Ep. 1074 - How Social Media Is Destroying Our Kids
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, another deadly TikTok trend once again highlights the danger that social media poses to children. When are we finally going to take action to protect kids from the insanely destructive effects of the internet and social media? Also, Elon Musk releases documentation proving that the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed at the behest of Democrat operatives. Plus, religious liberty is back on trial at the Supreme Court. The Left invents an insane conspiracy theory to explain a power outage in North Carolina. In our daily cancellation, what exactly is a "dink" and why are they being canceled?
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, another deadly TikTok trend once again highlights the danger that social media poses to children.
When are we finally going to take action to protect kids from the insanely destructive effects of the internet and social media?
Also, Elon Musk, speaking of social media, releases documentation proving that the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed at the behest of Democrat political operatives.
Plus, religious liberty is back on trial at the Supreme Court.
The left invents an insane conspiracy theory to explain a power outage in North Carolina.
In our daily cancellation, what exactly is a dink?
And why are they being canceled?
We'll find out about that today and so much more on the Matt Wall Show.
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Well, needless to say, the big social media story of the week is Elon Musk's release of internal emails and documents at Twitter, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that big tech has been censoring and suppressing information at the behest of political campaigns in order to influence the outcome of elections, and for other reasons just as nefarious.
We'll talk more about all that in a few minutes.
There's another social media story that has caught my attention, though.
As well.
It may not have the same political implications, but it points to what I think is an even bigger problem.
In fact, a much bigger problem.
Reading from The Independent, it says, the fatal blackout challenge on TikTok has reportedly been linked to the deaths of at least 20 children in the past 18 months.
The popular challenge on the social media platform encourages people to choke themselves with household items Until they become unconscious and then film the adrenaline rush once they regain consciousness.
At least 15 of those children who died while filming the challenge were aged 12 or younger according to data compiled by Bloomberg Businessweek.
Five of the victims were aged 13 or 14.
The Blackout Challenge is a modern incarnation of choking dares that have been around for years but have been made more accessible to children through social media platforms.
The choking game quote-unquote killed 82 minors when it first appeared in 2008 according to data from The CDC, TikTok, and its parent company, ByteDance, have been sued by parents who claimed their children died as a result of the fatal challenge.
Now, Bloomberg goes into more detail about one of the victims in one of these stories, and it is, as you might expect, horrific.
It begins, the five-year-old boy's panicked cries echoed down the hallway of the Arroyos three-bedroom clapboard house in Milwaukee.
It was February 2021 and he'd been playing with his nine-year-old sister, Ariane, before bedtime.
Their mother was at a Bible study class and their father was in his basement workshop out of earshot.
The boy had watched Ariane climb atop a toy chest, wrap a metal dog leash around her neck, and hook the buckle to the wardrobe door hinge.
Now she was hanging two feet from the ground, kicking and desperately scratching at her neck.
A few days later, after Ariane was buried wearing a princess dress and tiara, her nails freshly painted, the boy told his parents what had happened.
They were playing a game, he said, like they saw on TikTok.
Now, this is, of course, just the latest dangerous trend to spread to kids through social media platforms like TikTok.
Every week, it seems, there's another one.
And it's not as though, as the first article mentions, it's not as though kids weren't doing hideously stupid and dangerous things before the Internet existed.
The blackout challenge itself predates social media.
But social media spreads these ideas at the speed of light.
Not only spreads them, it provides enormous additional incentive for kids to participate in them.
Because now they can do it for the likes and the shares and the views.
And also, when they're doing these stupid, reckless things, not knowing that they're stupid and reckless, they're often going to be isolated by themselves while they're doing it.
And they do it, why?
Again, for the dopamine hit that they get from all the attention.
Attention that comes in measurable quantities that they can see.
And speaking of measurable quantities, the impact of the internet and social media on children obviously goes way beyond reckless and sometimes deadly challenge trends on TikTok.
Kids today are more depressed, more anxious.
They suffer more from mental illness.
They're more suicidal than any generation of children before them in history.
They're also fatter, less healthy, more isolated.
They spend less time outside.
They spend less time participating in group activities.
They spend less time with sports.
They have fewer real-life friends.
They have worse social skills.
And there are many factors contributing to this, but nearly all of the research, and also just basic common sense, points to one thing as by far the biggest factor, and that is their phones, the internet, social media.
The average kid over the age of 13 spends nearly 10 hours a day staring at various screens, and that's just recreational screen time.
It doesn't even take into account the time spent using screens for schoolwork or homework.
So when all is said and done, each day there is barely any time left for anything that doesn't involve looking at a glowing rectangle.
This is their life.
And we have barely begun to contemplate and confront the consequences of a life lived like this so young.
In fact, most adults don't seem to be contemplating it at all, according to a survey a few years ago.
And these numbers have probably all gotten worse, as that's what the trends indicate.
A few years ago, the vast majority of kids were given their first cell phone before the age of 13.
And nearly 40% have a phone before they turn 10.
And nearly 20% have a phone by the age of 8.
About 10% have a phone by 6.
There is even a not insignificant portion of 3-year-olds who are given smartphones.
3-year-olds.
I mean, the best we can say about kids who are given this kind of technology so young is that they'll become very good at using the technology.
But that's not saying much, as smartphones are not difficult to use.
We don't call them smartphones because you need to be smart to use them.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
They can be mastered in about five minutes, even by someone who's never held one before.
There's a reason why a three-year-old can figure out how to use it.
So it's not like you need to get them on it early so they'll know how to keep up with a technology-based society.
You could never hand your kid a phone until they turn 18, and they'll have it figured out by lunchtime.
And for the sake of getting our kids up to speed on the latest technology, the cost is that their chance of depression, mental illness, suicide, obesity, isolation, exposure to grotesque and harmful images like hardcore pornography, all of that skyrockets.
They will become overstimulated, easily bored, in need of constant distraction, entertainment.
