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Feb. 21, 2023 - The Matt Walsh Show
01:01:40
Ep. 1117 - The Woke Speech Police Are Now Rewriting Books By Dead Children's Authors

Click here to join the member exclusive portion of my show: https://utm.io/ueSEm  Today on the Matt Walsh Show, in perhaps the most egregious example of cancel culture yet, woke publishing companies are now re-writing the books of dead authors to make the language conform with left wing sensibilities. One of the most revered children's authors is their latest target. Also, Joe Biden continues to demonstrate his America Last approach by visiting Ukraine while his own country falls apart. Marjorie Taylor Greene provokes a heated reaction after suggesting a national divorce to fix our problems. And conservative media figures continue to criticize me for my mean language. I have some choice words for them today. - - -  DailyWire+: Become a DailyWire+ member for 40% off to access the entire content library of movies, shows, documentaries, and more: https://bit.ly/3JR6n6d  Shop the Jeremy’s Razors Presidents’ Day sale and get 30% off any razor: https://bit.ly/3xuFD43  Represent the Sweet Baby Gang by shopping my merch here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj   - - -  Today’s Sponsors: Birch Gold - Text "WALSH" to 989898, or go to https://birchgold.com/walsh, for your no-cost, no-obligation, FREE information kit. Jase Medical - Get a discount on your Jase Case with promo code ‘WALSH’ at https://jasemedical.com/ - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Rv1VeF  Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3KZC3oA  Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eBKjiA  Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RQp4rs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on the Matt Wall Show, in perhaps the most egregious example of cancel culture yet, woke publishing companies are now rewriting the books of dead authors to make the language conform with left-wing sensibilities.
One of the most revered children's authors in the nation, I'm not talking about myself, is their latest target.
Also, Joe Biden continues to demonstrate his America Last approach by visiting Ukraine while his own country falls apart.
Marjorie Taylor Greene provokes a heated reaction after suggesting a national divorce to fix our problems.
And conservative media figures continue to criticize me for my mean language.
I have some choice words for them today.
All of that and more on the Matt Wall Show.
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You may recall a couple of years ago when the estate of Theodore Geisel,
who's better known as Dr. Seuss, of course, made the decision to stop selling a number
of Seuss's books because the books featured culturally insensitive words and themes.
One of the books, for example, contained a shocking reference to Eskimos, and we're not allowed to call Eskimos Eskimos anymore for reasons that have never fully been explained.
But it's too late to explain these things to Dr. Seuss himself, as he died 30 years ago.
All they can do is posthumously label his work bigoted and shove a chunk of his catalogue into the memory hole, which is exactly what they did.
Now, many people, the optimistic ones anyway, thought that maybe the whole Seuss saga represented cancel culture at its most absurd.
And at the very least, they figured, it's the most ludicrous example of censoring a dead children's author that we'll ever see.
Can't get worse than that.
But they forget, in spite of my many reminders, that progressivism is progressive like cancer.
It grows and spreads and doesn't stop, can't stop, until its host is dead.
And so this past weekend, another beloved children's author, who died a year before Dr. Seuss, found himself in the woke cult's crosshairs, and this incident actually makes the Seuss cancellation look downright reasonable by comparison.
So the Guardian reports on the efforts by Roald Dahl's publisher to actually rewrite his books.
In order to bring them into line with modern sensibilities.
Reading from the report, it says, Roald Dahl's children's books are being rewritten to remove language deemed offensive by the publisher Puffin.
Puffin has hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author's text to make sure the books, quote, can continue to be enjoyed by all today, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl's works.
Hundreds of changes were made to the original text, and some passages not written by Dahl have been added.
But the Roald Dahl Story Company said, "It's not unusual to review the language during a new print run, and any changes
were small and carefully considered."
Now, if you thought that the DEI consultants were useless parasites, what can we say about professional sensitivity
readers?
I suppose we would say much the same about them, though perhaps we might be tempted to give them a little bit of credit for finding such a profitable yet low-effort grift.
And speaking of low effort, here are some of the changes that were made at their behest.
Quote, edits have been made to descriptions of characters' physical appearances.
The word fat has been cut from every new edition of relevant books, while the word ugly has also been culled, the Daily Telegraph reported.
Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now described as enormous.
In the twits, Mrs. Twit is no longer ugly and beastly, but just beastly.
Well, that's good, because now the line has left open the possibility that Mrs. Twit might be beastly, yet not ugly.
Perhaps she is a big, beastly, beautiful woman.
That might be a somewhat incoherent image.
I can't imagine what a beastly yet attractive person would look like, but at least you get the alliteration there.
Big, beastly, beautiful.
Reading more, it says, in The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald beneath their wigs ends with this new line.
Quote, there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.
I'm surprised that they didn't add yet another line to note also that not all witches are supernatural creatures who create magical potions to turn children into mice, as they do in Dahl's book.
You know, there are other kinds of witches as well.
In fact, we even have witches in Congress, quite a few of them.
One of them used to be Speaker of the House.
It seems the sensitivity readers missed an opportunity to fully combat the stigma against witches.
I'm a little disappointed by that.
Hopefully they'll catch it on the next go-round.
Back to the Guardian says, In previous editions of James and the Giant Peach, the centipede sings, Aunt Sponge was terrifically fat and tremendously flabby at that, and Aunt Spiker was thin as a wire and dry as a bone-only dryer.
This is another important edit.
As we all know, it's deeply offensive to call a woman fat.
"Aunt Sponge was a nasty old brute and deserved to be squashed by the fruit,"
"and Aunt Spiker was much of the same and deserves half of the blame."
This is another important edit. As we all know, it's deeply offensive to call a woman fat.
We should instead be polite and merely call them brutes who deserve to be squished to death.
But, you know, we shouldn't be surprised that these changes make no sense at all.
After all, the woke police, they still haven't quite figured out what to do with fatness.
