Ep. 1100 - The Internet Is Very Mad That I Want To Punish Criminals
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the internet is very mad at me because I suggested that criminals should actually be punished for their crimes. We'll dive into this provocative idea today. Also, Mike Pence is the latest former government official to have classified documents in his home. Apparently we all have classified documents in our homes. Which makes the media's narrative about Trump's documents all the more absurd. And an MSNBC host contracts covid and laments that he didn't get his fourth booster to prevent it. DeSantis is deemed racist for coming out against the new African American studies curriculum for public school. In our daily cancellation, we will learn why the word "aloha" is potentially insensitive, bigoted, and physically harmful.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, the internet is very mad at me because I suggested that criminals should actually be punished for their crimes, if you can imagine it.
We will dive into this provocative idea today.
Also, Mike Pence is the latest former government official to have classified documents in his home.
Apparently, we all have classified documents in our homes, which makes the media's narrative about Trump's documents all the more absurd.
And an MSNBC host contracts COVID and laments that he didn't get his fourth booster shot to prevent it.
DeSantis is deemed racist for coming out against the new African American Studies curriculum for public schools.
In our daily cancellation, we will learn why the word aloha is potentially insensitive, bigoted, and even physically harmful.
All of that and more today on The Matt Wall Show.
[MUSIC]
We begin with some breaking news.
This is not the sort of thing you expect to hear.
You may find it shocking and certainly upsetting.
I know I did.
But here's the news.
People are mad at me on the internet.
They are upset.
They're scandalized.
They're calling me things like fascist and bigot.
This is all, of course, making me feel quite bad about myself as someone who is so accustomed to receiving unanimous acclaim and adulation and agreement all the time everywhere I go.
So I don't know how to deal with this.
Let's back up for a moment so you can understand the context.
A few days ago, a leftist Twitter user, and I inferred his political leanings from the pride flag in his bio, posted a video expressing his awe over the airport in Singapore.
This is Singapore's airport, and as you can see, it's a rather impressive sight.
It looks like the futuristic Utopia in every sci-fi movie, right before the robots start killing everyone.
And I mean that in a good way.
The waterfall there is particularly magnificent.
Though in fairness, I have seen similar sights at like LAX.
It's just that those waterfalls were overflowing toilets.
Our airports in America are generally a different kind of experience from what you just saw there.
Airports in the United States, they qualify as really nice if they have like a food court with a Chipotle and more than three electrical outlets in each terminal.
So the bar is set a bit lower.
Admiring Singapore, though, has become something of a trend online.
Every so often, somebody, usually somebody on the left, will post a video, like the one you just saw, or like this one, extolling Singapore, the city, for its clean, green, eco-friendly approach.
Watch.
This place creates gardens and parks in the middle of its buildings.
That's because in parts of Singapore, you're required to replace the land that you're building on with this same amount of greenery.
So the greenery that is lost on the ground is replaced in the sky.
Each building must have greenery that's equivalent to at least 100% of the land that it was built on.
But some take it to the next level.
This building has over 200% greenery for the land that it replaced.
This is Park Royal, and it's absolutely crazy how they managed to include greenery throughout the building.
You can even go on a garden walk here.
But all of this is not just done for a more beautiful look.
There is a functional reason as well.
See, buildings with more greenery end up using less electricity, produce less waste, and in general, have a lower carbon footprint.
You also improve the air quality and keep the temperatures cooler.
This rooftop is over 50 stories high and it's pretty much entirely a garden.
And the crazy part is that it's completely open to the public.
This is a public area.
Now, your mileage may vary a bit with the Jumanji aesthetic, where forests are growing inside and on top of all the buildings.
The real point is that the city looks bright and clean and safe and not at all like a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested hellscape, which sets it apart from our cities, which in so many cases look like some sort of horrifying mashup of The Walking Dead and The Wire.
Like this, for example, what you see here is Philadelphia.
But it could be a random street in nearly any major American city.
There's a reason we don't have, you know, very many carefully manicured public parks located on the tops of our buildings.
Because if we did, there'd be almost immediately, you know, a drug addict passed out on every bench and a homeless guy taking a dump in every bush.
The people who look with envious, lustful eyes at Singapore's cleanliness and general lack of fentanyl zombies and random street thugs assaulting pedestrians have every reason to be so covetous when you consider what our cities look like.
But there's also a reason why Singapore looks like Singapore and Philadelphia looks like Philadelphia.
There are many reasons, actually, and not all of them can or should be emulated.
But in the tweet that got me into trouble, I mentioned one major factor that, to my mind, we should adopt.
I tweeted this.
Singapore is able to have nice things in part because they execute drug dealers by hanging and they arrest even petty vandals and thieves and beat them with a cane until they bleed.
We don't have nice things because we aren't willing to do what is required to maintain them.
Now that tweet has been viewed like 14 million times and 13.9 million of those views apparently came from people who were deeply offended by it, on the right and left.
But offended as they may be, the fact is that Singapore isn't plagued by property crime and violent crime nearly to the extent that our country is.
In fact, their crime rates are among the lowest in the world because, in part, in large part, they harshly punish lawbreakers.
As mentioned in the tweet, thieves, robbers, vandals, similar malcontents are subject to judicial caning.
Drug offenders can be given the same treatment and it's meted out to more serious criminals like rapists and people convicted of kidnapping.
Often the corporal punishment will be paired with a prison sentence which, depending on the crime, can be quite lengthy.
