Ep. 1084 - Porn Has Taken Over Society. We Need Laws To Fight Back.
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a new bill would finally require porn sites to verify the ages of their users. This is a very basic step that would help protect children, and yet many people object to it. What possible objection could they have? We'll investigate. Also, a pro-life priest is kicked out of the priesthood by the Vatican. Could Pope Francis possibly be any more of a disgrace? Los Angeles comes up with a disastrously stupid plan to deal with its homelessness problem. And a "science journalist" structured her entire life for three years around avoiding COVID, and yet got sick anyway. What lesson did she learn from this experience? All the wrong ones of course.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, a new bill would finally require porn sites to verify the ages of their users.
This is a very basic step that would help protect children, and yet many people object to it.
What possible objection could they have?
We'll investigate.
Also, a pro-life priest is kicked out of the priesthood by the Vatican.
Could Pope Francis possibly be any more of a disgrace?
Los Angeles comes up with a disastrously stupid plan for dealing with its homelessness problem, and a science journalist structured her entire life for three years around avoiding COVID and yet got it anyway.
What lesson did she learn from this experience?
All the wrong ones, of course.
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
Roe v. Wade has been overturned and this battle is now finally leaving DC
and going to the grassroots.
No group in America is better positioned than 40 Days for Life.
With about a million volunteers in 1,000 cities, 40 Days for Life holds peaceful vigils outside abortion facilities.
They have a larger presence in blue states, with California being their largest state.
Some former abortion facility directors say that these vigils can cause the abortion no-show rate to go as high as 75 percent, which is, of course, detrimental to their abortion business.
These law-abiding vigils have closed many abortion businesses in America, and nearly half of those closed abortion facilities were in liberal cities where abortions will remain legal, including closures in San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle.
40 Days for Life is effectively changing hearts and minds in the grassroots to end abortion.
You can check out their locations, podcasts, and free magazine at 40daysforlife.com.
And it's so crucial that you do, because the fight for life is not even close to over.
So if you want more information on 40 Days for Life, go to 40daysforlife.com.
It may surprise you to learn this, but there are at least a few people in Congress who are interested in doing their jobs.
Emphasis on a few, a very few indeed.
One of the few, however, is Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who just in the last couple of days has introduced two bills with the aim of combating the proliferation of online pornography, especially as it affects kids.
The Daily Wire reports on a great bill whose only flaw is that it really reaches for the acronym in its title.
So, says quote, the shielding children's retinas from egregious exposure on the Net Act or Screen Act
would direct the FCC to mandate that all pornographic websites adopt age verification technology to keep children
from accessing porn online.
The Interstate Obscenity Definition Act or IOTA Act would abolish a nationwide definition of obscenity,
reforming the Supreme Court's Miller test and enabling prosecution of obscene content transmitted across states or
from foreign countries.
The Screen Act would direct the FCC to require commercial websites that regularly create or platform pornographic
content to establish age verification technology to ensure that
users of those websites are not minors and that minors are prevented from accessing the content of
such websites.
Notably, the bill explicitly states that any proposed FCC regulation must make clear that simply asking a user to confirm that he or she is a legal adult is not a sufficient screening measure.
The IOTA would establish a federal definition of obscenity that would apply to, quote, a picture, image, graphic image, file, film, videotape, or other visual depiction.
Now, this is not the first time that Lee has addressed this issue.
Again, from the Daily Wire, it says, Lee previously proposed a bill in September to prevent sexual exploitation on porn sites.
The Preventing Rampant Online Technological Exploitation and Criminal Trafficking Protect Act That one's not so bad.
That actually wasn't a reach at all.
That was well done.
Would require age and consent verification of those depicted in sexually explicit or intimate materials online.
It would also allow victims of sexual exploitation to have their images removed and block re-uploads including any altered edited versions.
Websites that fail to remove the reported content could face penalties of up to $10,000 per day.
Victims could also file civil actions against these sites.
No.
So those are the bills.
Of course, the usual suspects are panicking over these proposed measures.
Articles and outlets like Vice and Gizmodo worry that it could spell doom for the porn industry as a whole.
It could take down the porn industry, which is music to my ears, personally.
I mean, if you've been listening to this show for any length of time, you know that I'm in favor of banning porn outright.
I would like to ban all of it.
Because pornography is not speech.
A person performing sex on film is engaging in something, alright, but it ain't speech.
Porn is prostitution.
Okay?
Very clearly.
It is monetized sex.
It is transactional sex.
It is sex as a product to be consumed.
If old-fashioned prostitutes cannot claim First Amendment protections, then neither should the prostitutes who happen to use the Internet to whore themselves out.
But that's a topic for another day.
Okay, that's a different topic because these bills would not ban pornography.
They would rather put some very basic safeguards and restrictions in place.
The sort of safeguards and restrictions that every other industry in existence has to contend with.
Porn has existed in its own special universe up until now, free of pretty much all restrictions and regulations.
It has been allowed to do whatever it wants.
That doesn't make any sense and has never made any sense.
And now that we live in a culture that is drowning in porn, billions and billions of hours of porn consumed every year, children first exposed on average at the age of 10 or younger, it is way past time to start thinking more seriously about this.
So let's focus just On the first bill for right now, which ought to be the least controversial of all.
Like, this should be something that every sane and decent person can immediately agree to.
The Screen Act would, again, simply require that porn sites make a serious attempt to verify the ages of its users.
