Ep. 1131 - Media Panics Over 'Dangerous' Trad Wife Trend
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the media is warning about a dangerous and perverse new trend that has taken over TikTok. It's called being a stay at home mom. Very scary stuff, at least as far as the Left is concerned. Also, journalists have managed to dig up some shocking dirt on Ron DeSantis. It turns out that he has bad table manners. Plus, are UFOs landing on military bases and using their alien energy to give people traumatic brain injuries? In our Daily Cancellation, we tackle what may ultimately go down as the dumbest internet outrage of the year.
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, the media is warning about a dangerous and perverse new trend that has taken over TikTok.
It's called being a stay-at-home mom.
Very scary stuff, at least as far as the left is concerned.
Also, journalists have managed to dig up some shocking dirt on Ron DeSantis.
Turns out that he has bad table manners, which is a big deal, I guess.
Plus, are UFOs landing on military bases and using their alien energy to give people traumatic brain injuries?
The answer is yes, they are, but we'll talk about it.
In our daily cancellation, we will tackle what may ultimately go down as the dumbest internet outrage of the year.
All of that and more today on The Matt Walsh Show.
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Recently, our cultural authority figures, the people who decide what we're supposed to think and what we're supposed to do and what our values and goals and aspirations are supposed to be, have become very alarmed by a perverse and dangerous new trend among young women in particular.
Of course, I'm not talking about the trend where young women have their breasts removed and then start injecting themselves with testosterone so that their hair falls out and they grow beards and they become infertile.
The gatekeepers are not concerned about that trend at all.
If anything, they're worried that the trend isn't even more popular than it already is.
No, instead, they're deeply worried about women who choose the so-called trad wife lifestyle.
Over the past couple of years, a growing number of women have started posting TikTok videos describing and documenting their day-to-day existence as trad wives, quote-unquote.
What is a trad wife?
Well, she is a woman who stays home to take care of the house, takes care of the children, while her husband goes to work.
She does most of the cooking and the cleaning.
She handles the lion's share of the domestic labor while relying on her husband to be the provider and breadwinner.
In other words, she is just a normal woman doing what many millions of other normal women have done before her.
Which is why my only objection really to the tradwife trend is that we're calling it a trend, and we're giving it a cutesy name and a hashtag.
That's my only problem with it.
My wife would fit the description of a quote-unquote tradwife, but not because she's taking part in a TikTok trend.
We've been living this way for 10 years.
And I wouldn't really call it a lifestyle either, but rather a system.
That works for us, just as it has worked for the majority of families all over the world since the dawn of human civilization.
Even before the Industrial Age and the advent of the modern nine-to-five job, before that, the phrase or the term stay-at-home mom didn't exist.
Still, even then, most families featured a man who would go out, whether to the fields to farm or the forest to hunt, or later to the office to earn a paycheck, and a woman who stays in the home to care for the children.
This is a very standard arrangement.
The women on TikTok aren't inventing a trend, but rather they're partaking in a way of life that is ancient and enduring and battle-tested.
But that's not how the left sees it.
As an article on foxnews.com reports, quote, donning elaborate dresses,
fastening an apron around their waist and popping in their finest pearl earrings,
or at least some iteration of pearls, for another round of household chores or cooking,
more and more young women are following in the footsteps of the quintessential mid-century housewife,
thanks to the latest TikTok trend.
But while some women are eager to shirk all the hustle and bustle of today's corporate world
and channel Barbara Billingsley as June Cleaver, Others are none too happy with the trend.
Quote, the new trend for submissive women has a dark heart and history, reads one headline from The Guardian.
An article from Hype Bay slapped the videos as disturbing, writing that they, quote, typically feature a cis-straight white woman longing for the 50s, an era where some women could opt out of participating in the corporate working world and be stay-at-home mothers instead.
And a third from Grazia Magazine accused the trend of, quote, romanticizing an era where sexism and racism ruled.
We can also add a recent CNN article which calls trad wives, otherwise known as housewives or stay-at-home moms, a, quote, fringe subculture.
Meanwhile, a piece by Insider says that many of these women are promoting white supremacist views.
This was the argument made this week in a video by a left-wing media organization called Novara Media.
A woman named Ash Sarkar argues that tradwives are really just agents of a far-right political agenda.
Here she is.
Though the idea of women being confined to their home while men do things like go outside and work isn't exactly new, the image of 1950s suburban domesticity has been given a new lease of life by the gals on TikTok.
Can you imagine?
Me, the wife of that boorish, brainless...
Some younger millennials and zoomers have decided to embrace living la vida casserole, dedicating themselves to cooking, cleaning and child-rearing while their husbands or boyfriends, I don't know, chop firewood or go to their job in human resources.
And look, I'm not saying there's anything inherently degrading about being a mum or making nice meals.
I like cooking elaborate dinners.
For that matter, my boyfriend does too.
But the tradwife trend isn't just a way to talk about the experience of being a woman and doing domestic labour.
It's saying that being a woman or expressing your femininity most fully means doing all the domestic labour.
Men and women are meant to have rigidly distinct roles in the home, in their relationships and crucially, in economic activity.
So this isn't just about personal choice or individual preferences, it's advancing a right-wing political ideology and dressing it up as a lifestyle.
So, why is this important?
Three things.
These women are often really young, in their 20s, and they're preaching the values of submitting to a husband to an audience of other young women.
The tradwife trend doesn't exist in isolation.
It's linked to deeply regressive political and social movements such as Christian and white nationalism and anti-feminism.
Feminism is an ideology which cannot be defended by feminists.
It's part of a wider shift of young people being dissatisfied with neoliberalism and wanting social change.
Well, she's right about that last point.
Not any of the rest of it, but the last point anyway.
But before we flesh that out, let's consider a few other points.
First, you see how stigmatization is perhaps the left's most common and useful tool?
Always has been.
I mean, even as they claim that they want people to be free to live their lives without judgment, the truth is that they have a very rigid idea about what sorts of lifestyles should be embraced.
And the standard is very simple, actually.
It's not complicated.
We should celebrate any and all lifestyles that would not be traditionally considered normal.
Okay?
That's the one rule.
So, live how you want, just don't be normal.
That's why they use a term like fringe subculture to describe a housewife in an apron who would, you know, but they would never put such a label on a man in a wig and a skirt standing up to pee in the women's restroom.
