, right?
And said, no, it's not that anymore.
And as you point out, there are a lot of people saying it's not that anymore.
Millions of them.
So I'm way outnumbered.
Fine.
Well, as I'm surrounded, outnumbered by this crowd of people screaming at me, can anyone in that crowd tell me what marriage is now?
Why it should no longer be what it was before and what it is now if it's not that?
If you can't explain that, then it doesn't... If you're babbling nonsense, it doesn't matter how many of you are babbling it.
It's still nonsense.
Well, as you're all aware, no one can define the word woman as of about five minutes ago.
The people in my documentary, what is woman, legislators, Supreme Court appointees, you name it.
As we've already discussed, Merriam-Webster redefined female in the hopes that they could stuff it down the memory hole without anybody noticing.
And frankly, this is the most attention a dictionary is getting in the history of etymology.
With all that in mind, we've decided to enlist the help of a team of biologists to create a garment in a lab.
This is the first time we've done this.
And that was what finally gave rise to the definition of woman t-shirt.
And it is here to educate all of those confused individuals by emblazoning your chest with the proper non-circular definition of the word woman.
Again, we did consult with biologists.
I think we got this one right.
Head over to my swag shack at dailywire.com slash shop to purchase this shirt and see all the other amazing products that my swag shack has to offer today.
It'll never not be cringey saying swag shock.
We have to stop doing that.
We really do.
Also, by the way, reading classic books will make you smart, but watching Ben Shapiro discuss classic books will make you even smarter.
So do the smart thing and tune in to this month's episode of Ben Shapiro's Book Club tonight at 8 p.m.
Eastern.
You'll meet up with Ben in Israel as he explores the historical novel and international bestseller Exodus.
Set amidst the Jewish people's displacement from a hostile post-war Europe, Exodus is a story of an American nurse, an Israeli freedom fighter, and the rebirth of a nation that had been dispersed for 2,000 years.
It's a triumphant piece of literature, and with Ben's always excellent analysis being brought to you from the deeply historic and visually stunning Jerusalem, tonight's book club is a can't-miss.
To watch Ben Shapiro's book club, you need to be an All Access member.
So go to dailywireplus.com to sign up for upgrade today and get 35% off your membership.
That's dailywireplus.com.
Then join Ben in the Holy Land tonight at 8pm to discuss the book Exodus.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Well, up until today, my favorite story out of the leftist dystopia of Portland happened a few years ago.
As reported by Andy Ngo at the time, a professional equity activist named Lillian complained about the racism she experienced at a bakery called Back to Eden Bakery.
And Lillian, if you remember this story, she said that she had been refused service by the two employees on staff.
And the only logical explanation for this refusal, of course, was that the employees were vicious, out-in-the-open, anti-Black racists who just so happened to work in downtown Portland.
After all, why else would anyone refuse service to a Black woman?
I mean, why else would these two employees actually tell the woman to leave without allowing her to purchase any baked goods?
That's what they said to her.
They said, leave.
The owner of the bakery couldn't imagine any other reason, so she immediately fired both of the transgressors, threw them under the bus publicly, and she also promised to hire black women and members of the, quote, LGBTQ POC community to replace the two Klansmen that she had on her staff.
Further, the owner pledged to donate 10% of their sales to a charity that bails criminals out of jail.
And all of this was done, but of course, it was not nearly enough to assuage the hurt and pain and anguish suffered by Lillian.
But it was a start, anyway.
Oh, one note that might be relevant here.
Lillian came to the bakery after it was closed.
So she walked in six minutes after closing and demanded to be served.
And they refused on the basis that they were no longer open.
But that excuse wouldn't fly.
The bakery should have checked with Lillian personally before deciding to close that evening.
Indeed, they should have polled every black woman in the city To see when they should close and open.
And if any black woman desires a muffin at any time of day or night and is not able to procure it immediately for low cost or no cost, then she is the victim of racism and whatever bakery is nearest to her while she is suffering this muffin deprivation is guilty of committing a hate crime against her.
This just makes sense.
I mean, the bakery agreed that it made sense.
Overall, it was a great Portland story.
My favorite.
Until this week, anyway.
Libs of TikTok on her site, LibsofTikTok.com, has a story I think even better than a bakery being accused of racism for not serving a black woman after they already closed.
Apparently, this is what the story is after much fanfare and celebration.
A lesbian bar opened this month in Portland called Doc Marie's, and there had surprisingly not been a lesbian bar in Portland, so this was seen as a significant and important event.
An opening day was a huge success, lines around the block waiting to get in.
A week later, the place was closed.
And the reason is pretty hilarious.
Reading now from the report, it says, Doc Maurice is a lesbian bar that opened on July 1st of this year with the hope of bringing more inclusivity to the city of Portland.
Just one week after their grand opening, they were forced to shut down because of complaints that the bar was not a safe space.
The crowd on opening day was huge.
One woman said that the line for entry on opening day was wrapped around the block with literally 200 lesbians waiting to get in.
But the excitement about a new progressive hangout dissipated quickly.