That's all it does.
Right now, they are not required to do anything.
Many sites don't even so much as require users to click a button confirming that they're 18 years old.
You have to do that if you want to go to Miller Lite's website.
If you want to go to the website of a brewery or distillery, you have to verify.
You have to at least click something saying that you're 21, your drinking age.
Now that doesn't really achieve anything because obviously anyone can click the button, but even that symbolic gesture towards trying to protect children isn't done when it comes to porn.
Nothing is done.
Nothing.
Billions of hours of the most depraved and perverted sexual images imaginable, and many more hours of stuff that is not even imaginable for most of us, is just one click away for any child on the internet all the time.
There are no barriers.
There are no safeguards.
There is nothing.
Nothing.
This is totally indefensible.
We are simply handing generations of children over to the porn industry, knowing about the devastating psychological effects, the documented, proven, long-term harm this exposure causes.
We know that.
Yet, as a society, we are doing absolutely not one thing at all to stem this tide.
And still now, even after all this, many people recoil in horror at the suggestion of something as simple and common sense as age verification.
Many of these people would call themselves conservatives too.
So I tweeted about this bill earlier this morning, and some of the responses are typical, and I think a good representation of how people respond to stuff like this.
So reading just a few of how people responded.
Matt Walsh and Mike Lee want government to come to the rescue with regulations on businesses.
Someone else says, I absolutely oppose the government assuming parental responsibilities.
If you don't like porn, then don't watch it.
Why do you guys always want to take away freedoms?
It's so bizarre.
Someone else says, age verification technology?
That sounds pretty frightening in and of itself.
Why not just keep kids off the internet unsupervised?
Someone else, no thanks, I don't want to use any identification to wank.
Parents should be the ones keeping children from this content, not the government.
So this was a general consensus.
There were also references to free speech from these brave warriors for liberty who believe it is our sacred responsibility to honorably defend the rights of smut peddlers to expose our children to hardcore pornography.
They declare, you know, I may not agree with this orgy you filmed, but I will defend to the death your right to distribute it openly on the internet without restrictions so that nine-year-olds can access it.
What an inspiring mantra.
Now, let me make a few points here.
First of all, age verification already exists on the Internet.
If you want to use a gambling site, for example, you will need to verify your age with a credit card, or an ID, or maybe both.
Nobody complains about that.
Nobody cries out that their free speech rights are somehow being infringed because gambling sites have barriers in place to prevent 10-year-olds from gambling.
Nobody has any issue with it.
It's only with porn that suddenly it becomes, as the one tweet said, frightening.
Age verification exists outside of the Internet, too.
If you want to buy alcohol, you are required to show ID, and the store that sells it is required by law to ask for your ID.
If they don't ask, and they're caught not asking, they could face severe penalties.
Could take their whole business down.
Again, you rarely hear anybody complain about that.
Okay?
Nobody argues that the liquor store down the street has the First Amendment right to sell whiskey to 12-year-olds.
And although kids can get their hands on alcohol anyway, obviously, nobody says that the proliferation of alcohol means that we might as well just allow the liquor store to sell the whiskey to the 7th grader.
As we see, with any other adult-oriented product, the people distributing, whether in real life or on the internet, are required to take serious steps to attempt to verify ages.
In every other example you can think of, tobacco, alcohol, gambling, guns, the people distributing this stuff are required, whether on the internet or in real life, are required to verify ages.
The question is whether hardcore porn sites should be the one exception to this.
Should we continue to carve out an exception wherein every other 18 plus business has to verify ages, but the sites distributing pornography to the masses should not?
They get to be special.
There's just no coherent argument for that position.
It just doesn't exist.
The only argument is the one we heard from one of the tweets there.
And it's a terrible argument, but it was honest at least.
The real argument against age verification for porn sites is that porn users don't want to be mildly inconvenienced in their pursuit of masturbation materials.
That's the argument.
They want to be able to masturbate to pornography as quickly as possible, find as much as they can as quickly as possible, and they don't want any hindrance, any inconvenience at all.
And if that means exposing tens of millions of children to this content that will have devastating and traumatic psychological effects, they're fine with that.
I gotta tell you, I don't find that argument compelling.
I just don't.
Second point.
It's the parents' job, they cry out.
Well, of course it is.
Parents should be doing everything they can to protect their children from this material.
There are bad parents out there.
Lots of them.
Neglectful parents.
What do we say to those kids?
You're out of luck?
Sorry, kid.
Nothing we can do for you.
I mean, yes, it's a parent's job to feed their children also, but if a parent decides not to feed the child, do we simply just leave the child in the care of the parent and let him starve to death for fear of becoming a nanny state?
No, the fact that parents have responsibilities to protect their children Does it mean that the government has no responsibility to protect children?
Is that the argument?
That the government has no responsibility to children at all?
Now, the government may abuse its power.
It does that all the time.
And yet, it exists for a reason.
And protecting its citizens is the primary reason.
Do kids not count?
Do they not deserve protections as well?
I mean, no matter what you say about the government, you want to be protected.
You expect the government to fulfill its obligation to protect you.
No matter how much of a libertarian you claim to be, when push comes to shove, you expect there to be basic protections put in place to protect you by the government.
And you demand it, you insist on it.
Do kids not deserve protections?
Because remember something, kids They cannot consent to being exposed.
