Ep. 1110 - Democrats Try To Ambush Me At A Hearing, Fail Hilariously
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, I testified at a committee hearing to support a bill banning child mutilation. The pro-mutilation Democrats took the opportunity to ambush me. But it didn't work out the way they planned. We'll play the clips and tell you all about my experience today. Also, AOC defames Libs of TikTok at a committee hearing in DC. We'll do the fact check that the fact checkers won't do. And AirBnB bans the parents of a conservative commentator, then backtracks. Plus, a school is forced to apologize after serving chicken and waffles for black history and month. We'll try to figure out how a delicious meal could possibly be offensive.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, I testified at a committee hearing to support a bill banning child mutilation.
The pro-mutilation Democrats on the hearing took the opportunity to ambush me, but it didn't work out quite the way they planned.
We'll play the clips and I'll tell you all about my experience today.
Also, AOC defames Libs or TikTok at a committee hearing in DC.
We'll do the fact check that the fact checkers won't do on that defamation.
And Airbnb bans the parents of a conservative commentator, then backtracks.
A school is forced to apologize after serving chicken and waffles for Black History Month.
We'll try to figure out how a delicious meal could possibly be offensive.
We'll have all of that and more today on The Matt Walsh Show.
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Yesterday I had the opportunity to testify at a House committee hearing to voice my support
for legislation banning the castration and mutilation Now, I've addressed school boards in the past, as you know, but this was my first time in front of any kind of legislative committee, so it was an interesting
learning experience kind of like my own schoolhouse rock sort of
Experience and one of the key difference differences here is that in my school board speeches?
I've spoken out against policies and measures that the boards were wanting to put into place or or had already put
into place in this Case however, I was speaking in favor of a bill that the
majority of the legislature has already expressed support for so I didn't need
To convince them of what they already believe or urge them to do what they're already going to do
But rather my plan was simply to add my voice of support as a citizen of the state
Now, you may be understandably concerned based on that description that my appearance in front of this committee Must have been rather boring and lacking the kind of fireworks that you might expect and hope for.
Well, allow me to allay those fears because fortunately for you, there were a few Democrats in the room who, though on the losing side of this issue, were still determined to use my appearance as an opportunity to try and score some points with their own base.
So after I delivered my brief remarks and all the other witnesses, there were three others on the anti-mutilation side and four on the pro-mutilation side.
They had their turns also to speak, and then the lawmakers on the committee had the chance to ask us questions.
And the first question came from a Republican who had a very fair and relevant query about the oft-repeated claim, which we also heard from other witnesses during the testimonies, that medically affirming quote-unquote trans-identified youth is necessary to decrease their suicide rate.
And because this is the thing that got everything kicked off, I want to play this clip for you.
It's a little bit long, but it's also, it's an important point too.
So here's my answer to his question.
Just a quick question for you.
We've heard in the news last week and even today that it's pro-life to vote against this bill.
We've heard that suicides are prevalent and suicide has impacted my family so I'm sensitive when I hear something like that.
I've read some of the stuff that you've done and I was wondering can you speak to the statistics of Mental health and suicidal tendencies For the people who have gone through transition and for people who have not in your studies from what I've read Can you can you speak to that?
Sure Sure well the claim that You know, doing the chemical castration drugs or surgery or hormonal intervention, the claim that this prevents suicide or has positive psychological effects down the line is utterly, totally baseless.
There are no credible long-term studies that bear that out.
And one of the reasons for that is that there couldn't possibly be any credible long-term studies because we've never done this to kids on this scale ever before in history.
So, this current, shall we say, crop of children They are the guinea pigs.
This is all experimental.
We're sort of trying it out on them to see if it works.
Now, they have attempted a few times to do studies, and the interesting thing is that the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, WPATH, which is a radical far-left pro-trans organization, they commissioned a study to try to prove that hormones and puberty blockers decrease suicide rates among trans Trans identified youth and even in their own study they found that they couldn't they couldn't they couldn't prove it They couldn't make that link because it's just not possible to do the other thing.
I would mention too is that you know the the The number of trans identified youth has skyrocketed in recent years talking about exponential 10x 20x growth just huge numbers having of a Have increased and what we hear from the pro-trans side is that well, this is not a social contagion It's just that you know, there's always been this many trans people.
It's just that they were not in an affirming Environment before in history and so they couldn't come out and now for the first time trans people Have the ability to live their truth so to speak well if that's the case And there have always been these sort of, like, millions of trans people.
And if it's also true that if we don't affirm them, that it would cause them to commit suicide, then we should be able to look back in history and find just this unbroken, incredible epidemic of children mysteriously killing themselves because they weren't being affirmed as trans.
And what you find is that that didn't exist.
I mean, the youth suicide rate has increased exponentially alongside trans affirmation.
So trans-affirmation causes the suicide rate, not the other way around.
Last thing I'll note is that the suicide rate among trans-identified people is sky-high.
It remains sky-high.
All the data shows this.
It remains sky-high even after surgery.
And in fact, in the most reliable data that we have, it's years after surgery when suicidality is the highest for trans-identified people.
That's the reality.
Now, So you see all that.
I make a number of claims and arguments in that answer, just as I did in my initial remarks, that the Democrats on the panel had the opportunity to refute.
If indeed I was wrong about anything I said and can be refuted, then they had a chance to do it.
But they couldn't refute it.
They had nothing to say, which, as we've learned about Democrats, will certainly not stop them from talking.
So the next question, or what pretended to be a question, came from a greasy little hack named Caleb Hemmer, who rather than discuss the issue at hand, instead decided to try and smear me with that Media Matters hit piece from my time as a shock jock morning host 15 years ago.
What does that have to do with anything?