He's not part of a fringe subculture.
Instead, a 25-year-old woman with two kids and a husband baking a casserole, she's the fringe weirdo, the degenerate pervert.
Now, if that same woman was doing all the same things, but happened to actually be a man, then she, or he in this case, would be revered as a bold and powerful woman daring to live her life as she wishes.
The problem with the actual real woman living this way is that she, again, is normal.
And while they shame normalcy as perverse, and they treat perversion as normal, they somehow have succeeded in convincing many conservatives to not respond in kind.
As we should.
So they will openly call stay-at-home moms a fringe subculture while insisting that we must never use such language to describe lifestyles that are actually degenerate.
And again, many conservatives willingly play along with this.
They willingly play by this rule.
The left accuses the trad wife of engaging in a political act.
But the truth is that, you know what they're really angry about?
They're angry that she isn't engaging in a political act.
She's simply living in a way that is healthy and traditional, and she's prioritizing her family.
She is not turning her entire existence into a political statement.
She is focused on things deeper and more meaningful than that.
And that is what infuriates them.
Remember that these are people who've structured their whole lives around opposing traditional values.
They're not even pursuing happiness or fulfillment or meaning.
They'll settle for misery so long as their misery is a protest against the value systems they despise.
Except that, ultimately, their misery only confirms and supports that very same value system.
And that's where the woman in the video had it right, I think.
People are deeply dissatisfied with the life that leftism has given them.
These so-called trad wives, they grew up in a society that told them that men and women are the same, that we ought to have exactly identical roles in society, that it's demeaning, it's oppressive to prioritize raising children and caring for your family, that fulfillment is found in Serving your boss rather than your spouse.
That a strong and independent woman is one who depends on her employer rather than her husband.
They were raised in a culture that takes all of these ideas for granted.
They were socialized and conditioned to accept them as gospel truth.
And many of them did for a time.
And then discovered that it was all a lie.
You know, the most basic problem with leftism is that it is just hollow at its core.
It doesn't have an answer, or at least not a satisfying answer, to the question of why we're here on this earth and what we're supposed to be doing with our time.
This ambiguity, this lack of answers, is presented to us as freedom, but it's the freedom of being lost in the woods, the freedom of having no idea where to go or why.
That's not freedom, that's abandonment.
This is what has happened to multiple generations of Americans.
They've been brought down a path with promises of happiness and fulfillment around the corner, and then they were just left there, abandoned.
This is the source of much of the epidemic of despair, what we now call depression in our society.
It stems from this, not from mental illness, but from this.
That you have generated millions of Americans that were led down a path.
They said, well, come this way.
Don't go that way.
Okay, that's the way that all of your ancestors went.
That's the way that people for thousands of years went.
Don't go that way.
Come this way instead.
And all these people listened and they said, okay, I'll go that way.
And then one day they looked around and they said, well, where are we exactly?
What's the point of this?
Where were you taking us?
We're just lost here now.
We're stuck.
So the people who are returning to traditional lives, who are making the radical decision to focus on their families and their marriages and so on, these are people simply deciding to live with some sense of direction.
To live with meaning.
Okay?
That's what they're doing.
They're not making some white supremacist radical political statement.
They are reclaiming meaning in their lives.
And they are certainly happier for it.
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Well, one thing is clear.
It's been clear for a long time.
The media is terrified of Ron DeSantis and of his candidacy, his potential candidacy for president.
Ultimately, they hate DeSantis more than they hate Trump.
And I've been saying that for a while.
And the reason is that they recognize That Ron DeSantis is effective at wielding state power to advance a conservative agenda.
He's done that in Florida.
He's able to do that.
He's willing to do it.
He knows how to do it.
That's something that Trump never learned how to do.
He didn't.
And so Ron DeSantis is a greater threat to them.
That's also why we've seen the personal hit pieces and the rumor-mongering pick-up steam recently.
But it turns out that Ron DeSantis is, I guess, squeaky clean and his closets are free of all skeletons because the stuff they're coming up with to hit him with, it's not exactly earth-shattering.
We can say that.
And most of it just makes me like him even more.
So, for example, A few days ago, reports were circulating that Ron DeSantis wasn't—he was in Congress, of course, before he became governor of Florida.
And reports were circulating that he wasn't well-liked by his Republican colleagues when he was in Congress.
And he didn't make a lot of friends, and he wasn't invited to the parties, and he didn't hang out with them.
He was kind of a loner.
He was on his own.
There was one quote saying he didn't seem to like being in D.C.
He didn't even want to be there.
And this is supposed to make us like him less somehow, which I'm trying to figure out how that works, because that's exactly what I want to hear.
The last thing I want to hear is that someone who loves being in D.C., loves the environment, making tons of friends, that's who we don't want in the White House.
So that just makes me like him more.
And then there's this from Mediaite.
This is the latest.
This was the big expose that was published yesterday.
Not by Mediaite, but by the Daily Beast, and they are reporting on that.
A new report on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis provided further detail on his well-documented struggles with personal public engagement, a quirk that reportedly includes unorthodox table manners.
A new Daily Beast report on DeSantis, which comes amid ongoing speculation about his 2024 ambitions, tackled concerns about his aloof persona, aversion to public interactions, and the distance he keeps from voters and reporters alike.
The reporting on the governor's personality and social graces delved into unflattering stories that The Beast uncovered about him from over the years, namely his propensity to devour food during meetings.
From the article, quote, he would sit in meetings and eat in front of people, a former DeSantis staffer told the Daily Beast, always like a starving animal who's never eaten before, getting everywhere.
I assume they mean getting food everywhere, not literally getting food everywhere.
I mean, if that was happening, then I would agree that it's a problem.
Enshrined in DeSantis' lore is an episode from four years ago.
During a private plane trip from Tallahassee to Washington, D.C.
in March of 2019, DeSantis enjoyed a chocolate pudding dessert by eating it with three of his fingers, according to two sources familiar with the incident.
The representative for DeSantis' political team did not return a request for comment on it.
I can't imagine why not.
They have reporters beating down their door asking for comment on a report that he ate pudding with his fingers.
I'm surprised.
You know, this is the kind of thing we need.
We need an official public statement.
We need a press conference.
