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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a left wing media outlet honors me with an incredibly prestigious award. It's a great way to start the new year. Also, an NFL player collapses on the field. 60 Minutes trots out an environmentalist prophet of doom who has been notoriously wrong about literally everything for decades. The usual suspects dance on the grave of Pope Benedict. The team formerly known as the Washington Redskins unveil their new mascot. And a libertarian publication is here to tell us that we shouldn't be so worried about children at drag shows.
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, a left-wing media outlet honors me with an incredibly prestigious award.
It's a great way to start the new year.
Also, an NFL player collapses on the field.
60 Minutes chops out an environmentalist prophet of doom who has been notoriously wrong about literally everything for decades.
The usual suspects dance on the grave of Pope Benedict, and the team formerly known as the Washington Redskins unveil their new mascot.
Plus, a Libertarian publication is here to tell us that we shouldn't be so worried about children at drag shows.
It's all a moral panic, they say.
All of that and more today on The Matt Wall Show.
[Music]
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As we begin the new year, I believe it is important to move forward,
to keep our gaze fixed upon the horizon.
We don't want to spend too much time looking back, dwelling on the past.
Yet, I must say that I do begin this year in a bit of a reflective mood because 2022 was, in many ways, a landmark year in my own life.
began with my episode of Dr. Phil in early January.
A week after that episode aired, I was off to Africa filming our, at the time,
still secret documentary project, What Is A Woman?, which would be released on the first day of Pride Month
in June of 2022 and go on to become one of the most influential and talked about documentaries
of the current century.
In the fall, we exposed and brought down Vanderbilt's child mutilation program,
which led to our rally to end child mutilation, which was attended by upwards of 3,000 people,
which led to the introduction of legislation banning child gender transitions in the state of Tennessee.
All of that, and we still found time to do other things like raise awareness about, you know, important issues like translucent mermaids and satanic anime.
So, there's a lot going on in 2022, and I'm very proud of all of those accomplishments.
And though I don't do it for the awards, I don't do it for the accolades, I still appreciate and am humbled by them when they come.
Which is why I must take a moment to thank the prominent left-wing publication, The New Republic, which, in the lead-up to the New Year last week, published a long article awarding me The title and trophy that I think I worked very hard all year to earn.
This is their headline.
Transphobe of the Year, Matt Walsh.
The right-wing writer and podcaster has raised his profile by spreading grotesque conspiracy theories about grooming and pedophilia in the LGBTQ community.
Yes, facing stiff competition from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Chris Ruffo and Libs of TikTok and others, I was still given the prestigious title of Transphobe of the Year.
The writer Indigo Olivier explains why the honor went to me.
She writes, quote, from book bans to bomb threats, 2022 has been characterized by a disturbing rise in right-wing violence brought on by the viral moral panic of very online fear mongers.
And the biggest target of this mayhem has been the transgender community.
Figures like Libs of TikTok's Shia Raichik, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and the Manhattan Institute's Chris Ruffeau have joined conservative politicians in flooding right-wing airwaves with hate speech and misinformation on issues like gender-affirming care and children's sports.
But in a year when Transgender Day of Remembrance was marked by a mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, one man stands out from the crowd.
Matt Walsh.
I've already decided that I want this person to deliver the eulogy at my funeral, which I think she'll be more than happy to do, actually.
But we're just getting started.
It says, quote, the Delaware columnist and podcast host has made a name for himself by demonizing medical professionals and pushing conspiracy theories about grooming and pedophilia in the LGBTQ community.
If the Club Q shooter is a lone wolf attacker, we should consider Walsh the unofficial PAC leader.
While the bodies were still warm, the host of the Matt Walsh Show would log on to say, quote, if drag shows are causing this much chaos and violence, why do you insist on continuing to do it?
If, according to you, it's like putting people's lives at risk, if the effort to have men cross-dress in front of children is putting people's lives at risk, why are you still doing it?
It's a crowded field, but the New Republic has crowned Walsh 2022's Transphobe of the Year.
So based on my reading of this, it seems that the Transphobe of the Year competition was a very stiff competition, and it came down to the wire at the end, and I finally pushed ahead of the pack by making the exceedingly obvious and basic observation documented in that paragraph.
Which is that, you know, by the groomer's own account, there has been mass violence and chaos in response to drag performances for children.
Now this account is entirely fictional, but that's beside the point.
The point is that if it's true that exposing children to drag has caused this violent backlash, then it stands to reason that one way to stop the violence would be to simply stop sexually harassing children at drag shows.
So if you really think that inviting children to your drag show will put your life at risk, and yet you still do it anyway, That only goes to show how totally dedicated you are to grooming.
You're apparently willing to martyr yourself for the cause.
Which just makes you all the more deranged.
That's the point.
Anyway, back to the article with a little bit about my origin story.
It says, Walsh launched his fetid career in the same manner as many of the worst of the right-wing swamp, conservative talk radio.
Walsh has since gone on to create Johnny the Walrus, an allegorical children's picture book about a boy who pretends to be a walrus.
It reached number one on Amazon's LGBTQ bestsellers list.
And the overall bestsellers list, by the way.
And What Is A Woman, a feature-length documentary on gender ideology.
Since his early years in radio, he's gone from a bog-standard shock jock vibe to a preppy fountain of increasingly weird far-right obsessions.
Media Matters LGBTQ program director Ari Drennan has followed Walsh's studied transformation, in which he's changed his appearance based on his audience.
She said, quote, Watching his early videos, it's really obvious that he wanted to become famous.
Today, Walsh sports a beard and flannels and describes himself as a theocratic fascist on Twitter, where he has 1.2 million followers.
