Ep. 996 - White Slaves, And Other Inconvenient Historical Facts
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the outrage mob is coming after me because I mentioned the forbidden historical fact that white people were slaves too. But why is this fact forbidden? And why does it matter? We’ll discuss. Also, the Biden Administration gears up to “forgive” student loans. And by “forgive” we mean “transfer to loans to people who didn’t take them out.” Plus, a Democrat congresswoman flips off her Republican colleague and then cries sexism to excuse herself. In our Daily Cancellation, an artist goes viral with dozens of comics bitterly complaining about her husband. We’ll talk about all of that and much more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, the outrage mob is coming after me because I mentioned the forbidden historical fact that white people were slaves too.
But why is this fact forbidden?
And why does it matter?
We'll discuss.
Also, the Biden administration gears up to forgive student loans.
And by forgive, we mean transfer the loans to people who didn't take them out.
Plus, a Democrat congresswoman flips off her Republican colleagues and then cries sexism to excuse herself.
In our daily cancellation, an artist goes viral with dozens of comics bitterly complaining about her husband.
We'll talk about all that and much more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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Over the weekend, I finished the book Skeletons on the Zahara.
It tells the story of James Riley, captain of the merchant ship Commerce, which shipwrecked off the coast of North Africa in 1815.
Riley, along with his entire crew, found themselves stranded in the vast Saharan desert, where they began to die from thirst and exposure almost immediately.
That was only the beginning of their troubles, of course.
The men were soon seized and enslaved by a band of desert nomads.
And from that point, the crew was split off in different directions as each man was sold and traded from one nomad to the next.
They were abused, starved, beaten, found themselves on a hierarchy where white slaves, Christian dogs as they were called in Arabic, occupied a rung on the social ladder somewhere well beneath camels and probably donkeys.
And at one point, Captain James Riley was traded for an old blanket, just to give you an idea of how much they were valued.
Several of the slaves were lost into the interior of the continent and never were heard from or seen again.
Doomed to live out their lives in bondage, though their lives would have been mercifully short.
You can only live so long when you're being used as a pack animal in the desert and forced to subsist on snails and camel urine, which is what they were consuming most of the time.
But Riley and a few of his men managed to escape with the assistance of a comparatively merciful Arab who ransomed them for several hundred dollars and a couple of muskets.
Yet, the survivors never escaped the physical or mental trauma of their experiences, and most of them died relatively young.
But two of them, including Riley, did publish books about their experiences, and both books were sensations at the time that they were published.
Captain James Reilly would become a household name.
Even Abraham Lincoln named his book, Sufferings in Africa, as one of his greatest inspirations.
The funny thing, though, is that this incredible and true tale, which was once widely known and renowned across the country, has faded into obscurity in recent years.
In fact, the author of Skeletons on the Zahara, Dean King, only found out about the story and decided to write a book about it after stumbling across an old, dusty, leather-bound copy of Riley's memoir while researching another book at the New York Yacht Club Library in 1995.
It's the only reason he even knew about this.
So, why don't more people know about this story?
Why isn't it taught in schools?
Why haven't there been movies made based on it?
It is an incredible story.
The book was actually adapted as a screenplay before it was even published, with DreamWorks attached, back in, like, 2001.
But the film was never made, and then five years, or rather, ten years later, in 2010, another screenplay was written.
But that project also fizzled out.
The movie was never made.
There's no mystery here, of course.
This story has fallen into the cracks of history because it touches the tip of an iceberg that our educational establishment, the media, and Hollywood would all prefer that we not acknowledge or explore.
And that would be the subject of white slaves in Africa.
Riley and his men were not the only ones, not by a long shot.
In fact, over the course of a few centuries, well over a million white people were enslaved in Northern Africa.
A million.
Some of them detained and enslaved after being shipwrecked, but the vast majority were abducted right off of ships still at sea or from coastal European communities by Muslim raiders who carried them back to Africa to be sold, traded, or ransomed.
In some cases, entire communities, coastal European communities, were ransacked.
Hundreds of people captured at one time.
You know, the United States fought a whole war, a series of them, the Barbary Wars, to put a stop to this practice.
There's a reason, though, that school curricula tends to skip over that conflict, going from, you know, the Revolutionary War to the War of 1812 to the Civil War, hop-skipping and jumping over some of these more uncomfortable and troublesome episodes.
There's a concerted effort in our society to erase, ignore, and cover up not just the story of white slaves in Africa, but almost the entire global history of slavery in general.
The impression that we're supposed to have is that the transatlantic slave trade, white Westerners enslaving Africans, which was actually only a small piece of the transatlantic slave trade, but that's the only form of slavery that ever existed.
That's the impression we're supposed to have.
Black Africans were the victims, white Americans and Europeans were the villains.
End of story.
And this is indeed what many people believe, because that is what our culture wants them to believe.
This point was driven home when I posted a thread about the true history of slavery to Twitter on Saturday.
Thinking about all these issues, you know, after having just finished the book, I posted this.
This is what I said.
Well, over one million whites were enslaved in Northern Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries, most of them abducted and sold by Muslim pirates.
Africans were raiding Europe for slaves for hundreds of years.
The school system has totally erased this fact from history.
Continuing, of course, white people were enslaved in other parts of Africa, too, and across the world for centuries, including in North America, where white servants, quote-unquote, were shipped to the colonies by the thousands.
Slavery in America didn't begin in 1619.
White children were being kidnapped and sold into servitude in the colonies before that.
And, of course, slavery existed in the Americas for hundreds of years prior to Europeans ever setting foot there.
Indian tribes all practiced slavery.
Slavery persisted in non-Western countries long after it had been abolished in the West.
Slavery was an accepted institution in Africa and Asia for millennia, and it seems to have never occurred to any of these societies that there might have been something wrong with the practice.
And, of course, the African slave trade was mostly furnished by Africans capturing other Africans and selling them into bondage.