Because on the one hand, of course they want to stop you from calling people fat because it's intolerant.
But on the other hand, they preach about fat acceptance and declare that fat is beautiful.
But if fat is acceptable and beautiful, then why can't we call people fat?
Shouldn't we, wouldn't we be complimenting them in that case?
I mean, one of the greatest things you could say to someone is, hey, you fat ass, you're calling them beautiful.
So the sensitivity readers are a bit confused on that point, but one thing they know for sure is that any reference to biological sex is, of course, terribly offensive now.
Reading again, it says, references to female characters have disappeared.
Ms.
Trunchbull and Matilda, once a most formidable female, is now a most formidable woman.
Gender-neutral terms have been added in places where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's Oompa Loompas were small men.
They are now small people.
The Cloud Men in James and the Giant Peach have become cloud people.
Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company made the changes in conjunction with Inclusive Minds, which its spokesperson describes as, quote, a collective for people who are passionate about inclusion and accessibility in children's literature.
Alexandra Strick, a co-founder of Inclusive Minds, says that they aim to ensure authentic representation by working closely with the book world and with those who have lived experience of any facet of diversity.
A notice from the publisher sits at the bottom of the copyright page of the latest editions of Dahl's books and says, quote, The wonderful words of Roald Dahl can transport you to different worlds and introduce you to the most marvelous characters.
This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.
Now as I said at the beginning, this is all significantly worse than simply banning books or taking them off the shelves.
It represents a rather startling escalation by the woke brigade.
Because if they had, you know, removed the offensive quote-unquote dull books from circulation, that would be a ridiculous and shameful move just like it was with Dr. Seuss.
But it would at least be honest, I mean more honest at any rate, and it would keep the author's work intact.
But now they've taken the liberty to rewrite the books and change the author's words without his consent to make it more acceptable by their standards.
And you don't need to strain very hard to see where this is going.
I mean, it's one thing to imagine a world where Shakespeare has been entirely removed from the classroom because he was a white male who authored works that contained problematic themes.
That prospect is disturbing enough, if it isn't already happening, which it probably is.
But now imagine a world where kids are taught Shakespeare, except they're reading things that Shakespeare never actually wrote.
I mean, I would rather Shakespeare be cast aside as a toxic white male than retroactively edited to be turned into a woke, transgendered polysexual, or whatever they would do to him.
Yet, that's where we're headed.
Now, the problem with this approach is not simply that it's politically correct.
We have moved way past mere political correctness at this point.
The problem is that, first of all, it's a lie.
So, you may wish that an author had written something a different way and used different language, gone this direction instead of that.
But those wishes are born from the fact that the work is not your work.
It came from someone else's mind.
You wish he had written it a certain way, but he didn't write it that way.
He wrote what he wrote, no matter how you feel about it.
This is no different from rewriting the history books to tell the story of what you think should have happened in history, rather than telling what actually did happen.
And of course, that's exactly what they're going to do with the history books, if they aren't already.
The left believes that it has the moral authority to alter anything it wants to alter, because it doesn't believe that anything that conflicts with their worldview has any right to exist in the first place.
And that's really what this comes down to.
From their perspective, Roald Dahl had no right to author those kinds of books in the first place, because it conflicts with them and it makes them feel bad.
And so he had no right to do that.
And so that gives them the moral license to do whatever they want.
If that means burning the books, banning them, they can do that.
If that means rewriting it, it means that.
This is not only unethical and arrogant in the extreme, editing a dead writer's words so that they sound better to you.
But it also deprives children of the full enrichment and edification that can come from reading the vivid and even maybe sometimes a little upsetting, if the child is an especially sensitive type, words of a great imaginative writer.
See, we tend to worry that this kind of censorship will help to indoctrinate children into wokeness, and we're right to worry about that.
We should be worried about it.
But it's perhaps an even greater concern that it will help to make our children into bland, boring people.
Which, of course, is an inevitable consequence of making them woke.
And if you want to make children bland and boring and bored, there is no better way to do it than to reimagine great children's literature so that it sounds like something written by a diversity consultant.
That is just about the worst and most disrespectful thing you can do to a piece of literature, and it's also a very terrible thing to do to the child who is reading it.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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Yeah, one more note about this.
I think it was the author Matthew Crawford who pointed out an important change in children's cartoon shows in recent years.
Aside from all the explicit left-wing indoctrination that we know about and we talk about all the time, the other major change is that this is the kind of thing that if you watch kids' shows today, it's like you notice it, but you might not be able to put your finger on it until somebody points it out.
So, the other major change is that a kids' cartoon show used to be vividly drawn and the plot and most of the humor would come from the characters experiencing frustration with the physical world, right?
That's what most of the plots revolved around.
The coyote failing to catch the roadrunner, etc, etc.
It's like every single plot was that.
It was a character trying to do something and then he encounters the physical world and maybe he can kind of defy
the laws of physics briefly like the cartoon character that runs over the cliff
and It was running on thin air and then notices that he's
running on thin air and then he falls right?
but but that's only brief and then and then eventually the laws of
physics Reimpose themselves again, and then that's where the plot
and the tension and the humor comes from and there was even violence in these shows
You know, it's cartoonish and it was played for laughs but still characters were shot or blown up or they were
they fell off a cliffs and all the rest of it and And in this funny and childlike way, kids were introduced to a world that will not fully bend to your whims and that has rules and laws that exist apart from your desires.
A world where you're going to encounter frustration and failure and all of that.
But kids' cartoons today are, again, aside from the Blatant, explicit, left-wing propaganda.
Along with that, they're bland, they're sanitized, they all kind of look the same, and there's no frustration.
The characters never are frustrated, especially for cartoon shows that are meant for very young kids.
There's certainly no pain, there's definitely nothing like violence.