He says the title can be interpreted in two ways, literally or as a joke.
Yes, the people who are clinging desperately onto my coattails, reporting on my every statement like I'm the Pope issuing infallible proclamations to the faithful, attaching themselves to me like barnacles on the side of a ship, and doing it all for clout, are concerned that I'm the one who is trying too hard to be famous.
And in their version of events, okay, in their version of events, I wanted to be famous so much that I grew a beard.
And wore flannels.
Because everybody knows that's the first step to fame and fortune.
They have it pegged, I have to say.
They've got it.
I still remember the day a couple of years ago.
I'll never forget.
I was thumbing through a Bass Pro Shop catalog, dreaming of one day becoming wealthy and renowned, when suddenly my eyes fell on a Carhartt flannel.
And I said to myself, yes, this is it.
This is the ticket.
And the rest is history.
I'm not going to read through too much more of this, but the next paragraph I think is worth some attention.
It says, quote, I am literally a theocratic fascist.
I do indeed believe that my religious beliefs should be forced on people by the government.
And not just the government, but a government headed by me as a dictator, Walsh said in a 2019 video for the Daily Wire, before referencing his recent Twitter tirade against white condiments.
Mayo, cream cheese, ricotta, tartar sauce, ranch dressing, in my theocratic fascist dictatorship, all of those condiments will be confiscated, prohibited.
And anyone who's caught with contraband, like, say, ranch dressing, will face execution and a $50 fine.
Are you in on the joke?
Like I said, this guy is deeply weird.
Now, I fail to see anything weird about wanting to execute people who use ranch dressing.
Ranch dressing tastes like buttermilk mixed with, like, pool water.
Okay, it's disgusting.
What else are we supposed to do with ranch dressing users except kill them?
I'm open to other solutions, but nobody's offering any.
So I've started this conversation.
I started it years ago.
What do we do about people using ranch dressing?
I have one idea.
We could kill them all.
If you have other brainstorms that you want to throw out there, go ahead and do it.
I'm just getting the conversation started is all.
Back to the article one more time, it says, this guy is deeply dangerous as well.
Walsh's most disturbing narratives have centered on children.
In August, after Walsh called for an organized effort against medical facilities that butcher children, Boston Children's Hospital, home to the first pediatric and adolescent transgender health program, received its first bomb threat.
Walsh, undeterred by the real-world effect of his fear-mongering, continued to push the claim that the hospital was mutilating children.
Which I was pushing that claim, by the way, because that's exactly what they were doing.
So that's pushing a claim.
It's not really, well, it's a claim, but it's a claim of what's actually happening.
And so, and it really wasn't a claim at all.
Actually, it was more of a, like, pointing to, see, here's what they're doing and here are videos of them talking about what they're doing.
Anyway, it says, when the hospital received its second bomb threat in early September, Walsh claimed it was a false alarm and a leftist hoax before turning his attention to Vanderbilt University Medical Center's trans health clinic.
Walsh is very much against the idea that people should be free to be who they are, so much so that he's led a stochastic terror campaign against the trans community, which he says he plans on personally taking to the street.
If the Proud Boys are, as some say, modern-day brownshirts, they may have found an unlikely leader in Matt Walsh.
Yes, that's me.
Leader of the Proud Boys.
I'm not sure that I've ever even met a Proud Boy, but I am their leader.
Which comes as news to them, and also to me.
But if you've listened to all of this so far, and you've thought to yourself, well, this isn't fair.
I mean, why are they just calling Matt a transphobe?
He's also a racist.
Don't worry, they make sure to include that accolade at the end.
They say, while he reserves the worst hatred for the trans community, Jason Campbell, a senior researcher at Media Matters, says it's important to point out that Matt Walsh is also a racist.
He's becoming this champion of white rights.
They then make note of my translucent mermaid activism before concluding with this, quote, Walsh is ready to adapt on the fly as various outrages and panics flit from fashionable to played out on the right.
Quote, I don't think this moment of anti-trans hysteria is going to last forever, Drennan said.
I would not be surprised if whatever the next right-wing moral panic is, we see Matt Walsh once again at the forefront, having conveniently forgotten his fixation on trans people.
Perhaps in years to come, he'll find new ways to take home TNR's accolades for scoundrels.
Oh, you can count on that.
I will find many more ways to upset you in 2023.
I guarantee it.
No question about it.
Except that, if I could just clarify one thing.
I am not going to move on from Or forget what you call my anti-trans hysteria, quote-unquote, until, until the trans movement has been totally and completely destroyed.
That much I can promise you.
I want it to be completely laying in ash, in ruin.
That's what I want.
Now, to that end, we did make major inroads last year.
The trans movement was running roughshod over the culture for years with basically no opposition, and that has now changed.
And you, on the left, have noticed that, and you're panicking.
And you're hoping that we'll be just sort of happy with the battles we've won so far, and then we'll just move on to something else.
But your hopes are in vain.
Because we're out to win the entire war.
And we will.
So stay tuned.
Now let's get to our headlines.
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Headline from the New York Times, Damar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills in critical condition after collapsing during an NFL game.
The article says Damar Hamlin, a 24-year-old safety in his second season with the Buffalo Bills, was in critical condition in a hospital after going into cardiac arrest during a Monday night game against the Cincinnati Bengals, according to the Bills.
Team officials said in a statement early Tuesday that Hamlin's heart stopped after he was hit during a play in the first quarter.
His heartbeat was restored by medical personnel on the field before Hamlin was taken to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center.
Adding, that's according to the bills again, adding that Hamlin was undergoing further testing and treatment and had been sedated.