Even if a 10-year-old goes on Google and types something in that causes pornography to pop up, and they click on it, the 10-year-old is not consenting to being exposed to that because 10-year-olds cannot consent.
Average age of first exposure to pornography is 10 years old.
These kids cannot consent to being exposed to this material.
They cannot consent to being third-party witnesses to a sexual act.
Which means that they need to be protected from it, because they cannot protect themselves.
You could say that the parent has the primary role here, but are you really going to tell me the government has zero role?
None at all?
And if you are telling me that, again, why don't we apply this logic to any other industry?
It's a parent's job to make sure that their kids aren't smoking or drinking, and yet we still have laws in place forbidding the alcohol and tobacco industries from selling their products to kids.
These laws may not be anywhere close to 100% effective, but the other option is to simply let the industries do whatever the hell they want and sell directly to kindergartners if they want, and obviously nobody is in favor of that.
Unless it's pornography.
One final point.
Not every child who ends up exposed to porn Has a bad or neglectful parent.
Because thanks to the porn-obsessed losers who break down in tears at the suggestion of any restrictions or regulations at all on the porn industry, we now live in a society where this stuff is absolutely everywhere.
It is extremely difficult for a parent to shield their kids from it indefinitely.
And we are not doing parents any favors.
We're not helping parents at all.
So you could say to the parents, this is your job.
Okay, but can we help them out a little bit?
You know, hey parents, this is your job and we're going to intentionally make it as impossible as we can for you.
This is society's message to parents on like everything now.
We say it's your job and we are going to do nothing.
In fact, we are going to rig the system to make it more difficult every step of the way.
What's wrong with telling parents to do their jobs while also having policies in place that make those jobs at least halfway feasible?
Is it really so frightening, so terrifying?
The thought of having a society with laws that are meant to help and protect families?
Does that scare you?
Well, this is Orwellian!
We're actually valuing families and children!
This is dystopian!
The idea of living in a country where the laws are more concerned with protecting families than protecting whores and pimps on the internet?
That scares you?
Doesn't scare me.
What scares me is the fact that we live in a country where this even needs to be a conversation.
Because the answer is so damned obvious.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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All right, we'll start with this from the AP.
It says, the Vatican has defrocked an anti-abortion U.S.
priest, Frank Pavone, for what it said were blasphemous communications on social media, as well as persistent disobedience of his bishop, who repeatedly told him to stop his partisan activism for Donald Trump.
A letter to U.S.
bishops from the Vatican ambassador to the U.S.
Archbishop Christopher Pierre obtained Sunday said the decision against Bavone, who heads the anti-abortion group Priests for Life, had been taken November 9th and that there was no chance for an appeal.
Von has been in conflict with the Bishop of Amarillo, Texas for over a decade over his pro-life and partisan political activities that came to a head in 2016 when he put an aborted fetus on an altar and posted a video of it on two social media sites.
The video was accompanied by a post saying that Hillary Clinton and the Democrat platform would allow abortion to continue and that Trump and the Republican platform wanted to protect unborn children.
So they defrocked the priest.
It's what they call laicizing the priest and turning him into, kicking him out of the priesthood.
This kind of thing does not happen, I can tell you if you're not Catholic, this sort of thing does not happen very often.
This is a rare step.
And in this case, it's a rare step being taken against one of the most prominent pro-life activists in the priesthood.
Not one of them, he's the most prominent Pro-life priest in the country and they kicked him out of the priesthood.
Now, first of all, To the extent that this stems from the video, which, this was back six years ago, the video where he had the aborted baby on the altar.
From what I understand, first of all, obviously the baby was given a proper burial, and it also was not a consecrated altar from what I understand, which is an important detail.
This was an intentionally shocking act.
Meant to show the brutality and horror of abortion.
Now, people find this sort of thing unsettling.
Of course they do.
They should.
I do.
But when you're fighting a historic, genocidal horror, the sort of thing that most people in society prefer to turn away from, then you need to shock them awake sometime.
You need to force them to confront it, visually.
And, you know, there's always this debate in the pro-life communities, like, to what extent do we show the victim images?
To what extent do we put that front and center?
And there could be a conversation about the right context for that, but what is absolutely certain is that you cannot allow the victims to be entirely erased.
What it looks like, this needs to be seen.
The visuals need to be seen.
Can you take any other example in history of people fighting against a genocidal horror?
Images were always crucially important.
Because you can describe it all you want, people need to see what it looks like.
And also keep in mind, these children are usually dismembered and then thrown out literally as trash into a medical waste dumpster.
That's usually what happens.
So Father Pavone rescued this child from that fate.
It's very difficult to claim that what he did was somehow more disrespecting to the victim than the fate that that child's body would have otherwise suffered, which again would be to be thrown out as trash.
The point here is the opposite.
It's to show the victim's humanity.
And besides all that, how is this blasphemous?
You know, we could have an argument, you could say that it's inappropriate, it's shocking.
There's all kinds of descriptions that you could come up with and we could argue about whether they apply, but blasphemous?
What's blasphemous about that?
And however you feel about that, however you feel about it, the fact is that, if anything, his sin here is being too zealous, too militant in the fight for the unborn.
Something that I don't really think is possible, to be honest with you.
The idea that he would be defrocked for this, kicked out of the priesthood, is just, it's grotesque, especially considering all of the priests who are not kicked out.
As I said, this is a very uncommon measure that is taken.
It does not happen often.