The African slave trade was abolished by the West, not by Africa.
Slavery remained legal in parts of Africa well into the 20th century.
Actually, I should have said that slavery was abolished against the, not just, you know, without the help of the non-Western world, but against the objections of the non-Western world, was the slave trade abolished.
Everything I wrote there is as true as it is unknown to the average American.
But, predictably, the outrage mob has been screaming at me for the past two days because of this, calling me a Nazi, accusing me of excusing or justifying or minimizing the enslavement of black people, accusing me of upholding white supremacy, quote-unquote.
My messages and emails have been, as you can imagine, even more colorful than that.
But the attacks have come from the right as well.
This is not all from the left.
Maj Torre is a prominent gun rights activist.
Maybe you've seen him on Fox News, maybe you've seen him on YouTube.
He launched into a tirade that included many tweets and several videos about me.
Beginning with this response, he said, Dumb, reductive, and horrible attempt at justifying the transatlantic slave trade take here.
Conservatives love going full retard and damaging any inroads into black communities with these kind of takes.
I just big up dude for the what is a woman film and then this.
Yes, how dare I say something he disagrees with after he just said he likes my movie.
I should have known that his endorsement of my film puts me in debt to him for life.
I didn't realize that.
Others on the right agreed with him, including Aja Smith, who's a GOP congressional candidate,
who tweeted, "Maj was correct for calling him out. Far too long, folks are silent when they
see and hear a wrong. That's why we're in this disinformation that we're in."
Now, despite my urging, I could not get Smith to explain what part of my statement was
disinformation. Most of the people angry at me for talking about this issue could not even begin to
explain, didn't try to explain, how or why I'm wrong.
There was at least one exception.
Well-known Twitch streamer, to the extent that any Twitch streamer can be called well-known, Hasan Piker, tried to debunk at least one of the things that I said about slavery.
Let's listen to that attempt.
Matt Walsh.
Well, over 1 million whites were enslaved in North Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries.
Most of them abducted and sold by Muslim pirates.
Africans were raiding Europe for slaves for hundreds of years.
The school system has totally erased this fact from history.
First of all, uh, you know, the glories of, of, uh, uh, Muslim pirates doing that, uh, was erased probably because the Western world was embarrassed by the L that they held.
Most likely to the Ottoman Empire, most frequently to the Ottoman Empire, the sick man of Europe.
Okay?
Of course, white people were enslaved in other parts of Africa, too, and across the world for centuries, including in North America, where white servants were shipped to the colonies by the thousands.
Matt Walsh is doing the classic, like, chattel slavery is the same as indentured servitude, which, of course, it's not.
Indentured servitude, in and of itself, is, of course, still completely unacceptable, obviously.
Uh, but, uh, the main differences in that situation is that you can actually purchase, uh, your way, you can purchase your freedom, not that it's like super likely or whatever, but you can do that, uh, whether there was no purchasing of your freedom as a, as a black slave.
Okay.
Um, your child was immediately also seen as property, whereas indentured servitude doesn't work that way as well.
And that's precisely why.
That's precisely why there is a difference between the way that Irishmen or the way that Italians or the way that whoever the f*** we're talking about in this situation were able to assimilate or be welcomed into white society in comparison to black people, which Matt Walsh, of course, still doesn't want to welcome into white society.
So, there you go.
Now, we're going to be generous and ignore the part where he refers to the glories, his words, of Muslims enslaving white people.
He considers that a glory.
And instead we're going to focus on his claims about indentured servitude.
This is totally different from chattel slavery, he says.
And I've heard a lot of this.
You hear a lot of this.
This attempt to distinguish chattel slavery from other kinds of slavery.
Well, in the West, there was chattel slavery, which is so much worse than all the other kinds of slavery.
Well, chattel just means property, right?
So, chattel slavery is when the slave is property.
Well, that's slavery.
That's the definition of slavery, is when someone is made property.
So, there is no Coherent distinction to be made between slavery and chattel slavery.
This is just what people do when they, in fact, are looking to minimize or justify one type of slavery and separate it from other types.
In the indentured servitude thing, he says, well, this is very different.
But that's also incorrect.
In a book called White Cargo, The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America, authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh explain, no relation, by the way, as far as I know, that in most cases an indentured servant, so-called, was simply a slave by another name.
The servants were bought, sold, and traded like any other slave, like any other property.
And though their period of bondage was supposed to be temporary, oftentimes they were kept in servitude for life, after their sentence was complete, because there was no one around to enforce the terms of the deal.
Many others were worked to death long before they could be freed.
Many of these quote-unquote indentured servants, when they were shipped to the Americas, died within a year, because they were worked to death.
They were worked harder than you worked your livestock.
Also, as the authors explain, many of the servants did not choose that arrangement at all.
Kids were kidnapped off the street and sold into servitude.
Others were coaxed there on false pretenses and then enslaved.
So yes, there were white slaves in America.
There were a lot of them.
As a New York Times review of white cargo says in its concluding sentence, this again is the New York Times which
wrote this, but this was 15 years ago,
"There are probably tens of millions of Americans who are descended from white slaves without even knowing it."
Don't often hear that brought up in the reparations conversation, do you?
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Now, the fact that white people were slaves should not come as a surprise anyway, given that the word slaves comes from Slav, because Slavic people historically were so often enslaved.
Was the enslavement of black people in America completely different in its barbarity from all other forms of slavery across the world and throughout history?
No.
We've already discussed the conditions of white slaves in Africa and of white children abducted and shipped to America and then literally worked to death.
What we see very quickly from any honest study of the history of slavery is that it was unspeakably brutal in all of its forms.
Galley slaves on Arab ships were kept in chains for years at a time, not allowed to leave the ship.
And then if a British patrol approached and they thought that the slaves were going to be liberated, they would just cut their throats and throw them overboard.