About nine minutes into the game on Monday night, Hamlin tackled Bengals receiver Tee Higgins after a 13-yard catch.
Higgins rammed into Hamlin at full speed, hitting him in the head and chest area.
Hamlin quickly stood up, took two steps, and collapsed backwards, and his body went limp.
Medical personnel administered CPR and attended to him for 10 minutes.
His players from both teams were visibly upset, and then eventually he was taken out on a stretcher and transported to the hospital.
All of this, if you don't watch football often, maybe it still wouldn't surprise you to learn that this is all You know, extremely unusual.
Obviously for someone to have an injury and need to be attended to, that's not unusual.
But to see CPR being administered, I don't think I've ever seen that before in a football game.
And being carted out by an ambulance on the field is... We have seen that on occasion, but that's very rare.
So, the two things together, it's something we've never seen before.
The game was suspended to be rescheduled.
I'm not sure when at this point.
And as of right now, You know, last I heard, Hamlin's vital signs are back to normal, but he's being intubated with a breathing tube.
So, you know, the good news is that he's still alive, and him still being alive right now seemed very much in doubt last night.
I think for people that were watching it when it happened, you were wondering if you just watched someone die on a football field, and right now it seems like Well, I don't want to speculate, but he has survived up to this point, and hopefully his recovery will continue.
Now, of course, immediately after this happened, you started to see the speculation online that this was somehow related to the COVID vaccine.
Was Hamlin suffering some kind of reaction to the COVID vaccine?
Was this a myocarditis situation?
Some people were asking, you know, some people were asking that question.
Was it related to the vaccine?
Other people were getting very angry at the people who were asking the question.
And there was a lot of shouting and recrimination back and forth, and everybody was very mad.
So, just another day on the internet, as far as that goes.
And here's what I'll say about this.
And I have one of those kinds of opinions that is sure to, you know, maybe upset people on both sides.
At least the unreasonable people on both sides.
So, on the one hand, There is no actual evidence that this has anything to do with a vaccine.
We don't even know if the player was vaccinated.
Okay, that's a really important detail here that, as far as I know, is not known.
The player has not announced that, and if he hasn't announced it, then that's his medical right to privacy, and so we just don't know.
There never was, and this is maybe a misconception people have, there never was a vaccine mandate in the NFL for players.
That was something that Aaron Rodgers last year famously tested.
Tested, you know, whether or not there was a mandate and he was able to, unlike in the NBA, for example, where you had a few players that didn't want to get vaccinated and they were held out of games, players that didn't get vaccinated in the NFL, they still were able to play.
So there was never a vaccine mandate, which means that just because a player's in the NFL, we can't assume that they're vaccinated.
It's possible that he wasn't.
And even if he was vaccinated, it also doesn't make sense to just assume that the two things are related.
Just because you have two data points, you have he collapsed on the field and he was vaccinated.
In order to draw a link of causation, you need more information than we currently have.
And besides, the assumption might have a bit more weight if he had just collapsed randomly while running down the field, but that's not what happened.
The fact is that he suffered a blow directly to the chest right before he collapsed.
And it does.
People were saying online, have been saying since it happened, that it looks like a relatively normal sort of tackle that you see.
Looks garden variety.
You know, it looks like a normal thing you see in the NFL all the time, which is true.
But keep in mind that a normal tackle in the NFL can still be a collision roughly equivalent to a car crash.
So normal doesn't really mean anything.
We also know that there is a rare condition.
It's rare, but it's very real, and it's been known about for many years, where somebody in an athletic setting gets hit in the chest at exactly the wrong moment, in exactly the wrong part of their chest, and then it interrupts the heart's rhythm, and it causes cardiac arrest.
That is a real thing.
It's called commodio cortis.
Now, I never heard of that until last night, and the thing is, like, another thing about the internet, obviously, is People are introduced to a concept, and 30 seconds later, they're experts in it?
So, last night, there were a lot of Commodio Cordis experts on Twitter.
I'm not one of them.
I don't know anything about it.
I learned about it last night.
But, it is apparent that this is a thing that exists.
It's been documented.
It does happen.
It's, again, rare, but rare—that's the thing about something that's rare.
It happens.
It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
And you can see the video.
I think we have the video of this.
Let's just put this up.
Not the part where he's collapsing, but you see where he's hitting the chest.
Go ahead and play this.
So he's hitting the chest right there.
And you can see his body kind of fold around the hit.
So that is a... Yeah, well, it's a normal hit in the NFL.
Yeah, it's a normal hit, but that is a full-speed jolt right to the chest.
And that... It's not unreasonable to think that that could really hurt someone, obviously.
Now, On the other hand, you cannot blame people for asking the vaccine question.
Okay?
It is not reasonable to get upset when people are asking about the possibility of a connection here.
You can't blame them because, first of all, it is a potential factor.
That doesn't mean that it's That it's a real factor.
It doesn't mean that it's an actual factor, but it's a potential.
When you look at all the possibilities here, there's a lot of potential.
We don't have a lot of information, so all we have right now is potential.
And that is one of the potential factors.
The potential is there.
And so people are going to wonder about potentials in a situation like this.
Besides, even if you think that the vaccine issue is a total non-factor, The fact is that millions of people are thinking it anyway.
Whether you think they should be thinking it or not, they are.
As soon as this happened, immediately, millions of people are thinking, does this have something to do with the vaccine?
Now, my point is that if millions of people are thinking it, The idea that it's wrong to verbalize what millions of people are thinking and have in their heads already is just absurd.
Why?
Why get upset about that?