A problem that will then often be solved by psychotropic medication.
They will become dumber, less interesting people than they otherwise would have been.
But at least they'll be able to type really quickly with their thumbs.
Now the messages that they're typing with their thumbs will be inane and semi-literate, even into adulthood, but they'll learn to say them very fast.
They're going to learn to say really stupid things quickly.
That's the benefit.
So what's the solution here?
Well, an unlikely person has stepped into that conversation.
The actress Kate Winslet got some attention this past week while promoting her new film, which apparently deals with social media addiction among children.
And she called for the government to get involved.
Let's listen to this.
Do you think there needs to be more regulation?
I mean, should we just say social media shouldn't be available to people under a certain age?
What might be the answer?
It's a difficult one because when you're an individual in something of a high-profile position, you know, we do have to be careful that we're using our voices wisely, hopefully telling stories that resonate, speaking with integrity and leading with the truth.
Those things are very important to me.
I really do struggle with social media.
I struggle with the impact it's clearly having on teenage mental health.
I do wish that our government would crack down on it.
I do wish that there would be certain platforms that were banned before a certain age.
I wish that security checks would be much more rigorous.
You know, teenagers Where there's a will, there's a way.
So if they want to get on that platform, they will.
But I do believe that there needs to be a lot more protection and accountability, because parents are left flailing, going, well, thank you so much, government.
Look what just happened to my child.
Now, later on, she says that parents feel utterly powerless to help their kids overcome their social media obsession.
Which is why she says the government has to step in, and she's not wrong.
I mean, the law cannot solve the problem on its own, but it can at least do something, whereas now it's doing nothing at all.
There should be laws banning social media companies from allowing minors on their platform.
That should exist.
Now, the harm that social media does to the developing minds of children, it's clear enough to anyone willing to look.
We don't need to spend another 15 years sitting around hoping that it will work itself out in the end.
We know all that we need to know right now to justify taking action, drastic action.
How can social media companies prevent kids from using their services?
Well, not perfectly, but they can do more than they're doing now, because again, right now they're doing nothing.
So, anything at all would be better than the nothing that they're doing.
As it stands, TikTok welcomes all kids ages 13 and over.
So they're not even trying to stop 13-year-olds.
They're welcome 13-year-olds to use it.
So the age limit by law should be moved up to 18.
And they should be required to take steps to ensure, however imperfectly, that the age limit is respected.
This is possible.
You know, there are websites, like if you want to use a gambling website, for example, that you have to take.
Now, there are ways around that, even then.
But there are steps that have to be taken to verify your age.
If we were really serious, though, we would actually have laws banning anyone under the age of 18 from owning a smartphone in the first place.
Now, this idea Only seems over-the-top and shocking to people today because we ourselves are mindless, phone-addicted zombies, and we cannot imagine a life apart from our beloved devices.
So even the adults, when we hear that, well, banning minors, it's like we can't even conceive of that because we, again, cannot conceive of what it means to live without this stuff.
But there is no God-given constitutional right to a smart phone, especially not for minors.
And we know that smartphones are addictive, and they're harmful on every conceivable level.
So what exactly is the argument for not banning their sale to children?
Like, what's the argument for allowing Apple to sell iPhones to kids?
No child has ever been harmed by not having a phone with internet connection.
That's never happened.
Many, many millions of children have been harmed by having it, so What seems unthinkable to unthinking Americans banning smartphones outright for minors is in fact the obviously correct course of action.
It's obviously the right thing to do, which is why it will never happen.
So, we're left then with the other obvious solution, although it too is only a partial solution, and that is for parents to step up and start taking the issue seriously.
You know, you give your kid a smartphone, Because it's the easiest thing to do.
Because it keeps him quiet.
Keeps him entertained.
Because all of his friends have one.
Because he says that if you don't give him one, he's gonna hate you.
Because you feel powerless to do anything different, as Kate Winslet says.
But you're not powerless.
I mean, you're the parent.
It's your money.
It's your house.
You hold all the cards.
You have all the power.
All the leverage.
Your kid has none.
Your child will not volunteer to radically depart from his peers by living a phone-free life, even if it's the life that every kid on earth lived up until the last couple of decades.
It now seems radical and unthinkable.
He's not going to volunteer for that, which is why you can't follow his cues on this.
You have to take the lead, which means taking the phone away.
It is a problem, if any of this seems extreme, well, the problem is extreme.
Again, we cannot even fully conceive, we know about so much of the damage, but we cannot fully conceive of what it will be like to eventually have a society filled with people who have been on these devices and addicted to them practically from birth.
And here's the thing, you take the phone away from your kid, I guarantee, once he's older, he's not gonna look back on his childhood and wish that he'd spent more time on his phone.
No one wishes that.
None of us on our deathbeds are gonna look back and say, you know what, my one regret is that I didn't spend more time staring at that damn thing.
Your kid's not gonna regret it.
You're not gonna regret it for him.
You're not gonna look back and say, well, man, I just wish I'd put him on the phone earlier.
No, he will thank you, eventually, for saving him from becoming a fat, depressed zombie like all of his peers.
Even if he hates you in the meantime.
But that's a price worth paying.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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As mentioned, the other big social media stories from Daily Wire says Twitter CEO Elon Musk released information through journalist Matt Taibbi Friday afternoon, showing that Twitter was working in conjunction with then-Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden's team, removing tweets that team Biden wanted deleted.
Musk said that he decided to release the information because it was necessary to restore public trust in the platform after it censored the New York Post's bombshell report about Hunter Biden's laptop just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
Musk, quote, retweeted Matt Taibbi's multi-tweet thread on Twitter, writing, here we go.
Taibbi began by explaining the company was slowly forced to add tools for controlling speech that were designed to combat the likes of spam and financial fraudsters.
Slowly over time, quoting now from Taibbi, Twitter staff and executives began to find more and more uses for these tools.
Outsiders began petitioning the company to manipulate speech as well.