Think, maybe there was a time when it was more common, but these days, things like defrocking priests, withholding communion, excommunicating people, These sorts of kind of ultimate punishments and measures are really uncommon these days.
And yet, if you're going to start doing that sort of thing, there's a whole line of people that should be far in front of someone like Father Frank Pavone.
James Martin.
This may be a name you've heard.
He's a Jesuit heretic, but I repeat myself, openly defies the Church's teachings on a number of central moral issues, especially sexuality.
He's a gay pride flag-waving blasphemer touting acceptance of sexual sin, promoting gay marriage, and all the rest of it.
Openly defying the church's moral authority and moral teachings.
In fact, he has also stated explicitly that the Bible is incorrect in its moral judgments on homosexuality.
He acknowledges that those judgments are in there, but says that it's incorrect.
He tweeted this a couple of years ago, apparently quoting someone else, but clearly in agreement he was quoting him.
He said, Interesting.
Where the Bible mentions same-sex sexual behavior at all, it clearly condemns it.
I freely grant that.
The issue is precisely whether the biblical judgment is correct.
The Bible sanctions slavery as well, and nowhere attacked it as unjust.
Oh, nothing.
No big deal here.
Just a priest, one of the most prominent ones in the country, saying that the moral teachings in the Bible are not correct.
Which, of course, raises all kinds of questions.
If it's not correct about this, then what else is it incorrect about?
Is there any reason to think it's correct about anything else?
You have just totally undermined the moral authority of the Bible.
And as a priest, you have undermined the moral authority of the Church.
That's what James Martin is doing.
Is he getting defrocked?
Is he getting laicized?
Not anywhere close.
Instead, priests like him are taken and given positions of prominence, you know, they're welcomed into the Vatican, they're put in positions of power by this Pope, Pope Francis, who is an absolute disgrace.
He is a disgrace and a disaster.
Alright, another church-related story.
This is from the New York Times.
Stonebridge Christian Church in eastern Nebraska is known locally for hosting a big annual fireworks event, which this fall included 15 food trucks and portable fire pits for making s'mores.
But it's the Christmas season that is our Super Bowl, so the church's executive pastor, Mitch Chitwood.
This year, the church's four locations in the Omaha area will host four Jingle Jam family parties in December and nine services on Christmas Eve, complete with classic carols, Christmas-themed coffee drinks, and festive photo booth in the lobby.
What they will not have is church on Sunday, December 25th.
On Christmas Day, Stonebridge will offer a simple community breakfast, but no religious services at all.
Chitwood said, And where they are on Christmas Day is usually at home in their pajamas.
This year, church leaders are grappling with what may seem like an odd dilemma.
Christmas Day falls on a Sunday for the first time since 2016, and that's a problem.
Christmas is considered by most Christians to be the second most significant religious holiday of the year behind Easter, but most Protestants do not attend church services on Christmas Day when it falls on a weekday.
If everyone from the pews to the pulpit would rather stay home, what is a practical house of worship to do?
This year, some Protestant churches are deciding to skip Sunday services completely.
And it's a long article giving all these examples of these churches that are closing down for Christmas.
Not only closing on a Sunday and also Christmas.
So you would think that Sunday and Christmas coincide all the more reason to have the churches open, although both of those reasons individually are reason enough.
Instead it goes the other way.
It's like it cancels each other out.
It's this weird mathematics where Sunday and Christmas cancel each other out and so therefore church is canceled.
I gotta say, I don't get this, and as I've talked about this a little bit, and I think we talked about it on the show maybe last year, and I didn't realize how widespread this is.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
Christmas is one of the holiest Christian holidays.
It's not our most sacred holiday, as the article surprisingly correctly points out, but it is very important.
I mean, it's up there, celebrating the birth of Christ, you know, and we have to keep Christ in Christmas.
That's what every Christian says.
And yet many of these Christians go to churches that close down on Christmas.
Because that's a good way to keep Christ in Christmas.
Close your church.
Of course, the justification that we often hear for this, and we also hear this in the article, is that the pastors themselves have families, and they want to be with their families on Christmas.
Alright, that, yes.
And, um, that may be the case.
Except that, if you're a pastor, You are a pastor.
You got into this line of work.
This is like, I don't know, this is like deciding that you want to go into business selling fireworks, but then closing up shop around the 4th of July.
Like, you know, if it's really important to you that you don't have to work on 4th of July weekend, then maybe you should be doing literally anything else in your life besides running a fireworks stand.
This is what you're there for?
This is like, this is it?
As it says there in the article, this is your Super Bowl.
So if you want to run a church, and yet you want to be home on the Christian holidays, well, maybe you shouldn't be running a church.
And look, I'm not saying you have to go to church on Christmas Day.
We usually go to church on Christmas Eve, and that's fine.
That counts, you know?
That's been our tradition in my family.
In fact, ever since I was a kid, it's been my favorite church service of the year.
My favorite mass of the year has always been Christmas Eve.
We really enjoy going on Christmas Eve.
That's not the issue.
The issue is with literally shutting your church down entirely on Christmas, not even giving the faithful the option of going to church to celebrate Christ's birthday on the actual day.
And you have to think about the message that this sends.
People wonder why the churches are dying.
Well, I mean, if the church is sending the message that their services aren't needed on Christmas, then why are they needed any other time?
If it's not important to go to church, if it's not important enough to go to church on one of the most significant Christian holidays, it's so unimportant that you could shut the church down, then I think a lot of people in the public say, well, what do I need you for at all?