We need all of that.
So they actually talked to two sources, multiple sources, to confirm that four years ago, Ron DeSantis ate pudding with his fingers.
And this is what they come up with.
And this is the, like, we can assume, right?
We can assume that if they had better stuff than this, they'd be telling us.
They've been digging through his personal life.
They've been talking to anyone who will talk to them.
They've been interviewing sources.
Okay, they're looking for juicy material about this guy.
And the best they can do is that he has bad table manners.
And that he's not a people person.
Doesn't make a lot of friends.
Now as far as eating pudding with your fingers, most of the time I would agree that's uncouth.
What else are you supposed to do if you don't have a spoon?
And that's some of the detail.
If you're going to have this whole report about how he eats pudding, then I think we need more details about why was he eating the pudding with his fingers.
Was there a spoon or some other utensil available on the flight?
And if there wasn't, then what else are you supposed to do?
I ask you this.
Okay, you're in a situation where you have pudding, you know, maybe someone hands you chocolate pudding, you ask for a spoon, and they tell you, we don't have a spoon, and you say, well, do you at least have a fork?
I could maybe make that work.
They say, we don't have a fork.
What are you going to do in that situation?
Are you going to not eat the pudding?
Are you going to say to yourself, well, I have this delicious pudding here, I'm just not going to eat it?
I mean, give me a break.
Let's be serious about this.
And in a situation like that, You do what you have to do.
You know what this tells me?
This tells me that Ron DeSantis is a man who's not afraid to get his hands dirty, not afraid to do what needs to be done in the moment to get the job done.
And that's what I like about him, is that he gets the job done, you work with what you have, and you make it happen.
And that's what he did with this pudding, and so I see it as really a microcosm of what makes him an effective governor in the first place, I would argue.
All the rest of it, I don't care.
Look, this whole thing, they've been doing this for years, where they want the litmus test for a politician, a president, to be, would you want to sit down and have a beer with this person?
Would you want to be their friend?
I don't give.
A crap about that.
I don't need to feel like, now it just so happens that I think I could sit down and have a beer with Ron DeSantis and enjoy a conversation with him, but who cares?
I don't need to feel like, what are we, a bunch of children?
Okay, don't answer that, because many voters, that is how we act.
We're a bunch of children?
We need to feel like someone running for president can be our friend?
Would he be my friend?
Who cares?
So he doesn't make friends?
He's not a personable person?
Why does that matter?
I don't need that.
I don't need you to be friendly.
I don't need you to make friends.
I don't need you to be a fun guy to hang out with because I'm not hanging out with you.
I need you to know how to govern and I need you to understand how to wield power effectively and in the right way for the right ends.
That's what I need.
And you know what?
It turns out that many of the people who fall into that category Are, you know, effective leaders, they know how to wield power, all those kinds of things.
Like, often, oftentimes, they're not the most fun to hang out with.
It's like a certain, it's a certain personality type, a certain sort of person is good in that role.
And often it's not the kind of person that you would want to, like, sit down and have a beer with.
Sometimes the two line up, but it doesn't matter if they do.
So, what do we learn from this?
All we learn is just make sure that, like, just make sure Ron DeSantis has a spoon on hand.
That's all.
I'm pretty sure there are many spoons in the White House.
So, if you're worried about this, if you're worried about having a man in the White House that eats pudding with his fingers, just remember that they have spoons in the White House.
I think, I'm pretty sure they probably have a lot of them.
So, this should not be an offense that's repeated.
Well, it comes to the current occupants of the White House.
If you want to know how stupid they are, here's a good example.
Last week, the House and Senate both unanimously passed a bill to declassify all the intelligence around the origins of COVID.
And this was a unanimous House and Senate.
There was zero no votes.
I think there were a couple of people that were voted absent or, you know, not present.
But it was, there was no, it was a, nope, nobody voted against it.
Unanimous vote.
And I usually say that bipartisan bills are the worst kinds of bills, because legislation has to be pretty uniquely terrible to attract the support of both parties.
But there are exceptions to every rule, and so this is one.
Obviously, they should declassify whatever information they have.
Even if they do declassify it, I'm not going to believe that they really declassified all of it.
Still, in theory, this is the right thing to do, obviously.
Now, I'm not going to give them much credit for voting for this.
They all have re-elections, or most of them have re-elections that they have to worry about.
They don't want to be on the record as being in the minority opposed to transparency when it comes to the origins of COVID.
So, they really had no choice but to vote in favor of it.
And they all did.
Legislation goes to Biden's desk.
A week later, he still has not signed it, or even decided what he's going to do with it.
And Karen Jean Pear was asked about this at the White House yesterday.
Let's hear what she said.
I wondered if you do have an answer now as to whether or not the president will sign the COVID origins intelligence bill that was unanimously passed.
So it's so we are thank you for the question.
I know I was asked about it.
I believe on the plane on Monday as you just mentioned.
So we're looking at it.
We have continued to share information with members of Congress.
And as you know, just months after the president came into office, he asked his intelligence community No, we're just taking a look.
and to take a look of the origins of the COVID origins because we believe it's important
to get to the bottom of this and to get and also if once we have once the intelligence
community has made the made the assessments clearly we would share that with the public
as it relates to the legislation we're going to continue to we're going to take a look
at it and certainly we'll have more to share.
But you haven't made a decision whether we want to take a look?
No we're just taking a look we're taking a look into the into the bill.
Just taking a look at it.
This should be an easy slam dunk.
First of all, they pass and sign legislation all the time without reading it, so since when do they care about that?
This should be, I don't know, think about it for half an hour and then sign it?
There's nothing really to think about.
Yes, obviously the public has the right to know everything there is to know about the origins of COVID.
But also from a political perspective, you don't have a choice.
This is unanimous.
It takes two-thirds of a vote, it's a two-third vote to override a presidential veto.
So even if he did make the politically suicidal decision to veto it, it's going to happen anyway.
So you might as well just take the win, even if Biden would prefer not to declassify because he doesn't want to upset China.
You have no choice.
So you might as well say, yes, absolutely, of course we're going to sign this right away.
This administration cares deeply about transparency.
That's going to be the result anyway.
So you, from a political perspective, you take ownership of it and pretend that it's what you wanted to do.
But these people are so stupid, they don't even understand that.