What did he think he would accomplish with this?
Well, we'll find out.
Thank you Mr. Walsh.
I found it interesting one of our people testified today that they had their gender affirming surgery at 16.
I know you in former comments mentioned this on your blog.
At about 16 you're an adult who's mature and can make decisions.
You're that at 16.
I don't care what anybody says.
Even going so far as to say you know 16 people when you're 16 you should be Married and and could be pregnant or should be pregnant.
So I'm curious if 16 is a An adult in your view.
Why does this bill have the minor defined as 18?
Yeah, that's that's a hit piece you took from media matters from something when I was a radio host 13 14 years ago my early 20s It's also not an accurate reflection of what I actually said.
I was talking about The fact that people tended to marry young historically, and that's all that that was about.
How does that relate to this subject?
Just curious of your definition of if you feel like people are adults at 16 should... People are adults at 18, but actually your brain is not fully developed until you're 25.
So, we should be having a conversation about whether we should even be doing these surgeries to people at 18.
But certainly before 18, it's absurd.
I mean, do you think that a 16-year-old can meaningfully consent to having their body parts removed?
Do you?
No?
[INAUDIBLE]
We do not.
Yeah, we asked the questions.
It's not.
It's.
Representative Henry, you are recognized.
So, that was one gloriously awkward silence, even more so for those of us in the room.
Actually, you can't see it from that camera angle on the clip exactly, but Caleb sat back away from the microphone when I asked him that question, and he kind of looked off to the side, almost like he was trying to pretend he didn't hear the question.
It was a bizarre scene, but not so bizarre when you consider that I had asked a question
that Caleb Hemmer simply could not answer.
He obviously couldn't say no, that 16-year-olds can't consent to having body parts removed,
because then he'd be agreeing with me and with the legislation.
He doesn't wanna do that.
But he also didn't wanna come out and say yes, that 16-year-olds can consent, because
that sounds horrific and insane when said out loud.
And it puts them in the position of having to explicitly defend a totally indefensible
proposition.
You'll notice that leftists, they often find themselves in this kind of situation.
They hold many views that they cannot say out loud.
Their actual positions on the issues are often so deranged, so inconceivably gross, so morally vacuous and incoherent that you can defeat them in an argument simply by asking them to clearly state their own premise.
Of course, what this means is that Leftists themselves, leftists like Caleb Hemmer, they themselves realize how evil their own policies are.
They are deliberately pushing things that they recognize as unspeakably wicked, which is why they will not speak it out loud.
And this puts people like Caleb Hemmer somewhere below mere partisan hacks.
You've got partisan hacks, and then it's below them that you have the Caleb Hemmers of the world.
Because these are people who are consciously evil, which also explains why they would resort to smear tactics against a private citizen at a legislative hearing.
Keep in mind, by the way, that I was not there as an author of the bill, nor was I testifying as some sort of accredited expert.
I didn't stand up there and say, I'm a medical expert and a doctor, and this is what... In fact, I introduced myself as I'm a citizen of Tennessee, I'm a husband and a father, and this is how I feel about this.
A citizen of Tennessee who supports the bill.
And this is supposed to be a democracy, they tell me, right?
So the point is that even if they could succeed in tearing me down and embarrassing me, which sadly for them they didn't, how would that remotely come close to proving that the legislation is bad?
Now if you're wondering how Caleb Hemmer will recover from this humiliation, well, he'll do it, or he'll try to do it, the most weasely and dishonest way possible, of course.
So shortly after the hearing, Ben Shapiro posted that full exchange that you just watched, and he posted it to Twitter.
Hammer responded to the post with a link to a different video which he urged people to watch instead to see what quote really went down.
Now that video was an edited montage by an obscure left-wing propaganda rag called the Tennessee Holler.
And what they did is they took all the questions that the and not really questions but statements that Democrats on the committee hearing made to me and they spliced all that together and then cut out most of my responses.
And then anything else that may have been especially embarrassing for the Democrats, and pasted all the rest of it together with a bunch of very obvious jump cuts and posted that.
So, Hemmer therefore is actually claiming that an edited montage without my responses is a more accurate reflection of what actually transpired than the full unedited clip.
That's how shameless this guy is.
By the way, if you're concerned about his lack of honesty and this lack of honesty from an elected official, or perhaps you're not satisfied with his refusal to answer my simple question, you could always reach out to him on any of his social media channels.
And look, I'm not telling you, I want to be very clear about this, I am not telling you that I want you all to spam his Twitter and his Facebook and Instagram, that I want hundreds of comments and everything attacking him.
I'm not.
I could not tell you to do that.
I couldn't tell you to do that.
I just want to make sure that you have his information so that you can reach out to him to express your concerns.
Again, he's an elected official.
So you can find him on Twitter at Caleb Hemmer.
That's C-A-L-E-B-H-E-M-M-E-R.
Or Instagram the same way.
Then you go to Facebook.
You go to Facebook.com slash CalebHemmerTN.
And then CalebHemmer.com slash contact will take you to his website, and that's the contact information for his office.
So again, if you have any concerns about the behavior of this public official, or if you really want to know, like, does he think that 16-year-olds can consent to having body parts removed, he still hasn't answered that question.
But I bet he'd love an opportunity to answer it, and I think he would want to hear from you.
He'd be very glad to hear from you.
So you can always do that if you want.
Now there's more, though.
The next question came from Democrat John Ray Clemens, who also had no interest in talking about the substance of the issue.
Instead, with the slander already covered by Caleb Hemmer, Clemens went to the Democrats' second favorite tool in the box, which is credentialism.
Let's watch.
Can you give us a summary of your educational background or your healthcare education experience?
Mr. Walsh, you're recognized.
My experience in healthcare?