Crawford gives the example of the modern Mickey Mouse clubhouse cartoons, where You know, again, it's just a sanitized animation.
It just looks bland and boring.
But on top of that, you know, the house is like magical and it solves all the problems for the characters.
And so, just when you get to the point where you think they're about to be frustrated by something, something magical happens and it's okay.
And that's what we're feeding to kids.
And I think what they're doing with Roald Dahl and rewriting his books is a similar kind of thing.
Just changing the words so that there's nothing that might be a little bit upsetting or a little bit frustrating.
Yeah, describing a character as ugly might be, if a kid is sensitive, it might be, oh, that's a little rude.
So we're going to take all of that out, add disclaimers.
Oh, this character is bald, but there are lots of other bald people, by the way.
Just making everything kind of soft and bland and boring.
And this is all the content that's being fed to kids all the time.
All right.
So Joe Biden went to Ukraine yesterday.
This is supposed to be a very big deal for some reason.
We're supposed to be very impressed by that.
Fox has the story.
It says President Biden's surprise Monday trip to Ukraine was actually an operation that began under the cover of darkness early Sunday morning and included a plane ride on an Air Force C-32 jet.
A motorcade on an empty Polish highway and a long overnight train ride into the war-torn country.
The small two-person print press pool accompanying Biden on the trip found out it was happening just days before it had to arrive at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland in the wee hours of the morning before being forced to hand over their phones before boarding the jet.
The plane was parked in the dark next to a hangar away from the tarmac with the shades drawn.
The plane stopped to refuel.
Okay.
Why am I reading this?
Who cares?
I don't need the whole saga.
He's not James Bond.
He got on a plane, basically, and he went to Ukraine.
What happened?
And you know what?
This would be a lot more impressive and harrowing if, like, Sean Penn hadn't already been there and other celebrities.
And if cable news pundits hadn't already gone there dressed like G.I.
Joes to pretend to be fighting the Russians, every famous left of center person has been to Ukraine at this point.
It's a tourist attraction for these people.
And Biden was among the last to show up, so I find it, for that reason, a little bit less impressive.
Although it is interesting that Biden showed up there, and he's on the tarmac, and you can see they have a place, they mark down a place where he's supposed to stand for the photo op in the middle of a war zone, right?
This is very dangerous, but they took the time to put some tape down so that Biden would know where to stand for the photos.
And they do the photo op, and it's just at that moment when he arrives for the photo op that you hear the air raid sirens going off in the background.
And other journalists that, I don't know, maybe they didn't know exactly what they were saying, but other journalists on the scene reported that it's been a long time since they've heard the air raid sirens, and it just so happens to go off the moment Biden arrives and the cameras are rolling.
Wow.
Very convenient timing to make all this quite dramatic.
And it worked for the media.
They are very impressed.
Here's CNN talking about it.
As our resident historian here, place this in the context, in the pantheon of presidential visits to war zones.
Presidents have visited Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years, but those were U.S.
wars.
This is a Ukrainian war.
No U.S.
military presence on the ground.
How significant?
It's extremely significant.
The United States is wedded more to the Ukraine than ever before.
I go back to history and think of Roosevelt and Churchill when FDR had to sneak off in the dead of night, even had a body double at one point to first meet Winston Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland.
And then, of course, he had all those World War II meetings between Churchill It's worth, I mean, mentioning Churchill because Zelensky has been called the Churchill of our generation.
And Biden going there today, I think it's going to be a moment for the history books.
It's like when John F. Kennedy went to Berlin in 1961 and gave a speech at the height of the Cold War.
Ukraine is the new Berlin.
It's the rally point for NATO and the Western allies.
And I think Biden did something really heroic.
Hmm.
Heroic.
Well, you know, it's nothing like either of those, any of those other historical analogs that he mentioned, because this is a scuffle, well, for a few reasons, but the first reason, most important, is that this is a scuffle between Russia and a frankly irrelevant country, which has no significance outside of that region, no matter how much they want to convince us otherwise, it just doesn't.
And unless we continue to try to make it relevant by intentionally trying to escalate it into a world war.
But there is no reason, maybe I should rephrase, there's no reason why this should have any relevance outside of the region where it's happening.
There is no actual reason why it should matter to Americans which corrupt government controls Ukraine.
Is it going to be Russia or is it going to be Ukraine's current government?
Which of the governments controls the territory of Ukraine?
There's no reason why that should matter to any of us or have any impact on any of us.
But even so, very courageous of Biden.
At least that's MSNBC.
Here they are talking about not only how courageous Biden is, but what a coward Trump was by comparison.
The president has some wind at his back.
I'm not sure that it was all pre-planned, but it has certainly all been well executed.
His back and forth with the nuttiest of the nutty Republicans at the State of the Union, pulling off this trip and these images of defenders of democracy from two very different generations walking shoulder to shoulder in Kiev.
What do you make of this moment in the Biden presidency?
Well, it's very important because in the back of everyone's mind, there's always a contrast.
There's always a comparison.
And this kind of dovetails with what you talked about earlier, that when the president runs for re-election, it is not a referendum on him.
It is a choice.
And if you compare and contrast Donald Trump, Donald Trump was afraid to go to Afghanistan.
I mean, very little courage.
And, you know, having flown into war zones a number of times, both Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Senate, was there moments that it was weird?
Yes, but there was always a sense that you're surrounded by the United States military.
You're enveloped by the United States military.
When that Air Force won.
Good.
Well, and she also, she had to throw that in there.
She's also quite courageous herself.
Biden is way more courageous than Trump, they say.
This very much has the whiff of, like, my dad could beat up your dad type of thing.
That's basically what this is.
Meanwhile, we're supposed to believe That there was, like, any chance at all that Biden would be a battle casualty.
That's what we're supposed to believe.
That there was even the smallest chance that they were putting the President of the United States in a position where he could be killed by Putin.