First a little, then more often, then constantly, Taibbi said.
By 2020, requests from connected actors to delete tweets were routine.
One executive would write to another, more to review from the Biden team.
The reply would come back handled.
Taibbi's post shows that on October 24th, Team Biden asked five tweets to be removed.
According to Andrew Kerr of the Washington Free Beacon, those tweets were either drug-related photos of Hunter Biden or pornographic photos of him.
Which, by the way, those two things obviously are not the same.
Like, you could make an argument for deleting pornographic images.
I mean, I think all pornographic images should be banned from Twitter.
But images of him using drugs You don't have the same argument for that.
That's damaging to him and to Biden for people to see.
But you can't hide behind, well, this is part of our anti-pornography policy.
Which, by the way, since when did Twitter even have an anti-pornography policy?
Um, continues, celebrities and unknowns alike could be removed or renewed at the behest of a political party, or reviewed, rather, at the behest of a political party.
Both parties had access to these tools.
For instance, in 2020, requests from both the Trump White House and the Biden campaign were received and honored.
However, the system wasn't balanced.
It was based on contacts.
Because Twitter was and is overwhelming staff by people of one political orientation, there
were more channels, more ways to complain open to the left, Democrats, than the right.
Taibbi continues, Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story about the laptop,
removing links and posting warnings that it may be unsafe.
They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme
cases like child pornography.
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany was locked out of her account for tweeting about
the story, prompting a furious letter from Trump campaign staffer Mike Hahn, who was
obviously furious about it.
But they continued, of course, banning people we know about that part of the story.
And he goes into a lot more detail.
What is the overall story here?
Well, the story is nothing important really, no big deal, just political powers using big tech as an end run around the First Amendment, using censorship to influence the outcome of an election, suppressing information to manipulate public opinion.
The other thing we have to remember here is it wasn't just the suppression of the story, as bad as that was, it was also the lying that went on.
Okay, we heard from people who knew better that this was Russian misinformation, all this kind of stuff.
Hacked materials.
We heard this from people who knew that wasn't true.
Or, at a minimum, knew that they didn't know whether that was true or not.
They were just assuming or hoping.
So, no big deal, except for the fact that this is a very big deal.
Is it a revelation?
You know, as in, like, is this new information?
Not exactly.
And people that wanted to downplay this story and the Twitter files that were released, they took a couple different tacks, and we'll play some of the cable news, you know, footage so you can see what different strategies they took to downplay this.
But one of them was to say, well, we knew about all this already.
This is all already known.
We knew about a lot of it, sort of in broad strokes, but this is confirmation, this is documentation of what was going on, and that matters.
You know, that's a story, that matters a lot.
And what Elon Musk has done here is extremely important.
You know how important it is based on how little the corporate media is talking about it.
In fact, I was out of the loop on social media myself over the weekend because I tried not, you know, speaking of like trying to get a hold of your social media addictions, I tried not to use it over the weekend because I want to be with my family.
And then getting back on on Sunday, trying to figure out what, you know, doing some show prep, I wanted to read about, read up on this story.
And I went and not that I thought I would see anything honest in corporate media outlets, but I wanted to see what they were saying about it.
And what I found is that, of course, they were saying almost nothing about it.
Like, according to them, none of this even happened.
Mostly they tried to ignore it, and when they did talk about it begrudgingly, it's been to sort of justify their own lack of interest.
So here's how MSNBC handled it with contributor Matthew Dowd, who gave his thoughts.
Let's watch that.
The release of these internal Twitter files, right, that were related to this controversy surrounding a 2020 New York Post article on Hunter Biden.
And here's what the Washington Post says.
By the time the dust settled Saturday, even some conservatives were grumbling that it was a dud.
Musk's Twitter files produced no smoking gun, showing the tech giant had bent to the will of Democrats.
The Twitter thread, based on internal communications posted by Substack writer Matt Taibbi, showed the company independently decided to limit the spread of the article without Democratic politicians, the Biden campaign, or FBI exerting control over the social media network.
This happened, I believe it was October of 2020, when Trump was president, right?
Biden was in fact, at that point, running for office.
What do you make of what Elon Musk did, right, and the dissemination and distribution now of so much misinformation?
What we have become, really, Matthew?
Well, I mean, I think every since Elon Musk took over Twitter, we've seen it devolve into something that is nothing close to truth and nothing close to unifying in the country as we see it today.
What amazes me is Elon Musk might have spent a little more time reading the First Amendment and what it said, because his immediate thing was this was a violation of the First Amendment when As far as I can tell, no government authority told Twitter not to do something.
To me, this is... And it seems like they were upset.
They're upset that somehow some pornographic or some revealing pictures of Hunter Biden weren't revealed in this, which...
So you get the idea there.
So first of all, we get this harrowing and horrifying image of what Twitter has become.
It's the Wild Wild West all over again, which is great to me.
I mean, that sounds great.
But in actuality, if you go on Twitter, what you're going to find is that it's just very strikingly normal.
It's what it's always been.
Apart from all of the hysteria from the media about Elon Musk taking over, If you didn't know about any of that, you had no background knowledge, and you use Twitter, you say, well, it's no different.
It's like the user experience is slightly improved, but for the most part, it's like the same.
And as far as actual misinformation, like people saying untrue things, there's the same volume of that that there's always been.
And it's always been a pretty high volume.
Because social media is made up of, it's a social platform.
It's made up of people.
And people say a lot of things that aren't true.
It's actually not the platform's job, much less it is the government's job, to police and discern truth from falsehood and tell us what we're allowed to say based on what they think is true.
It's actually not their job.
And one of the reasons why it's not the platform's job and it's not the government's job, aside from, of course, the obvious free speech concerns, but the other reason is that that assumes that we can trust them to discern truth from falsehood.
And we know we can't do that.
Given that, as we know, the people that want to put themselves and have already put themselves in the position of being the arbiters of what is true, these are the people that would look you straight in the eye and tell you that men can get pregnant.