We've heard a little bit actually about this punishment in Singapore and the methods that are used from Westerners who have made the mistake of committing the crimes in Singapore that everyone knows you aren't supposed to commit in Singapore.
For instance, a couple of years ago, the British media reported with great alarm about the story of a British national who got caught dealing drugs in Singapore.
Which again, everybody, even people who don't live in Singapore knows that Singapore is the last place where you go to deal drugs.
That's what he did and he received 20 years in prison to go along with a caning that was so severe that he couldn't sit down afterwards.
He had trouble controlling his bowels because of how badly he was beaten.
He reported that the fear that he felt in having to wait in line while listening to the screams of other inmates as they received their punishments.
He's in one room waiting, this is the way he described it, and they bring people in one by one, and they beat them with the cane, and you can hear them screaming in agony, and then they open the door and it's your turn.
Not a pleasant experience.
Not one that I would ever want to experience myself.
But he got off easy compared to other drug offenders, because if, in Singapore, you're caught with drugs over a certain amount, and it doesn't have to be all that much, 15 grams of heroin, 30 grams of cocaine, for example, you are automatically charged with trafficking, drug trafficking.
It's automatically assumed that you have that because you want to traffic drugs.
And in Singapore, they simply do not tolerate drug trafficking at all.
So if you're convicted of drug trafficking, you are automatically executed.
It is a mandatory sentence.
And they will dole out this most severe of punishments for, you know, a number of crimes, not just drug trafficking.
Of course, murder, terrorism, kidnapping can also warrant that, and other serious crimes as well.
And the executions are carried out usually swiftly.
Death row inmates are given four days notice, not four decades, four days notice, before they're taken out, usually at dawn, and they are dispatched by hanging.
Now, it's often said that studies prove that death penalty and other harsh punishments are not effective deterrents.
That's what we hear all the time in this country.
Oh, it doesn't, studies have proven, studies have proven it doesn't deter anything.
Well, seems to be working pretty well in Singapore, which in Singapore, they can make it through entire days.
Okay, in fact, dozens of days in a year without any reported crimes at all.
As a CNBC report marveled over a few years ago, Singapore is so safe that many stores don't have locks.
They don't lock their doors at night, and sometimes they don't even have doors or locks to begin with.
If capital punishment lacks a deterrent element in our country, it's obviously because we hardly ever use it.
It's not capital punishment itself that doesn't deter crime, it is the way that we go about it.
That lessens its deterrence factor.
There have only been something like 1,500 total executions in our entire country since the mid-1970s.
And that number is decreasing all the time.
It's like a small handful of people across the entire country are executed in any given year.
And on the extremely rare occasion that anybody is executed, it happens decades after the crime they committed, out of sight, out of mind for the public, and after hundreds of appeals.
What this means is that criminals, they aren't deterred by it because they know they almost certainly won't receive that penalty.
They know it won't happen to them, no matter what they do.
It's not that they aren't scared of the death penalty itself.
Obviously, anybody would be scared of that.
It's that they don't believe the court system will have the gumption to actually impose it on them.
And in nearly every case, they're right.
Now, when the death penalty or other harsh penalties are immediate and all but certain, It does have, unsurprisingly, a way of dissuading potential criminals.
As it turns out, people do respond to incentives and disincentives.
This is one of the basic realities of human psychology, is that every single person on the planet responds to incentives and disincentives.
And the prospect of dangling at the end of a rope until you die is a rather powerful disincentive.
It's not going to be 100% effective.
Okay, there are people who will risk it, but most people won't.
For the pettier criminals, the idea of being stripped naked and beaten so hard with a cane that the guy doing the beating has to take breaks to let his arm rest throughout your ordeal is also a rather powerful disincentive.
Now, our system of dealing with thieves and vandals and those of that ilk is laughably ineffective because in these cases, too, the criminals aren't convinced that there will be any significant penalty.
And if they do wind up with a short stint in prison, the experience is likely to only increase their street cred and give them an opportunity to spend time with and be influenced by criminals even worse than themselves.
But an added element of extremely painful corporal punishment creates a profound disincentive so that even those unbothered by prison would be bothered by this.
Caning is also, and it is meant to be, humiliating, degrading, emasculating, which means that the experience isn't going to enhance anybody's street cred.
Okay, you're not going to get out of prison bragging about getting caned.
Put another way, it's not the kind of thing that you can imagine a rapper, you know, boasting about in a song.
And that's precisely why it's an effective form of punishment.
In fact, maybe this is the easiest way to think about this.
When you're thinking about what sort of penalties should we have for criminals, think about it.
If it's the kind of penalty you can imagine a rapper bragging about in a song that becomes a big hit and is streamed 100 million times on Spotify, if it's that kind of penalty, then it's not a good penalty.
Let's imagine penalties that they would be too embarrassed and too ashamed to brag about.
Those are the good penalties.
Those are the effective ones.
Now, am I actually suggesting that we should adopt these Singapore-like, draconian forms of justice here in the United States?
Am I seriously advocating that?
Yes, absolutely.
Of course I am.
Corporal punishment for convicted criminals, that shouldn't even be controversial.
Okay, that's actually obviously the correct thing to do.
Both obvious and effective.
And just.
Those who cause damage to another person's body or livelihood or property should be made to experience the sort of physical suffering that might help them appreciate the seriousness of their crimes.
Our current system is not impressing anyone with the seriousness of their crimes.
That's what the punishment is supposed to do.
We have it in our heads that, well, all forms of physical punishment are automatically cruel and unusual.
I've heard this over and over again in response to this argument.
It's cruel and unusual punishment!