Slaves in the Americas, before the arrival of Europeans, that is, slaves owned by Native American tribes, because they all owned slaves, were frequently tortured and brutalized, especially in Mesoamerica, where they often would be gutted, dismembered, and sometimes cannibalized during religious rituals.
It was not good to be a slave anywhere, let's just say.
Maybe we can leave it at that.
America was not unique in its relationship with slavery.
It wasn't even unique in its exploitation of the transatlantic slave trade.
Most slaves from Africa were shipped not to the US, but to the Middle East and South America.
What makes the USA different from most countries is not that it had slaves, in that fact it's on the same footing as literally every other country that had existed on Earth until that point, but that it had slaves for such a comparatively short amount of time.
But does this matter?
I mean, should we be talking about any of this?
Well, yes, it matters.
It matters because it's true, and it's a truth that a lot of people aren't aware of.
And it matters because we cannot study history, and most importantly, learn from it, if we're determined to only look at little pieces of the bigger stories.
That's why it matters most of all.
America's slavery was not America's sin or the Western world's sin.
It was the entire world's sin.
One that the Western world ultimately did far more to stamp out and rectify than anyone else.
This is the entire world.
I mean, for thousands of years.
It's not just that slavery existed for thousands of years.
It's that for thousands of years across the world, It hardly even occurred to anyone, even some of the greatest philosophical and religious thinkers for thousands of years across the world, hardly even occurred to anyone that there might be something wrong with the practice in and of itself.
There are people who spoke out against the conditions of slaves, against the abuse of slaves, but very, it's very, very rarely did you hear anyone even get close to criticizing slavery as an institution.
This was a massive moral blind spot that virtually everyone who existed on Earth for thousands of years shared.
That's an important story.
That there could be a blind spot like that.
That everyone shares.
Something we should probably talk about and think about and learn from.
Because as I said, it's the truth.
And the thing about the truth is that the more you tell me not to say it, the louder I'll be about it.
That's the way it works.
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Um, this, this, you know, this is just, this is how it goes.
You tell me to stop talking about it, then I do a 15 minute monologue about it to start the week.
That's just the way this works.
And, uh, in fact, that ended up, um, that ended up, uh, superseding what I was going to start the show with today originally, which was, uh, the issue of student loans.
Because there's a couple of things going on.
On that issue that are important.
So first of all, we have this from NPR.
It says, a new report from the U.S.
Government Accountability Office finds the U.S.
Department of Education miscalculated the cost of the federal student loan program.
Miscalculated is a generous understatement, let's say.
From 1997 to 2021, the Education Department estimated that payments from federal direct student loans would generate $114 billion for the government.
But the Government Accountability Office found that as of 2021, the program had actually cost the government an estimated $197 billion.
A percentage of that shortfall, $102 billion, stems from the unprecedented federal student loan payment pause that began under the CARES Act of 2020.
The pause has been extended several times under former President Trump and President Biden.
The most recent extension runs through August 31st.
A bigger reason for the $311 billion difference report says is that initial predictions did not account for the high percentage of borrowers who ended up enrolling in income-driven repayment plans.
About half of all direct loans are now paid through these plans, which are designed to help people who can't afford to make large monthly payments and which promise loan cancellation after 20 to 25 years.
So what do we learn from this?
First of all, the Department of Education is incompetent, useless, should not exist, and it's really bad at estimating the costs of things.
to the extent of estimating a $114 billion windfall that in reality becomes a nearly $200 billion loss, a money
pit.
And that should make you really nervous about this.
This is a story from Business Insider.
It says, the Education Department is ready to cancel student debt once President Joe Biden gives the word, according to Politico.
On Thursday, Politico released a report detailing internal memos within the Education Department on plans to carry out broad student loan forgiveness.
Biden has considered moving to cancel $10,000 in student debt for borrowers making under $150,000.
And the report says the department is prepared to provide that relief within months of any announcement for borrowers whose income information is available.
Borrowers without income information readily available to the department would apply through a form on studentaid.gov to self-certify their income and qualifications for relief per the report.
So, the Department of Education is ready to do this.
The most recent student loan pause, as it's said, is up at the end of this month that just began.
So either Biden is going to kick the can down the road some more and pause it again, which I wouldn't be surprised if he does because he's just going to keep pausing until we get to the midterms, which at this point it would take, I think, one more pause and you're past the midterms, or he's going to institute some sort of student loan forgiveness.
Now on this issue of student debt and so-called forgiveness, which is a euphemism that I'm using myself because I'm reading it in these articles, but it is, we should keep in mind, it is a euphemism.
Because it's actually not possible.
This is not something that anyone has a magic wand where they can wave it and say, oh, you are forgiven.
Go in peace, my child.
You are absolved of your debts.
No, as I always point out, this is not student loan forgiveness.
It is student loan transferal.
It is debt transferal, not debt forgiveness.
All debt forgiveness is debt transferal.
Because somebody is left holding the bag.
Someone has to pay the debt.
It's just a matter of who is it going to be.
Um, and on that topic of who it's going to be, I thought this poll from, uh, Nina Turner, who's, uh, I don't know, she's a leftist mouthpiece.
She has a blue check on Twitter, so she must be important.
She was, um, she, she sent out this poll about student debt and she obviously wanted it to go a certain way.
The way she phrases the poll, she said, should the president cancel student debt?
And then the options are no, people should suffer.
Yes, $10,000.
Yes, $50,000.
Or cancel all of it!
In exclamation points.
Now, she's phrased it that way because obviously she's hoping that everyone will hit the cancel all of it option there.
I mean, obviously when you phrase it, no people should suffer, no one's going to click on that.
But in fact, people did.
So what she ended up with is almost 69% of the respondents of her poll answered no, people should suffer.
And I actually, even though this was not intentional, and the way she phrased it was meant to skew the results in favor of debt forgiveness, I actually love the way she phrased it.