Men have menstrual cycles.
These are the people that want to be in the position of telling you what's true and what isn't.
When they hold beliefs that are arguably more deranged Than any belief system held by any other group of people in the history of the earth.
Okay, like, more deranged than flat earthers, than, you know, you wanna go back to pagan cults and they were sacrificing humans to the sun god and everything else.
Well, we know the left, they engage in their own form of human sacrifice.
But their belief system, the modern left belief system, is even more deranged and divorced from reality than any of that.
So they're not in the position to do it.
As far as free speech goes, you know, Dowd says, well, this is not a First Amendment issue.
Well, it is because, again, it's political actors and the government.
We already know about the reports of the FBI going to Facebook and the other social media platforms and telling them, hey, look out for misinformation having to do with Hunter Biden and all that Russian misinformation.
They're doing this in order to get around the First Amendment.
But it's still an attack on the First Amendment.
It's just, it's a more subversive rather than a direct attack.
They also brought Republican gimp Michael Steele.
I think he still calls himself a Republican anyway.
And let's listen to what he has to say for some reason.
What are your thoughts on all of this tomfoolery over the last 24 hours?
I guess with Musk is to prove that, hey, I'm the right kind of Republican, meaning I'm a Trump Republican.
I'm a, you know, election denying Republican.
I don't know what kind of Republican he is.
I mean, probably next year he'll be an independent or a Democrat, depending on how the wind blows.
But the reality of it is putting those things back on the platform Juxtaposition with the argument that he's all about free speech really undermines some of the central tenets of free speech is that it is about, yes, the freedom of you to say things, but not at the harm or expense of someone else.
And so when you're perpetuating lies and so forth, you're really kind of laughing in the face of this idea of what the platform he claims is supposed to be.
For the party, they love it.
I mean, they got the world, one of the world's richest men, helping them foment the kind of distrust of the system and disinformation where their fingerprints don't necessarily have to be on it.
Like a little plausible deniability, if you will.
Well, Elon said.
Exactly.
It wasn't me, it was Elon.
This is... Who's watching this?
Who's actually sitting down and watching this on purpose?
I mean, we know based on the ratings, basically nobody.
This is the level of intelligence that we get.
This is the analysis.
What do you make of all this tomfoolery on Twitter?
But I liked his answer, actually.
I liked his answer because it was quite revealing in ways that he didn't intend.
And what does he say at the end there?
What does Michael Steele say?
He says, well, this is going to foment distrust of the system.
Well, yeah, exactly.
And this is what, even if he calls himself a Republican still, as a member of the left, He is the system.
He's a defender of the system.
He's a member of the system.
He's a defender of the system.
And so he's going to be opposed to anything that makes you... We're way past the days, of course, of rage against the machine, down with the system.
That's all... The people that we're talking about that became the system.
And so now you have to protect the system at all costs.
And anything that causes distrust in the system...
Is a threat.
Is dangerous.
Dangerous to them and to their perceived authority.
And to the control they have over the population.
Which is why transparency... This is transparency.
It's just letting the users of the site see what's going on behind the scenes.
But this is a problem.
Somehow transparency is anti-free speech.
Stopping government actors from suppressing speech is anti-free speech.
Up is down, left is right, water is dry, and so on.
And of course, this is what we come to expect from the corporate media because they are part of a conspiracy.
This is an actual conspiracy, conspiring to suppress information, to suppress speech.
The Hunter Biden laptop stuff is an actual conspiracy, a far-reaching conspiracy when you have the corporate media, big tech, political.
Actors, the government, conspiring to suppress this story.
That's an actual conspiracy in real life.
And it is also how the First Amendment is attacked and will ultimately be destroyed in modern society.
It's not any sort of direct way.
The First Amendment is destroyed, in the end, by mid-level lackeys at tech companies who list their pronouns in their bio.
They're the tyrants who destroy our liberty and effectively rig our elections by rigging the information that we're able to see.
Which is why the only remedy here is to turn the fire hose on and let all the information out.
I mean, Elon has been talking about doing this, and that's what he should do, release all the Twitter files.
All of them.
Selfishly, I'm interested also to see my own file over there, which I can imagine is quite extensive.
I'd like to see the conversations that they had where they decided to allow death threats against me to remain on the platform, which was a decision that they clearly very obviously made.
The ones where they decided that doxing me is okay, as long as I'm the target.
I'd like to see the conversations they had where they decided that my film, What Is A Woman, isn't allowed to show up in Twitter trends.
That was a decision that they made.
And when we first announced it, it was trending like number, you know, the top 10, and then it just disappeared just like that, and in the blink of an eye, never returned to the trends.
It was a decision that was made.
And of course, many higher profile conservatives have similar complaints, and also, you know, lower profile conservatives have similar complaints.
I think we want to see it all.
That's the only path forward here, is complete transparency.
Release it all, let us dig through it, and see everything.
Okay, this is from Reuters.
It says the US Supreme Court on Monday will hear arguments in a major case pitting LGBT
rights against the claim that the constitutional right to free speech exempts artists from
anti-discrimination laws in a dispute involving an evangelical Christian web designer who
refuses to provide her services for same-sex marriages.
It's all one sentence, by the way, from Reuters.
The justices are set to hear Denver-area business owner Lori Smith's appeal seeking an exemption from a Colorado law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and other factors.
Lower courts ruled in favor of Colorado, including the Denver-based 10th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021.
Smith contends that Colorado's Anti-Discrimination Act violates the right of artists, including web designers, to free speech under the U.S.
Constitution's First Amendment by forcing them to express messages through their work that they oppose.
The case, of course, follows the Supreme Court's narrow 2018 ruling in favor of Jack Phillips, a Christian Denver area baker who refused on religious grounds to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
The court, in that case, stopped short of carving out a free speech exemption to anti-discrimination laws.