As if it's just self-evident.
You can't simply assert that it's cruel and unusual to impose the death penalty or corporal punishment.
Explain why.
You could call it cruel and unusual.
In what sense is it either of those things?
I mean, these punishments certainly aren't unusual.
On the contrary, they are probably the most usual sort of punishment imaginable from a historical perspective.
And they aren't cruel because the person that they are inflicted on has chosen to act in a way that warrants it.
It is not cruel to assign undesirable consequences to undesirable behavior.
It is, on the contrary, the only way to maintain a civilized society.
Criminals and lawbreakers must be made to suffer.
If they aren't suffering, then it is not really a punishment.
That's what a punishment is supposed to do.
It's supposed to make you suffer.
And so, if we have a system where the criminals are not suffering, then they're not being punished.
And we are trying a system where we just actually don't punish people for committing crimes.
Now, as for the death penalty for drug traffickers, this again, to me, seems obvious.
They sell poison for profit, taking advantage of the most helpless and miserable among us, turning people and entire communities into zombified husks, slowly dying while these parasitic scumbags reap the rewards.
They deserve to die for what they're doing to people, to our cities, to our country.
They deserve to die for it.
Fentanyl traffickers, okay, the people that are, those zombies that you saw in the clip of Philadelphia that are walking around hunched over, the people trafficking those drugs into our communities, they deserve to die.
I can't understand the argument to the contrary.
You're actually telling me they don't deserve to die for doing that to people?
Do we need to keep them around?
In what ways would we be harmed as a society if the people that are doing that, if we are deprived of their presence?
How are we harmed?
How are we missing out?
No, our nation would be a better, more hopeful, safer, and more livable place without them.
Now, I'm not arguing that our country should emulate Singapore in every respect.
There are certainly things about the country I don't like.
And I'm not claiming that beating criminals and hanging drug traffickers would on its own solve all of our problems.
I acknowledge that Singapore has other advantages.
They have a smaller, much more homogenous population, for one.
And that helps it to build and maintain communities that aren't littered with used heroin needles and reeking constantly of weed and human urine, like our cities.
But even so, there is a lesson we can learn here.
The lesson is that civilization comes at a cost.
If we have decided that nobody should have to pay that price, well then, we will no longer have civilization.
We live free and comfortable and gentle lives, and so we imagine that everything is and should be comfortable and gentle all the way down.
What we don't realize is that this freedom and comfort and gentleness has been maintained by tough men who are willing to do hard and sometimes ugly things.
If we insist now that those things must not be done anymore because they interfere with our comfortable illusions, then pretty soon we will no longer have the comfort or the freedom.
We are surrendering our society to its worst and most predatory factions because we're too squeamish to stand up to them, to impose our will over them, and to force them to live like civilized human beings, which is what you're supposed to do with criminals.
You stand up to them, you impose your will on them, you force them to behave.
You don't give them an option.
It's not putting them in jail for... Let's hope they reform.
Let's hope they see the error in their ways and that they choose of their own free will to be better people.
No, we don't sit around waiting for that while, you know, our children are getting murdered in the street.
We don't sit around waiting for it.
We say, we're not giving you an option.
And if your crimes are bad enough, we're not going to worry about reforming you because you're done.
There's no second strike.
In other words, these days we wish to have a civilization without justice.
Because justice is too harsh a thing for us to stomach.
We say no to justice, which means we say no to civilization, which means that rather than forcing the lawless dregs of humanity to pay the price, we all have to pay it instead.
Now let's get to our headlines.
Some of you have noticed that episode 1097 of this show, where I discuss the gender surgeons who want to implant uteruses in men, is now missing from our YouTube channel.
And that's because, as we found out last night, YouTube deleted the episode, having decided that comments I made during that discussion were in violation of their hate speech policies.
And I'd say to begin with, in a sense, They're right.
I do hate what is being done by these Frankenstein surgeons and these New Age Nazi scientists who are conducting horrifying human experiments.
I hate what they're doing to people.
That's for sure.
I absolutely hate it.
We all should.
It was a speech expressing hatred of those practices, which, of course, I also don't even remotely come close to apologizing for, needless to say.
But YouTube took it down, which means that if you want to watch the full episode and hear all of my hateful thoughts, then you need to go to DailyWire.com, and it's all still there in its hateful glory.
All right.
Fox has this report.
Former Vice President Mike Pence informed Congress on Tuesday that he discovered documents bearing classified markings from his time as Vice President in his home in Indiana on January 16th.
Following the revelations, the classified documents from President Joe Biden's tenure as Vice President were found at the Penn-Biden Center, Think Tank, and Wilmington, Delaware, Pence, and also Wilmington, Delaware.
Pence's team conducted searches of Pence's Indiana home and the office of his political advocacy group, Advancing
American Freedom.
According to his team, Pence informed the National Archives on January 18th that a small number of potential classified
documents were found in two small boxes.
Another two boxes contained copies of vice presidential papers.
The National Archives then informed the FBI per standard procedure.
All right, so, I mean, at this point, like, I feel like I need to go home and make sure that I don't have classified
documents.
I guess we all have them.
And if I do have them, I would immediately return them.
Unless Putin offers a high price for them, obviously, and that would change things.
This does just go to show, I mean at this point it's a farce now.
It's like everybody has them.
I'm quite certain that if they were to do a check of Obama's residence, which they would never do, they'd find plenty of classified documents as well.
Apparently this is something that people do.
I didn't know that, but evidently it's what happens.
And it goes to show Of course, that the Trump classified document story was always ridiculous.