Why is it ever important to go to church?
And what is the message?
I mean, the pastor is skipping one of the holiest holidays because he wants to stay in his pajamas on Christmas morning?
He wants to wear his Christmas PJs and eat a late breakfast, and so church isn't all that important in that case on that particular day?
Why would anyone take the church seriously?
That's the question.
All right.
This is extremely revealing.
I know you don't like to hear the word revealing used in the same sentence as Rachel Levine, but here it is.
Rachel Levine at, I don't know what event this is, doesn't matter.
He's at some kind of event.
Talking about his own experiences with transitioning, and I want you to listen to what he says.
Here it is.
You know, my transition was very different, because for many reasons, professional and mostly personal reasons, I transitioned over 10 years.
Most people don't take that long to transition.
First of all, young people are not willing to do that anymore.
And, you know, I mean, I don't know if I was 15 now, I don't know if I would have taken so long, but again, when I was 15, what were you going to say, and who would you tell, and how would you possibly express that?
So the language started about, you know, and that was now 20 years ago,
when I started, when I kind of started this journey.
And it was starting to become more in culture, in the internet, and support groups, et cetera.
So I took a long time.
I don't regret any of that, but I have no regrets, because if I transitioned when I was young,
then I wouldn't have my children.
I can't imagine a life without my children.
And so every experience led me to here.
And so how could I regret that?
Amazing. Not really amazing.
This is the kind of, this is the kind of incoherence that we expect from these kinds of people.
I mean, first of all, the fact that he has kids, it just, you know, it makes me feel so terrible for these kids who I imagine are probably Older now than adults, but no matter what age they are, it just goes to show how intensely selfish all of this is, the trans agenda, along with all the other problems with it that we talk about all the time.
It's incredibly selfish.
Think about what you're doing to your kids when you hear about these grown adult men who discover that they're really women and they want to live as women.
So you have no concern at all for what this is doing to your kids.
No concern.
Doesn't matter to you.
And then all we ever hear is, oh, I feel so much better.
I feel so much better.
I don't care how you feel.
That's not the point.
What about your kids?
How do they feel with their dad now dressing up and pretending to be a woman?
How does it make your kids feel?
And according to you, if you actually are now a woman, you have just taken, by your own logic, you have just taken the children's father away.
They no longer have a father.
They thought they did, but it turns out, according to you, they don't.
If you have any capacity for caring about anyone else besides yourself, That should be reason enough to suppress whatever internal things going on that makes you have these feelings.
Suppress them, go to a counselor, a real counselor, a good one, not many of those, but find one.
The fact that you have kids should be reason enough.
You're not going to take a child's father away from him.
Also, he says that, oh, I can't imagine life without my kids, you know, and if I transitioned earlier, I wouldn't have kids.
And yet he still thinks it's perfectly fine to transition kids.
Yeah, that's right, because if you transition early as a child, what comes with that is sterility.
We are sterilizing kids Removing their ability to have children in the future.
And so he can look back and say that, well, I'm really glad that it took as long as it did to transition and that I did it in adulthood so that I still had kids.
Meanwhile, in the next breath, he is advocating for doing this as young as possible to kids so that they never have that option.
I mean, what do we imagine?
Do we imagine that he doesn't notice the inconsistency here, the contradiction?
Of course he does.
He just doesn't care.
I mean, this guy doesn't give a damn about his own kids.
You think he's gonna care about anybody else's kids?
All of this.
Everything.
Take Rachel Levine.
Everything he says.
His whole life.
Everything.
is just about affirming himself.
He's just constantly trying to affirm and rationalize and justify himself and his own preoccupations and his own self-perceptions.
That's what all of this is about.
And he will enlist generations of children to follow down this same path because it makes him feel better about himself.
It's the only thing he cares about.
All right, the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, is given her plan for dealing with homelessness, and here it is.
Are you still going to allow LAPD and sanitation officers to do these sweeps of encampments?
No, these are not sweeps at all.
This is getting people to move on their own, but then after the person leaves, sanitation is absolutely going to have to be there.
No question about it.
But this is not coercing people.
This is not ticketing people or incarcerating people.
This is moving people from tents to hotels or motels.
Okay, so you just take the homeless people, take them out of the tent, put them in a hotel or motel, because that's how you solve the homelessness problem.
Which is like, it's like solving the drunk driving problem by, you know, putting more padding on the inside of the car and telling drunk people to wear a helmet if they're going to drive.
You're just facilitating more drunk driving that way.
You are facilitating more of the behaviors that lead to the drunk driving deaths.
Because that's the thing.
If we have a problem with drunk driving deaths and injuries, the issue is with the behavior, obviously, that leads to those deaths.
And same with homelessness.
I have to keep making this point.
Homeless people Are not homeless simply because they lack homes.
They're homeless because they'd rather spend their money on drugs than on anything else.
They're homeless because they're addicts and or because they're mentally ill.
And obviously those things are certainly not mutually exclusive.
An able-bodied, mentally stable, sober person is not going to be out sleeping on a park bench.
It's not going to happen most of the time, and in the very rare circumstance when it might happen, it will only be for a very short amount of time.
So if you take these people that are years and years living out on the street, it's just, it takes the most minimal competence To be able to make enough money to afford some kind of living arrangement.