Because, inadvertently, she brings up a good point.
And it's a question of, who should suffer?
And when you answer no, you know, when you say, no, the president should not cancel student debt, You're saying, no, people should suffer, but not just people in general.
It's that the people who took out the loans should suffer because of those loans.
Yes, that's my position.
And if that sounds cruel or uncaring, well, how could you think that people should suffer from the consequences of the choices they made?
Well, because, and look, I would love it if nobody ever had to suffer ever again.
That would be my preference.
So if that was the poll, you know, if there was a poll where we could click a certain option or press a button and no one ever has to suffer again, then I would take that option.
But unfortunately, we live in reality.
And that's never the option in reality.
So really, it's a question of not whether people should suffer, but who should suffer.
There is some suffering that's going to happen.
It just is.
Who's going to have to carry that burden?
There is a cross that has to be carried.
Someone's going to have to carry it.
Who's it going to be?
Well, there are two options.
Either the mostly upper class college graduates who took out these loans can suffer because of them.
That's one option.
Or the people who didn't take out the loans can suffer because of the loans that the upper class college grads took out.
People who took out the loans suffer or the people who didn't suffer.
And another way you could break this down is that, you know, upper-class college grads can suffer or middle-class working-class people can suffer.
And of those two options, yeah, the people who took out the loans should do the suffering for the choices that they made.
The person who should suffer from the mistake is the person who made it.
Yes, definitely.
There's not much to even think about there.
And let's make no mistake about this, that if we have student debt, quote-unquote, forgiveness, yeah, it might be a temporary relief for the people who, you know, just look and, oh, my debt's gone away.
But there's going to be a lot of suffering because of it.
I mean, that money is going to come from somewhere.
And as much as the Democrats might claim, oh, it's going to come from billionaires, No, it's going to come from the working class, because it always does.
They're always the ones who end up holding the bag.
And then there are other consequences too, like inflation.
Okay, inflation that is already causing much suffering.
And now you're talking about cancelling all student debt, now inflation.
Is that going to help inflation or hurt it?
Is that going to help us in battling inflation or is that going to hurt us, is the question.
So this would mean suffering for a lot of people and it would mean suffering for the people who did not make that choice to begin with.
This is just, it's not a fun reality and in fact, I am sympathetic.
I'm sympathetic to the people who took out these loans because they were duped into it and they were convinced You know, by the education system, by their high school guidance counselors, by their own parents, by the media, by everybody.
By the college, you know, by the university system especially, that they have to take out these loans and purchase this really expensive piece of paper, purchase the degree, because if they don't, then they're going to be failures and they're never going to have any chance at success in life.
That's a lie.
It's a scam, but there were a lot of people that were duped into it.
And I feel bad for those people.
I'm very sympathetic to them.
But my sympathy dries up the moment you take your hand and try to reach into somebody else's pocket.
Okay?
The moment you try to offload your suffering onto someone else, that's when my sympathy goes away just like that.
It's gone.
It evaporates.
I have none left for you.
Now, if you are carrying this burden with some stoicism, you know, if you're carrying it with some courage and strength and saying, like, this is really, really hard, and it's not fair, and I was lied to, and I paid six figures for this stupid piece of paper which has done nothing for me, But you carry it because there's no other choice, and the last thing you're going to do is expect anyone else to carry it for you?
If you do that, then all the sympathy in the world.
There is no magic wand way around this.
What we can start thinking about and talking about is, what do we do going forward?
Because we're left with this really difficult situation, and it's a very unfair situation.
For a lot of people, it's just that, you know, yes, I think it is unfair.
I mean, the idea, like, 18 years old, you can make a choice like this?
These 18-year-old kids don't know what they're doing.
So it is unfair.
It's just that it becomes even more unfair.
So if it's already unfair in many ways to expect people who took out these loans when they're 18 to pay them back, how much more unfair is it to expect people who never took out the loans to pay them back?
But if we want to rectify the unfair situation in the future, What we have to do is start telling people the truth.
Start telling kids the truth.
You don't need to go to college.
It's not just that college is unnecessary.
It is that it is, in many cases, malignant.
And the college, the university system's overall effect on the culture has been generally malignant for decades now.
You can just sidestep that completely and go off and have a lot of success in life.
It is possible.
And the really great thing is that if you do just leap right over this step that they told you you had to take, and you go off and you live your life, down the line, when you're older and you actually have some financial means, if you decide that you actually do want to go to college, you still can.
It'll still be there for you.
That's the truth we should be telling.
Okay.
It's from the Daily Wire.
It says, well, first of all, Thursday night was the congressional baseball game where Republicans won 10 to 0, which is pretty funny already.
Of course, it was only five years ago that Republicans were attacked during a baseball game by a crazed Bernie bro who went there with a hit list, intent on murdering GOP lawmakers.
And so you might think that given that history, that this would be, you know, a congressional baseball game is a time for displays of unity and brotherly love.
You might think that if you're brain damaged, but if not, you're not surprised to see this.
Representative Linda Sanchez, a Democrat from California, after, I believe, striking out, we can only assume, she's walking by the GOP dugout, and then she does this.
Let's play this clip here as she flips them off as she walks by.
Lead off the inning, we'll get a pinch runner down there, the fist bump.
We'll get an eye on who the pinch runner's gonna be.
Looks like it's gonna be Jeffries.
And she will come off to a nice ovation.
Not much reaction from the... Okay, let's see this flip off there.
So... Okay, I might have been unfair to her.
I guess I take from the context there that she did get a hit, but then she had a pinch.
She has someone running for her.
She has a pinch runner.
No big surprise there.
But she goes by the dugout and she just flips off the Republicans.
And this is like, this is a lawmaker, right?