Not because it wasn't true.
This thing we have to remember about the fake news media is that, yeah, sometimes they invent stories out of whole cloth, and they've certainly done that with Trump.
And sometimes that's what they do, but usually that's not how the fake news works.
Usually the fake news, it's in the details they're ignoring.
It's like what they're saying might be sort of accurate, but it's meant to give a misleading impression because of the details they leave out, or because of the things that they choose to emphasize.
Or because they take a story and try to blow it up and make it a huge deal, while other stories they ignore.
That's slightly more subtle in how the fake news operates.
In this case, was it true that Trump had classified documents in his home?
Yeah, that seems to be true.
What's not true is that it's some sort of earth-shattering, enormous deal that we all need to be really worried about and that it indicates that Trump was up to something deeply nefarious and that he was trying to sell the documents to Putin or whatever.
That's the part that was obviously, from the beginning, absurd.
And there's no excuse to be misled on this sort of thing anymore.
Your BS detector should be refined enough to pick up on this stuff.
As I said, I had no idea that, I'm not terribly shocked by it, but I didn't know that this is something that presidents and vice presidents apparently do where they end up with classified documents.
I didn't know that until this thing happened with Trump.
But as soon as I found out about it, even though I just found out about it, it still was apparent to me that, well, this doesn't seem like a big deal.
The only way that this is a big deal is if he did have some sort of intention to sell the classified information on the black market.
That's what would make it a huge deal.
But he just wasn't going to do that.
That's not what this was.
Because we live in reality, not a movie.
This is not Jack Ryan or something.
This is reality.
And now that's all become, I think, hopefully obvious to everyone.
And the left, they can't deny it either, because now they know.
Now it's happened with Biden.
And they also know that if they were to dig deeper, which they're not going to do, that they're going to find classified documents in everybody's home.
Everyone in D.C., apparently, they just, they take a, it's like a parting gift.
I don't know, when you leave, you take, they give you a little goodie bag.
They give you some classified documents you can bring home with you, keepsakes.
Something to reminisce with, I suppose.
Alright, Joe Scarborough on MSNBC contracted COVID, and when he came back to work, this was yesterday, he expressed regret that he hadn't gotten his fourth booster shot to prevent the COVID infection.
He was disappointed in himself that he didn't get his fourth shot, and that's why he ended up getting COVID.
Because the first three didn't do it.
The first three didn't do it, and what does that mean?
It means you keep getting more of them.
Which is pretty funny, and people were laughing about it, which prompted Joe Scarborough, when he came back, to respond to their mockery of him.
And his response is also funny.
Let's watch that.
You know, yesterday when I was talking about getting COVID and should have gotten a fourth booster shot, a lot of these freaks go, oh, fourth booster shot, robot.
No, listen, here's the deal, moron.
If you get a flu shot, What do you do?
Do you go to the doctor and go, oh my god, you want me to have a 50th flu shot?
No.
You get a flu shot every year.
Right.
And as we're finding out with this pandemic, well, it lasts six months, maybe a year.
So yes.
Yes.
Put on your big boy pants.
Put on your big girl pants.
And if you want to be healthy, I don't care if you don't.
That's your business.
Smoke cigarettes.
Do whatever you want to do.
Stay up all night.
Don't sleep.
That's fine.
Be unhealthy.
Your choice.
My concern here though, and let me bring in Reverend Sharpton because we've talked about this.
My concern, Rev, is that there's a disinformation out there where people are saying, oh, well, it doesn't work because you've got to keep getting booster shots.
The thing is you're always trying to build up your immunity.
And people are still dying from COVID.
Is it a crisis right now?
Well, for the people who are dying of COVID, yeah, it's a crisis.
Is it as bad as it's been?
No.
But, as a doctor explained to me when I didn't want to get flu shots, you're not just doing it for yourself, Joe.
I want to cut this off before the Reverend Al Sharpton shows up.
Why are we bringing Al Sharpton in to talk about, he's a medical expert now, about vaccines.
Which they basically dropped that.
I mean, there's a few things here.
To begin with, he says everyone gets a flu shot every year.
Do they?
I don't.
I've never gotten a flu shot in my life.
I've never gotten a flu, you know what?
I've never gotten a flu shot because I've never gotten a flu shot in my life.
Have I ever gotten the flu?
Yeah.
I mean, I've never gotten the flu shot and I've had the flu, I don't know, maybe twice in 36 years.
And one of the times it was pretty bad, I was pretty sick for about three or four days.
So I've never gotten a flu shot, and I've gotten the flu twice.
Well, they also fully admit that even if you get the flu shot, you can still get the flu.
So what would my batting average be if I had been getting a flu shot every single year?
I mean, they would admit that even if you get the flu shot every year for 36 years, you'll probably still get the flu a couple times.
Well, I don't get it, and I get the flu a couple times.
So why am I gonna get the shot?
But also, this is the game that they're playing now.
Where now we hear from people like Joe Scarborough.
Oh, the shot lasts six months to a year.
It's just like the flu shot.
You get it every six months.
Which, even that, does anyone get the flu shot every six months?
There's a difference there, too.
It's a difference of, like, double the number of shots.
I think most people, if they get the flu shot on a regular basis, they get it every year.
So now they're saying, yeah, you just get it every six months.
What's the big deal?
Part of the big deal here, which you hope that we forget, is that that's not what you said at first.
That's not how this was sold.
That's not how the shot was sold.
And when I say sold, it was not really sold, it was more like forcing it into people's arms.