So, in the Masterpiece Cake Shop decision, Really, the court just punted on the whole issue entirely and did so pretty explicitly and said, you know, worse to the effect of maybe another case will come along in the future that will decide.
But they came down in favor of Jack Phillips because they found that the so-called Human Rights Commission in Colorado had been targeting him and, like, bullying and harassing him to an extraordinary extent.
And so it was kind of a smackdown of Colorado's Human Rights Commission, but it was not an absolute defense of his free speech rights.
And now they get a very similar case where maybe we'll finally get a ruling on that.
Only this case, it's a web designer, who as far as I understand it, she was, she proactively was suing,
again suing this, you know, the state government, because of this anti, so-called anti-discrimination law,
that would force her to, for example, design a website for a gay wedding.
So rather than waiting around for her to, you know, be targeted in that way, she's proactively suing, and now it made its way all the way to the Supreme Court.
A couple points about this that we should keep in mind.
First of all, in all these cases, whether it's the web designer, the bakery, there have been similar cases with photographers, wedding caterers, it always centers around the gay weddings.
And why does it always center around gay weddings?
Well, that's because nobody has actually refused service to gay people.
Jack Phillips at Masterpiece Cake Shop, that's not what he did.
Okay, it's not like there was a gay couple that walked in and he said, get out, none of your kind are allowed here.
It's not what happened.
In fact, Jack Phillips was willing to sell anything, any of the cakes that were available at his store, he would have sold to them.
Even if they wanted to use it for a wedding, they could have walked in and said, uh, we want to buy this cake, we're going to use it for our upcoming nuptials.
Jack Phillips would have sold them the cake.
Okay?
He was not refusing service to the gay couple.
What he was refusing to do was to make them a custom cake for the wedding specifically, because that would be him participating in this event that he objects to on religious grounds.
Now, if you just If you sell a cake, if you just sell some pastries to a gay person, or if you're a photographer and you take a picture of a gay person, or if you're a web designer and you design just any kind of website for a gay person, that's not you participating in something that you find morally objectionable.
That's just you providing a good or a service to someone, and the fact that you disagree with their lifestyle choices is irrelevant.
Um, just as you might object on religious ground to divorce, but if a person is divorced and they walk in and they try to buy a cupcake, you're not going to tell them, I'm not going to sell you the cupcake because you're divorced.
No, it's about the event.
I don't want to participate in that event.
And although Jack Phillips may not have refused a divorced person a cake, I could tell you, if a divorced person came in and said, I'm throwing a divorce party, and I want you to custom make a cake that says, congratulations on your divorce, I want you to make that cake for me, he would have said no to that too.
Because that's an event that he doesn't want to participate in.
And he has every right to do so.
So that's what the Supreme Court's gonna rule on.
And, you know, I think this comes, it's a freedom of religion thing, it certainly is.
I think it's even more so a freedom of association thing.
Because it really doesn't, the reasons, like Jack Phillips didn't want to participate in the gay wedding and his personal reason was that his religion, because of his religious beliefs.
Okay.
But I don't see how the reason even matters.
What does it matter what your reason is?
Yeah, you have religious freedom.
But, I mean, why does he even have to, he shouldn't have to even give a reason.
I don't want, I am a free person, I'm not your slave, I don't want to participate in this event, because I don't like it.
Why don't you like it?
None of your business.
Maybe I'll tell you, maybe I won't.
But I'm an American, dammit, and you can't force me to participate in something I don't want to participate in.
And of course the irony is that the advocates for gay marriage for so long have been using freedom of association to make their case.
And yet they deny it to everybody else.
Obviously, as always.
Because that's how it goes with the Alphabet Club, with the LGBT activists.
They are constantly claiming rights, special rights, and even not special rights, that they want to deny to everybody else.
And this is another example of that.
So there are really two versions of a kind of a right answer that the Supreme Court could come up with here.
There's the limited version, which is what, if they come up, and there's also the wrong answer, right, that they could also.
You know, I feel pretty good that they'll have some kind of mostly correct answer on this case.
There's always the option of the wrong answer.
But when it comes to the right answer, there's the, and I feel pretty certain that if they have the right answer, it's going to be this, which is the limited version, which is that they find that people have the right not to participate in activities that those individuals have a religious objection to.
So it will be a decision based around religious liberty.
And that would be good.
That's the right answer.
And it would be a big win for religious liberty.
The sort of absolutist version of an answer, which won't happen, but which I would favor, is that people have the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, period.
If you're a private business owner, you have the right to refuse service to anybody.
Just like those signs that we often see outside of many stores that say, we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.
And of course, you see the sign there, but in reality, they actually don't have that right.
I think they should.
But the way the laws are set up right now, they don't.
But to me, it's pretty simple.
That's the simplest answer.
And it's the easiest answer, and it's the answer that maximizes freedom for all involved, and that minimizes the chance of corruption, because we're not putting the government in the position of getting involved and determining, well, is this a sincerely held religious belief?
They're not in that business.
This is your business.
You own it.
You're providing a service.
You're selling a good, whatever it is.
And you have the right to decide who you sell it to.
That's all.
And of course, whenever you say that, you hear the dire kind of hypotheticals from people on the other side who say, well, if we allow that, the next thing you know, there's gonna be restaurants that'll be just like Jim Crow all over again.
There'll be restaurants that have signs up that say no blacks allowed and all that.
That's not gonna happen.
Like, there are no cases of any business anywhere in the country trying to do that in modern times.
If they did try to do that, they would be out of business in about 30 minutes.
Okay?
Because the protests and boycotts would be through the roof, and there wouldn't be anyone who would want to go into a business, be seen walking into a business with a sign like that.
So all that would mean is that they'd just be, you know, all of the, supposedly all these store owners and shop owners out there who are just like secret racists and they're waiting for the opportunity to prevent people from other races of walking into their store.
As soon as they announce themselves, they're all out of business in like less than a day.
But I think there would be almost no one who would actually announce themselves that way.