May not be a mansion, may not be a nice living arrangement, but if you're sober and mentally competent, there is rarely going to be a reason why you wouldn't be making enough money to sleep somewhere that isn't a subway grate.
Now, this is not about being cruel to the homeless.
It's quite the opposite.
It's about acknowledging what drives the problem.
Which is more than what most people are willing to do.
So we talk about the homeless problem and the conversation never goes anywhere because we're not actually acknowledging what the problem is.
We're acting as though people just end up homeless, you know, like anyone could end up homeless.
You take someone who's sleeping in a box on the side of the road or whatever, living under a bridge.
We want to pretend that it's like, well, any one of us could be just in that spot tomorrow.
That's just, that's simply not the case.
And because we can't acknowledge what lies at the root of the problem, that's why we end up doing these monumentally stupid things like sending mentally ill drug addicts into hotels.
Where, as we've seen in the past, they promptly proceed to trash every room that you put them in, they drive away all the business, Who knows, maybe they send the hotel owner into homelessness himself because it destroys their business.
This is what happens when you refuse to acknowledge the actual source of the problem.
Let's get to the comment section.
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All right, hopefully you've all finished your Christmas shopping, by the way.
I'm almost done my own Christmas shopping, mainly because I only have one person to buy for, which is my wife.
And this is why I say it every year, just like a PSA, that I cannot recommend marriage enough during the holidays.
I recommend it during every other time of year, too, but especially during the holidays, and especially if you're a man.
If you're a man, once you're married, almost all the gift shopping is farmed out to the wife.
She buys everything.
I mean, I buy it because I'm making the money that buys it, but she's the one who goes out and actually makes the purchases and picks the gifts and keeps track of everything.
She has the flowchart and the spreadsheet going and she knows who gets what and everything.
I couldn't even begin to do that.
She takes care of it.
And then we sit there on Christmas morning and it's the classic dad thing where people are opening gifts and a kid runs up, thank you daddy!
For what?
What did I?
Oh yeah, for that.
I remember getting you that.
It's fantastic.
Here's what gets me, though.
My wife, she's a pro at gift shopping.
She gets people the best gifts.
She finds great deals.
She's the kind of person who she'll buy someone a Christmas gift in July if she's out and she sees something and says, oh, this would be great for this person on Christmas.
And she'll buy them a gift in July.
She does that, and yet somehow she complains that I'm hard to shop for.
And this is a complaint that you hear from wives all the time, that their husbands are hard to shop for.
I don't understand that.
It's the exact opposite.
We are the easiest.
Are you kidding me?
I'm a simple man.
Whiskey, flannels, cigars, fishing rods, socks, or a gift card.
I would take that too.
That's it.
Choose from those options.
That's all you need to do.
Every Christmas like clockwork.
Just give me the same thing every single year.
I'm fine with it.
So I'm the easiest one to shop for.
I think what happens with women Is they make it harder on themselves because they think that they have to put, they have to be creative and they have to put thought into the gifts.
So they're too thoughtful.
It's the worst mistake you can make when you're buying a gift.
When you're buying a gift for a man, worst thing you could do is be thoughtful.
Just don't put any thought into it.
Ask him what, like you know the things that he likes, ask him what he wants and just get that and that's it.
No man has ever opened a gift, and it was something that he wanted, and then said, well, and was like disappointed because it seemed like, well, you just got me exactly what I said I wanted.
I was hoping you would surprise me.
No man has ever thought that, I guarantee you.
Especially if he's a dad, because this is something that happens when you become a dad even more so, where it's just, there are the dad gifts.
And it's the dad gets the same gifts every single year.
I remember when I was a kid, my dad would get the same gifts year after year after year.
And as a kid, I would look at that and I would think, this isn't fun for him at all.
How could this be?
And so some years we would try to surprise him with something creative and he would try to hide it, but we could always tell he was disappointed when he opened it because he just wants his gifts.
So you don't even need to wrap it.
Just take the dad gifts.
Put them in a plastic grocery bag, right with Sharpie, dad gifts, and just throw them at them on Christmas morning, and I'll sift through them later.
That's perfect Christmas, okay?
That's all you need to do.
All right.
Jack says, disappointed to hear that you only defend free speech for those you agree with.
I thought you had better principles than that.
No, that's not what I said.
Last week when the left was claiming that their free speech was infringed upon because some journalists were temporarily suspended on Twitter for doxing people.
First of all, it was not a free speech violation because they violated the terms of service, they violated the rules, and the rules were applied to them consistently for a change.
So not a violation of free speech at all, but then yeah, I do also say that even if it had been a violation of their free speech, I most likely would not have defended them.
And I'm not one of these people who's going to claim, as referenced earlier, you know, I hate what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it.
When it comes to left-wing journalists, no, I wouldn't.
I wouldn't fight to the death for their right to say whatever they're saying.
I wouldn't.
My life's too valuable to give it up for these scumbags.
No, in fact, it's quite the opposite.
It's good for them to get a dose of their own medicine.
Talk about, we can describe the medicine, talk about how horrible it is, but sometimes people need to learn by doing, they need to learn by experiencing it.
And I am a fan also of holding people to their own standard, that's all.
I think, and I think that's perfectly consistent.
You should be held to your own standard.
It's the only way, if we want these standards to be abolished, the only way to do that, If we want to get rid of the double standards that we're subject to from the left and we complain about all the time, the only way to get rid of it is to apply it to them.
It's to force them.