As if they'd ever take that chance.
Then again, as I say this, maybe they would.
I mean, the Democrats are desperate to find someone else for 2024, after all.
Not to start any fresh new conspiracy theories, but the point is that this was more pageantry meant to puff up this Ukraine war with Biden visiting, and visiting, by the way, while a town in Ohio is still dealing with being poisoned after a train derailment.
I mean, we have massive problems.
We can't even keep our trains on the rails, and so that's the kind of problems we have here, not to mention at our border and everywhere else, and Biden is going to Ukraine instead.
Here's what he tweeted about it.
He said, One year later, Kyiv still stands.
Ukraine stands.
Democracy stands.
America and the world stands with Ukraine.
Well, no, America doesn't.
D.C.
does.
Washington, D.C.
stands with Ukraine.
America doesn't, because America is comprised of people, and the majority of people don't care one way or another about Ukraine, and there's no reason why they should.
And still, to this moment, the proponents of America's involvement in the Ukraine war, the people that want us to continue sending billions of dollars over there and weapons, and the people that are pushing for even more involvement, potentially boots on the ground and all the rest of it, still, I mean, these people have had now a year to come up with some kind of cogent argument for why we should care about this, and they still can't do it.
This is the best they can do.
What you just read in that tweet.
Democracy stands.
That's it.
That is still the entire argument.
Now, when this first started happening, you heard warnings about how, well, no matter how you feel about Ukraine, America might have to get involved here because Putin, you know, he's not going to stop at Ukraine.
He's going to try to invade all of Europe.
We heard all this kind of stuff, and that hasn't happened.
And it's not going to happen.
That's just not a plausible scenario we have to worry about, about Putin trying to take over the world.
So that hasn't happened, and instead that means that they're stuck with this.
They're stuck with a shilling for the Ukraine war on the basis of freedom and democracy.
Never mind the fact that, yet again, the Ukrainian government is not a beacon of freedom and democracy.
It's one of the most corrupt governments in the world.
And even if it was, you know, there are There are billions of people all throughout the world whose freedoms are being infringed upon.
To include people that live in this country, by the way.
I mean, after what we just went through with the COVID lockdowns and everything, we know how precarious our own freedoms are.
But, you know, versions of that are happening all over the world.
And people that are in really difficult spots, there are wars and conflicts and larger powers trying to impose themselves onto weaker powers and weaker people.
That's happening all over the globe.
And so why is this specifically the one area that we have to be interested in?
Why should this matter to us more than what's happening anywhere else?
They can't explain it.
All they have, even now, after all this time, all they have are bumper sticker slogans about standing for freedom and democracy.
And that's the kind of thing that might have been compelling to a lot of Americans, I don't know, 20 years ago?
But it hasn't been for the past two decades.
Because we've seen quite enough of American money being spent, more importantly, American lives being lost in pursuit of defending quote-unquote freedom of other people in other parts of the world.
Who very often, as it turns out, aren't even interested in our idea of freedom.
Closer to home, this is from the Washington Examiner.
Reports, uh, it's President's Day and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene's got a plan.
Instead of celebrating the birthdays of America's founding fathers, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, the, uh, Georgia... America's founding fathers, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
That's the way the Washington Examiner frames it, anyway.
The Georgia GOP firebrand is calling for a national divorce, tweeting that red and blue states need to separate and go their own ways.
She's also advocating shrinking the federal government.
We need a national divorce, Green tweeted.
From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrats' traitorous America-last politics, we are done.
And so, that's it.
She tweeted about the national divorce and obviously there's the expected freakout over this and What's even more expected is that the freakout deprives us of any chance to have an interesting conversation about it, at least on a national level.
And what I'll say about it, and it is, it's not, it's not every day that a member of the United States Congress actually floats the idea of a national divorce.
I mean, I'm not sure when's the last time it happened, you know, after the Civil War.
I'm sure it's happened before, but it's not, it's an uncommon thing.
So that is noticeable.
Although she's not the only person to talk about it, and this is something this is a it's a sentiment that I understand I've expressed similar sentiments myself many times going back years You know and it's that's why I say it's not it's something worth discussing Like if we were capable of being adults and just having a conversation It's not a crazy thing to talk about Because it is true that as I talk about all the time our the divide In this country, and in our culture, is deeper and wider and more unbridgeable than it's ever been in American history.
And that includes the Civil War.
I'm talking about the ideological divide.
When you have two sides, and it's not as simple as two sides because there are factions on the different sides and everything, but just speaking generally, you have two sides that do not share anything.
We have nothing in common.
We have no shared values whatsoever.
And I've gone through this exercise several times in the past of just asking people, like, what do you think?
Can you name one shared value that binds Americans together?
One thing we can agree on?
And I'm talking about fundamental, basic things.
And there really is nothing.
You want to answer, well, we all believe in freedom.
But that clearly is not the case.
Or at the very least, that will raise the question of, okay, what is freedom?
How do we understand that term?
And then you find out that for a lot of people, they say they value freedom, but for them, freedom means, for example, mothers killing their children.
That's the kind of freedom they talk about.
And it means children being liberated and freed from the clutches of their parents by an overarching federal government and a school system that steps in between them and severs the bond between parent and child.
That's what they mean by freedom.
So we don't have freedom in common.
We don't have anything in common.
And that is a serious problem and one we should be talking about.
What is it that binds America together?
We are people, but in what sense are we a people?
And it would seem like the only thing is just the borders that we all happen to live within the same borders, but then of course those borders are being erased, so we don't even have that anymore.
So what's left?
That's not crazy that I'm talking about national divorce, but the problem is one of geography.
It's a simple logistical problem that I think makes a plan like this totally unfeasible.
It can't happen.
It's an issue of geography.
Yeah, there is a deep and unavoidable, unbridgeable ideological divide, but that divide is not reflected by the geography of the country.