You know people are thinking and wondering it, so we're not allowed to talk about the thing that's in our heads anyway?
For what reason?
And by the way, if you're concerned about so-called conspiracy theories and people engaging in what you consider to be Conjecture and all the rest of it, you know, shouting people down when they bring this up is not the way to, you know, address that.
Also, the other thing is we've been lied to, right?
Again and again and again.
We've been lied about the vaccine, about the virus, about everything.
And that makes people suspicious.
It makes people more likely to engage in speculation.
This is the consequence of a lack of trust.
And the lack of trust is the fault of the public health authorities that now chastise the people who are speculating, but it's their fault.
See, I don't blame people for speculating, because what else are they going to do?
Wait for a trusted authority to tell us?
Well, who is that exactly?
Who's the trusted authority at this point?
Where is this mythical person?
They don't exist.
So when you have a lack of trust, you know, we don't trust the public health authorities, so-called, you don't trust the media, and they're the ones that are supposed to be disseminating this information.
And when that happens, all that's left, you just, you just, you just, you have an environment where people are just kind of on their own, imagining scenarios.
It's certainly not ideal, but it's, it's inevitable.
And I don't blame the people who are imagining these scenarios.
I blame the people who have created this catastrophic lack of trust.
So, that's how that all breaks down.
Alright, let's move to this.
Headline from the Daily Wire.
Stand firm in the faith.
Pope Benedict XVI's final message to the faithful.
Now, we missed some major news events over the break, and this is one that I think is worth circling back to.
Pope Benedict, of course, passed away at age 95 on New Year's Eve.
A day after, I believe it was a day after, Barbara Walters died at 93.
So, here's the Daily Wire report.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI told Catholics to stand firm in the faith in his final message to the faithful.
The Vatican published the late Pope's Spiritual Testament shortly after his death on Saturday.
In it, Benedict thanked his family, his friends, and God for the blessings of his life and asked forgiveness from anyone who he had wronged.
He then urged believers to stand strong in the faith, even in the face of philosophical and scientific opposition.
He wrote, quote, If in this late hour of my life I look back at the decades I have been through, first I see how many reasons I have to give thanks.
First and foremost, I thank God himself, the giver of every good gift, who gave me life and guided me through various confusing times, always picking me up whenever I began to slip and always giving me again the light of his face.
In retrospect, I see and understand that even the dark and tiring stretches of this journey were for my salvation and that it was in them that he guided me well.
He went on to thank his parents for providing him with a loving home and role models for his faith.
He also thanked his brother and sister for caring for and guiding him through his life.
He also thanked his friends, colleagues, and former students.
Benedict then instructed Catholics to remain true to the faith in the face of opposition from science and philosophy.
He wrote, quote, Stand firm in the faith.
Do not let yourselves be confused.
It often seems that science, the natural sciences on the one hand, and historical research, especially exegesis of sacred scripture on the other, are able to offer irrefutable results at odds with the Catholic faith.
I've experienced the transformations of the natural sciences since long ago, and I have been able to see how, on the contrary, apparent certainties against the faith have vanished, proving to be not science but philosophical interpretations only apparently pertaining to science.
He also noted that science helps to better define the parameters of faith.
And the whole statement from him, his final words, are certainly worth reading.
Go do that.
You know, as for my own thoughts on Benedict, I would just say that he was, first of all, a great theologian.
And I read a few of his books.
Jesus of Nazareth was my favorite of his.
Actually, it's multiple volumes about the life of Jesus.
And the important thing about Benedict, for my money, is not just that he was orthodox, a defender of orthodoxy, but that he was able to write and speak beautifully and clearly and in a way that people could understand.
There have been a lot of great theologians through the history of the church who have
incredible insight to offer, but you need to already have like a PhD in theology to
understand what they're saying.
That was not the case for Pope Benedict.
As for his acts as Pope, he welcomed back the Latin Mass, oversaw the reemergence of
the most traditional and reverent form of the Mass.
Now it's true that a lot of that is being undone right now by his predecessor, unfortunately, but the key thing is that in making that change, he facilitated a wave of young people and young families coming into the church.
People who were looking for something sacred, something Reverend something mystical and found it in the Catholic Church under Pope Benedict So even if Francis is trying his level best to ruin all of that I don't think he can do undo all of it and even despite his best efforts but The challenge with Benedict the difficulty I have with him is That is that he left he retired He gave the church over to Francis and and yet obviously was not on his deathbed when he left because he lived another decade and
That's the thing that's hard for me to reconcile.
Because I think that Pope Francis' pontiff has been such a... Papacy has been such an absolute disaster.
And you have Benedict who stepped aside and remained relatively silent as Francis executed his reign of confusion and moral insanity that's been ongoing for a decade now.
So that's the part that for me is extremely difficult.
But all in all, You know, a great life, a life of great consequence.
So naturally, of course, that means that leftists on social media and in the corporate media, they were dancing on his grave when he died.
I'm not going to go through and read examples.
You can imagine just posting the most vile and hateful things.
One note I will make about that, though, is that obviously it's not especially surprising that they would react this way to a pope dying, especially that pope.
Because he's known to be conservative, orthodox, and so they hate him reflexively for that.
They don't need to know anything else about him.
And they don't.
But they know that.
They know that he's Catholic, he's a pope, and that he was associated with being conservative, and so that's enough reason to hate him.
But this is a trend now, I think, when most famous people, especially older famous people, die.
Same thing happened with Queen Elizabeth.
More often than not now.
The death of a significant person is met with jeers and mocking and ridicule and jokes.
I think it's partly ideological, right?
It's partially the people that are dancing on the graves, you know, they associate the dead person with an ideology that they abhor, and so that's part of why they're doing it.