Which is the other part of this, because he also says, well, it's your choice if you want to live an unhealthy life.
That's not what you were saying two years ago.
No, that's what we were saying two years ago.
That's what those of us who don't believe in, you know, forcing chemicals in people's bodies if they don't want it, that's what we were saying.
We were saying, however you feel about the vaccine, it should be your choice.
So if you're a pro-vaccine person and you think that it's really unhealthy to not get the vaccine, you're allowed to think that.
So your answer should be, well, if you want to live an unhealthy life, then that's your choice.
Now they've adopted that attitude.
Do what you want, it's your choice.
That's not what they were saying before.
And they certainly were not saying, yeah, this will be just like the flu shot, or actually even less effective than the flu shot, because this one you have to get every six months for your entire life.
So if you live 60 more years, you're going to get the COVID, quote unquote, vaccine 120 times.
That is not what they were saying.
That's what they're saying now, and hoping we don't remember what they actually said.
I want you to hear this exchange between a reporter and a Karen Jean pair.
And this is a wonderful clip because between the two of them, they may be setting the record for, I don't know, lowest collective IQ.
But let's listen to this together.
We have spoke like between me and some friends that in this country and this I'm making this point because because we need to remind people that America is the only country on earth that people Die by gun without even being in war because I'm giving this example because in Africa there's countries in war but people doesn't even have access to gun.
It's very hard because the government and everybody is very conscious that the guns can cause a lot of destruction.
But in this country it's very normal for everybody to have access to gun and this needs to be controlled.
But what can people like me, common people, can also, what can we do to help control gun?
All right, let's pause it there for a second.
Pause it one second before we get to Karen.
I want to hear her answer, because she's a very eloquent and articulate person.
She always has insightful things to say, so I really want to give her a chance to answer that.
Here's what her answer should be to what you just heard her answer should be that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of my life How did you get in this building?
What are you doing here?
What she actually claims the reporter there is not from this country Claims that America is the only country in the world where people die by gun violence That is not when it's not in the context of a war it's just simply Not close to true.
It's especially not true in Africa.
But it's not true anywhere on God's green earth.
Is that what Karen G. Perry will say?
Well, we'll find out.
Well, look, what I can speak to, there are many ways that people can get involved in dealing with the gun violence that we're seeing here.
I'm not going to make any suggestions, but there are ways that folks can go out there and participate.
In a way that's healthy, in a way that actually helps deal with a real issue.
What I can speak to is what the president has done.
What I can speak to is what the president believes.
What I can speak to is the president's record on this, which is you can see for yourself as a senator, this last two years as president and the executive actions that he's taken.
He signed a bipartisan piece of legislation, as I just mentioned moments ago.
Great.
She's great.
She's great because she's so terrible at this.
And I don't blame her for the fact that she can't answer any of the questions.
She just has to obfuscate all the time.
I don't blame her for that.
That's what White House press secretaries do.
That is their job.
Their job is to never answer a question.
But there's a skill there.
There's actually a talent.
There's a talent involved in being a really good BS artist and being asked a question and giving something that sounds like an answer but isn't.
She does not have that skill.
It's so obvious when she's... We can't even say she's dancing around.
This is not dancing.
Because dancing gives the impression of someone who's artful and graceful, which she is not.
So she has no answer to that.
Well, what I can speak to is...
What the President has said, what I can speak to is his record.
What I can speak to is the President.
She keeps listing what she can speak to and then she doesn't speak to it.
She doesn't say anything about it.
So, that's good stuff.
In fairness, it was a really, really dumb question.
Dumb question, not only because the person claimed that gun violence only happens in the United States, and dumb not only because the person making that claim is from Africa, where there is certainly plenty of violence of all kinds, but also dumb because it all led to the question of what can we do individually in our communities to stop gun violence?
There's one thing you could do.
One thing we could all do is...
Maybe that part of the question isn't so dumb.
Because actually there is something that we can do in our communities.
There are two things actually.
If you don't want crimes with guns to be committed, one thing is don't commit those crimes yourself.
So the more people who commit to that, the less crime there will be.
And then the second thing is to have the ability to defend yourself and to refuse to be a victim.
That's the second thing you can do.
But of course she's not going to say that.
All right, I don't know why we're gonna spend any time on this at all, but Variety has this report.
Everything Everywhere All at Once, a twisty sci-fi adventure, led the nominations for the 95th Academy Awards on Tuesday morning, picking up 11 nods.
It was followed closely by All Quiet on the Western Front, a World War I epic, and The Banshees of Ynyshirin, I think, a darkly comic look at friendship that unfolds against the backdrop of the Irish Civil War, both of which scored nine.
Nominations.
All three films will vie for Best Picture in what is shaping up to be a much more commercially successful collection of honorees than recent years.
The Best Picture race contains the two highest grossing films of the year, Avatar The Way of Water and Top Gun Maverick, along with Elvis, a musical biopic that scored with audiences last summer.
Other contenders include Steven Spielberg's The Fableman's Tar, a drama about an abusive conductor Women Talking, a look at the residents of a repressive religious community, and Triangle of Sadness, a send-up of the 1% that unfolds partly on a megayacht.
So they opened up the Best Picture nominations a few years ago, so that now they're nominating... I think they doubled the number of films that can be nominated.
And this is what you end up with.
You end up with some of these blockbuster films that were not good.
I mean, Avatar.
It was very good at earning a lot of money.
Although it's arguable how good it was at that, considering it had hundreds of millions behind it in marketing.