Your educational background.
I'm just curious.
You've testified as to a lot of your own research.
I'm curious for what purpose you do that and what background you have to qualify you to speak to that.
Well my background that qualifies me to speak to this is that I'm a human being with a brain and common sense and I have a soul and so therefore I think it's a really bad idea to chemically castrate children.
That is my experience.
Also I did, now it's true, I didn't go to college but I did go to school long enough to learn how to read so I can read the data for myself and that's exactly what I've done.
And for what purpose do you conduct your research and use this brain of yours?
Mr. Walsh, you're recognized.
I use it for the purpose of trying to protect children from being castrated and mutilated.
That's one of the things I try to do.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
You don't use it to get clicks on your publication?
Are you using it right now to try to get clicks with this interaction?
I really like the idea of drawing attention to the fact that this is happening to children.
I know you seem to find it very amusing.
I don't.
Yes, what qualifies me to speak up against chopping body parts off of kids?
Which credentials give me the right to form an opinion about the sterilization of middle schoolers?
I wonder what John Ray Clements might have said if I told him that I'm also against drowning bags of puppies in the river.
I'm not even a big dog guy, but like, I don't think that you should put puppies in a bag and drown them in the river.
If I were to tell him that, would he have demanded to know what veterinarian school I attended?
This apparently comes as a shock to Mr. Clemens, but using your brain and your conscience, it's not the kind of job that requires a resume or professional references.
That's something you're supposed to be doing all the time, especially when it comes to this particular issue.
But this is all they have.
They cannot challenge me on the merits, they cannot debate me on the substance of the issue, they cannot explain why I'm wrong, so instead they will make the case that whether I'm wrong or right, I shouldn't be saying anything at all.
That's the entire argument.
That is the only argument I have heard from these people since I started talking about this issue years ago.
The only argument they have, it really only boils down to, you shouldn't be talking about this.
Yet they can't even make that case convincingly, so instead they're left with the bumbling, ridiculous mess you just witnessed.
Now there were more questions, or questions I should say.
After the exchange we just saw there, another Democrat representative started reading my tweets where I advocate for capital punishment for drug traffickers.
Now, what in the world could that possibly have to do with the bill in question?
Well, he couldn't explain that.
And I didn't have a chance to point out how irrelevant it was because they wouldn't let me respond either.
So after that happened, they basically got tired of me answering, and so for most of the rest of the time, it was just them talking to me.
And then if I tried to speak, they'd bang the gavel.
No, this is not, this is not, it's not time for responding.
Democracy in action, folks.
Isn't it inspiring?
But, this is all predictable, of course.
I don't want you to think that I was surprised or caught off guard.
That was their intention, but unfortunately, they were using the same tactics on me that a million hacks and charlatans before them have already used.
What I'll say to the Democrats on the committee is this, if you want to rattle me with smears and irrelevant, out-of-context quotes and bad faith questions and accusations, etc., you're gonna have to try a lot harder than that.
A lot harder.
Or instead, Instead of trying to get better at being gutless smear merchants and disgraceful hacks, you could instead work on becoming better people.
Better men.
You could stop trying to defend the indefensible.
What you yourself know to be indefensible.
You could stop trading in your soul for the sake of promoting and defending the most depraved ideological agenda mankind has ever known.
And instead you could try to be men of dignity and integrity and moral courage.
That's the other option.
It's an option that'll work out a lot better for you in a lot of ways, including come Judgment Day, I would add.
And in the meantime, another bonus, maybe you won't make such asses of yourself in any more committee hearings.
Just a thought.
Now let's get to our headlines.
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There was another committee hearing yesterday, so it's a big day for committees.
This one was in D.C., where three former Twitter executives have been called in to answer questions about Twitter's decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, of course, rigging thereby the 2020 election by suppressing relevant information that might have swayed the voters.
And that was the point of it, of course.
We'll start with this clip, where AOC takes the opportunity to, instead of discussing the issue at hand, so there's a common theme, a theme is emerging.
Instead of talking about that, she instead decides to defame Libs of TikTok.
Let's watch.
Additionally, Ms.
Navarroli, are you familiar with the account Libs of TikTok?
I have heard of it from the news, yes.
Mr. Roth, are you familiar with this account?
Yes, ma'am, I am.
Are you aware that from August 11th to August 16th, that account posted false information about Boston Children's Hospital, claiming that they were providing hysterectomies to children?
Yes, I am aware of that and other claims from the account.
And are you aware that this lie was then circulated by other prominent far-right influencers?
Yes.
And are you aware that all these claims, which I have reiterated were false, culminated in a real-life harassment and ultimately a bomb threat to the Boston Children's Hospital?
Yes, I am aware.
And this account is still on that platform today, isn't it?
Regrettably, yes it is.
Despite inspiring a bomb threat due to the right-wing incitement of violence against trans Americans in this country, because they cannot let go of this obsession with fixating violence and inciting violence against trans and LGBT people, in addition to immigrants, in addition to women of color, this is a party that cannot pick on anyone their own size.
Oh, the old punching down routine, right?
We're punching down when LGBT has institutional power.
Every single major corporation is tripping over itself on Pride Month, covering itself in rainbows.
LGBT, the most privileged, celebrated group in America.
And in American history, in fact.
And yet, if you say anything critical of any, not even critical of them, if you say, if you remotely say anything critical of some of the things that some of them do, you're punching down, you're punching down on these poor people.
Maybe eventually, you know, we keep hearing about us inciting violence, people on the right inciting violence.
I hear about this so much.
Maybe one of these days, one of these people will get around to providing even like one example of us inciting violence.
I keep hearing about it.
I hear about how I do it all the time.
I hear about how Libsit TikTok does it.