There are not clear geographical dividing lines between the two sides.
We talk about red and blue states, but that is a massive oversimplification.
Because even in the reddest of states, most of the time the big cities are going to be deep blue.
And even in blue states, you have pockets of the state that are red.
So how exactly do you divide all this?
Like, who gets Texas, for example?
I mean, every state you could do this.
So there's just no way.
If you could divide things geographically that easily, If we could say that, well, you know, we've got this deep ideological divide, and most of the people who are on the right side of that divide live in these states, and most of the people that are on the other side live in those states.
If you could say that, then I think it becomes very practical, and we should really be considering the National Divorce Strategy.
But that's not the case, and so I don't see how it works.
Where do we go from there?
Like, what's a better strategy?
I don't know.
That's why I said we should be talking about it.
Talking about it in a frank and, you know, uncomfortable way.
Nobody wants to think of their country this way.
We don't want to think of our country as one that is, like, where we say the word United States of America.
We don't want to think that we are united in name only.
We might not want to think about it, but it is the case.
And we need to confront that.
I wanted to play this clip, too.
Larry Hogan is the former Maryland governor and is gearing up for a presidential run, we think, that's sure to earn him about as much support as probably—he'll get as much support from the Republican base as Michael Bloomberg got from the Democrat base in 2020.
It's going to be about on par with that, which is to say no support at all.
But here's Larry Hogan going after Ron DeSantis over the weekend.
My question to you is not whether this is a legitimate issue to be talking about.
It's about whether this is the main issue or not.
Do you view this as the main issue for 2024?
No, I think it's an important issue, and I do hear it.
And people are concerned about this as I travel around the country because, you know, most people just don't think we should be talking about, you know, things like sex to young kids.
And the parents want to be more involved in the decisions about what their kids are being taught.
However, I think some of this rhetoric is demanding that things be done a certain way or that you can't say this or you can't say that.
We've got to be really careful about that.
Does it feel like you're going the other way?
It's sort of like you're, on one hand, Governor DeSantis claiming, hey, I don't want all of this, but I'm going to tell you exactly what you can say and I'm going to tell you what you can't say.
Well, I'm a small government, you know, common sense conservative, and to me it sounds like big government and authoritarian.
You have to agree with me, and I'm going to tell you what you can and can't do.
But it's an issue.
It's not the most important issue.
I think more people are concerned about the economy, inflation, they're concerned about crime.
But education is one of the things that we've got to talk about.
Yeah, this is, I mean, this is...
You put him in the same camp as Nikki Haley or any of these other Republicans that are looking at jumping into the 2024 race.
They're going to run campaigns that might have had a chance in 2008.
That's especially the case for Nikki Haley.
Nikki Haley.
I don't know, we're not talking about Nikki Haley, that was Larry Hogan, but they don't exactly look the same.
But Nikki Haley would have been a formidable Republican nominee for the presidency in 2008.
But it's not 2008 anymore, so she's not anymore.
And Larry Hogan's in the same kind.
It's just kind of your milquetoast, whatever, moderate Republican.
thing and he doesn't even have the courage to just say what he really thinks and what he really thinks is that he doesn't
care at all about education, doesn't care at all about what kids
are taught, he doesn't care at all about about anything that has to do with the culture, any of the
so-called social, he just doesn't care about that.
He doesn't want to say that, so instead he says, "Well, it's an issue we should talk to, but important issue,
it's not the most important issue, it's a field and there are both sides to this and there are two sides."
People care much more about the economy.
People do care about the economy, but they don't care more about the economy than they care
about their kids and their kids' education.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Like, people wake up in the morning and, yeah, they're worried about how they're going to pay their bills, but they're also and primarily worried about their children and the future that their children are going to have.
And so that is one of, that's like the most deep-seated concern that an American has, especially a parent, that a parent has.
And this idea that it's, well, I'm not a big government conservative.
I'm a small government conservative.
That's nonsense, first of all.
That's the other thing about these establishment Republicans.
They all describe themselves as small government.
All they ever do is expand the government.
That's all they ever do.
I mean, we've had so many small-government conservatives that go into the White House, they're elected to Congress, they end up in governors' mansions, and they don't do a single damn thing to actually actively shrink the size of government.
They just don't.
All they do is expand it.
And Larry Hogan's the same deal.
Small-government conservatism is just another bumper-sticker slogan that he uses, and it doesn't even make any sense in this context.
We're talking about public schools.
These are government facilities.
So, let me see if I understand this correctly.
The person who runs the government in the state, you know, the executive of the state, who's the governor, for him to exercise any control over what's being done in the schools, which are government facilities, that's big government?
They are government facilities!
Now, if you want to argue that the existence of the public school system to begin with is a symptom of big government, and we should get away from the public school system entirely and dismantle it, burn it to the ground and dance around its ashes, if that's what you want to argue, then now you're singing my tune.
But that's not what he's saying.
He's saying that public school system is great, government facilities where kids are brought and indoctrinated.
But if anyone, whether it's Ron DeSantis or anybody else, including private citizens, if anybody criticizes or scrutinizes what's happening in those government facilities, then we become proponents of big government.
It's completely and totally incoherent.
But what else can you expect from these people?
Let's get now to the comment section.
First of all, I have to tell you that I did learn a valuable lesson over the weekend.
And the lesson that I learned is to not let my kids throw axes at my faces.
And my wife came home with this.
It's actually a great toy.
It's a toy Velcro.
It's an axe-throwing toy.
The axes have Velcro on them.
And of course, the first thing I thought is that we need to have someone stand in front of the target so that the axes can be thrown, like, around their head.
Looks like a danger act, you know, that you see on America's Got Talent or something like that.
And I thought that's what we should do.
Of course, my kids volunteered me as the first victim in this game.
And here's the brief replay on that one.
Let's watch that.
Go, Josh.