Because that's not, that's not, you know, that's not actually happening in modern America.
Freedom of association, that's the answer.
All right.
Let's see, what else do we have?
Before we get to the comments section, I also have this.
This is an interesting case, and you'll understand why I'm talking about it in a minute, but this is from Fox.
It says, a North Carolina sheriff and power company official said intentional vandalism at substations has caused outages for about 40,000 customers expected to last longer than 24 hours.
Moore County Sheriff Ronnie Fields reported that the mass power outage across the county is being investigated as a criminal occurrence, according to the Sheriff's Office Facebook page.
Just after 7 p.m.
on Saturday, several communities across Moore County began experiencing power outages as utility companies began responding to the different substations.
Evidence was discovered that indicated that intentional vandalism had occurred at multiple sites.
So that's the story.
There was some sort of intentional vandalism, intentional attack at a power station, and it put 40,000 people out of, you know, meant that they didn't have power.
Well, Andy Ngo, now we go over to Andy Ngo with this report, and you see why I'm bringing this up.
He says, without evidence, leftists spread a viral conspiracy theory that right-wing terrorists were behind the power substation vandalisms in Moore County, North Carolina, to stop a drag show.
The sheriff just said at the presser, there is no evidence for that claim.
Thousands remain without power.
Trans activist Charlotte Clymer recklessly spread the unconfirmed claim to tens of thousands that the vandalism of the power substation in Moore County, North Carolina, was to shut down a drag show.
The sheriff said they've come across no evidence for this rumor.
So Charlotte Clymer said tonight there are unconfirmed reports in Moore County of three substations being shot up with firearms simultaneously to cut power to a drag show.
And I saw this claim too.
This claim was spreading like wildfire on social media.
And, you know, if you if you've been around the block a few times and you see claims like that, you become immediately suspicious.
You say, where's the evidence of this?
And it turns out, as we hear from the sheriff's office, there's no evidence of that whatsoever.
So there was the power.
There was a power outage.
They are saying that it was something intentional happened.
But the left just invented this story that it was right-wing domestic terrorists trying to shut down a drag show by attacking the power station?
Like trying to take down the whole power grid, the local power grid, in order to shut down a- that doesn't make any sense!
If there were, you know, quote-unquote right-wing terrorists who wanted to use force or violence to shut down an upcoming drag show, you'd think that they would just vandalize the venue.
They would just attack the venue where the thing is going to happen.
This would be the most, this would be the most absurd and indirect way of shutting down a drag show imaginable, but it's just made up by the left, and it's spread all over Twitter, and of course the truth doesn't matter to these people.
And it only goes to show that, on the left, they are desperate.
They are desperate for some right-winger somewhere to attack a drag show.
And the more violent, the better, as far as they're concerned.
If people die, as far as they're concerned, all the better.
This is what they want.
They are desperate for it.
They are hungry.
They are eager.
Which is why they keep inventing these things.
Things happen that have nothing to do with conservatives or, you know, anti-groomer sentiment, and they draw this connection because this is what they want, and they can barely contain themselves anymore.
And that goes to very bad places.
I'll say that.
Let's get to the comment section.
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Angie says, hey Matt, I'm so excited to tell you I just presented a political poem of mine in my college poetry class.
It resulted in a liberal classmate crying.
I'm impressed I had this effect with my poetry.
Now I really need to get myself a liberal tears Tumblr.
How can you leave a comment like this, Angie, and not produce the actual poem?
I need to see this poem that brought your liberal classmates to tears.
Although I congratulate you on that.
I think that's awesome.
But I gotta see the poem.
You gotta show us the poem.
David says, and if you have young children listening, you should turn down the volume for this question because it has to do with the big guy.
S-A-N-T-A.
All right, he says, Matt, I was disappointed to see your posts on Twitter advocating for parents to lie to their kids about Santa.
Lying is lying.
We will never lie to our children.
We don't have kids yet, but it has always felt dishonest to me to mislead kids in this way, and it will make them distrust you on more important issues.
Yeah, we talked about this.
I think it was in the members block a few days ago.
Okay, so on the Santa thing, first of all, because we've got to deal with this every year as we get into Christmas time.
First of all, every family is going to do their own thing, right?
I'm a big believer in families having their own holiday traditions.
I'm a big believer in cultures having traditions that we should protect and cherish.
And Santa Claus is a tradition in our culture, which is reason enough, I think, to participate in it.
But families have their own traditions too, especially around the holidays.
And even among the families that do the Santa thing, there are many different variations of what that means.
And if you decide you're not gonna do it, that's fine.
I don't, you know, teach their own, that's cool.
It doesn't bother me.
But if you're gonna get all melodramatic about families that do the Santa thing,
then I do have a problem with that, especially if you don't even have children.
So I'm not at all interested in your declarations of what you will or won't do once you have kids,
if you ever have them.
But here's the way I look at it.
Santa is not a lie.
It's not like a deception with malicious intent.
Santa is exactly the same sort of thing as unicorns, fairies, dragons, leprechauns.
My kids believe in all those things, too.
And when I talk about Those things with them.
I don't go out of my way to, like, beat these fantasies out of their heads, right?
I play along.
So when my three-year-old runs in to the living room and says, Daddy, I saw a unicorn, I don't respond, No, you didn't.
Unicorns aren't real, you idiot.
Do your research.
Have you even Googled this?
No, I say, You did?
Wow, that's awesome.
What color was it?
I might even call me a hideous liar.
I might even tell her a story about a time when I saw a unicorn.
See, I enter into this make-believe world with her, and I participate in that world.
I'm not lying.
I'm participating in the fun, in the make-believe.
And Santa is the same kind of thing.
Jordan Peterson has talked about this, and I like the way he put it.
He says that Santa is a game.
Okay, it's not a lie.
It's a game.
It's like a play.
It's a story.
That you're, you know, telling to your kids in a game that you're playing with them.
Do they understand that the game isn't 100% real?