So, really, it had to make over a billion dollars or it would have been a loss.
So, on one hand, you have these films that, like, they're only there because they made a lot of money.
And then you have films that no one has ever heard of or seen.
And there's nothing in between.
Films that were, like, legitimately successful and, you know, people actually saw and have heard of.
But also, we're good films.
That isn't very represented here.
What I can tell you, though, just to give the official answer on this, the best movies of the year, without a doubt, and there's no dispute, there's no debate on this, best movies of the year, All Quiet on the Western Front, that was one of the best movies, and that did get some nominations.
And then The Northman was the other best movie of the year.
But the Northmen wasn't nominated for anything, and All Quiet on the Western Front will almost certainly not win anything.
And the reason on both counts is because those films are basically all white.
Not just white, it's like the worst of all worlds for Hollywood.
These are films about white people, and even white people acting heroically, and then also almost entirely men in both films.
So we can't allow that.
They're both among the whitest and most masculine movies we've seen in a while.
So, no hope of actually winning anything.
All right.
The Daily Wire has this report.
The College Board announced on Tuesday that the curriculum for AP African American Studies would be publicly released on February 1st, citing the start of Black History Month.
The curriculum has garnered backlash among conservatives following reports that the program, which is currently undergoing pilots at five dozen high schools across the nation, is centered upon Leftist activism rather than study of black history.
The Florida Department of Education recently informed the College Board that the course's content is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value, adding that the state would reconsider the course should the organization make the material lawful and historically accurate.
The College Board referenced the beginning of Black History Month in a statement provided to the Daily Wire, announcing the course's structure's public release, saying, quote, this framework under development since March 2022 replaces the preliminary pilot course framework under discussion to date.
We're grateful for the.
OK, who cares about that?
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who signed legislation last year preventing the state government schools from teaching discrimination on the basis of race, color, or sex, has emerged as a leading skeptic of the new AP African American Studies course.
He noted that it submits policies such as prison abolition for student consideration, even though such suggestions are primarily supported by left-wing activists.
Here he is, by the way, we have a clip of Ron DeSantis talking about this new This course on Black History, what's one of the lessons about?
AP course and the problems with it and here it is.
This course on black history. What are one of what's one of the lessons about queer theory now who would say that an
important part of black history is queer theory.
That is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids.
And so when you look to see they have stuff about intersectionality, abolishing prisons, that's a political agenda.
And so we're on, that's the wrong side of the line for Florida standards.
We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think.
But we don't believe they should have an agenda imposed on them.
When you try to use black history to shoehorn in queer theory, you are clearly trying to use that for political purposes.
Yeah, of course.
He's absolutely right, obviously.
And there's just no chance that in the modern age, in the government school system, they can have any course related to something like African American Studies that will not be highly political, ideologically charged, and yeah, include things like queer theory.
Because that is going to be shoehorned into anything, anything where the left is involved.
It's always going to come down to LGBT indoctrination.
It's always a forum for that.
I mean, look at BLM before they changed their website, originally on their website, when they listed what their mission statement is, all over their mission statement.
It's about trans rights, LGBT this, LGBT that.
What does that have to do with Black Lives Matter?
Most because that's a cover for just a far-left agenda, as he accurately points out.
Though, I'll also say that I'm not in favor of, you know, you hear some conservatives say, well, we've got to reform, we need to reform this program, we need to take a look at it, we need to audit it and figure out a way to...
No, we don't need this at all.
Okay, this is not an appropriate or relevant thing.
Any kind of African American history or studies, that should not be a course that is offered or presented in grade school, in public schools.
It shouldn't be there at all.
And why is that?
Because what we should be teaching kids is American history.
The courses should be focused on American history, not breaking history down by racial groups.
The moment you start to do that, it is, again, going to automatically become political and ideological.
But it's also not appropriate for a public school environment.
Teach the kids American history.
And that will Include the story of everyone who has been an American.
All right, let's get to the comment section.
Bob Pierce says, the reporters tried to contact the 17-year-old girl at her workplace.
That part should not be overlooked.
It's a sweet baby gang.
Bob Pierce says the reporters tried to contact the 17-year-old girl at her workplace.
That part should not be overlooked.
They're trying to get her fired.
Yeah, they're trying to do a lot more than that.
The 17-year-old girl who stood up to the male who entered the locker room at the YMCA and disrobed, exposed himself to her.
And the media, not just calling it a workplace, but they're trying to publicly shame her for the crime of not wanting to be exposed to male genitalia in the locker room.
It's really sinister stuff.
Luke says, the moment Matt said, pass down the fat genes, I had to brace myself for the inevitable pun.
The more children he has, the stronger his dad jokes become.
I couldn't look.
During that segment on obesity, there were many opportunities for fat puns.
And I think that I showed incredible restraint because I only I'd say there were about five or six opportunities.
I only took maybe two of them.
And I was impressed with myself.
I was very proud of myself after that, that I didn't grab every single pun.
That one was just too, that one you have to go with.
Aiden says, can't believe Matt didn't laugh at the obesity expert being named Fatima.
That's exactly my point.
I wanted to, I wanted to make a comment about that, but I didn't.
Meow, meow, meow says, Walsh's ignorance of actual science on psychiatry and psychology is shocking.
And yes, he is also right that such a claim can also be applied to many who challenge him.
This is just sad all around.
P.S.
He's 95% correct on obesity.
Well, meow, meow, meow, far be it from me to, you know, challenge you at all on this, but just simply stating Well, what Matt said about this is wrong.
That's not an argument, that's an assertion.