[Groaning]
[Laughter]
You're supposed to try not to hit me.
You know, I've watched that replay a few times, and this is starting to feel flagrant and intentional.
I have to be honest with you.
She put that axe right between my eyes.
And some people have asked me, why did I think that that was a good idea to do?
And the answer is, I never said it was a good idea.
It was just an idea.
You know, this is the fundamental confusion that people have about me, maybe about men in general.
Not that all men would make themselves the target for an axe-throwing game.
I'm not accusing all men of that.
I just mean that we don't need to think that something is a good idea In fact, I have matured a little bit.
We could know that it's a bad idea and do it anyway.
Sometimes the fact that it's a bad idea is what makes it appealing.
And it's not that I'm totally undiscerning when it comes to these things.
In fact, I have matured a little bit.
I feel like I have to reclaim my pride a bit and tell you that, for instance,
two weekends ago, I took my machete out to help my son clear a path in the woods behind our house.
He's building a fort and he wanted me to help clear a path to his fort.
And so I, you know, I look for any excuse to use the machete because it's a lot of fun.
And so I did.
And I briefly, I briefly, I briefly felt the urge to try to impress my son by flipping the machete in the air and catching it on the handle.
And of course, I would make sure he was nowhere near.
And I briefly had that urge, but I didn't.
I didn't do it.
And I didn't bring it up either, because I know if I brought it up, then he would try it.
So the thought crossed my mind, and if this was 20 years ago, and I had a machete, someone was dumb enough to give me a machete 20 years ago, and I had that thought, I would have just done it, and I wouldn't have a hand today.
But, I didn't.
I said, that's not a safe thing to do.
And now I just stick with, uh, I satisfy my urges for dangerous stunts by using styrofoam axes.
So I have, I think, I have grown, I think, is what I'm trying to say.
Alright, Stacy says, uh, Matt, we've all seen way too many sci-fi movies.
Also Matt, desperate for an alien invasion.
Well, yeah.
Exhibit A. I don't deny that.
So when I criticize people for watching too many sci-fi movies and then, you know, imagining that Siri or whatever, some AI chatbot's going to take over the world, that they've seen too many sci-fi movies, it leads them to that conclusion.
I fully admit that I have watched way too many alien invasion movies.
I mean, I've watched any movie that involves an alien invasion or people encountering aliens.
I've watched them all.
And I am very much influenced by that.
And I don't deny it at all.
Doesn't mean I'm wrong though.
Doesn't mean I'm wrong.
Let's see, Evan says, "I'm not worried that AI is turning into a mediocre woman with a liberal arts degree.
I'm worried that society is actually run by a bunch of mediocre women with liberal arts degrees."
Well, I think you're right.
And actually picking up on that theme, this kind of brings me to my thought about this AI stuff
and the concern that, well, AI and robots are going to become human.
They're gonna become sentient, conscious, and self-aware, and they're gonna take over
the world.
I'm less concerned about that than I am about it going the other way.
I think that's what we have to worry about.
It's not robots turning into humans, it's rather humans turning into robots, effectively.
I think that's what's happening.
We're already sort of seeing that with people who, you know, they carry the phones around, they can't be without them, they're staring at the phones, all the words are totally dependent on the screens and everything.
It's like basically becoming these programmed robots.
You can't even drive, you know, five minutes down the street to Walgreens without using your GPS.
Like, we are turning into, we are sacrificing much of what makes us human and becoming robots ourselves.
So I think that's It's not as, you know, it's not as cinematic of a prospect, but I think that's what's actually happening.
Thomas says, there are moments when Matt disses someone.
It's so true and so cold that you feel it in your soul.
Chelsea took a hit on that one.
Yeah, she did, but she started it.
Remember that.
She started it.
And I do think this idea that like she, the other person saying, well, they started it.
The idea that that's not, A good excuse?
I mean, sometimes it's not, but sometimes it is.
Like, if someone starts an altercation, then they started it.
I think it's perfectly valid to point that out.
And finally, Kitty Foods says, someone got an F on their science fair project because the federal government shot it down.
Yeah, in order for Joe Biden to salvage his own pride and his own ego, he's out there shooting down science fair projects that people have worked very hard on.
I find that really offensive.
You know, it's no secret that the left hates our country, wants to rewrite history, and even our children's books, as we've already reviewed.
They villainize our heroes and omit key details from the historical record, like the fact that on Christmas night, 1776, George Washington only crossed the Delaware River in a sneak attack against British forces after shaving With a Jeremy's Razors.
That is a historical fact.
Few people know that.
It's a sad reflection of our great nation going woke.
But like Washington before us, you can fight back against woke tyranny simply by picking up a magnificent Jeremy's Razor during our 30% off President's Day Sale.
It's time we celebrate history, not cancel it.
So unless you want our founding fathers renamed to our founding non-birthing parents, go to jeremysrazors.com today and get 30% off any razor.
That's jeremysrazors.com today.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Okay, so it's been a week since my brief but now infamous segment on this show about trans activist Dylan Mulvaney.
The tweet with that clip has been viewed nearly 20 million times on Twitter alone.
That doesn't count all the other platforms where it's been shared and reposted.
As you know, all I did in the segment was speak honestly to Dylan and about Dylan, a man who degrades and appropriates womanhood while shilling for child mutilation and sterilization and does all of it for profit.
Real women have tried to tell Dylan how demeaning his woman-face routine is, but he only doubles down on the mockery in response.
And most recently, he released a video bragging about what an attractive woman he is and warning women that he could steal their husbands, quote-unquote.
And this was the video that provoked my response, in which I simply told him the plain and unvarnished truth about himself, that he is not a woman, that he doesn't look like one, that the whole degrading display is not beautiful or remotely attractive.
That he is imitating something he will never truly be.
In other words, I said out loud what most people already think.