This is someone who's supposed... There was a time when you expected There's never been a time when politics was anything but a rough-and-tumble sport, but there was a time when you would expect some measure of decorum and dignity and statesmanship from your elected leaders.
Even when they were pummeling each other over the head, when arguments in Congress became physically violent, still there was some dignity and decorum to it.
Now we just don't expect that at all, so it's not a surprise to see that.
But here's her excuse from the Daily Wire.
She says, Democrat Representative Linda Sanchez claimed in a statement Friday afternoon that she flipped off the Republican dugout during Thursday night's congressional baseball game because she heard a sexist remark being made as she ran back to the Democrats' dugout.
The statement read, the Congressional baseball game is one of my favorite events of the year.
It's a great cause and brings both sides of the aisle together for a night off from partisan politics.
That's why it really struck a nerve when I heard an offensive and misogynistic comment from the Republican side on my way back to the dugout.
So it was an offensive and misogynistic comment that was made to her.
She doesn't say what the comment was.
And I guess being very charitable, she never says who said it.
Well, this excuse didn't really land, and that's why a day later, she clarified the story yet again.
This is from RedState.
It says, Now Sanchez is clarifying her story again.
She's now saying it wasn't the Republican team that made the comment.
She says, "It wasn't the team, it was an obnoxious fan who shouts misogynistic S at me every
single year."
But she still went after Republicans.
She says, actually they, you know, she's the victim here.
She says, if the Republican women would have stood up and said that's not acceptable, instead of, you know, trashing me for my response, then we might have a place where there's no misogyny that's tolerated by anybody, anywhere.
And yet, amid all these excuses that she's offering, she still has not, she's not told us what the comment was.
And she even says, well, it wasn't the Republican, it wasn't the actual Republicans themselves, it was someone on their side up in the stands who made the comment.
But she knows who the guy is, because she says he's there every year.
But very nice of her to not mention his name.
Because Democrats are known for that, right?
Of course.
They're very reticent to throw anybody under the bus, to name names, to send the outrage mob after anybody.
They never do that kind of thing.
All right, moving on, this is the New York Post.
It says, there's a chance the identity of the winner of the $1.3 billion Mega Millions jackpot will never be known, thanks to an Illinois law allowing people who score more than $250,000 to keep their name secret.
The winning ticket to the mind-boggling fortune was sold at the Speedy Cafe Speedway gas station, according to lottery officials.
But no one yet has come forward to claim the prize.
So that's the news.
The jackpot was up to 1.3 billion dollars.
Someone claimed it.
We still don't know who.
This apparently is not the highest jackpot that the lottery's ever had.
1.5 billion dollars.
One and a half billion dollars in the lottery that somebody won back in 2018 and we still don't know who that person was either.
Probably a smart move to not tell people who you are if you win a billion dollars in the lottery.
I only mention this because And I know this is one of those things that for whatever reason nobody cares about, but just FYI, you know, lotteries are one of the most indefensible and dystopian things that we all take for granted.
We all just kind of accept that the lottery exists and lots of people like it and they think it's a lot of fun, but this is an actual gambling ring run by the government.
And in the case of the Mega Millions, it's, I guess, a consortium of state governments.
But however they divvy it up, this is the government, state governments, governmental powers that are running a gambling ring.
And this happens even as many other forms of private gambling are banned.
In some states, in fact, I think there's at least, I don't know, there's several, I don't know how many, five, six maybe, states where the only form of gambling that's allowed is that which the government runs and profits off of.
So they banned all forms of gambling.
You know, you can't do sports gambling, there's no slot machines, there's no casinos, you can't bet on cards, you can't bet on anything.
Oh, but they have the lottery though, you can bet on that.
And that's, by the way, the one form of gambling where you're the least likely to win.
That's the worst form.
It's just as addictive as, if not more so, any other form of gambling.
But the difference is that unlike, like with sports betting, you could actually get good at it and win money consistently.
I know people who do.
But with the lottery, there's no way to master it and eventually win consistently.
And yet, that's the one kind that's allowed in a lot of states.
And the reason that they give, just to add insult to injury, the reason given for banning these other forms of gambling in other states is they always give moral reasons.
They say, well, gambling is bad.
You shouldn't be doing it.
It's harmful.
It's addictive.
And yet, the very agents of the government making this argument are running their own gambling ring.
And what is the lottery?
Of course, it's a tax on the poor.
It's a tax on ignorant people.
It's a tax on addicts.
People who, you know, dump.
I mean, we've all been at the gas station standing behind some pathetic sight of a person dumping like $90.
And you could tell this is their gas money and grocery bill for the week and dumping it all into scratch house.
Or jackpot lottery tickets.
And the thing is, you're never gonna win.
Almost certainly.
And if you do win, it's worse than not winning because it's almost certain to destroy your life.
Like it's one thing to hit it big on sports betting, but to just take someone, some average person,
and hand them like $900 million, that's almost a death sentence.
Guaranteeing it's gonna rip their lives apart, they're gonna die of an overdose, all the rest of it.
We've seen that many, many times.
I guess it's because there are so many corrupt and inexcusable and indefensible things
that the government does, you have to pick your spots a little bit.
And so I guess we kind of gloss over this one, which maybe is somewhat understandable.
I also wanted to mention this.
This is from ESPN.
News hot off the presses here.
It says, Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson will serve a six-game suspension for violating the league's personal conduct policy following accusations of sexual misconduct.
So, if you haven't followed this story at all, Deshaun Watson is a superstar quarterback now for the Cleveland Browns after being traded from the Houston Texans.
And now he's going to get a six-game suspension.
And this is after being accused of sexual assault by, I think, we're up to 26 women.
All of them massage therapists.
So it's the same story they all tell, where they were either assaulted or harassed in very graphic ways while giving Deshaun Watson a massage.
And what we know about him is that he has, is that while he was in Houston, he cycled through like 40 different masseuses over the course of like a year or two.
That's a normal thing, isn't it?