I don't know why I'm giving political advice to the Biden administration, not that they'll listen to it anyway.
All right.
We'll go here.
In Kentucky, Representative Jerry Miller is a former Republican, now Democrat, and he testified against a bill that would ban gender transitions for minors.
And here's the story that he told to explain his position.
As a grandfather of two girls, I was thrilled to learn my daughter was pregnant with a boy.
I thought of all the things we would do together, like playing ball.
That's just not been my reality.
As a toddler, he wasn't interested in balls.
He has... she has...
focused on dolls, not balls.
He started dressing a girl like a girl, mainly princess dresses, at age three at home.
His mother tried to dissuade him from doing so at age four.
My intuitive wife asked the dress-wearing child if he didn't like being a boy.
His response was, quote, inside I feel like a girl, close quote.
My wife accepted that Jonah was different well before I did.
I thought it was because he had an older sister that he was competing with.
I hoped he would grow out of it, but that has not happened.
I still screw up the pronoun thing, but regardless of anything, I'm going to love my grandchild and fight for what I think is best for Jonah.
For that reason, I urge you to vote against that.
Kentucky Constitution says that we should seek, Section 1 says we are able to seek and pursue safety and happiness.
And I ask you, where's Kentucky's compelling government interest in not letting a parent protect their own children's safety and happiness?
What a pathetic excuse for a man.
I mean, it's no wonder he supports castration.
This is a castrated man himself.
Whether literally, I don't know, but certainly metaphorically.
Just a completely ball-less, pathetic nothing of a man sitting there saying, I'm going to love my grandchild.
No, you don't love him, actually.
You do not love him.
You might tell yourself that you do, but you don't.
There are things that you love a lot more than your grandchild, going along with the culture, taking a politically popular position.
You know, those things you value a lot more than you do your grandson.
Because if you loved your grandson, you would fight for him and for his well-being.
And you would do everything you can to protect him from the abuse that he is being subjected to right now.
And we hear the, it's always the same story.
It is always, how many times have we heard this story?
It's always the same story.
Okay, a million times we hear the story about the child, the very young child who quote-unquote comes out as trans or reveals their true identity, supposedly, and we never hear Like, you never hear anything that kind of blows your mind and makes you go, well, wow, maybe that person, maybe that boy really, maybe it really is a girl stuck in a boy's body.
Well, I've never heard of anything like that.
You never hear any detail.
I don't know what that detail would even sound like.
I mean, really, there's nothing you could say that would make me accept the proposition that a boy is really a girl because that's a logical contradiction.
It doesn't make any sense.
There's no way to accept it.
But my point is that The story that they tell is always just, oh, it was a boy and he liked to wear dresses when he was two years old.
And that's what persuades you that we need to radically alter the very course of life.
That's what persuades you that something, that's what persuades you that everything you thought you knew about reality itself is wrong, because that's what he's actually telling us.
What he's telling us is that it turns out that this boy, who's a boy in every way, is really a girl somehow.
Can't explain that.
They never explain that.
They never try to explain that.
But in order to accept that, you would have to first abandon everything you thought you knew about reality, about biology, about everything.
Everything out the window.
And what caused you to radically and fundamentally alter your very perception of reality?
That a two-year-old boy put a dress on because he was allowed to by his parents?
That a two-year-old boy thought that a sparkly thing was pretty?
That's what caused you to say, well, maybe everything I think about the world is wrong, it turns out!
But I just don't.
I don't believe that he's that stupid.
And maybe people are.
Maybe I have severely overestimated the intelligence of most people.
But when I hear stories like that, I think there's no way the guy is that stupid.
He cannot be that stupid.
No, he's going along.
He knows better, but he's going along with it, which makes it even worse.
All right, this video is Making the Rounds.
It's actually from several years ago, and it's from an episode of The Price is Right.
And a certain contestant appeared on this show a few years ago, and you may recognize him.
Let's watch.
I get to spin the wheel!
Yeah, you get to spin the wheel, but guess what?
You get a second chance in this game first.
No way!
Oh my god!
Oh my god, I'm still in it!
So you know two prices already, which is a great thing.
$3.99 and $5.99.
Which one do you want to keep?
I'm gonna keep the $5.99.
Keep $5.99.
Something else up here is $5.99.
You can tell me what it is, you get everything.
I'm going to say the soup.
Soup!
$5.99.
It's pretty fancy.
It is... Yes!
You got it!
Dylan's the winner!
Dylan's the winner!
Dylan, nice job, man.
Look at that.
We're going to spin the wheel right after this.
Don't go away, folks.
My God.
Imagine being the father.
Imagine being a dad, and you're told that, you know, your son's gonna be on Price is Right, and you sit down, and you have a beer, and you sit down to watch him on Price is Right, and this is what you see.
Imagine seeing your son.
I don't know how you go—I don't know how you move on after that.
Well, but of course, Dylan—all right, turn it off, please.
Turn it off.
Of course, if Dylan Mulvaney's father thought that this was the worst embarrassment he was ever going to suffer, he was in for a rude awakening as time went on.
Now, the point here, though, is there was a couple of things.
First of all, this guy's been starved for attention, you know, for a long time.
Has been begging for attention.
That's what all this is about anyway.
But also, you note how his performance as a woman His performance as a woman, as a quote-unquote woman, is identical to his performance as a flamboyant homosexual on Price is Right.
And this is a performance as well.
No human being actually acts like that in real life.
So this is a performance, it's an affect that he's putting on.
But it's exactly the same.
Because that's all that a woman is to the left.
That's the left's vision of womanhood.
That's all a woman is.
A woman is a flamboyant gay man in a dress.
So you've got flamboyant gay man, and then you take that same flamboyant gay man, change nothing about him, put a dress on him, that's a woman.
That is truly how they see it.
Moving on quickly, because there's several other things we need to talk about, including, okay, we're going to get right to this, because this is the most important, and if I don't mention it now, we might not have time for it.
We'll start with the New York Post.
Pentagon officials said in a draft document last week that aliens could be visiting our solar system and releasing smaller probes, missions that are conducted, wait, hold on a second, releasing smaller probes like missions conducted by NASA when studying other planets.
A draft research report authored by Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Pentagon's All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and Abraham Loeb, chairman of the Harvard University's astronomy department, was released on March 7th and focuses on the physical constraints of unidentified aerial phenomena.