I'd be really interested to know when was that exactly?
Where's the part where any of us have said, have called on others to commit acts of violence So go out into the street and find trans people and beat them up.
When have any of us said anything even like vaguely similar to that?
I do have to admit though, I was pretty jealous when I saw this.
Look, not to make it about myself, but I'm the transphobe of the year.
And I don't get a mention here.
So AOC at the committee hearing, she wants to go after transphobic accounts.
Lives at TikTok, fine, I get it, but I don't, she defames Lives at TikTok and I don't even get an honorable mention as the transphobe of the year?
I'm the award-winning transphobe?
Me and LibzaTikTok, Shia, are in kind of a feud, a battle to see who can be defamed by the media the most, and it's a friendly contest.
I thought that I'd surged pretty far ahead with my Transphobe of the Year award.
I thought that, not that I got comfortable or complacent, I just thought that I got a comfortable, I do have a comfortable lead here.
I can coast a little bit, maybe pace myself a little bit more.
But then she gets the name drop in a congressional committee hearing, and suddenly I'm in danger of getting left in the dust.
But this shows you how heated the competition is, because this was earlier yesterday.
This happened to Chaya.
And then later that same day, I get ambushed and defamed at a committee hearing in Tennessee.
Now, yeah, hers was federal.
I get that.
But for me, I was there in person.
So it's kind of, I don't know, I think it's kind of close.
It's a real competition, though.
We'll see what happens.
Ultimately, it's who's going to be.
This is really what the competition is.
Who's going to be transphobe of the year 2023?
That's the contest.
I understand that I'm going to need to vigorously defend my title, and I plan to.
But I see things like this, and it makes me a little nervous.
Now, more to the point, of course.
What AOC accused Libs of TikTok of was totally false, both on inciting violence, that's obviously completely made up, but then also the part about misinformation about Boston Children's Hospital.
Now, just to remind us all, so we can all remember, Libs of TikTok, this was not, she didn't post something and say, hey, you know, I heard that they do gender-affirming hysterectomies, I heard about this.
No, what she did is she found a video, a Boston Children's Hospital video, where they talk about providing this procedure.
So she is quoting them.
Now let's go back and watch that video again, just so we can all refresh our memories.
Gender-affirming hysterectomy is very similar to most hysterectomies that occur.
A hysterectomy itself is the removal of the uterus, the cervix, which is the opening of the uterus, and the fallopian tubes, which are attached to the sides of the uterus.
Some gender-affirming hysterectomies will also include the removal of the ovaries, but that's technically a separate procedure called a bilateral oophrectomy.
And not every gender-affirming hysterectomy includes that, and people who are getting gender-affirming hysterectomies do not have to have their ovaries removed.
Okay, can we go back to just the very beginning of this video again?
Just start from the top.
Interfering hysterectomy is very similar to most hysterectomies.
Stop right there.
Right on the corner there.
It says Boston.
Now, again, we already established in the opening that I don't have any medical credentials, I didn't go to college, but, so correct me if I'm wrong, this reading thing can be a challenge sometimes for us, those of us who didn't go to college, but I'm pretty sure it says Boston Children's Hospital, and there's a doctor who works there talking about gender-affirming hysterectomies, okay?
That's where we got the idea from.
Where did we get the idea that Boston Children's Hospital does gender affirming test records?
Well, we got it from them in this video where they talk about it.
That's where we got it.
Just so you know.
So when AOC and all the rest of them, when they say that this is misinformation, again, as always, Misinformation means, when they say it, it means inconvenient information.
It means information that I wish you didn't know.
That is misinformation.
All right, moving on a little bit on that same committee hearing.
Well, not moving past the committee hearing, because Marjorie Taylor Greene had a few things to say as well, coming from the opposite perspective.
And let's watch that.
I'm so glad that you're censored down.
I'm so glad you've lost your jobs.
Thank God Elon Musk bought Twitter.
And you know what?
Let's talk about something a little bit further.
It's amazing to me, Mr. Roth, as the head and trust of safety at Twitter, your ability, or should I say inability, to remove child porn.
Now here's something that disgusts me about you.
In your doctoral dissertation entitled Gay Data, you argued that minors should have access to Grindr, an adult male gay hookup app.
Minors?
Really?
You know, Elon Musk took over Twitter and he banned 44,000 accounts that were promoting child porn.
You permanently banned my Twitter account, but you allowed child porn all over Twitter.
Twitter had become a platform, you said, connecting queer young adults.
You also wrote on Twitter in 2010, can high school students ever meaningfully consent to Everything she's saying there is correct, of course.
But the one thing I'll take issue with from Marjorie Taylor Greene is she says that it's, I think she says it's astounding to her, surprising, astounding, that there was all this child porn and they didn't take the child porn off the platform, but they were going after her and they were going after Hunter Biden's laptop story and taking conservative content down.
She's astounded by that.
I'm not astounded by it in the least bit.
I'm not even remotely surprised by it.
Because they don't, look, why weren't they aggressive in removing child porn before Elon Musk took over?
Because they don't see child porn as a problem.
They don't see child sex abuse as an issue.
They just don't.
And sometimes, that can be hard to wrap your head around because if you are a decent person and you do have a soul and a brain, At least a functioning one, then it's impossible to conceive of how anyone could be anything less than totally horrified and infuriated by the abuse of children.
But we're dealing with people who do not, whose souls and brains do not function, at least don't function like a human being should.
You know, these are people that have Which isn't to let them off the hook either.
It's not like their brain's malfunctioning, you know, through no fault of their own.
It's just that they're so beholden to their ideology, they've sacrificed their souls, and they just don't see it as a problem.
And they also do believe.