But some of those people, the ones who agree with what I said and were already thinking it, were nonetheless very upset by my remarks and perhaps upset is an understatement.
They've called me mean and cruel and sadistic and this has been going on for a week now with no sign of letting up.
They've called me a bully and a grifter.
They've said that I'm only And remember, these are people on the right, or at least not openly on the left, saying this.
Now I've already addressed the critics on the show, but the criticism has only gotten louder and more intense since then, and many conservatives in media, or at least again people in media who do not identify as leftists, Have joined in the dog pile.
And what began as a three or four minute commentary on Dylan Mulvaney in the middle of an hour long podcast on Tuesday, has now turned into something of a demarcation, kind of a dividing line.
It's been a very revealing moment.
Enlightening.
And I think for that reason, it's worth revisiting one more time, so that I can make, or perhaps reiterate or emphasize, a few crucial points.
In order to frame those points, I'm going to play a quick montage of some right-of-center media figures and podcasters sharing their criticisms of my Mulvaney comments.
And what you'll hear in these clips doesn't come close to representing the harshest rebukes that have been directed at me, but they do capture the basic point that all my critics have been trying to make in one form or another with varying levels of outrage.
Listen.
Eh, it wasn't that good.
Well... He was just being mean.
Well, I was gonna say, like, what he is saying is actually genuinely, like, really mean.
Yeah.
The whole thing is true.
Like, it's not like it's untrue.
It's not like... Dylan Mulvaney is a male, and he will always be a male.
And no matter how much makeup or face feminization or whatever, you'll always be a male.
This is, like, a reality.
I have a lot of contempt for these people.
Like, a lot of contempt.
You're talking about, like, woman-face people.
Yeah.
You're not talking about Matt.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
Well, I sometimes have contempt for Matt, but less often than I have contempt for Dylan Mulvaney.
I get where he's coming from because, like, I have so much contempt for these people and the more that this drags on and the more that they denigrate females, the more that anybody denigrates females, the more angry I get and the more contempt I have for people who participate in that, in whatever form that comes in.
I don't know if there's a necessity or a point in just being, like, mean.
Here's my take on it.
And I, you know, obviously I'm much softer generally, but like, there's nothing he said that isn't true, but it accomplishes nothing.
All it does, it's just so mean that like, it won't resonate and it won't change minds.
And I will absolutely say, yeah, it's mean.
Yeah, Matt Walsh is being mean.
I mean, come on.
Matt Walsh insults Dylan Mulvaney as eerie, weird, and bizarre.
You can get the point across without saying that.
The major divide on this video is whether or not the language was a little too harsh towards Dylan.
You guys know me.
You watch my show.
You know how I talk about these issues.
I am on the side of this being too harsh, and I know there are many who will disagree with me.
But to me, there is no need for vitriol.
I mean, do you reckon he's into her?
It sort of does look like the sort of thing somebody would say when they're slightly obsessed with somebody.
Yeah, exactly.
And look, factually he's not wrong.
Yeah.
Is he?
No.
Factually?
Yeah.
I don't look... If your job is to wean hearts and minds, I don't think this is the best way of doing it.
What if it's your job to get clicks online?
Again!
But do clicks lead to changing of opinion?
No.
I don't think he's trying to change anyone's opinion.
What do you think he's trying to do then?
He's trying to make people on his side feel like he's done something cool and said something that they think.
I think.
Do you think that?
Yeah.
Well, he's not trying to change Dylan Mulvaney's mind, is he?
Yeah, I completely agree.
I completely agree.
I just... I just look at that and just go...
Even people on his own side were like, "Hold on a bit, mate."
Okay, so that was Tim Pool, Jeremy from the YouTube channel The Quartering,
Sidney Watson, Amala Ekponobi from PragerU, and the guys from the podcast Trigonometry.
Now, one thing I want to be clear about here is that I'm not mad at any of these people.
There are no hard feelings. We can disagree and all that.
It's fine.
I could have done without the snideness and the lame cheap shot from the Trigonometry guys at
the end, especially in the video where they're supposed to be lecturing me about the value of
of taking the high road.
When you're going to do that, you can't start the video by insulting me, but we'll leave that to the side for now.
Instead, all I'd like to do is address the overarching criticism one last time.
First, you'll notice the connecting thread.
They all agree that I'm right, that what I said is factually correct.
But they think that it goes too far by saying it out loud.
Mulvaney's the one running around like some cartoon of a woman passing out camp pods in the women's room and meeting with the president to defend the mutilation of children.
But I went too far.
Well, see, this is where we differ.
Because in the culture war, I don't think it's possible to go too far by speaking truth.
The truth is the truth.
It is what it is.
It's the reality.
Are we going to defend it?
Or are we going to conceal it?
Are we going to embrace it?
Are we going to hide from it?
You can't have it both ways.
When it comes to gender ideology, the truth is ugly.
It is brutal and harsh and disgusting.
I wish it wasn't that way, but it is.
I didn't make it that way.
I didn't create the ugliness.
I'm merely pointing to it and saying, look at this.
Look at it for what it is.
But you would rather that I soften the blow a little bit, that I dress the truth up to make it prettier, more palatable.
You want me to lie to protect the feelings of our enemies.
And make no mistake, Dylan Mulvaney is our enemy.
He is an open, visible, active, and passionate advocate for the abuse of children, the war on fundamental truth, and the destruction of human society as we know it.
You wish to defeat this man in a manner that will not make him feel bad about himself, but I'm here to tell you that you are delusional.
I'm not going to protect your feelings any more than I'll protect his.
You are deluding yourself.
We got into this position in our culture precisely by valuing politeness over truth.
We got here by doing exactly as you would have me continue doing and what you blame me for not doing.
We got here by refusing to speak the plain truth and by allowing the anti-truth brigade to emotionally blackmail us into silence.
They used their own mental fragility as a cudgel to beat us into submission.