The report read, quote, an artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions.
These dandelion seeds could be separated from the parent craft by the tidal gravitational force of the sun or by a maneuvering capability.
The AARO was published in July 2022 and is responsible for tracking objects in the sky, underwater, and in space, or possibly an object that has the ability to move from one domain to the next.
Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all objects near Earth that are larger than 140 meters in 2005, which resulted in Pan-STARRS telescopes, according to the report.
On October 19th, 2017, the Pan-STARR detected an unusual interstellar object that was later named, I never know how to pronounce this, or any other word, Oumuamu, we'll just call it O, or Scout in Hawaiian.
Okay, we'll call it Scout.
The object was cigar-shaped, appeared flat, and was propelled away from the Sun without showing a commentary tail, leading scientists to believe it was artificial.
So this was Yes, and there are images you can see of this, but it's just a long, flat- it looks like a long- what is it?
It looks like a cigar.
It looks like a long, flat object that we know is interstellar, and there are some scientists who think that it might be- they don't know exactly, but it might be artificial.
It might be some kind of, you know, alien technology.
It could be a piece of something that broke off.
Who knows?
But this is what scientists are now speculating about, that maybe, and this would explain some of what we see in the skies, some of what military pilots have seen, the Navy pilots, where you've got these small, which seem to be vehicles that are moving around in odd ways, and they don't seem to be propelled.
There's no propulsion device that we can see that's noticeable to us.
And so maybe these are probes that are being sent from a larger craft.
Sent down to check out Earth, and then they go back to the parent craft and go on their way.
It's a possible theory, but you have scientists who are speculating about this.
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson was recently on a podcast and had a really interesting conversation about UFOs.
The whole conversation is 10 minutes long, and I debated playing the entire thing on this show, but I thought that might be pressing it a little bit.
So instead we have, still kind of long, about two and a half minutes, but it's an interesting story.
With a little bit of a first-hand account here from Tucker Carlson.
Go ahead and listen.
The Pentagon was required by the last defense authorization bill to like produce some of their files on UFOs.
And it turns out they have known about this since the end of the Second World War, which ended in 1945.
Been a huge increase during that war, during the war as well.
Huge increase in UFO sightings, in UFO crashes, et cetera, et cetera.
And it turns out the federal government has been tracking this for 80 years and lying about it.
So why?
Well, that's a great question.
I can't answer it.
I have theories, but I don't know.
But here's what I learned.
The first question is, is this real?
Or am I just being a crazy person who's spending too much time on the internet?
Well, this summer, We got a call, we didn't reach out, this person called us, Lexi, who's standing right there, who's a genius, one of our producers, gets this call from this guy who's a tenured Stanford Medical School professor, and he wants to come on the show.
Now this guy has a couple patents, and so he's rich.
And he's got tenure at one of the most prestigious schools in the world.
So like, he's not a flake.
He comes on and he's like, 11 years ago, the U.S.
government reached out to me because I'm an expert on head injuries, on brain injuries, traumatic brain injuries, as a physician, and they had all these court cases from families of U.S.
servicemen, over 100, who'd been killed by UFOs.
And the Department of Defense was refusing to give them death benefits or medical benefits.
And I'm like, and he's like, so they're in the courts.
And I was like, there are over 100 servicemen killed by UFOs?
Like, what?
He's like, yeah, and there are court cases about it.
I'm like, why isn't this on the front page of the New York Times?
I don't know.
But he goes, I'm involved in it.
I'm one of the researchers.
I'm the expert witness in these cases.
Holy shit, what does that mean?
And he's like, for example, UFOs appear to be attracted, for whatever reason, to nuclear energy.
So at nuclear missile bases in the upper Midwest, for example, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered submarines are all getting buzzed by these objects, including underwater.
And in a number of cases, these things have landed on military bases, including famously in Germany, in West Germany in the 70s, and servicemen have approached them.
Like, what is this thing?
There's this, like, giant glowing thing on the base.
And they approach, and they get traumatic brain injury.
Like, they are rendered... Yeah, yeah.
They get brain damage, or they're killed.
And he studied their brains.
And they have... This is all totally real.
This is not...
There it is.
I mean, like I said, the whole conversation is interesting.
It's about 10 minutes long, and he goes into talking about how, you know, most of the people that have looked at this have I think that many of these objects actually are coming not from the sky, but coming out of the ocean.
And that has also been observed.
You know, sounds crazy, but there's actually video of that that has also been captured by pilots and other kinds of videos where you can see things.
There's video where you've got objects that come out of the ocean and then go fly up into the sky.
Also, video of objects going into the ocean.
At high rates of speed and not exploding on contact.
So, look, what are you going to do with this?
There is a lot of evidence here, and I know we joke about it a little bit, but that's the truth.
There's a lot of evidence.
Now is it enough to absolutely confirm that some sort of beings from another solar system
or galaxy have visited Earth?
No, because there's a lot of details that we don't have.
But even so, I mean, when you start thinking about, well, if it were true that there were,
you know, intelligent civilization out there somewhere, maybe multiple intelligent civilizations
that have sent whether manned or unmanned craft here.
You think, well, if that were true, what kind of evidence would we have of it?
And the skeptics will say, well, we don't have any of that evidence.
Well, actually, we do, though.
We have a fair amount of it.
We would have video.
We have a lot of video.
And it's not all... Now, you know, back in the 60s, if we were talking about UFOs, you could say, well, all the video is grainy and all that.
That's not true anymore.
There's some pretty compelling video and lots of it.
Not just a little bit.
There's a lot of video evidence of Things that are flying around in the sky in ways that should not be possible.
So we have that.
We also now even have scientists and people that have worked in the government going on the record and saying, this is what we've seen, this is what we're looking into, this is what we've researched, here's the physical evidence that we have.
Tucker Carlson's talking about people that have suffered traumatic brain injuries because of contact with strange things that have landed.
So that's all evidence.
Does it confirm?
No.
But it does mean that if you still are taking the position that, no, no, none of this is alien in origin, that is actually an irrational position.
It's quite irrational to say, to just definitively declare, as I hear many people do, absolutely not alien in origin.
That's irrational.
Because it's just a fact that there is this evidence.