Basically, you're getting rid of the double standard, and you're saying, okay, you want to apply these standards to us, and we don't like them, but we're going to apply them right back on you.
It's the only way.
manbot3000 says, I was put in special needs class in seventh grade.
That's what they called it in the late 80s.
All the bad kids.
Some were intellectually deficient, for lack of a better description.
Most, like myself, were troublemakers.
I actually met three of those classmates in prison a few short years later.
Putting all the bad kids in a room at the end of the hallway isn't a viable solution.
Thank God he changed lives, and today I'm a father of three, happily married and gainfully employed.
Well, congratulations, first of all, on being able to get your life together.
And this is The fact that you went through this in the 80s and this is what they were doing with kids, and it was already having that effect, I mean, think about how much worse it is now.
Because the discipline problems have not gotten any better in the last 30 years, they've only gotten worse.
They were already just sort of like taking the back, like we talked about last week.
I can remember this.
When I was in high school, if you were a troublemaker, they just took you and threw you into a room with other kids that are just like you.
And that's not going to help much.
But at least back when I was in school, you could still punish kids a little bit.
Now you can't punish them at all.
The Natundi says, "Getting divorced because you don't feel the sparkles is
like concluding you can't work your job because you're tired in the morning and don't want to go and then just
quitting."
Well, yeah, that is very similar sort of mentality, but that's exactly the mentality that lots of people have about their jobs.
This is what they call, you know, quiet quitting.
There's people that say it's really, yeah, it's a similar kind of thing.
So yeah, the country star who said she had to divorce her husband, because I just didn't feel, I didn't feel the glitter anymore.
There was no glitter.
And so she divorced, and a lot of people in their jobs would say, I don't feel the glitter anymore in this job.
But the difference is, they actually don't quit.
They're going to keep doing the job, but not trying and expecting to make the paycheck.
Lisa, done listening to Matt, lost all credibility on backstage when he said, Wonderful Christmas Time is the worst Christmas song ever.
Everyone knows it's Feliz Navidad.
Sorry, it's not even close.
It's not in the ballpark.
Feliz Navidad is... I'll tell you right now, if you want a contrarian take, Feliz Navidad is a delightful song.
It's catchy.
You know?
It's catchy, it's...
Catchy, it's, I mean, you can at least call it catchy, you have to agree with me on that.
I'm not saying it's my favorite, I'm just saying it doesn't hold a candle to the putrid pile of audible mush that is called Wonderful Christmas Time.
The song that Paul McCartney wrote in 19 seconds with crayon on the back of a CVS receipt, and that was then piped into every retail store in the country on repeat from November 1st to the end of December.
Even though nobody wants to hear it, nobody likes the song, nobody understands why we have to hear it, but we just do.
The song is a god-awful nightmare, and there are some bad Christmas songs out there.
People always say, Last Christmas, Feliz Navidad.
I would listen to Last Christmas ten times in a row before I listen to Wonderful Christmas Time once.
It's hard to believe it, but the holidays are already here.
Christmas is upon us.
Kwanzaa follows close behind.
Now, I know a lot of you are already Daily Wire Plus members and get to enjoy the great content that we have released this year, like Terror on the Prairie, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold, and last but certainly not least, 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.
We are now less than a week away from Christmas, a time of joy and celebration, of family, togetherness, unless you're a left-wing hypochondriac, in which case it's a horrifying festival of sickness and death.
Yes, as we get into the holidays, the media has ramped up its masking push, trying to reignite those germaphobe sparks, recapture the magic of holiday season's past.
In many recent published pieces, most media outlets have agreed it's time to once again don our gay apparel.
And by that, I mean a mask.
As CNBC reports, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, in a call with reporters, said wearing a mask is one of the several everyday precautions that people can take to reduce their chances of catching or spreading a respiratory virus during the holiday season.
Quote, we also encourage you to wear a high-quality, well-fitting mask to prevent the spread of respiratory illness.
She said, adding that people living in areas with high levels of COVID transmission should especially consider masking.
The CDC director said the agency is considering expanding its system of COVID community levels to take into account other respiratory viruses, such as the flu.
The system is the basis for when CDC advises the public to wear masks, but Walensky encouraged people to take proactive action.
On Friday night, there was a MSNBC medical analyst who made the case in perhaps even more strident terms.
Here's what he said.
To your question, it is well past time, especially because pediatric hospitals across the country are overwhelmed, as you said.
That we just need to accept what's unpopular, and I'll just say it, that communities across the country, especially with pediatric hospitals that are overwhelmed, which is most, just need to mask up.
Schools need to take the leadership here.
Public health officials need to accept And I know that they privately communicate this all the time.
It's just we need to have the courage to say this publicly, even if it's unpopular, that communities, especially with hospitals, children's hospitals that have little slack in the system, need to protect those hospitals.
Schools need to lead by example and mask, and that's school officials.
I'm looking at you, public health officials at the local level.
It only makes sense.
It's our only buttress here, in addition to vaccination, and we need to do it.
Yes, public health officials must have the courage, the courage to advocate for muzzling children, a policy that all the credible evidence suggests was ineffective, pointless, and caused far more harm in terms of educational delays and psychological damage than it prevented.
There's a word we might use for the promotion of policies that were disastrously stupid the first time around and destined to be just as stupid the next time.
There are many words, in fact, and none of them have anything to do with courage.
That's for certain.