What did I say about psychiatry and psychology that not only is wrong, but you say is shocking?
Especially in the context of the show yesterday, where I didn't say much specifically about it.
Other than to, you know, make the broad but correct criticism that what the psychiatric industry has been doing for the last several decades, part of the effect of what they've been doing, is to categorize and catalog every aspect of the human condition, every emotion and behavior, and turn it into a disease-ify it.
Disease-ifying the human condition.
And I base that not on just my assumption or some vague feeling, but you can read what they have in the DSM.
In fact, you can look at the fact that they've had five revisions to the DSM, and every single time they add more things to it, which should already make you skeptical, that every time they keep adding to it, are they really discovering?
Is that really what's happening?
Every year you discover new mental illnesses that nobody knew about before?
Oh, but maybe I'm not being completely fair.
They don't just add to the DSM, right?
Sometimes they take things out.
But they take things out in response to political pressure.
And when they take things out, they very rarely can give any kind of scientific reason why they took it out.
They just took it out because people were upset.
The classic example, of course, is when they took homosexuality, which originally the psychiatric industry, the psychiatrists said was a mental illness.
It was in the DSM.
They took it out, and they took it out because there was a lot of pressure from gay activists saying that they were deeply disturbed and offended that it was in there.
They've also made changes to the way that gender dysphoria is categorized and certainly how it's treated in response to
political pressure.
This is not ignorance, this is just exactly what they've done. I'm sorry to say.
This month we're celebrating the anniversary of one of the greatest moments in Daily Wire history.
After months of us leading the legal battle against the federal government in a national Do Not Comply campaign, the Supreme Court ruled in our favor and blocked the Biden administration's outrageous vaccine mandate.
This mandate would have set a dangerous precedent, giving the unelected OSHA power over the personal medical decisions of American citizens.
The Supreme Court recognized this power grab and they made the right decision.
And we are so proud to have led the charge in this fight, but we could not have done
it without you.
Thousands of you joined the Daily Wire and over a million Americans signed our petition
against the mandates to celebrate.
We're offering 40% off on our annual memberships with the code DO NOT COMPLY.
And this is why it's so important that if you're not a member of the Daily Wire, you
consider becoming a member because this is how we fight and we're in the fight together.
So to celebrate, celebrate one of the greatest moments in Daily Wire history with 40% off on your annual membership.
You can do that right now, but you've got to go to dailywire.com slash subscribe and join the winning team as we continue to crush the left.
Remember, do not comply for 40% off.
Do not comply.
Let's get to our daily cancellation.
Well, as we know, the woke cultists among us are constantly running a linguistic inventory, scanning through the catalog of human language, looking for random words to suddenly, out of nowhere, and for no intelligible reason, declare problematic and insensitive.
And this week, the cultists seem to be putting in some overtime work, as there are multiple examples, just from this week, of benign words and phrases being declared suddenly and indiscernibly offensive.
But today, we're going to focus only on USA Today and an article written by diversity and inclusion reporter David Oliver.
The headline asks, "Is it time to stop saying 'aloha' and other culturally sensitive words out of context?"
Not to spoil the ending, but yes, it is time, apparently.
That's what he wants to tell us.
He writes, quote, Aloha, hola, shalom.
These are ways to say hello in Hawaiian, Spanish, and Hebrew, respectively.
But just because you can say something doesn't mean it's always appropriate.
On the surface, simple greetings and phrases from other races and cultures may seem fine to sprinkle into our vernacular, inclusive even.
But did you know that aloha doesn't just mean hello or goodbye?
Quote, it's a greeting or a farewell, but the meaning is deeper, says Mel Arvin, the Director of Pacific Island Studies at the University of Utah.
One of my Hawaiian language teachers taught it to me as, aloha means recognizing yourself in everyone and everything you meet.
If you're not Hawaiian and you say it, it could come off as mockery.
That's just one word to think about.
The use of certain words requires education, knowledge, and the foresight to understand when they should or shouldn't come out of your mouth.
Yes, David Oliver of USAT will tell you what should or shouldn't come out of your mouth.
You cannot be trusted to simply go around speaking and saying words all willy-nilly.
You need guidance and instruction and correction, and David Oliver is here to provide it.
Very nice of him.
Something to keep in mind, by the way, when considering the subject that we began the show with today, people are very squeamish about imposing our collective will on criminals, punishing them and forcing them to comply with the law and the standards of basic human decency.
But I'm willing to bet that, you know, David Oliver himself would take great exception to everything I said about that subject.
And yet, These same squeamish, gentle, tolerant folks suddenly adopt a quite different attitude when it comes to normal, law-abiding citizens who say words and express ideas that they don't like.
It's not true, then, to say that we live in a permissive society.
It's more accurate to say that we are a society permissive specifically of criminals and social leeches, but quite stern and controlling when it comes to normal people who do say and think normal things.
Now granted, David isn't suggesting caning or executing white people who use the word aloha, but I'm not sure that he'd necessarily object to that suggestion either.
Back to his article, he says, "Of course, not all uses of language outside someone's culture are problematic.
Quote, 'We live in a multilingual world where we're always influencing one another's language practices,
where we might come into contact with a variety of terms or language practices that we have not grown up in,'
says Nikki Lane, cultural and linguistic anthropologist.
'Intention matters most.
Dropping 'Hola' or 'Shalom' to someone who you know speaks Spanish or Hebrew, for example, isn't something to worry
about.
Actively don a fake exaggerated accent and say those words?
Well, therein lies the problem.