Within days, Doc Marie's found itself on the receiving end of accusations of not being inclusive enough for trans people and people of color.
Despite mask mandates being lifted in Portland, patrons accused the bar of not implementing enough COVID safety measures.
Patrons also claimed that Doc Marie's had culturally appropriative art on the walls.
That's just some of it.
It gets worse.
A TikToker who goes by the handle DangerDallas and identifies herself as a queer stripper who uses they-them pronouns followed the Doc Marie's case closely, as you would expect, and provided a thorough outline of some of the sins the lesbian bar committed in just a week of being open.
Let's listen to that.
Payroll systems that are not paying people correctly, discrepancies in salaries, dirty water leaking onto the floor, and the owner enabling racist behavior.
So the real reason why Doc Marie's is closed is because when the workers brought these concerns to the ownership the next day after opening day, the ownership did not meet the concerns with any sort of plan of action and the unsatisfactory response caused the managers to quit their jobs immediately.
The Workers' Collective goes on to assure us that protecting black and brown LGBTQ plus folks in building an actively anti-racist space is their top priority, that they are committed to ongoing racial bias training, and will continue to educate ourselves in order to actively foster a safe environment while upholding a zero policy towards racism.
So we take from that that the entire staff made a list of demands.
And because those demands were not met right on the spot, they all quit.
A day after the place opened.
Back to the libs of TikTok Report, it says, Employees of Doc Marie's created an Instagram page to echo these concerns.
They claimed that the owners weren't proactive enough in creating a safe space and accused the owners of racism.
The employees also demanded that the bar host free opportunities for education for the community.
Eventually, the employees demanded the owners relinquish ownership of the bar and hand the business over to them.
This all happened in like a day of being open, I have to remind you.
The owners were given a 24-hour deadline to adhere to the ludicrous demands.
Just five days after opening, the bar announced on July 6 that they had to close temporarily in order to address the cries from the woke mob for a safe and inclusive space.
And now the bar is closed with no immediate plans to reopen.
They say only that they are working on a plan to become proud and inclusive.
Meanwhile, their employees, or former employees, I guess, still insist that the business they chose to work for committed an unforgivable violation by being a business.
They demand that the business should not be a business at all.
It should have no ownership, it should provide free services, and its primary goal should be racial equity.
Now, as a greedy capitalist, I would have thought that a business's primary goal is to turn a profit so that it remains in business.
But that's just not the way things are done in Portland.
And the problem only compounds for Doc Marie's because they're closed, you know, they closed so as to stop inflicting whatever unspecified trauma on the black and trans community.
But as the bakery learned a few years ago, you're also inflicting trauma by being closed.
See, this is the trouble with being a black or trans person in Portland.
Literally, no matter what anyone else does, they are always victimizing you.
And the bigger problem for being not black or trans in Portland is that literally no matter what you do, you're always victimizing someone in one of those groups.
Now, I, of course, am not at all interested in defending the Portland lesbian bar from the woke mob.
I am interested instead in standing on the sidelines and just snickering about the whole thing, because it's funny, and also in observing and studying this self-cannibalizing victimhood orgy to see what we can learn from it.
And as far as I can tell, the big and also kind of encouraging takeaway is that leftism is inherently weak and vulnerable.
It has institutional power and so it controls the culture, but considered on its own, we see that it's prone to dissension, mutiny, paralysis.
This is just one example of the left eating itself.
Every day provides new ones.
And this happens because leftism is a fundamentally self-focused, self-obsessed ideology.
It discourages any real unity, any real rallying around a central cause, because everyone's central cause is themselves.
All alliances are formed only temporarily, for as long as each person individually feels served by it.
Nobody is looking out towards anything transcendent, anything beyond themselves.
It's hard for them to march in the same direction together for very long, because they're all staring not ahead, but back into themselves.
Into their egos.
Up their own asses, basically.
The only universal code they recognize is the ever-fluctuating, ever-changing, ever-more-complicated victimhood hierarchy.
A system that breeds competition as each group vies for ultimate victim status.
And each individual within each group competes not only with the other groups, but with members of their own group.
Intersectional splinter factions are constantly formed as people look to marginalize themselves more and more because in their inverted upside-down world, to be on the margins is to be in power.
It is fortunate for the left, tragic for the rest of us, that this final plunge into self-defeating, self-cannibalizing madness happened after they'd already gained control of every institution.
If it had happened before, they never would have had this success.
This is what creates the ironic situation where the far left runs the most powerful cultural institutions in the country, but they can't even manage to keep a lesbian bar in Portland open for more than a week.
And still, even with their institutional power, this madness makes them vulnerable.
It makes them beatable.
And sometimes, it even makes them very funny to watch.
And so, though I am not the one who decided to cancel them, that is nonetheless why Doc Marie's, the lesbian bar in Portland, is today cancelled.
And that'll do it for us today.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
Also, tell your friends to subscribe as well.
We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, Michael Knowles Show, The Andrew Klavan Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, production manager Pavel Vodovsky, our associate producer is McKenna Waters, The show is edited by Jeff Tomlin.
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