26 women come out and say this is what happened to them, and now he's facing a six-game suspension.
No monetary fine either, being added on top of that.
And this is where, you know, it's important to distinguish between a lot of the Me Too stuff and something like this.
Because during the height of the Me Too hysteria, there were plenty of men who suffered far worse consequences while being accused of things not nearly as bad as this.
But this is what Me Too does.
One thing it does is that it, you know, kind of just discredits everybody all at once.
Anyone who makes an accusation is discredited.
And in this case, yeah, there isn't any physical evidence because of the nature of the accusation that if he did physically sexually assault or harass someone during a massage, what kind of physical evidence could there possibly be of that?
And so all you're left with is the accusations, but 26?
Now it's true, just because one woman comes out and accuses a famous man of doing something doesn't mean he did it.
If another woman comes out and corroborates and said, same thing happened to me, doesn't mean it's true.
Another woman comes out, also doesn't mean it's true.
But at a certain point, when you get into the 20s, you do have to stop and think, like, there's something going on here.
This is not a problem that anybody else has.
Lots of guys go get massages, and none of them have ever been accused of 25 women of sexual harassment.
And yet, interestingly enough, even though there are plenty of men at the height of the Me Too hysteria, who were accused of far less, had far less evidence against them, because 25 accusations, I mean, that is a form of evidence, right?
That's testimony against you, and yet suffered far worse repercussions.
I wonder why that is.
Alright, one other thing I want to mention before we get to the comments section, This is from Live Science.
Explorers have discovered a series of mysterious, perfectly aligned holes punched into the seafloor roughly 1.6 miles beneath the ocean's surface, and they have no idea who or what made them.
The strange holes were spotted by the crew of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Explorer vessel as they investigated the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a mostly unexplored region of the seafloor that is part of the world's largest mountain range.
The holes form a straight line and appear at irregularly repeating distances and they are surrounded by tiny mounds of sediment.
And no one knows exactly where these holes came from.
What's so fascinating about this, as I once again try to convince you to care about a science story, what's fascinating is how little we actually know about our oceans and what's happening in them.
80% of the world's oceans remain unexplored.
That's because the oceans are so vast, obviously, but also they're so inhospitable to, if not life in general, then at least us.
Because deep down in the ocean, it's extremely dark and cold.
The water pressure, if you go all the way down to the deepest part of the Marianas Trench, six or seven miles down, you're talking about 15,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, which is the equivalent of having like a bunch of tanks or cement trucks stacked on top of you.
And yet there are all kinds of life forms living deep in the ocean anyway.
Who are able to survive in those conditions, and we don't know anything about most of them.
And who knows what else is going on down there?
Like I said, 80% unexplored.
70% of the Earth is covered in oceans.
80% of that 70% is unexplored.
We have no idea what's going on.
Who knows who or what made those holes?
We may never know.
But it was probably aliens, is the point I was getting to, ultimately.
Let's get now to the comment section.
The fact that the elites think this would be a good idea here really illustrates their contempt for humanity.
Yeah, he's referring to the city of the future that we talked about on Thursday's show.
And this is something that they're supposedly going to build in Saudi Arabia, and then they hope to export it to other countries, including our own.
Which is just a long, they call it the line, but really it's just a long, vast rectangle where they want to stuff all of the people and you would live there between these mirrored walls your whole life and never leave.
And yeah, it does kind of remind you of what you would put on a planet if it was a total wasteland that couldn't sustain human life.
And the other point there is that Mars and Venus Are, you know, you mentioned Mars, Venus as well.
Good case studies, I think, in the sort of inevitable course of all planets.
Because both of them were once like Earth.
You know, they had oceans and atmospheres and everything.
Probably had life on them.
But now they're barren wastelands.
And it's not because anybody was driving SUVs on those planets three billion years ago, as far as we know.
But just because this is the course of nature.
This is the course of the universe, and it's inevitable, and there's nothing you can really do to stop it.
Zachary Todd says, I'm glad someone else is finally calling out the BS.
Midget just randomly went from being normal to being a slur without any explanation.
Well, it's like I said, there's this absurd idea that the comfort level of the speaker When it comes to speaking, right, the comfort level of you as the speaker doesn't matter.
It's only the comfort level of the person hearing whatever you're saying that matters.
Which doesn't make any sense to me.
So some people, for whatever reason, feel more comfortable hearing little people than midget, which is fine if that's what they prefer, and if that's what they want to say, but I don't feel more comfortable saying that.
It feels weird to me to say little people instead of midget, and since I'm the one speaking, Shouldn't it be up to me what words I use, based on my own comfort level, based on what feels right to me.
Annie says, Matt, to this day, I regret objecting when my husband tried to confront some pervert who came into the ladies' room.
My marriage would be better today if I just sat quietly and let him deck the guy.
We've come to a point in our culture where women don't know how to be protected any more than men know how to protect us.
I think that's a really important insight there.
It's not just men losing the instincts and the ability, the desire, the will to protect women, but on the other side of it, you know, women should allow themselves to be protected by men.
So, both of these things are happening all at once.
Mike says, I'm roughly the same age as Matt, and I remember in elementary school believing that if AIDS didn't get me, it would be the acid rain.
Those were the childhood propaganda of our time.
Yeah, and we've talked about, you know, we've been over this.
Especially in the 90s.
If you made the mistake of going to elementary school in the 90s, which at least is better than going to elementary school now, but there are a lot of things you didn't have to deal with in the 90s in elementary school that kids today do have to deal with.
But one of the big things in the 90s in elementary school is that you were told about AIDS and you were told that anyone can get it and you like basically just walking past someone in the hallway you can contract AIDS.
And I do always wonder If all of this AIDS propaganda and paranoia being, you know, shoved into the minds of kids in the 90s, if that has helped to turn us into, you know, hypochondriacs, and then when you get to the COVID panic and the way that especially my generation has reacted to it, many of them still walking around with masks on, you know, is it because of like the mental conditioning that started way back 30 years ago?