And for you to take that position, you would have to just pretend it doesn't exist.
Or really, it would have to be, on your part, it's a position grounded in your assumption that there can't possibly be any other intelligent life in the universe.
And I think that is what really explains it.
Almost everyone who says, no, none of this is alien in origin, absolutely can't be.
Almost all of them, they're saying that because they refuse to even consider the possibility that there are any other intelligent beings in the universe.
And that is also an irrational position to take.
It just is.
The universe is vast and is absolutely loaded with things that we don't understand.
And so to sit here and say, I know that this isn't out there.
I have seen none of the universe, okay?
I have seen none of it.
I haven't even seen, like, it's not even a thimble compared to the ocean.
Even that, it's like a molecule of the ocean compared to the entire ocean.
I have seen that molecule, and because of that molecule, I know for a fact that there is nothing else out there.
That's basically what you're declaring, and it is irrational.
So, that's it.
What are you going to do with the information?
Maybe it's scary for people to think about, but these things are happening.
Nothing we can do about it.
Let's get to the comment section.
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All right, happy St.
Patrick's Day, by the way.
Very important holiday for rampant cultural appropriation.
But it's the kind of cultural appropriation you're allowed to do because you're appropriating from Irish people who are white, so it's okay.
Those are the rules, remember.
You can celebrate Irish culture by getting drunk and wearing a shamrock.
You know, drinking green beer and eating Lucky Charms, and you can put a pin on that says, kiss me, I'm Irish, and all of that is fine, but if you wear a Native American headdress on Halloween, then that makes you a genocidal racist.
Makes sense when you think about it.
I'm sorry, it makes sense when you don't think about it, actually.
Some of this is our fault though, I'll admit.
I mean, ours and people of Irish ancestry.
Because the squeaky wheel gets the oil, as they say.
And we don't complain about the St.
Patrick's Day stuff because we're not petty and ridiculous.
And also, we have a sense of humor.
So, it is funny.
We can laugh about it.
Speaking of having a sense of humor, and speaking of Ireland, I finally watched, a couple of nights ago I watched the movie, maybe it's a good movie to watch in St.
Patrick's Day if you're looking for a St.
Patrick's Day movie, there's the film Banshees of Innishirin, which I think it won a couple of Academy Awards, who cares, but it was nominated for some stuff.
And I have to say, based on the description of this film, I wasn't very excited about watching it, but a couple of people that I, who's Opinions I value recommended it and so I decided to watch it and I should have watched it, you know when it first came out I should have been first in line to see this film at the in the theaters because it it Resonated with me on such a deep and personal level because the film at least on the surface level now, there's a lot of symbolism going on and all that but plenty of metaphor but on the surface it is really a movie and
About a guy, Brendan Gleeson, who hates small talk so much that he will chop off his own fingers to avoid it.
That's really the movie.
He's tired of pointless small talk and he starts amputating his own fingers in protest to try to get this other guy to stop talking to him.
Because he finds the conversation that uninteresting.
And on that kind of surface level, I've never found a movie more relatable.
It's like, it's two and a half hours of a guy trying to avoid small talk and going to increasingly desperate lengths to avoid it.
I found it to be quite powerful.
So something worth watching.
All right.
Bad Mr. Frosty says, when you Google your name and the whole cast of The Daily Wire is what comes up talking against you, talking about Dylan now, you know it's time to subscribe to Daily Wire Plus.
Yeah, I mean, that maybe tells you all you need to know.
Dylan Mulvaney did his 365 celebration, and he wanted villains, he wanted the villains for his big show, and he chose the entire cast of The Daily Wire as the villains.
And nobody else in conservative media, it was just us.
The best thing we could do is not repeat this individual's name ever and not share its image across the media's vast ocean.
We're talking again about Dylan Mulvaney.
And yeah, I understand that argument, but I would also say that that has been the conservative argument about all this stuff for years and it hasn't really worked out that way.
You know, I can remember back Think about when Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn Jenner, and was celebrated as Woman of the Year and all that, and when that happened back in, whenever that was, in 2015 or something.
And it was the same thing.
You know, I was talking about that, and I was very vocally opposed to Bruce Jenner being accepted by society as a woman.
I was very opposed to it.
And what I heard from many conservatives was, well, let's just not give any attention to this person.
They just want attention.
Let's not give them attention.
And if we don't give them attention, it'll go away.
Well, how did that work out?
Like, how did that strategy of saying, well, let's not pay attention to this.
Yeah, they're taking a man and celebrating him as a woman.
Let's not pay attention.
It's a trend.
It's attention starved.
How did that work out for us?
Has that strategy of ignoring these sorts of things, has that proven to be effective?
No, if we don't oppose this, Dylan Mulvaney, he's been selected by the powers that be.
There's a reason he's got all these corporate sponsorships and everything behind him.
There's a reason why he could afford to throw a big bash at the Rockefeller Center.
He's got money behind him from all these corporate sponsorships and everything else.
So they have taken, the cultural elites, the cultural powers that be, have taken this guy and said he's going to be our new mascot.
He's going to be our vehicle for, you know, getting this stuff out to the masses and making it appealing and acceptable and mainstreaming it.
So, if I don't talk about it and the other people at The Daily Wire don't talk about it, and we decide to ignore it, do you think that, like, what's going to happen?
Do you think all the corporate sponsorships are going to go away?
Do you think the left's going to say, oh, okay, we're not interested in it anymore?
No.
Then he's just running unopposed.
No, they will continue their campaign of normalizing this stuff, and it will be a campaign that runs unopposed.
The campaign is happening regardless.
It's like, think of an actual political campaign.
Somebody's running for office.
Are you going to stop him from being elected to the office by making sure that no one runs against him?
It's the same sort of thing.
Mary Smith says, um, Matt, um, Matt, the issue is that women get paid approximately 30% less than men doing the exact same job.
I worked as a scientist in big pharma and no one ever discusses salary, but after I left and compared salaries with former colleagues, it was really infuriating to realize this was true.
And by the way, I worked harder, was smarter than my male counterparts, but I was not able to schmooze on golf courses, shoot the shit over beers at their clubs, or talk sports over lunch.
Male bonding goes a long way to determine compensation in corporate America.