You know, they do believe that children can make choices, can consent to all kinds of things from a very young age, and they won't say it out loud, but that's what they think, and there are all kinds of implications to that horrific viewpoint, and that's part of what we're seeing here.
All right, this is from the Daily Wire.
Canadian conservative activist and YouTuber Lauren Southern announced Tuesday that her parents had been banned from vacation rental property company Airbnb for being closely associated with their daughter.
Quote, we've removed you from the Airbnb platform because your account is closely associated with a person who isn't allowed to use Airbnb.
This means you'll no longer be able to book reservations on Airbnb.
Southern was banned from Airbnb years ago over her right-wing political views and was denied reinstatement, which she tried to appeal.
My parents just got banned from Airbnb for being related to me, Southern captioned the now viral Twitter post.
They have never booked anything for me.
They don't represent me in any way.
They aren't publicly political in any way.
How is this sane in any way?
As of Wednesday morning, Southern's post about the ban had received more than 6.8 million views.
And then there's the follow-up.
Airbnb told the Daily Wire, the Daily Wire reached out, that the banning of Southern's parents was a mistake.
So they were banned, and then Lauren Southern called attention to it, and now they're saying it was a mistake.
We have reinstated their accounts and apologized to them for this mistake.
The Daily Wire reached out to Southern about the response, and she said she believes Airbnb is lying about the ban being a mistake and only backtracked because of the public blowback.
Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
It's not a mistake.
What does that mean, mistake?
It's like someone tripped and fell and accidentally banned Lauren Southern's parents?
Someone hit a button by accident, like some sort of typo?
No, this was a decision that they made.
There was no basis for it.
As she said, it wasn't like she was trying to evade the ban by having her parents book reservations for it.
That didn't happen.
They banned her, which was completely insane when they did it, but they banned her years ago.
And the other thing too is that Lauren Southern mentioned that her parents never appealed it.
Okay, so it's not like they appealed it and made their case.
So when Airbnb went back on this decision, they weren't responding to an appeal.
They were responding to public pressure.
That's what they were responding to, which is good.
It's good that the public was able to pressure them and that we were able to exert that kind of power.
It's a good thing to know that we can do, but it's also very disturbing because what it means Is that they, this was kind of, they're testing the waters.
They were seeing if they could get away with it.
And if they could have, if Southern, you know, even just like wasn't on Twitter, so she couldn't post about it.
Let's say she had been banned by Twitter also, and so wasn't able to call anyone's attention to this, then yeah, this would have stayed in place no matter what.
Even if it had been appealed.
So this is just, this is testing the waters.
We already have these big corporate brands and companies and platforms that are banning people for wrong-think, and now they want to expand that to even banning your family members.
They want to erase all of you as far as, you know, being consumers of their products and their services goes.
And I'm afraid that one of the lessons that they might learn from this—they're not going to learn the right lesson.
It's not like they're going to have a come-to-Jesus moment and say, you know, that was really too far.
We shouldn't do that.
Like, it's bad enough that we're punishing Lauren Southern for having political views we don't agree with.
Punish her parents, too?
That's overboard.
That's not the conclusion they're going to draw.
I think one conclusion they might draw is that, okay, this needs to be more, like, if we want to erase these people, then it has to be a more, you know, the effort has to be more coordinated.
So, the real mistake, as far as Airbnb is concerned, is that, yeah, they banned Southern, and then banned her parents, but she still had access to all these other platforms, so she was able to call attention to it.
So then, the elites and the powers that be, what they're going to then decide is that, well, we need to make sure that when we do this, we erase you from everything, so that you have no means to speak out against us.
And they are.
That's already the conclusion that they've drawn.
We've seen them do that to several people.
But they can't do it on Twitter now because they don't control Twitter at the moment.
All right, what else do we got here?
I want to mention one.
I've had this sitting on deck for a few days, so I'm just going to mention it.
This is from Fox News.
A New York middle school is apologizing after serving students with a meal on the first day of Black History Month that was deemed to be culturally insensitive.
Administrators at Nyack Middle School say that the hot lunch menu was changed by the vendor without their knowledge on February 1st, the first day of Black History Month, to include chicken and waffles with a watermelon dessert, which the school's principal called an unfortunate situation.
We're extremely disappointed by this regrettable situation and apologize to the entire Nyack community for the cultural insensitivity displayed by our food service providers.
I'm disappointed that Aramak would serve items that differed from the published monthly menu, especially items that reinforce negative stereotypes concerning the African-American community.
And then also there's going to be, I think, cultural sensitivity and all other sorts of things and there are apologies and all the rest of it.
Here's what I'm trying to figure out.
So, it reinforces negative stereotypes.
Why exactly is it a negative stereotype?
That a lot of black people like chicken and waffles?
Why is that negative?
Is it inaccurate?
It is true that you tend to find chicken and waffle restaurants and those sorts of dishes in black communities more than in white communities.
So?
Why is that a problem to notice?
I like chicken and waffles too.
It makes sense.
It's a great dish.
I actually hadn't had it.
I'd had it for the first time like a year ago.
I'd never had chicken waffles before.
And then I had it the first time a year ago.
And it always sounded a little bit weird to me.
Like, how do you combine chicken and waffles?
That's amazing.
Then I had it.
I'm like, this is amazing.
I love this.
So, it's a great food.
It's a great dish.
I think it's accurate to say that it tends to be more popular and prevalent in the black community.
I'm not sure if historically it was first designed or if the first person to come up with the chicken and waffles dish was a black person.
I don't know if that's the case.
But who cares?
Why is it automatically offensive?
A negative stereotype?
What's negative about it?
This is what we've done.
We've decided that every stereotype is automatically negative.
Simply because it's a stereotype, but that's not the case.