Well, no, but they also don't understand that about any game you play with them at a certain age.
You know?
And that's all it is.
And it's a great way for them to use their imaginations.
And I also just think, like, kids have An opportunity, when they are kids, when they're young kids, to live in this
You know, magical world, where there are dragons, and there are unicorns, and there are leprechauns, and there are, you know, all these fantastical things going on.
And there is a fat guy, you know, flying through the air at light speed with his reindeer.
Like, they have an opportunity to live in that world, and to really live in it, at least in their own minds.
And it's totally healthy, and it's completely normal.
Okay, it's not like we're fostering unhealthy, self-destructive delusions.
This is normal and healthy for them at their age.
And they have that opportunity, and it's a wonderful, magical thing, and I don't understand trying to take it from them.
I don't get it.
All right, Chris X says, speaking of magical, wonderful things, I hope Matt will post a picture of the walrus once it arrives.
I absolutely will, and I did.
The walrus was delivered, as promised, on Friday, and I can't tell you what a delight it has been.
My kids love the walrus.
I mean, they really do.
They absolutely love him.
They spent the whole weekend playing with the walrus, and I love him too.
Here's a picture that my wife took.
And just to show you how excited I am about the walrus, I never ask her to take pictures.
I don't think in my life I ever have asked her to take one.
This is the first time in our marriage when I've ever said, you gotta get a picture of this.
Those words have never crossed from my lips, except for here, because we needed to get the picture.
I needed a picture with my cherished walrus.
And you can see there, you can see how big it is.
It takes up like this whole corner of our living room.
And one of the most joyful moments of my life, for me and the kids, not so much for my wife.
But the great thing is that she threatens to throw it away, but she literally can't, because the thing weighs like 100 pounds, and it's way too big.
So when she says, I'm going to throw that thing away, oh yeah, how are you going to do that?
You can't even lift it.
So it's there.
Besides, like I said, he's the kid's best friend.
So on Saturday, I walked into the living room, and I found my six-year-old curled up on the walrus with a blanket, sleeping.
I didn't put him up to this.
He just wanted to take a nap, which is amazing enough on its own, by the way.
He just wanted to take a nap, I don't know.
And he was curled up on the walrus, sleeping there.
Isn't that adorable?
And I showed my wife, I took that picture, I showed my wife, and I know she thinks it's the cutest thing ever, but she can't fully admit it, so she's trying to suppress How cute it is.
The most I could get her to admit, she said this last night, she said that the walrus, because we were putting the kids down for bed and my three-year-old was hysterical crying because she wanted to be with the walrus.
She was playing with the walrus and she didn't want to go to bed.
And she was saying, no, no, I want to play with Johnny, Johnny the walrus.
And so my wife, the most I could get her to admit, she said that it's a blessing and a curse having the walrus.
And I said, so you're saying it's a blessing?
See, I told you.
Well, it's hard to believe, but the holidays are already here.
Now, I know a lot of you are already DailyWirePlus members and get to enjoy the great content that we have released this year, like Terror on the Prairie, the greatest lie ever sold in my very own documentary, What is a Woman?
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In it, Jordan meets with historians, theologians, and philosophers to discuss the history of the Bible and its influence on the world.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Well, good news, everyone.
There's a new acronym in town, and it's the trendiest one on the market right now.
The website PopSugar, where I go for all the most important news, has the story about those living the D.I.N.K.
lifestyle.
D.I.N.K.
So, it says, quote, In the United States, a growing number of couples live a D.I.N.K.
lifestyle instead of the historically traditional family structure that includes having children, at least according to data.
The Dink Lifestyle, aka dual income, no kids, is generally used to describe a family where neither adult in the partnership has children and both are working paying jobs.
According to the latest data from the U.S.
Census Bureau, the number of adults living without children has increased by 19% since 1967.
In addition, a 2021 Pew Research Center survey found 44% of non-parents between the ages of 18 and 49 say it's unlikely they will have children.
The figure is up from 37% in 2018, indicating a growing trend of couples delaying having kids or foregoing them altogether.
Several factors contribute to the rise of the DINK lifestyle, including a delay in median age at the time of marriage, financial reasons, and shifts in life goals.
Now, apparently DINK isn't technically new.
The acronym was coined, I guess, in the 80s from what I understand, but has become more popular recently.
And it's only further proof of the age-old saying that I just made up, which is this.
Just because you can make something into an acronym, doesn't mean you should.
DINK sounds like some kind of slur.
You know, it's like not a label that people willingly apply to themselves.
Yet still, I must admit that the name seems to fit the people who have embraced it.
This is one dumb, trendy acronym that I will happily use.
If you want to be called a dink, I will call you a dink.
In fact, from my brief research online, I discovered that there are subsets within the dink community.
For instance, there are, I'm not making this up, there are people who apparently call themselves dinkwads.
Dual income, no kids, with a dog.
Dinkwad.
Once again, I concede that Dinkwad, okay, that Dinkwads have chosen a name which fits them perfectly.
Childless people with dogs.
Dinkwads.
That's what you want to identify yourself as.
I will happily call you that.
And I will encourage others to do the same.
So going back to the article, we're given more specific information about these dinks and dinkwads.
It says, quote, like any partnership and family structure, the dink lifestyle isn't a one-size-fits-all term.
Instead, couples come to live the dink lifestyle for various reasons.
Jay Zygmunt, PhD, and founder of Child Free Wealth in Water Valley, Mississippi, tells PopSugar, for Zygmunt and his wife, the dink lifestyle provided more flexibility in creating a life that works best for them, which he's also seen with many of his clients.
Zygmunt says that in his experience, Those who choose to live a dink lifestyle do so for three main reasons.
They never want children, they are focused on financial wellness, and they desire freedom.
There's another recent article, this one on Yahoo, written by a dink, and it goes into more detail about the reasons why the dinks decide to be such dinks.