Well, Mary, first of all, I'll tell you that you're not the first person who feels as though they're being undercompensated at work or that they're more talented or better qualified than colleagues who are making more money.
This is a complaint of, I don't know, maybe approximately 99% of all people in the workplace, men and women alike.
But it doesn't necessarily reflect the reality.
So you think that you were better qualified, you worked harder, you were more skilled than the people that were making more than you.
And in order to explain that to yourself, like explain this disparity, you came up with this story about sexism and how you weren't able to go to the golf course and all the rest of it.
Maybe that story is true, but there's no reason to assume that it is.
Because, again, it's a story that you've told yourself to explain why you made less money.
So, rather than looking at anecdotes, let's look at the actual statistics.
And the actual statistics are this.
This is what the data says.
The women make 70 cents on the dollar.
I think now it's up to 82 cents, they say.
make 70 cents on the dollar, whatever, I think now it's up to 82 cents, they say.
So women make 82 cents on the dollar for every dollar that a man earns.
That statistic comes from, as we've been talking about, just a one-to-one comparison, grouping
all women and all men together and comparing their salaries without taking into account
anything else.
When you don't control for any other factors, that's what you come up with, and so it is a meaningless statistic.
Now, when you actually do factor in Industry, job type, hours worked, experience level, overtime, all that kind of stuff.
When you factor all of that in, here's what you come up with.
And I'm getting this from the website payscale.com, and they've compiled all the information about this.
And here's what they say.
The controlled gender pay gap is $0.99 for every $1 a man makes.
That's the pay gap.
One penny between, when we control for all these factors, one penny between the woman and the man.
Which is to say the gender pay gap doesn't exist because one penny is a rounding error.
That is margin of error.
It doesn't, statistically it doesn't exist.
And this, by the way, this is from a source that is not a right-wing source.
Like, they are reporting this, but then also claiming that there is still a gender pay gap.
Because it goes on in the same report to say, although 99 cents may seem very close to a dollar, small differences in earnings on the dollar can compound over the course of a lifetime.
The gender pay gap should be zero.
It is not zero.
So they're still trying to pretend.
They are biased in favor of trying to create a gender pay gap, or pretend that there is one.
And that's why they're pretending that one penny still constitutes a problem, when it doesn't.
Because again, statistically, it's margin of error.
And it's also, it's just, it's not, it's not possible that you would control for all these factors and then make this comparison and they would be exactly the same.
That doesn't happen in real life.
So, it's effectively the same and that's what the data tells us.
You know, in addition to me, The Daily Wire has a couple other hosts you may have heard of.
One of them is named Ben Shapiro.
You might know something about him.
Well, this Ben guy, who it turns out is actually pretty smart and interesting, just premiered the second season of his show, The Search.
And his first guest is actor, comedian, and eccentric British man, Russell Brand.
Here's a teaser of their episode.
Check it out.
Ben, I can smell weed right now.
Right now.
Are we going to just sit here?
Ben!
There's a difference between innocent and good.
Ah, cool.
Let me think about that for a couple of months.
Give me the talmud, because if it's not in there... What the hell's going on?
Can you smell it?
I'm not going to be the one who says the weed is kosher.
I'm 20 years clean.
I didn't think this is how I was going to fall off the wagon.
I've been with Bill Maher.
I thought it was you and Rogan.
I've been with Rogan.
Maher and Shapiro, and it takes me down.
For God's sake.
Well, if you haven't seen the search yet, you should.
It's not an interview show.
It is a conversation show.
There is a difference that you'll see when you watch this show.
The episodes are unscripted.
They're loose.
They're always entertaining.
Plus, Ben has some great guests in store for this season, including a sit-down with Megyn Kelly as well.
To watch the now-streaming episode with Russell Brand, become a Daily Wire Plus member today.
You'll get exclusive access to The Search, plus all Daily Wire Plus hit shows and movies, including my personal favorite film, What Is The Woman?
You can join today and check out The Search by going to dailywireplus.com.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Well, it's still pretty early, but we already have a candidate for the dumbest internet controversy of the year.
And it all began, as it usually does, with a tweet.
A tweet that countless news articles have described as mean, offensive, sexist, very, very bad.
A tweet which has led to thousands upon thousands of people expressing their outrage while jumping on an internet dogpile that has lasted for days now.
A tweet that's provoked reactions from members of the media, from celebrities, even from people who aren't mentally ill as well.
So what was this tweet?
What was this outrageous, unthinkable, calamitous tweet which will live eternally in infamy?
This tweet that will have monuments built to it so that generations can come and mourn together and remember the tweet and lament the tweet?
Well, here is the tweet.
Get ready for it.
It was posted by journalist Lachlan Markey a couple of days ago, and here's what it said.
Quote, "The tragedy of the White Stripes is how great they would have been with a half-decent drummer.
Yeah, yeah, I've heard all the 'but it's a carefully crafted sound, man' takes.
I'm sorry, Meg White was terrible and no band is better for having sh*t percussion."
That's it.
That's the whole thing.
Loughlin posted an opinion about an early 2000s rock band, which he said didn't have a good drummer.
He didn't like the drummer.
He said the drummer of a band that broke up over a decade ago was terrible, and that is what caused mass outrage.
This is what prompted not one think piece, but many.
Just the first page of Google News results has 10 articles about this opinion from major media outlets.
All condemning it as wrong, offensive, of course misogynistic.
Other musicians like Questlove from The Roots have joined in to voice their disapproval.
Questlove responded, quote, I try to leave troll views alone, but this right here is out of line AF.
Actually, what is wrong with music is people choking the life out of music like an Instagram filter trying to reach a high of music perfection that doesn't even serve the song or music.
Out of line, he says.
It is out of line to dislike the drummer from the White Stripes.
You are not allowed to dislike her.
You have to like her drumming.
It is entirely out of bounds to have any other opinion about her drumming skills.
This is also apparently the opinion of Jack White, of course, the former lead singer of White Stripes, who responded to the controversy with a lengthy poem that he wrote as a tribute to Meg White.
Yes, that's correct.
They are memorializing her as if the tweet literally killed her.
They're writing poems in tribute to her because someone criticized her drumming on Twitter.
So this is what Jack White posted on Instagram.
He posted, quote, "To be born in another time, any era but our own would have been fine.
A hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, some other distant, different time,
One without demons, cowards, and vampires out for blood.