A stereotype is a, it's a, it's a, it's a generality, um, uh, made about groups.
It's like it's speaking in a kind of general term about a group.
And that is not... Now, there can be negative stereotypes.
There are things you could say about groups that are not accurate, that are not true, that could be degrading or offensive.
But not everything is.
Just because you're making a general statement and saying, you know, people in this group generally like this, or do this, or whatever.
It can be true.
It's okay to notice it.
But this is the conditioning, this is the conditioning they want.
They're telling us that we're not allowed to notice things, or at least we need to ask permission.
There are certain things we're allowed to notice, and other things we're not allowed to notice, and we need to get permission first.
And the fact that the unacceptable things, the things that we're not allowed to notice, the fact that this is so arbitrarily determined, that's part of the game here.
It's part of the, as I always talk about, this kind of societal game of Simon Says.
So you are allowed to speak in general terms about black people.
That's what Black History Month is all about.
You're allowed to talk about things like black history.
So there are, and if you were to say, well, we're celebrating black history, we're celebrating black culture, that'd be an okay thing to say.
You're allowed to say that.
We're going to celebrate black culture for Black History Month.
Okay, you can do that.
So you're speaking in general terms now.
But then what is black culture exactly?
We're allowed to celebrate it, but what qualifies?
Especially when you get into things like food.
What are you allowed to say is part of that scene?
That's when the rules become extremely arbitrary, and there's just no way, as a reasonable, rational person, there's no way to know, well, I'm allowed to notice that this food tends to be a part of that, but not this food.
That food's wrong.
We can't bring that up.
It's completely ridiculous.
All right, let's get to the comment section.
Joe sleepover.
Yeah, look, and if the sleepover was at my house, we were having Fruity O's for breakfast, not Fruit Loops.
We were definitely, you know, we were having the Frosted Mini Squares rather than the Frosted Mini Wheats.
My mom was the queen of off-brand stuff.
There's an off-brand version of everything.
And that was my house, 100%.
And when you've got, you know, I have five brothers and sisters, so it just comes with the territory.
We should be doing that more in my house.
My wife, for some reason, still buys, she buys my kids the name brand cereal.
She refuses to get the off-brand cereal.
And so we're paying like a 3x premium.
It tastes basically the same.
And so this is a discussion we had.
Probably not relevant to the rest of you.
Kenny says, is it such a horrible thing for someone to take their own life if there is nothing else we have control over?
It should be whether we live and suffer or bring about an end that was coming anyway.
That's a thought I've never had to entertain and I hope I never do.
But if I do, it's definitely a personal decision.
Well, here's the thing, Kenny.
It is horrible to take your own life.
I mean, suicide is a horrible thing.
And I think that you understand that.
And even the people that, most of the people that say that they I don't necessarily agree.
Well, if you were walking across a bridge and you saw a guy about to throw himself off of it to kill himself, you would try to stop him, wouldn't you?
You wouldn't stand there and say, well, it's his own decision.
I guess he's trying to end his suffering.
No, you would try to stop him because, in effect, if you saw someone else just standing there watching while it happened, you would think that person's a terrible scumbag, and they would be.
Yeah, suicide is a terrible thing.
But more to the point, when it comes to euthanasia, doctors shouldn't kill people.
That's the principle here.
So, you can try to argue that a person has the right to take their own life, or it's okay for a person to take their own life.
I don't agree with that.
At least on a moral level.
If you say someone has a legal right to take their own life, well, that's the kind of thing, like, obviously, I can't really, if someone kills themselves, obviously there's no way to legally enforce the law against it after the fact, but I don't think we have the moral right to end our own lives.
But that's a separate conversation.
Because we're not talking about what people have the right to do to themselves, you know, when it comes to euthanasia, we're talking about what do doctors have the right to do to people.
And what I'm saying is that no doctor has the right to directly and intentionally kill another person.
Whether that person is an infant in the womb, or that person is terminally ill, or that person is depressed, that should not be a tool in the medical toolbox.
Because it's not medicine.
Medicine treats, medicine heals.
Anything that doesn't do that is not medicine, and so should not be within the purview of a doctor.
And finally, do we have time for this one?
Yeah, sort of.
Well, not really.
But Nick says, why you gotta come after Trump all the time?
It really casts your credibility into doubt.
It seems like reading from the script.
Of course, anytime I criticize Trump, I'm always told that I always criticize Trump.
It has always been the case that I, in general, I talk about Trump and I talk about politicians probably less than almost any conservative in media.
I don't focus on these issues that much.
I like to focus on other things.
So, criticize him all the time, I think, automatically is quite inaccurate.
My policy has always been that I criticize Trump when he does things that I think are wrong, and then if he doesn't, then I don't criticize him.
If he does something I think is right, then I'll defend him.
In fact, just yesterday on the show, when Biden was taking credit for putting a cap on the price of insulin, I said, no, Trump did that.
Okay?
So that's something that Trump did.
Give him credit for that.
But Trump also tried to defame DeSantis as a groomer because he took a picture with some women.
And I think that's wrong, so I criticize him for that.
So that's basically my approach.
I think that's a rational, reasonable approach.
And just so you understand something, too, because it kind of boggles my mind that people don't get this, is that criticizing, when it comes to Trump, Like, when it comes to Trump, the sort of grifting, profitable, reading-from-the-script, sacrificing-your-credibility approach to Trump is always going to be on the extremes, okay?
So someone who always loves Trump and supports everything he does, no matter what, an always-Trump person, That's a grift.
And the other side, the people who hate Trump so much that then they went and supported Hillary Clinton, and now they support the Democrats, and Bill Kristol, like, hates Trump so much that he just decided to go and become a leftist despite him.