But some of the media's renewed panicking over COVID is driven by the personal experiences of people in the media.
For example, a woman named Tanya Lewis, who's a science journalist for Scientific American, tweeted her own harrowing tale over the weekend.
She wrote this.
Well, it happened.
After nearly three years of covering COVID and thinking about it almost constantly, it finally got me.
And rather than focus on how I got it, I'm going to tell you how I didn't get it for this long.
What follows from this point is a truly terrifying glance into the mind of a sick woman.
And I don't mean sick with COVID.
Her sickness is not in the lungs, but in the mind.
She continues, From the moment we had evidence that COVID might be airborne, I wore a mask, but not just any mask, an N95 or a well-fitted KN95.
At first, these were really hard to come by, but now it's quite easy to find them.
I don't just wear it some of the time.
I wore it any time I was indoors in public, or even outdoors if I was in a crowd.
I wore one in the hallways of my apartment building, even if there was no one else around, because aerosols can linger in the air for a while.
For the first year or two, I avoided spending time indoors in public as much as possible, with the exception of grocery stores or doctor's offices.
I've hooded the subways for a while, although studies suggest trains weren't the biggest vectors for the spread.
She's not done.
She goes on.
I did get on planes a few times to visit a sick parent who needed my help, but from the moment I left my apartment to the moment I arrived, I didn't take off my mask.
I opened windows in taxis.
I didn't eat or drink on the flights except to sip water while holding my breath.
As soon as vaccines became available, I got mine.
I've gotten every booster I could since then, including the new bivalent booster that targets Omnicorn.
Because we know the coronavirus is airborne.
I only ate at restaurants with outdoor seating.
I bought portable air purifiers and a CO2 monitor to measure ventilation levels at home.
I opened windows.
If I was going to visit an elderly slash immunocompromised family member, I took lots of tests.
PCR tests before traveling.
Rapid tests for several days after arriving.
I avoided possible exposures for a week or more before traveling.
So, finally we get to the story of how she still managed to contract the virus after all this, which she blames on the holiday party that she worked up the courage to attend this year.
She wore her N95 to the holiday party.
She bathed herself at hand sanitizer.
She brought 10 booster shots with her, injected one every 15 minutes.
She refused to shake hands with anyone or speak to them or stand within 50 yards of anyone.
I'm only making some of this up.
The point is that she emerged Only ever so slightly from her hypochondriac cocoon after three years, and she still got the virus.
What lesson does she learn from this?
What lesson does this professional science writer want us to learn?
Well, of course, exactly the opposite of the actual lesson.
Indeed, she summarizes her experiences at the end with this mind-boggling statement.
She says this, Quote, getting sick doesn't have to be inevitable.
What?
No, Tanya, no, you've missed your own point.
Your experience proves that getting sick is inevitable.
You structured your entire life around avoiding the virus for three years and yet you still got it.
I, on the other hand, have done absolutely nothing to avoid getting it.
In fact, I've done the opposite.
I've spent my time working in a busy office, traveling the country, shaking hands with hundreds of people at a time.
You've done everything not to get sick.
I have seemingly done everything to get sick.
And we both have had COVID the same number of times since China invented it.
Once.
Okay?
You have sacrificed your normal human existence in favor of a self-imposed, paranoia-fueled self-exile.
And in the end, you're in exactly the same spot that all of us out here breathing fresh air and participating in society are in.
You get sick sometimes.
Most of the time you don't.
Until eventually you die.
That's the story for almost everyone on Earth, mask or no mask, socially distanced or not socially distanced, we are all in the same boat.
We all must navigate the world in frail, mortal, you know, bodies, subject to all manner of risks and potential tragedies.
You either come to terms with this and live your life, or you hide in fear from it, trembling in terror, and yet still find yourself subject to the same inevitabilities that all the rest of us are.
To quote Shawshank Redemption, either get busy living or get busy dying.
What you can't choose, much to your chagrin I realize, is a state of suspended animation where you're neither living nor dying as you wait for humans to achieve immortality before re-emerging into society.
That is not an option on the table.
In the end, what we really learned from COVID, or our response to it at any rate, is that some people in our country had never, before the winter of 2020, actually confronted their own mortality.
They had never stopped to think about the fact that death is certain.
That they came into this world and will have to leave it sooner than they would like.
That their own lives are but small blips on the radar screen in comparison to the lifespan of human civilization, or of the Earth itself.
That when considered on that time scale, their lives may as well be five seconds long.
Somehow, there were many people who had never really thought about any of this, which came as a shock to those of us like myself who think about it all the time.
And in a way that may seem ironic to some people, it is those of us who think about death who are the least liable to panic over it.
Because we know that it's coming.
This isn't news to us.
We know that the world is filled to the brim with deadly things, COVID being not even close to the top of that list.
Nowhere near it, in fact.
But those who successfully distracted themselves from reflecting on their own mortality, who managed to sublimate those thoughts, numb themselves psychologically and spiritually, were jolted quite suddenly by the existence of this relatively mild virus.
To them, it came out of nowhere, like a bolt of lightning.
And the constant reminders of death, the one thing they tried to desperately avoid thinking about, broke them mentally.
They retreated into their cocoons like paranoid little caterpillars and pledged to never come out until all the scary stuff is gone.
And yet it hasn't gone away and never will.
And still they cannot bring themselves to simply accept the terrible truth that life is short, no matter what, and we will all die.