That's the threat, right?
And we let them get away with it.
Or you do, anyway.
I won't.
Second, you say that I'm not going to convince the other side with this kind of rhetoric.
But here's what you have to understand.
This is very important.
Convincing the other side is not my primary objective.
This is the core difference between you and me.
I'm not looking to reach an understanding with these people.
I'm not interested in compromise and dialogue.
For those who castrate children and attack the very concept of truth and erode the foundations of human civilization, my goal is to defeat and humiliate and demoralize them.
Okay, I want to destroy everything they stand for.
The other side is not interested in compromise.
They want nothing less than your unconditional surrender.
We have to meet them with that same energy or we will lose or continue losing.
And by the way, this is also a good strategy because it rallies people to our side.
It emboldens the troops.
It lets people know that it's okay to speak up and to speak truthfully.
You know, it's often said that you shouldn't preach to the choir.
That's basically what they were saying at the end of that clip there.
Just pandering.
He's pandering to his own audience.
This is a message that's meant for his own audience.
Well, God forbid!
God forbid I speak to my own audience on my podcast!
No.
Preaching to the choir is a good thing.
We need to do more of it.
Because if the choir is demoralized and scared and cowering in silence, then you damn well better preach to them.
What kind of congregation can you hope to have when even the choir is too afraid to sing?
And our choir, those who agree with us, the many millions of them, have been cowed into submission.
They are nervous.
They are timid, like you.
And then you come along and say that we should ignore them and instead tailor our message for a group that hates us and will hate us no matter what we say or do?
This is not just morally wrong, it's also terrible strategy.
Okay?
It is a dumb strategy.
In fact, it's exactly what the churches have done for decades.
And it's why most of them are dying.
They water down their preaching to appeal to the crowd, a crowd that isn't interested in the message no matter how softly it's peddled.
And while at best, because they did that, they bore to death and at worst actively alienate the very people who are actually sitting in the pews.
That's what the churches do.
They have people sitting in the pews who come to hear it, and then they give their preaching, which is designed to appeal to people who are outside the building and not even sitting there.
But the people that are outside the building, they don't come in to hear any more of it.
Instead, the people that were actually sitting there get up and leave.
Conservatism has made the same mistake.
And at what point do we learn the lessons that our own recent history seeks to teach us?
Now, you say that we can't win hearts and minds by being nice.
Because, by the way, I'm not saying that we're only preaching to the choir.
That's not it.
We also do want to convince people.
But guess what?
You don't convince people by being nice.
You don't.
At least not on a cultural level.
I mean, where did you get this idea?
Where did you arrive at this conclusion?
That the way to win the culture is by being nice.
Is that how the left won the culture?
Have you been paying attention at all?
They have seized hold of our society, indoctrinating entire generations, and they didn't do it with niceness.
They didn't win these flies with honey.
They did it by being bold and aggressive and by making their opposition's arguments seem not only wrong, but utterly horrific and insane.
That's how they did it.
See, it turns out that the tone of your argument is often more important than the substance of it.
And the tone that actually wins the day on a cultural level is the one that is unwavering and which paints the opposition as so repulsive that you shouldn't even take their position into consideration.
Now, the only difference is that they do that to us dishonestly, right?
They make the truth seem insane.
But what they're peddling actually is insane.
We have allowed them to make the truth seem crazier than actual craziness.
Okay?
We take their ideas more seriously than they take ours, but their ideas are insane lunacy!
And we lend them more legitimacy than they will lend to us when we are speaking the truth and they are babbling nonsense.
You think this is a good strategy?
What is the evidence that this strategy works?
We moderate our tone, we seek to kill them with kindness, while they recruit legions by doing exactly the opposite.
Again, I ask you, when will you learn?
Now, finally, if you sense anger in the words that I use when discussing this topic, you're right.
That is one crime I will confess to.
I am angry.
When I look at what these people have done to our country, the devastation they have wrought on a generation of children and adults alike, the bleakness and ugliness of their worldview, the moral and intellectual chaos they leave in their wake, yes, I get very angry.
And when I consider that my own children must inherit this culture?
That Dylan Mulvaney and his ilk will prey upon my children and try to turn my own sons and daughters into mutilated, mutant, self-loathing, hollow, twisted shells just like themselves?
Well, my anger then turns into more of a boiling rage.
And I know that I will do whatever is necessary, and I will speak whatever truths are necessary, to protect my kids from this hellish, God-forsaken madness.
Now, I have personally heard from many parents, more than I can count, who tell me versions of the same horror story.
A beautiful and innocent kid, one day, seemingly out of nowhere, gets sucked into the gender cult and is devoured by it.
The child they held as a baby and raised and gave their lives to and loved and still love becomes suddenly unrecognizable.
All of their innocence and light and beauty just drained out of them, replaced by this self-cannibalizing madness.
For a parent to see this happen to a child, it is a fate worse than death.
I would rather be dead than have that happen to my kids.
See, the thing that I most despise about Dylan Mulvaney is that he is part of a movement which actively seeks to turn my children into Dylan Mulvaney.
That's why I'm entitled to my anger and to whatever language I use to convey it.
I will say whatever I want to say and I will be justified in saying it because these people are after my kids and yours.
And everyone else's?
And you're worried that I'm being a little rude?
Well you see, when it comes to my children, the children that I cherish more than my own life, if you think mean words go too far, then you would be very shocked to hear how far I would really go to protect them.
Trust me, words are the least of it.
So yes, My words reflect anger, because I am angry.
But the problem is not that I'm angry.
The problem is that you aren't nearly angry enough.
And that is why the Be Nice Conservatives are finally, today, cancelled.
I'll move over to the Members Block.
If you're not a member yet, become a member and use code WALSH at checkout for two months free on all annual plans.
Hope to see you there.
If not, talk to you tomorrow.
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