That's also a grift, okay?
And then, because there's like a built-in audience for both of those.
It's a simple, it's a simplistic sort of position.
There's a built-in audience.
Anything in between, where you take the in-between approach, where you're like, well, I don't When he does things I agree with, I criticize him.
When he does things I agree with, I support him.
If not, I criticize him.
There's no grift there because you're automatically going to be upsetting people on both sides.
And so anytime you do that, it's hard to call that a grift or to say that, well, you're reading from a script.
It's like with Trump, the easy, especially as a conservative.
The easiest thing has always been either just become a full-on leftist, and then maybe you get the CNN hits and maybe you get something on MSNBC so you could do that, or to say, well, he's God incarnate and everything he does is right.
But just trying to be reasonable about it, that's never been, like, really the most profitable position on the guy, or on any politician.
But that's the correct position on any politician.
So I'm not sitting here and saying that we should be in the middle, like being in the middle is the right thing all the time.
When it comes to issues, to principles, the middle is not the right place to be.
But when it comes to a person, a politician, I think the right thing is to support them when they have earned it and not when they don't.
A couple weeks ago we told you about how YouTube removed an episode of our show because my comments about men who want to have uteruses implanted in their bodies were deemed to be offensive and hateful somehow.
These restrictive speech policies exist because the world is on a mission to make you woke.
It's as simple as that.
But our good friend Dennis Prager is on a mission to make you wise.
And thankfully Dennis has created a brand new series with Daily Wire Plus called The Master's Program to do just that.
We've had a long-standing relationship with Dennis Prager for good reason.
He's been leading the charge against stupidity for longer than I've been alive, with content like PragerU's 5-minute videos, while the Master's program takes 40 years' worth of wisdom and experience from one of the most influential conservative thinkers in America today and distills it all down in a way that is relevant and accessible.
Episodes explore topics like, is human nature basically good?
I think we can say for certain that I'm obviously good, but I can't speak for anyone else, so we'll find out more about that.
The series also covers the consequences of secularism, which, by the way, are so dire it needed two episodes to explore.
A brand new episode of PragerU Master's Program is available to stream right now, but only on Daily Wire+.
So head to dailywireplus.com to become a member and watch PragerU Master's Program and more.
That's dailywireplus.com today.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
It is perhaps cosmic justice that Sam Smith and Kim Petras perform their satanic ritual at the Grammys, and though they did succeed in getting some of the attention they craved, still most of the conversation surrounding their performance has been focused not on the performance, but on Madonna's face.
The aging former pop star introduced the two men on Sunday night, and ever since then, people have been remarking on the fact that Madonna looked like she was having a potentially fatal reaction to shellfish.
She looked like Marilyn Manson reimagined as a Muppet.
She looked like she paid 15 bucks to a caricature artist to draw a picture of her, and then brought the drawing to her plastic surgeon and said, turn me into this.
And I'm not being mean here.
I'm just trying to be precise in my description.
It's important to be very precise.
But it's not my fault that Madonna now looks like a large flightless bird that went extinct in the Pleistocene era.
You can't blame me for the fact that Madonna looks like a sock puppet.
She just does.
Now, Madonna herself seems to have noticed the comments and the comparisons and the fact that people are saying that she looks like a ventriloquist dummy from a Jeff Dunham act, and so she sent out this tweet on Tuesday She said, the world is threatened by my power and my stamina, my intelligence and my will to survive, but they will never break me.
This is all a test.
She's right, actually.
Speaking for myself, I am blown away by her will to survive.
I mean, she has a net worth of only $850 million after all.
I don't know how she manages to endure, to keep going, to survive against the odds, but she does.
She wills her way through it with sheer guts and determination and copious amounts of Botox.
It is inspiring.
Inspiring, at least, to the New York Times.
So while everyone else has been making fun of Madonna, the New York Times has swooped in to explain why we should actually admire her for destroying her face with plastic surgery.
In an essay titled, Madonna's New Face is a Brilliant Provocation, the author Jennifer Wiener writes, quote, With blonde braids looped over her ears, dressed in a long black skirt and black jacket accessorized with a riding crop, one of the best female recording artists of all time stepped into the spotlight of the 65th Annual Grammy Awards Sunday night.
Madonna was there to introduce Sam Smith and Kim Petras, a non-binary performer and a trans woman.
She began by referring to her four decades in the music industry and praised the rebels forging a new path and taking the heat for all of it.
Was anyone listening?
Social media's loudest roars weren't about her speech or her longtime LGBTQ advocacy or her upcoming world tour.
They were about Madonna's preternaturally smooth and extravagantly sculpted face.
All of Madonna's features looked exaggerated, pushed, and polished to an extreme.
There was her forehead, smooth and gleaming as a porcelain bowl.
Her eyebrows, bleached and plucked to near invisibility.
Her cheekbones with deep hollows beneath them.
People posted with a picture side-by-side with that of Jigsaw from Saws and Janice from The Muppet Show and made jokes about desperately seeking a surgeon, while extremely online plastic surgeons hastened to guess about exactly what procedure she had undergone.
Well, there's that.
And now comes the part where the leftist writer does what leftist writers love to do more than anything, which is to try to make simple vanity seem interesting.
She continues.
Beyond the question of what she'd done, however, lay the more interesting question of why she had done it.
Did Madonna get sucked so deep into the vortex of beauty culture that she came out the other side?
Had the pressure to appear younger somehow made her think that she ought to look like some kind of excessively contoured baby?
Perhaps so, but I'd like to think that our era's greatest chameleon, a woman who has always been intentional about her reinvention, was doing something slyer, more subversive, By serving us both a new, if not necessarily improved, face and a side of critique about the work of beauty, the inevitability of aging, and the impossible bind which older female celebrities find themselves.