Yeah, but what if the fake accent is hilarious?
Can we carve out an exception for exaggerated accents that are particularly funny?
Probably not.
Continuing, it says, Quote, like saying ni hao to someone Asian-American who isn't Chinese, this could be both othering and a microaggression.
What we need is a critical consciousness in our public around a language, says Jeffrey McCune, director of the Frederick Douglass Institute of African and African-American Studies at the University of Rochester.
Language is too critical to our culture that we can't just casually use language in ways that might offend and or even harm, do harm to certain groups of people.
It's the larger cultural considerations around the use of these words that matter most.
Quote, I don't think the intention is necessarily to be offensive or anything, but for native Hawaiian people, Hawaiian language was banned in schools after the Hawaiian kingdom was overthrown, Arvin says.
Considering how difficult it has been to keep the language alive, to see someone using it without respect is really difficult for that reason.
Ah, so it's been difficult to keep the Hawaiian language alive, which is why you don't want people to use it?
There was allegedly an effort to eradicate the language, and now parts of the language are so common that even people who are not Hawaiian use it, and that's a bad thing, you say.
Well, it's only bad when the word is used without respect.
But what sort of respect do we need to grant a word like aloha?
What kind of sacred reverence do you need to see?
I'm not sure I'd know how to respect the word Aloha even if I cared enough to try, which I don't.
Whatever they mean by respect, the point is that our intentions are what matters.
That's what they say.
And on that point, I actually agree.
What matters most in any human communication is intention.
You cannot know how to respond to someone or how to feel about what they've said until you understand their intention behind their words, the meaning they were trying to convey.
The words and syllables themselves are less functionally important in most day-to-day communication than the intended meaning behind them.
Somebody might phrase something incorrectly or use a word in the wrong way, but if you know what they mean, which most of the time you do, then the communication was successful and only a tedious pedantic jerk would feel the need to go back and correct them.
The problem is that when the left says, intention is what matters, what they mean to say is, My perception of your intention is what matters.
They don't actually care about your intention behind your own words.
That couldn't be less relevant to them.
The words themselves are also basically irrelevant.
They will just arbitrarily decide what your motivations and intentions were, and they will adjust their level of offense accordingly.
But don't worry, though.
They're not going to leave you entirely in limbo, wondering what you should or shouldn't say, and how you should or shouldn't say it.
They won't leave me in that limbo because I simply don't care at all about their language rules and I'm not waiting for their permission to say anything.
But if you are concerned about the rules and if you are determined to follow them, well, our white knight friend David Oliver concludes his article with some very helpful tips.
Here they are.
Quote.
These action items will help keep your language in check.
Number one, make an effort to befriend people from other cultures.
Step outside your comfort zone and talk to people who do not share our values or our experiences, says Suni Rucker Chang, Associate Professor at the Center for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at The Ohio State University.
You'll likely get a better feel for what's appropriate this way.
Two, ask yourself why you are saying the term.
Are you using the term because you want to say something besides hello or hey?
Consider the cultural implications before you do.
McCune says, Is it to the benefit of laughter and sarcasm and satire?
Or is it a genuine interest in being a part of a cultural community that recognizes the historical meaning and historical significance of various terms?
Three, remember the weight of words.
Quote, language is really about power, says Rucker Chang.
And I think that the person who is using these terms needs to be more aware of the origins of them.
Four, avoid terms you don't know.
Once you learn, you might decide you don't want to use the term because you see that it is indexing certain things that have nothing to do with you and which might reproduce ideas in which you are not interested in reproducing.
What?
Okay.
Five, educate, educate, educate.
Whether it's history of colonialism in Hawaii or other significant historical facts, knowledge helps fight ignorance.
Now, one thing they don't cover is, um, about, what about when I, when I intentionally mispronounce foreign words and foreign names simply because I find it amusing to butcher terms I'm not familiar with?
Like, what about when I, is that okay?
Can I do that?
I guess it's not okay.
That's my guess.
Which only makes it more amusing to me, which ensures that I will continue doing it even more.
As for the rest, it's all nonsense, of course.
Consider the cultural implications before saying hello to someone.
How is it even possible to function in society if you have to treat every conversation like some sort of explorer making contact with a primitive jungle tribe for the first time, paranoid that one wrong move or phrase will result in a spear through your chest and your corpse roasting over You know, an open fire for dinner.
Of course, it's not possible to function that way, which is part of the point.
These people are very much opposed to any functional vision of society or human interaction.
Function is what they hate most of all.
And what in the hell does she mean when she says, language is about power?
I mean, that's the kind of utterly nonsensical statement that college professors make to their students all the time, who are meant to just sit there and mindlessly consume the nonsense, like baby birds inhaling whatever half-digested muck is spewed at them.
If you sit and think about it, though, for more than half a second, you realize that it makes no sense.
And it makes no sense in the most cynical and hideous way imaginable.
Because she is casting ordinary communication, polite greetings between people, as power struggles.
When you say hello to someone, it's a power struggle.
You are exercising power over them by saying hi.
She suggests that people ought to bring their ancestral resentments and blood feuds into every exchange, seeing even a statement like hello as an effort to colonize and enslave them.
As always, then, we find that what appears to be merely stupid on the surface turns out to be still very stupid, of course, but even more insidious and hideous than it first appeared.
And this is ultimately why, to David Oliver and Suni Rucker Chang and anyone else associated with this article, we must say to all of them, Aloha, and you're cancelled.
That'll do it for this portion of the show.
As we move over to the Members Block, hope to see you there.