I do wonder that.
And finally, another comment says, I think it's really hard to fall in deep and genuine love with anyone if you don't like them even a little bit on the outside.
We have to be honest.
Men, and yes, women too, do take looks into consideration, even if they don't want to admit it.
We need to stop going by the exceptions to the rule, those who don't take even a small amount of looks into consideration.
Well, it's not just a matter of taking looks into consideration, right?
Your looks are part of who you are.
It's how the other person knows you.
It's how they experience your presence.
Your physical body is not just a container.
We aren't hermit crabs living in shells, right?
Now, the difference for women is that their perception of your physical attractiveness is more determined by aspects of you that are not physical.
So, like, if a woman finds you smart and thinks that you're kind and generous and funny, especially funny, then she'll begin to perceive you as more physically attractive, even if in reality you look like a giant toad.
And that's very good for men.
Because without this advantage, we would, most of us, probably die alone.
Alright, so this is the moment in the show where, in years past, I would have read you an ad for Harry's razors.
I would have said something like, hey, you millions of listeners, I love Harry's, go out and buy one.
But I'm not going to do that because I don't love Harry's.
I hate Harry's, in fact.
If you don't know the story by now, Harry's used to advertise on our shows until someone here said that boys are boys and girls are girls.
If you can imagine the horror of a statement like that.
This was too much for our sponsor who pulled their ads due to values misalignment.
Well, we're not going to promote products that hate your values, so we did the only thing that made sense to us.
We launched our own razor company, Jeremy's Razors.
Every Jeremy's Razors kit comes with a premium razor, two sets of blades, shaving cream, and aftershave balm.
It's a beautiful thing to behold, and over 70,000 kits have shipped already.
People love this product for good reason.
You can see why.
So instead of telling you that I'm a big fan of Harry's, I'm here to tell you about the thousands of ex-Harry's fans
who've literally thrown their razors in the trash and switched to Jeremy's,
and they're not going back, I can tell you.
Go to IHateHarrys.com and get your Jeremy's Razors Founders Kit.
It's time to stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you.
Give to Jeremy instead.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
(dramatic music)
Today we cancel Mary Catherine Starr, who is the artist, podcaster, consultant,
professional yoga instructor with pronouns in her bio, though that last detail I'm sure
would already have been assumed, who's amassed a large online following
through her viral comics depicting motherhood as she sees it.
Now, if you spend any time on social media, you may have already encountered one or two or twenty of these mom-life comics where Star shares her relatable insights into marriage.
Relatable to her anyway, and I suppose to the band of bitter, sullen women who follow her and share her content.
It becomes clear rather quickly after glancing at her work that Star really does not enjoy motherhood very much, doesn't like her husband very much, and is now attempting to make her resentment seem inspirational.
Much of it centers around, as a glowing profile in the Huffington Post explains, the unfair ways that society views moms versus dads.
Except that these viral comics often seem less relevant to society and more based on whatever petty gripe she has about her husband on any particular day.
For example, one of her recent offerings, which has circulated widely on social media, is captioned, One of the many differences between me and my husband.
In one panel, we see her staring at a peach on the table, and the thought bubble says, oh look, the last ripe peach.
I'll save it for the kids.
They love peaches so much.
And the next panel shows her husband, and his thought bubble says, oh look, the last ripe peach.
I'll use it as a special treat in my daily smoothie.
Now, surely her husband deserves this public shaming for having the audacity to eat the food in his own house.
And he gets shamed for many other things too.
In another comic, this one with nearly 20,000 likes on Instagram, she tells us the saga of her husband having trouble finding things.
It says, "We're sitting down to eat breakfast. My husband is still in the kitchen. I say, 'Will you grab a bib for
Teddy?' He says, 'Where are the bibs?' What I want to say in response is, 'They're in the same
place they've been for the past five years.'"
In the same place I put them every time I washed them and put them away.
Presumably the same place you've gotten them from a thousand times before.
Unless, of course, you've never gotten either one of our kids a bib in the past five years.
But what I actually say, in the corner cabinet.
The same place they've always been.
And that, my friends, is called self-control.
Nothing like bitching about your spouse publicly while also congratulating yourself for being passive-aggressive.
Oftentimes, she seems to make no attempt to be humorous at all.
I'm being generous in assuming that some of this is at least supposed to be somewhat funny, I guess.
I don't know.
And in these other cases, she just simply lectures her husband directly.
Like this one.
It says, me trying to explain our household dynamics in terms my husband understands.
Then we see her saying, "On most sports teams, you have a superstar or a playmaker who makes things happen.
That's me.
Then you often have that one person who just stands around waiting for other people to make plays or shoot the ball.
That's you.
We need you to step up so we can win as a team."
Now here we see the danger of making a sports analogy when you've never watched a single sporting event in your entire
life.
But we're going to return to that in just a moment.
There are many other examples we don't need to cycle through.
She has comments complaining that her husband doesn't carry as many grocery bags from the car as she does.
Another where she complains that her husband gets to work out alone while she has to work out with her kids draped all over her.
She complains that once he wore a winter hat that was hers without her permission.
She has a whole comic about that.
She complains that he takes up too much room on the couch when he naps.
She complains that he gets to nap in the first place and she doesn't.
She complains that he takes too long to run errands.
She has many comments complaining that her husband spends too much time going to the bathroom.
This is a theme she returns to over and over again.
Her husband's defecation habits have been thoroughly chronicled by this woman.
She even has a Father's Day card that she's created which centers around this theme.
It says, This Father's Day, take as much time as you need in the bathroom.
Oh wait, that's you every day.
So this Father's Day, take as much time as you need in the bathroom, and I promise not to say anything about it.
Well, I'll try my very best.