But the other part of it is that, I think, it's the fact that the significant person was significant.
It's the significance itself that they hate and loathe and resent.
I really think we're entering an age now, we're in an age actually, where greatness is despised per se.
Like people hate greatness just because it's greatness.
So, you know, you have these people that they'll They'll mourn when some irrelevant 22-year-old rapper gets shot, right?
They'll mourn that.
Some drugged out nobody who created garbage, glorified violence, then died by the violence he glorified.
That will provoke solemn mourning from these people.
But precisely because the guy they're mourning didn't do anything.
He became moderately famous for babbling incoherently in a couple of songs that made it onto their Spotify playlist.
And that's it.
And they'll mourn a guy like that.
Because he didn't commit the sin of achieving anything significant.
But I think if you live a long life, and you achieve significant things, and you do great things, you're going to be hated just for that reason alone.
There's a lot of resentment and jealousy, I think, mixed up in that.
But that's what it comes down to.
Which is why, really, at this point, the greatest honor that we could all hope to achieve is that when we die, our death will be celebrated on Twitter.
Because that means that you did something significant.
Because that's the price you pay, ultimately.
Let's see.
Here's a headline from CBS News.
Scientists say the planet is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction.
Earth's wildlife are running out of places to live.
So this is pretty remarkable.
Not the headline.
The headline is remarkably bogus.
What's remarkable is that 60 Minutes did a report on this supposed Environmental crisis, which is completely fake, by the way.
But one of the key interviews in this report, I think, has people talking and talking for all the reasons that 60 Minutes doesn't want.
But let's watch a little bit of this first.
Finding solutions to the problems was the goal two weeks ago at the UN Biodiversity Conference, where nations agreed to conservation targets.
But at the same meeting, in 2010, those nations agreed to limit the destruction of the Earth by 2020, and not one of those goals was met.
This, despite thousands of studies, including the continuing research of Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich.
You know that there is no political will to do any of the things that you're recommending.
I know there's no political will to do any of the things that I'm concerned with, which is exactly why I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we've had it, that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to.
In the 50 years since Ehrlich's population bomb, humanity's feasting on resources has tripled.
We're already consuming 175% of what the Earth can regenerate.
And consider, half of humanity, about 4 billion, live on less than $10 a day.
They aspire to cars, air conditioning, and a rich diet.
Yes, Paul Ehrlich.
This is a guy who's had an illustrious career of being wrong.
That's been his job for decades, to just be wrong.
And he's been wrong about everything.
He has predicted dozens of Armageddons and been wrong about all of them without fail.
Now, to his credit, slightly, he at least has the gumption to make specific predictions.
And I think that the The environmental doomsayers, the climate change chicken littles, these days they've learned their lesson and they're much more sort of vague and broad and the things that they're saying are ambiguous and kind of they make these amorphous claims that, you know, it's like that no matter what happens with the weather, it automatically validates whatever they just said.
So that's what they do these days.
Always ready to pull their punch.
But he didn't do that.
He was very specific about this is how many people are going to die, this is when they're going to die, and all of that.
He wrote the book The Population Bomb in the 60s, which foretold a future in which hundreds of millions would die from starvation because there are too many people on Earth.
And he said, again, he was specific.
He said this would happen in the 1980s.
But it didn't.
And we're now in the 2020s, and we have 8 billion people on Earth, and his apocalypse still has not come to fruition.
The Federalist has an article about this, reading a little bit from this.
It says, his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, is among the most destructive of the 20th century.
The long screen not only made Ehrlich a celebrity, but gave end-of-day alarmists a patina of scientific legitimacy, popularized alarmism as a political tool, and normalized authoritarian and anti-humanist policies as a cure.
Ehrlich's progeny are other media-favored hysterics by other anti-humanists, such as Al Gore, Greta Thunberg, Skip learning history and science because she also believes we're on the precipice of mass extinction and none of this is to mention the thousands of other little Ehrlich's nudging you to eat insects gluing themselves to roads and Demanding you surrender the most basic conveniences and necessities of modernity The battle to feed all of humanity is over the opening line of the population bomb reads in the 1970s hundreds Oh, sorry, so he predicted the 70s not the 80s when this would happen
In the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now, Ehrlich wrote.
It was likely, he went on, that the oceans would be without life by 1979, and the United States would see its population plummet to 23 million by 1999 due to pesticides.
The death rate will increase until at least 100 to 200 million people per year are starving to death during the next 10 years.
He said, and he was wrong about all that.
The oceans will be without life.
Now there's a bold, again, maybe slightly to his credit, he made bold predictions and he put a date on it.
He said, by this date, this is what will happen.
And he also claimed that there was nothing that could be done to prevent this.
Which means that he can't say now that, oh, well, I was, you know, I was only wrong about that because I made this prediction and then people mobilized and we averted it.
Well, you said it can't be averted.
So now they've carted this guy's carcass out of its crypt so that he can rattle off some more doomsday prophecies.
Which is just amazing.
And as mentioned in the headline, one of the prophecies that he's now making is that we're on the verge of a sixth great extinction event where lots of Species on Earth are going to go extinct.
Michael Schellenberger, on his substack, has more on the specific claims being made by Ehrlich this time.
He says, on CBS 60 Minutes last night, scientists claim that humans are causing a sixth mass extinction, and that we would need the equivalent of five planet Earths for all humans to live at current Western levels.
He continues, to cause a mass extinction, humans would need to be wiping out 75 to 90 percent of all species on Earth.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature, the main scientific body that tracks species, says just 6% of species are critically endangered, 9% are endangered, and 12% are vulnerable to becoming endangered.