One with the positive inspiration to foster what is good.
An empty field where no tall red poppies are cut down.
Where we could lay all day every day on the warm and subtle ground and know just what to say.
and what to play to conjure our own sounds and be one with the others all around us and even still
the ones who came before and help ourselves to all their love and pass it on again once more
to have bliss upon bliss upon bliss to be without fear negativity or pain and to get up every morning
and be happy to do it all again. Just to remind you that is a poem written in response to one
random guy who said Meg White wasn't a good drummer.
He is the demon, coward, and vampire out for blood in this poem.
He is the source of fear, negativity, and pain.
And if you think that is just a tad melodramatic, wait until you hear Lachlan's inevitable apology tweet, which we knew was going to happen.
Actually, it's more like an apology essay.
Before we read it, if it were me, and yes, I'm a contrarian a-hole, I know that, but if I had voiced a music opinion that prompted Jack White to write a tearful poem, I would think that the whole thing was absolutely great.
It'd be the greatest thing ever, and incredibly funny, of course.
I'd probably respond by randomly insulting other musicians just to see if I could get more of them to write retaliatory poems.
I'd start thinking even bigger, actually.
Maybe if I bullied enough rock stars, eventually they'd all band together and record a kind of We Are The World type charity single to stand up against my hate.
That's what I would do.
Like, that's my dream.
But Lachlan adopted the opposite strategy, and instead of enjoying this hilarious moment, he ran away in fear.
He deleted the offending tweet, he locked down his Twitter account, and he posted this apology.
Quote, by now you've probably seen an ill-advised and since-deleted tweet that I sent out yesterday about the White Stripes and Meg White.
It was an over-the-top take on the White Stripes and White as a drummer, and it was, let's face it, just truly awful in every way.
Petty, obnoxious, just plain wrong.
I don't know if Meg White herself saw that tweet.
I hope not, because I imagine it wouldn't feel great to see a stranger dumping on you like that.
So to Meg White, I am sorry.
Really.
And to women in music, in the music business generally, who I think are disproportionately subject to this sort of s***, I am sorry to have fed that as well.
I'm really going to try to be more thoughtful in the future, both on here and off.
I've been thinking to myself as all this, again, completely justified hate comes in over the last 24 hours, why did I actually write that?
It's not what I really think, and I like to think I'm not the asshole it made me out to be.
Or at least I try not to be.
I think the answer, in part, is that this sort of vicious sniping is something that we, as online folks, tend to reward with eyes and clicks.
And I think I got caught up in that implicit incentive structure with a needlessly inflammatory, downright mean, and most importantly, false take.
Well, that is also embarrassing that I felt secondhand shame just from reading it out loud.
I mean, we have seen some truly pathetic, groveling public apologies in the past, many of them, but this one manages to sink to new depths of self-degradation.
He is pretending now that his tweet about a band that existed 20 years ago was some kind of trolling, intentionally inflammatory hot take.
You know, as if he wrote that tweet about Meg White as a drummer, thinking that it would attract reactions from millions of people.
But of course, that's not the case.
It was just an innocuous opinion that was not intended to be the subject of a week-long national discourse.
Meg White is a millionaire and a former rock star.
She's not a victim.
She's not a victim because some dude on Twitter doesn't like her drumming.
All musicians encounter criticism.
They have to be able to deal with it.
They are not damsels in distress.
Actually, the person being bullied here is Lachlan.
He's the one being targeted and harassed by thousands of rabid hyenas who are enraged for reasons that they can't even explain.
But Lachlan doesn't have the balls to make this point in his own defense, which means that all of my sympathy for him, of course, evaporates.
Most pathetic of all, Lachlan is now confessing that the opinion he held up till three days ago about Meg White's drumming is now wrong.
He's been convinced that his opinion was wrong.
How was he convinced?
Well, because lots of people were upset about the opinion.
But how does that work exactly?
You didn't like her as a drummer.
You said you didn't like her as a drummer.
A bunch of people cried about it.
And now you do like her as a drummer?
Their hurt feelings convinced you that your analysis of her artistic talents was incorrect?
How does that work?
And of course, just to make matters more ridiculous, the opinion that Loughlin articulated about Meg White used to be widely shared by nearly everyone.
Because in fact, Meg White isn't a great drummer.
It was never controversial to say that until everyone arbitrarily decided that it is controversial.
In fact, many of the media outlets that are now valiantly defending Meg White used to publish reviews ripping her to shreds.
For example, Pitchfork condemned Loughlin's tweet as a bad take.
But back in 2003, here's what they wrote in a review for the White Stripes album, Elephant.
This is what they wrote, quoting now, "The naivete of Meg's playing deflates any big
rock aspirations.
Meg's pancake-handed drumming drips solvent over the whole experiment."
Now just to clarify here, pancake-handed drumming is not meant as a compliment.
In fact, it's a pretty clever insult.
And this is the kind of fun and vivid imagery we used to get from music and film critics before it was decided that the last thing a critic should ever do is engage in, you know, actual criticism.
But this is not a surprise, really.
I mean, there are many, many widely held beliefs and opinions from 20 years ago that are now treated as utterly shocking.
Opinions about Meg White's drumming chops are the least of it.
But this is how the game is played now.
Opinions, no matter how innocuous or valid or both, you know, are treated like war crimes.
At least some opinions, right?
Because the rules are meant to be arbitrary.
There's always this element of Simon Says to it.
After all, it's not as though we live in an era of niceness, where everyone is expected to be nice to each other and polite and gentle with their wording.
There's still plenty of viciousness to go around.
We live in a culture that is, in many ways, far nastier, far more negative, far uglier, far more cruel than it was 20 years ago, back when music critics delighted in finding creative ways to insult rock stars.
It's just that the cruelty can only be sent in certain directions at people who are not accepted members of assigned victim groups.
And if anyone commits the ultimate sin of wrong-think, then there's essentially nothing you can say or do to him that would be considered overboard.
But Meg White, though a millionaire musician, can claim membership in a recognized victim group as a woman, which means that any criticism of her is a human rights violation.
These are the rules now.
And they are insane.
Which is why the cancel mob coming after Lachlan is cancelled.
But since he bowed and apologized to the mob, Lachlan himself is also, I must say, today cancelled.