While this is passive-aggressive, it's at least a little bit nicer than the Mother's Day card that I wish her husband would give to her sometime.
It could say something like, Happy Mother's Day!
Being with you is at least better than being fed feet first into a wood chipper.
Though the wood chipper is looking better every day.
Her husband, we can assume, lacks the gumption to say anything like that to her, but others on the internet have spoken up on his behalf, suggesting that maybe she should stop incessantly whining publicly about her marriage.
Maybe this is something she could do in counseling or something.
In response to the critics this weekend, she martyred herself some more, posting a defiant response on Instagram and extensively quoting Taylor Swift lyrics at the same time.
And she, of course, chalked the criticism up to sexism and said that anyone who disagrees with her approach will be blocked.
Which certainly is the least intimidating threat ever issued in the history of threats.
But at the risk of maybe suffering the same fate, I want to offer some thoughts to this woman about her marriage.
I mean, given that she's talking publicly about it, I guess it's fair game.
First of all, I don't know how many of these complaints accurately describe her husband's behavior.
There's no reason to think that any of them are 100% fair.
I do know that many of them certainly don't accurately describe husbands in general as she claims they do.
I've never met a man who doesn't take immense pride in his ability to transport an entire trunk full of grocery bags into the kitchen in one trip.
That's what men do.
We love doing that.
As for having kids draped all over you while exercising, I actually encourage my kids to do that to me because it adds extra resistance and makes for a more effective workout.
Also, it puts them to good use for a change.
It might be true that men take longer to complete one specific bathroom activity, but this is balanced out by the amount of time that women take to do everything else in the bathroom.
And do we as men have a habit of forgetting where things are in the house, often staring helplessly at our own kitchen cabinets and pantries as if this is the first time we've ever laid eyes on them?
Yes.
I mean, that stereotype is, I admit, richly deserved.
But here's the bigger question.
So what?
Sure, Mary, your husband isn't perfect.
No husband is.
All husbands are deeply and irretrievably flawed.
Yes, the rumors are true.
As a wife, you will not be able to turn your husband into a perfect specimen of faultless humanity.
You especially won't be able to accomplish that by scolding, nagging, or whining.
That approach always, and I mean always, has the opposite effect.
The only thing you can do is decide.
Whether you will obsessively focus on your husband's flaws or not, you have to decide if you want to be a martyr or simply a wife.
A martyr or simply a mother.
Do you want to stew in the juices of your own resentment, constantly adding to the broth with new groans and gripes?
Or do you want to actually be happy and content, or at least have a chance of happiness and contentment?
Are you going to be so resentful over the chores you do around the house that simply being around you becomes a chore for everybody else?
This is what you have the power to control.
And so does your husband for himself.
Because despite what you apparently believe, your husband certainly has a whole litany of complaints about you.
He may not say them out loud very often, or post about them on the internet, because he respects you more than you respect him, but he has them.
No husband is perfect, yes, but neither is any wife.
And that's especially true in your case.
I wonder, have you ever taken a break during one of your self-pity sessions to reflect on the things that you might be doing wrong?
You've devoted hours and days and months and years to thinking about, talking about, crying about, screaming about all the many ways that you're put upon, oppressed, unappreciated.
But have you ever at any point Allowed for even one second of honest self-reflection.
If you feel that your husband is so oblivious to his failings that you need to point them out 75 times a day, have you considered the possibility that you might suffer from the same blind spot?
Or worse, are you aware of your failings and yet you justify them to yourself by comparing them to your husband's failings?
And if this is the case, and I'm certain that it is, have you considered that he might be doing the same thing?
Perhaps your marriage is stuck in a cycle of self-rationalization and self-martyrdom, and it will continue in that circle all the way around the drain.
One other thought.
Your sports analogy was instructive, but not for the reason that you hoped.
You say that there's always the one guy on the team who stands around doing nothing.
Now, that might be true on amateur teams, like in Little League or Pop Warner or on the Detroit Lions, but in the big leagues, everyone on the field or on the court is involved.
They all have a role.
They're all doing something on every play, even if they appear to be doing not much at all.
Someone who doesn't understand football might watch the action, you know, from whistle to whistle and conclude that the left tackle is mostly just a spectator.
But those who know the game understand that he has an indispensable role to play, even if it's less glamorous, less highlight-worthy, less praised, and even if he tends to only get his name called when he screws up.
In spite of that, he's in the trenches on every play, filling a role that no one else on the team could possibly fill.
So I wonder if you might misinterpret your marriage in the same way that you misinterpret football.
Just because you don't appreciate or understand all the ways that your husband contributes, that doesn't mean he isn't contributing.
I mean, this could be less a problem with his effort and more a problem with your self-centered refusal to even attempt to see things from his perspective.
You're the superstar, the playmaker, in your own mind.
And just like any other player who elevates himself while denigrating his team, You're doing more harm than good.
You're destroying your team, in fact, while telling yourself that you're the only one helping it succeed.
So I would recommend that you try watching a game before saying anything else about sports, and also try looking in the mirror before saying anything else about your marriage.
But you don't have to look in the mirror to know that you are, today, still cancelled.
And we'll leave it there for 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, we're there.
Also, be sure to check out the other Daily Wire podcasts, including The Ben Shapiro Show, Michael Knowles Show, The Andrew Klavan Show.
Thanks for listening.
The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer Jeremy Boring, our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, production manager Pavel Vadosky, our associate producer is McKenna Waters, The show is edited by Jeff Tomlin.
Our audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is done by Cherokee Heart.
The Matt Wall Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright Daily Wire 2022.
Hey there, this is John Bickley, Daily Wire editor-in-chief and co-host of Morning Wire.
On today's episode, the Biden administration's response to economic recession, the impact of TikTok on the social media landscape, and new evidence related to Hunter Biden and his business partners prompts calls for a special counsel investigation.