Further, the IUCN has estimated that just 0.8% of the little over 100,000 plant, animal, and insect species within its dataset have gone extinct since 1500.
within its data set have gone extinct since 1500.
So that's in the last 500 years, 0.8% have gone extinct.
And when you hear figures like this, you also have to always remember
that like 99% of the species that ever existed on Earth had already gone extinct by the time human civilization
came about.
That's a rate, it continues, that's a rate of fewer than two species lost every year for an annual extinction rate of .001%.
0.001%. So this claim is just total nonsense. You know, not only are we not
bringing about this mass extinction, but human beings are also working to
conserve animal species.
There are animal species that are around today and would not be if not for us.
Now, you know the classic example that I always bring up are pandas, but they're not the only ones.
But that's, it's a good example, no matter how you feel about pandas, it's a good example to bring up here because they would be extinct not because of us, not because of deforestation or whatever, but just because of their own lack of effort, okay?
Pandas, if human beings did not exist at all, pandas would not exist either.
So they are one of the species that we are keeping around through our conservation efforts.
But, as always, with the left, like they, No matter what victories they claim, they can never actually claim the victory.
They can't actually celebrate anything.
So they call themselves progressive, but even if they achieve progress in a certain area, part of the whole game here, part of the gimmick, is to claim that we're constantly in a state where no progress has been made at all.
We're constantly in a crisis, all the time.
And this is the case with, in the environmental arena, this is the case when it comes to race, everything else.
So, we're in a crisis.
They put forward all of these solutions to solve the crisis.
But it's already been decided ahead of time that none of those solutions can actually work because they need the crisis.
That's what they need most of all.
All right, one other thing to mention here is the headline from NBC Washington, Meet Major Tutty, the Washington Commander's new mascot.
So they got rid of the redskins, and then it took them a little while, and they finally settled on the Commanders as the new name.
And now they have finally come up with their new mascot.
Let's look at this guy.
Here's the new mascot that they introduced.
This is Commander, or no, Major Tutty.
There he is.
He's a pig in a military uniform.
You know, there's a...
Okay, that's the new and improved mascot.
You know, there's a barbecue restaurant chain that my dad used to be obsessed with, and I'm not sure if it even exists anymore, but it was called Red Hot and Blue.
It was a regional thing.
I don't know if it still exists.
Anyway, this pig looks like that restaurant's mascot.
This is literally a cartoon pig mascot from a regional barbecue joint.
And that's what they're going with.
And by the way, how is this less offensive than what they had before?
This is a pig in a kind of like vaguely military uniform with a military title.
Somehow he's obtained the rank of major, we don't know how.
I'm not saying I'm offended by it, but it's just like, isn't this more obnoxious and crass than the Indian they had before?
Which is why I will continue to deadname the Washington Redskins.
They will remain the Redskins to me.
I cannot be a party to this.
I cannot be a party to Major Tutty.
This is how it goes, right?
They get rid of something traditional, something with meaning, and they replace it with just the dumbest crap you've ever seen.
They replace it with a dancing pig in a military uniform.
That's the improvement.
That's progress.
Let's get to the comment section.
If you had a Christmas break at all, I really enjoyed mine, I have to say.
We have the pregnancy card to play, which meant that our family, we didn't have to travel for the holidays.
Everyone had to come to us.
And so we got to stay at home, and that made things easier.
And we got about a half inch of snow.
Here in Nashville, it was like negative two degrees for a couple days.
And that wasn't going to stop us from going out and doing some sledding.
And when I say us, I mean us.
Because obviously, I'm not sending my kids out alone.
As always, it's my deep and solemn responsibility as a father.
My kids know this at this point.
I've got to do a safety check on all the sleds.
So I've got to go out.
And this is just, it's one of those things you gotta do as a dad.
And I had to sled down all the hills first, on all the different sleds.
And keep doing periodic safety checks.
Similar to the health checks that I do on Halloween candy.
You have to make sure that they're not poisoned, or whatever.
So, doing plenty of safety checks on that.
Plenty of safety checks on my kids' toys they got for Christmas.
And I know we just talked about before the break that, you know, adults need to grow up and stop playing with toys.
But this was different because I'm a father and I have to make sure my kids are okay.
So, for example, they got these those hoverboard things.
They're not really hoverboards, they're actually just like segways, but without handlebars.
So they got those, and I was driving them around quite a bit all week, continually checking to make sure that everything's okay, making sure that everything's working fine, that it's not going to explode when you step on it.
That's what I had to do.
And ironically, it turned out that the hoverboards were extremely safe for my kids, but not for me, because I sustained probably three or four injuries, serious ones.
From playing on the hoverboards.
Not playing on them, checking them for safety.
Anyway, so for the comment section today, it's been over a week since the last show, and rather than pulling comments from that show, because it's, you know, old news now, I'll pull from one of the pieces of content that we posted to YouTube during the break, and this is the most important one, I think, where I was forced to try vegan milk and cookies.
It was a vegan milk and cookie taste test, and that video is up right now.
Again, very important content, like everything we post on YouTube.
And so here are some comments from that, because why not?
Sean says, after trying the vegan milk and cookies, Matt Walsh suddenly is unable to define what a woman is.
Merry Christmas, everybody.
Der Gepbuck says, Der Gep, Der Gepunkt says, Matt's new film is going to be What is Milk?
Now, I don't need that film, because that's an easy question to answer.
And as I explained in that video, milk is something that is secreted from a mammal.
Okay, that's one of the most... It's not the only thing that can be secreted, but in order to be milk, to begin with, it has to be a mammal secretion.