It says, "We've all seen the memes and even the bumper stickers, colorful displays proclaiming 'I am a funkle' or
celebrating being mom to fur babies only.
There are countless ways some share that they're enthusiastically certain they're living their best life thanks to being
child-free.
And once, and once these happy souls of which I am one find a partner, there's another term that comes into play."
Dink.
I'm a proud dink.
My husband and I are both in our late 30s and have chosen the dink life.
And no, we aren't those married-to-our-career types.
While we both enjoy success in our fields, we enjoy a deep bond that I can't imagine would be possible if I had to give so much of myself to caring for a child.
We are not selfish individuals, but instead selfish with the time we have together for the sake of our relationship.
We're then given other examples from the Dink community to show that there are many and varied reasons why a Dink might choose to be a Dink.
It says, "In recent times, I've discovered that we're not alone.
In addition to circles of friends that share this similar mindset, there's an entire online
community dedicated to removing the pressures and stigmatism surrounding the subject."
Dania Casales, a 33-year-old microbiologist and online fitness coach, resides in Florida
Together, they've created a safe and inspiring space on Instagram for others like them to share the daily humorous and often reluctant encounters they face as dinks.
Quote, I knew in my early 20s that I, for sure, had no desire to have kids, Casellas tells Yahoo Life.
I don't get excited over babies, but I'm good with kids.
I have a silly personality and enjoy being around them, but taking on the huge responsibility of raising someone just doesn't appeal to me.
I was told I was crazy, selfish, and that I would regret it.
I'm now 33, child-free, and living my best life.
The best life she speaks of, Casella spent years living in New York City on a journey of self-discovery, and she and her partner now enjoy the spontaneity that dink life brings, like making last-minute dinner plans, playing in soccer leagues, and taking trips to Universal Studios Orlando.
Now, every example in the article is like this.
It turns out that there are not actually many and varied reasons why people become dinks.
All the reasons are basically the same.
They want more money, they want more time to go on vacation, and they want fewer responsibilities.
And that basically sums it up.
It is rather revealing that even in these propaganda pieces, and I've read a lot of them, designed to promote the child-free life, rarely do you hear about someone who uses their, quote, freedom to go on great heroic adventures, you know?
Nor do you hear about them devoting their free time to serving their communities, nor any other worthy pursuit.
Instead, they just buy more stuff, and they take sad little childless trips to theme parks, and they eat at restaurants more often.
So they dedicate themselves to being more active and more loyal consumers, in other words.
That's what it always comes down to.
They choose to not have kids so that they can consume more and become more devoted consumerists.
For all the high-minded theoretical talk about what a child-free quote-unquote life could free a person up to do, This is what they actually do.
This is what it actually means.
They're not trudging through unexplored parts of the Amazon or inventing a cure for cancer or building homes for poor villagers in Namibia or whatever.
They are rather far more focused on entertaining themselves and their adventures of exploration will generally be relegated to tourist spots that have already been explored by approximately 900 million people before them.
That's the reality.
And this is the problem with the dink life.
One of the problems anyway.
And we must as always stipulate, though it should be clear by now, that we're talking about couples who choose not to have children.
Not those who want to, but are unable.
The issue is the lifestyle choice.
And the first way you can tell that a lifestyle choice is problematic is by extending its logic as far as it will go.
So, the dinks say that dink life is good and noble and it's wonderful and all that.
Something to be proud of.
Yet, if everyone chose to be dinks, human civilization would quickly collapse.
And in less than a century, our species would go extinct.
So, if everyone chose to be dinks, like today, within 20 years, there is no civilization anymore.
It collapses.
It's so top-heavy that it would just fall over on itself.
And, you know, a few more decades, it's extinct.
So if your lifestyle choice can only be adopted by a relatively small percentage of the most privileged members of the human race, or else civilizational catastrophe would ensue, that's a pretty good indication that there's something wrong with your lifestyle choice.
Okay?
And that applies across the board.
If your lifestyle choice cannot be adopted by very many people, or else it will destroy the human race, then there's probably something wrong.
At the very least, it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that your lifestyle is not one we should recommend.
Because again, if too many people took us up on the recommendation, the human race disappears.
So, there are those who are doing the work to ensure that our race survives and thrives, and there are those more interested in taking trips to Universal Studios.
Those two choices are not equal by any objective measure.
But the truth is that the Dink approach does plenty of damage even before it can get to the point of causing a mass extinction event.
The point is that when we encourage people to get married and have children, we are encouraging them to look towards the future.
And to live lives of love and service.
Not every parent is going to, you know, live up to this calling, of course.
You could be a parent and still be a selfish SOB, that's for sure.
But at least as a culture, we are pointing people in the right direction.
The other option is to point people towards lives centered around themselves, their own comfort, luxury, entertainment.
That's no way to build or maintain a thriving society.
And on an individual level, it's a recipe for a life that, while comfortable, is ultimately empty and purposeless.
You know, the consequence of being sentient, self-aware, relatively intelligent creatures is that we cannot help but search for meaning.
No other creature, as far as we know, on Earth is bothered by this detail.
So great white sharks aren't reflecting on the meaning of it all as they hunt and devour a seal.
Ants aren't wondering what it all means as they swarm over a melting popsicle left in the pavement.
Only we are left with these questions and we cannot escape them.
And what we find ultimately is that momentary pleasures and amusements cannot satisfy our need and longing for meaning.
They can only distract us from them.
But not forever.
Not for long.
Family life gives us purpose and meaning.
And even that isn't ultimate meaning in and of itself.
Our ultimate meaning, our ultimate purpose is to know God, love Him, and serve Him.
But family life points us in that direction towards the eternal and the transcendental.
It grounds us in something that goes beyond, transcends self-service and self-satisfaction.
And the cost of that is that we can't take as many vacations.
But that is a price well worth paying.
And it's why today, I must say, both the dinks and the dinkwads are cancelled.
That'll do it for this portion of the show.
As we move over to the members' block, hope to see you there.