People complain that she no longer looks like Madonna, but which Madonna comes to mind?
She's been a blonde and a brunette, butch and high femme.
She's worn cast-offs and couture.
She's adopted and abandoned an English accent.
She's shown us her roots and her underwear, deliberately putting the hidden parts on display.
Every new version of Madonna was both a look and a commentary on looking.
A statement about the artifice of beauty and about her own right to set the terms by which she was seen.
Is it possible that Madonna has been so blinkered by her fame and wealth that she's lost the ability to see herself objectively?
Yes, but whatever her intentions, the superstar has gotten us all talking about how good looks are subjective and how ageism is pervasive.
In the end, whether she meant to make a statement or just to look younger, better, refreshed, almost doesn't matter.
If beauty is a construct, Madonna's the one who puts its scaffolding on display.
Okay, first of all, no.
That's not what's going on here.
Two points.
As for beauty being a construct and subjective, Madonna's face is actually a perfect example demonstrating why that is not the case.
Despite the extremely common misperception, beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder.
There is an objective quality to it.
See, everyone agrees that Madonna's artificial face is not beautiful.
Everyone agrees that all the injections and surgeries and plastics have not improved anything.
Women, you know, everyone knows that a woman who ages naturally and gracefully is more beautiful than one who obsessively goes under the knife in a desperate and futile attempt to reverse the clock.
Why do we all feel that way?
Is it entirely arbitrary?
Have we settled on this view randomly?
Do we all happen to have the same artificially constructive, subjective opinion about beauty?
No.
In fact, we recognize, even if we don't realize we recognize, the objective qualities of beauty.
We know, even if we don't know that we know, that beauty is wholeness, completeness.
Beauty is found in order, in symmetry.
Something is beautiful if it reflects its own essence, and if that essence is good.
That's why a beautiful tree is one that has grown tall and mighty, not one that is rotting and diseased and, you know, covered with graffiti.
Thomas Aquinas said that beauty consists in due proportion.
And, you know, I think this is basically what he's getting at.
Madonna's fake face isn't beautiful.
We all see that it isn't beautiful.
Because it's a rejection of what is natural and true.
It is a reflection not of her Truly, the idea that beauty is subjective, it probably stands alone as the one viewpoint that nearly everyone professes, and yet no one really believes.
There's nothing beautiful about that, and so there's nothing beautiful about her face.
Truly, the idea that beauty is subjective, it probably stands alone as the one viewpoint that nearly everyone
professes, and yet no one really believes.
So you think that you think that beauty is subjective, but you don't really believe that.
And I know that you don't believe it, because here's how I know it.
And, you know, I don't know anything about you, whoever you are listening to this.
But what I do know is that you would be appalled If somebody were to look out upon a snow-capped mountain range, or a lake glistening in the sunset, or someone looked at a Rembrandt painting, or who heard a very talented choir singing Amazing Grace, and if that person recoiled and said, Ew, gross!
This is disgusting!
Now, you would be appalled by someone who reacted that way.
You would think that they were insane.
You would not say, well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I mean, that's a perfectly valid reaction.
You wouldn't.
Now, people may resonate differently with these sights and sounds.
Some may be more moved than others, but no sane person is actively repulsed by any of those things.
Nobody outside the walls of an insane asylum experiences actual revulsion at a sunset.
These are timeless and universal beauties.
We're told that each culture reinvents beauty for itself, and yet what we actually find is that all through history and across time, in fact, every culture arrives at strikingly similar conclusions about what is beautiful.
Now, there may be cultures that have difficulty creating beautiful things.
Our culture, for instance.
And cultures who intentionally create ugly things instead of beautiful.
Again, ours.
But everybody knows what is beautiful.
Nobody would prefer a bathroom stall splattered with urine stains over the Sistine Chapel.
Nobody would because one is grotesque and filthy, the other is beautiful.
And we can all see that.
Final point, women like Madonna who refuse to age gracefully, they are not victims of ageism.
Except perhaps the ageism they direct against themselves.
Really, they are a reflection of a culture that fears mortality.
Okay, we worship youth because we are afraid of death.
This is like, if you want to call it, it's deathism, I guess.
And it really is as simple as that.
That's why we worship youth, because we're afraid of death.
Now, you may think that both of these things, worshipping youth and being afraid of death, are inevitable in every society, but you're wrong.
Because traditionally, especially in more ancient times, the elders in the community have been revered and respected.
Age was associated with wisdom.
It wasn't shameful to be seen as old, but rather there was honor and dignity that came with being of advanced age.
Yet these were also societies that accepted the reality of death.
Death was a part of life for them.
They were around it all the time.
They may have had different ways of understanding death, different ideas about what happened after you died, but they didn't hide from death itself.
Not nearly to the extent that we do today, anyway.
These days, it's considered rude to even ask somebody their age.
Somehow, the fact that you've been walking the earth for more than 20 years is supposed to be embarrassing.
But why should it be?
Why should a 65-year-old woman be embarrassed that she's 65?
Well, for no other reason than the fact that 65-year-old women are likely closer to death than 25-year-old women.
And we see age as proximity to death, and death is the one thing we don't want to be reminded of.
And so, that's why we reject the aging process entirely.
Indeed, much of modern society is, I'm convinced, fundamentally set up to distract us from thinking about our own deaths.
But death is inevitable, whether we think about it or not.
And Madonna is 64 years old, whether she embraces that reality or not.
So, she might as well embrace it.
There's no shame in being whatever age you are.
There is only shame in being ashamed of it.
And that's why, ultimately, Madonna is today cancelled.
That'll do it for this portion of the show.
As we move over to the Members Block, hope to see you there.