And I understand that, you know, we might not like to think of it that way, and you don't want to see, when you go to buy the 2% gallon of milk, you know, at the grocery store, you don't want it to say mammal secretion on it, but that's what it is.
And my only point is that When you hear about coconut milk or almond milk or, you know, soy milk or whatever, none of that is actually milk, because by definition it was not secreted from a mammal.
As I explained, that is not a mammal secretion, that is nut juice.
That is juice from a nut.
And so you have nut juice versus mammal secretion.
Two completely different things.
Jorge says, I'm not vegan, but a friend once made vegan cookies and they were top three best tasting chocolate chip cookies I ever ate.
Couldn't tell the difference and extremely chewy.
Well, that just tells me something, Jorge, about all the people who are making you regular chocolate chip cookies up until that moment.
And that is a very sad life that you've lived.
Urduck says, almond milk is actually really good.
I grew up on whole milk only, but got tired of my milk going bad fairly fast.
Now I don't even think about it when I drink it.
You know what?
If you want to claim that you enjoy almond juice, almond nut juice, that's fine, but just don't compare it to this.
Two completely different things.
That's my only point.
Kyle says, why is it so entertaining to watch Matt so miserable?
I don't know, but people seem to enjoy it.
Krista says, I feel like these bits make up for all the times Matt weasels his way out of punishments like interpretive dance and watching anime.
Okay, first of all, I didn't weasel my way out of interpretive dance.
For the millionth time, I actually did it, and there's video evidence of it.
And as far as anime, I've already said, I tried to get out on a technicality, and I believe in the letter of the law and the spirit of the law.
There's the letter and the spirit.
And if I can get out of something, it's not really getting out of it, but if I can, if the, if the letter of the law offers me an escape hatch, I will take it.
Okay?
I believe in this across the board.
I believe in this when you're like paying your taxes.
That's right.
It's like, it's like if, if the law offers you a way to pay less taxes, take advantage of it.
Why shouldn't you?
But I have been informed that my efforts Didn't even live up to the letter of the law, which means that I still have to watch the anime, and I will.
So you can stay tuned for that.
Today is January 3rd, or as I like to call it, the day where most New Year's resolutions come to a screeching halt.
Well, here's one resolution you'll want to keep, and that's subscribing to Daily Wire Plus.
If you didn't take advantage of our 30% off holiday membership sale, we've extended it until today.
This is your very last chance to get 30% off new Daily Wire Plus annual memberships and gift memberships when you go to dailywire.com slash walsh.
In some ways, 2022 was the definition of success for me, as we talked about at the start of the show, my best-selling children's book, Johnny the Walrus, the triumphant reception of my documentary, What Is Woman?, and our rally to end child mutilation, which put leftists on notice everywhere that we are united against destructive gender ideology.
But 2023 is going to be even bigger for Daily Wire Plus.
You'll be seeing kids content that you'll actually want your kids to watch.
The Pendragon Cycle will also get a release later in the year.
And we'll continue to stand up to leftist tyranny.
You're going to want to be a part of all of this and everything else we got coming up.
Today is your last chance to get 30% off annual memberships and gift memberships by using
code HOLIDAY at checkout.
So head to dailywire.com/walsh right now.
And let's get now to our Daily Cancellation.
So one thing we know about our friends over at Reason, which is the libertarian publication,
is that they are very concerned about moral panics.
They want to make sure that nobody is engaging in a moral panic.
It's just that to them, anyone who demonstrates any moral concern over any issue at all is automatically guilty of a moral panic.
It is impossible to make a moral argument of any kind about anything without being charged with a moral panic from people like this.
Unless you're having a moral panic about moral panics, in which case, it's not a moral panic.
So those are the rules.
They don't make any sense, but those are the rules.
And that brings us to an article published by Reason shortly before the New Year, written by Scott Shackford, entitled, The Fight Over Kids at Drag Shows is a Classic Moral Panic.
Shackford writes, quote, Of course Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his administration would contribute to the latest Christmas-themed targeting of drag queens as some existential threat.
The state's Department of Business and Professional Regulation sent a letter Wednesday to the Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation in Orlando, Florida, because their venue was hosting a Drag Queen Christmas, which is a touring stage production crossing the country that's been around for eight years.
The letter warns that the venue that they have reason to believe that this drag show is of a sexual nature, involving the exposure or exhibition of sexual organs, simulated sexual activity, and or the sexualization of children's stories.
Note that this letter doesn't actually say that there is any nudity or simulated sexual activity at this show, only that the department believes that there is.
It probably consulted this Twitter thread by Taylor Hanson, who provides images and clips of the show from its stop in Austin, Texas.
A Drag Queen Christmas is a pretty raunchy show in the way that's familiar to anybody who has watched drag performances.
But the only nudity found in Hansen's clips and images is a pair of absolutely fake boobs being worn by a drag queen.
There's a lot of overtly sexualized behavior and gyrating from people who are not actually naked or having sex.
Ah, so you see.
Shackford is offering important context here.
The male cross-dresser was only flaunting prosthetic breasts in front of small children, not real ones.
And although there was lots of sexualized behavior, as he says, none of the performers were fully naked.
And besides, they were only simulating sex in front of children.
They weren't actually having sex.
Now, how does this make any of it okay?
Well, because Shaqford can compare this thing to some other thing.
And we all know if you can compare one thing to another thing, then the thing must be fine.
This is Internet Debating 101 here.
Okay, he continues.
Essentially, this is a Madonna concert circa her Blonde Ambition World Tour days.
Madonna, of course, is famously beloved by gay men and drag queens in particular for her wild looks and deliberately sexualized persona.
She was threatened with arrest in Toronto back in 1990 for simulating masturbation during her live performance of Like a Virgin, though police eventually backed down.
There was a moral panic then that children exposed to Madonna's antics were being sexualized at a young age.
Funny how some things don't change.
Now...
There are so many egregiously stupid arguments in this piece that I don't want to get hung up on any one of them for too long.
But I do need to take a moment to let this part absorb.
Because this is a classic move of child sexualization apologists, otherwise known as groomers.
They love to point out that kids in earlier decades were exposed to sexual content, too, and, well, look how well they turned out.
Except that the astute observer might note that those kids, in fact, did not turn out well.
Indeed, the people who were having a moral panic about Madonna in the 80s and 90s, claiming that the coarsening of culture, the over-sexualization, the profanity and debauchery would put us on a slippery slope into full-on cultural depravity, they were 100% right.
They didn't even know how right they were.
Even they couldn't imagine that in another 30 years there would be family-friendly drag shows with cross-dressing, half-naked men simulating anal sex in front of toddlers.
So critics three decades ago, they were not engaged in a panic, but rather were issuing a prophetic warning about the state of and direction of the culture.
A warning that the Scott Shackfords of the world have always been quick to blow off because the Scott Shackfords of the world are always wrong about everything.
Back to the article, the wrong man writes, quote, "If I had small children, I probably would not take them to
the show."
But what's clear from Hansen's clip is that several parents did voluntarily
and seemed to know that this was going to happen.
It doesn't appear that there's actual nudity in the show, and the amount of sexualization would put it at maybe an R
rating if it were in a movie.
What we have here is a lot of screaming and politicization about families making entertainment decisions other adults
do not like.
This is flat out a moral panic.
And a few lines later he continues, "But this is not a moral panic," some insist.
"There is a limit to the parents' rights argument, and this all crosses a line.
Parents should not be allowed to take their kids to live drag shows.
To that I say, by looking at the behavior here and the public response to it,
we can see that, just as with Madonna, this is a moral panic."
Well, at least we can all agree that Scott, whatever else you might say about him,
is a tremendous and persuasive writer.
This is a moral panic.
Some people say it's not a moral panic.
To that I say, this is a moral panic.
Truly a compelling composition, I have to say.
He concludes, "Claiming that drag shows are different is a subjective evaluation based
on how a person feels about exposure to drag performances.
It's an attempt to force one group of people's parental choices on the collective.
And the mindless tossing around of the word 'groomer' is just an epithet designed
to shut down opposition on the belief that nobody wants to be accused of supporting child
sexual abuse."
It's a reminder of back during the 1970s through the 1990s when anybody who was not heterosexual was regularly accused of trying to recruit kids.
Moral panics about gay people interacting with children are hardly new.
We have laws about minors and nudity and sexually explicit live performances, and we have parents to make decisions for stuff that falls just on the legal side of that line.
That's how it has been for the longest of times, and drag queens don't change that calculus.
If you don't want your children to see this stuff, don't take them.
Leave everybody else alone.
So once again, we have the historical comparison that only helps to validate the very concerns he's trying to dismiss.
Because he points out that a few decades ago, some people were concerned that the gay agenda was recruiting kids.
Okay, fast forward to our current time, and we see that LGBT identification doubled in the millennial generation, and then doubled again for Gen Z. So all of the evidence strongly suggests that the recruitment efforts were not only real, but incredibly effective and still ongoing.
So what is Shackford's actual argument?
There really isn't anything in this lengthy diatribe that deserves to be dignified with the label of argument, but the closest he gets is when he points out repeatedly that parents make the decision to bring their kids to drag shows.
It's an entertainment choice, as he says.
If you don't want your own kids to be spectators at a drag-themed sex show, then don't bring them.
Leave those other parents alone.
This is what passes for an argument among libertarians.
Simply pointing out that something is a choice is automatic justification of the choice.
A choice is valid because it was chosen, they think.
But that is completely incoherent, of course.
Yes, we all recognize that some parents choose to expose their children to this sort of sexual content.
Yes, that's established.
But the question is not about whether it's a choice, but rather about the nature of the choice.
And in this case, they are making the choice to subject their children to sexual grooming.
That is not a valid choice.
It's not a morally acceptable choice.
It should not be a legally permissible choice.
And when it comes to drag shows, by the way, choice only works as an excuse if we're talking about the choice that adults make to expose themselves to such content.
Okay, so if we're talking about adults at a drag show, then it might be good enough to just say, well, all the people here chose to be here, and this is what they want to see.
Now, even that argument is not decisive, I don't think.
Because just because people choose to do something doesn't make it automatically okay.
There's still a conversation to be had.
But the point is that here we're talking about the choice that adults make to expose another party, another person, a child, to this content.
It is a choice being made for and on behalf of somebody else.
And that someone else cannot legally consent to being involved in this activity.
So this is not actually a question of personal choice at all.
The person at issue, the child, cannot choose.
The child therefore does not choose to be at the drag show.
So the drag show is something that happens to the child.
It's being done to him.
He is brought there against his will.
He's exposed to these images and ideas against his will.
Because again, even if the child says, yeah, I want to go, He is a child, he can't consent.
The question then is whether parents have the right to do whatever they want to their kids.
And whether this right supersedes the child's right to be protected from harm.
And only a moral idiot and a pervert would answer yes to a question like that.
Which explains Scott Shackford's position on the subject.
And that is why he is Today.
First one of the year.
Canceled.
That'll do it for this portion of the show as we move over to the Members Block.
