Ep. 1163 - The Left Turns Mother's Day Into Anti-Father Campaign
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the Left predictably celebrated Mother's Day by insisting that men can also be mothers, which is to say that they celebrated Mother's Day by erasing the existence of mothers. Meanwhile, CNN published an article extolling the advantages of single motherhood. Also, thousands of people have lined up to contribute over a million dollars to Daniel Penny, the good samaritan who restrained Jordan Neely. But Neely's family has now come out placing the blame on the subway commuters who physically restrained Neely rather than "offering to help him." Joe Biden says that white supremacy is the greatest threat we face in America. In our Daily Cancellation, another tale of a hostile work environment. This time at the Kelly Clarkson talk show. What do we make of all of these hostile work environment claims?
Ep.1163
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, the left predictably celebrated Mother's Day by insisting that men can also be mothers, which is to say that they celebrated Mother's Day by erasing the existence of mothers.
Meanwhile, CNN published an article extolling the advantages, advantages they say, of single motherhood.
Also, thousands of people People have lined up to contribute over a million dollars to Daniel Penny, the Good Samaritan who restrained Jordan Neely on the New York subway.
But Neely's family has come out now placing the blame on the subway commuters who physically restrained Neely rather than, quote, offering to help him.
Joe Biden says that white supremacy is the greatest threat we face in America.
In our daily cancellation, another tale of a hostile work environment, this time at the Kelly Clarkson talk show.
What do we make of all these hostile work environment claims?
We'll talk about all that and more today on Matt Walsh Show.
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Yesterday was, of course, Mother's Day, a holiday that was first celebrated in 1907 and declared a national holiday seven years later.
The concept was pretty simple in the beginning.
Mothers play a very important role in human society.
In fact, we can't have a society without mothers.
And it makes sense, then, to set aside a day celebrating and recognizing this reality, even if it did become very quickly an overly commercialized, hallmark kind of holiday.
That was always inevitable.
And in spite of it, there was value to the tradition.
But these days, even our commercialized hallmark holidays, which are basically all of them at this point, can't be allowed to remain simple and straightforward.
Everything must be made complicated.
Everything gets sucked up into the funnel cloud of leftism and tossed back out five miles away, shattered and broken.
Or perhaps it would be better to make a Wizard of Oz reference here and say that the leftism tornado Picks everything up and drops it off in the land of Oz, where everything is bizarre and uncanny and makes no sense at all.
In the case of Mother's Day, as expected, many of the attempts to complicate and confuse the matter came from the LGBT camp.
Now, I probably only need to give one representative example to make the point.
So here's a trans activist on TikTok trying to make the concept of Mother's Day seem somehow confusing and also quite upsetting to him.
Listen.
Okay, so Mother's Day is tomorrow, and this is the second day that's rolled around.
There's two different days in the year that I question.
There's Mother's Day and there's Father's Day.
As a trans person, as a trans woman, which one do I celebrate?
Father's Day rolled around.
I don't feel like a father.
Mother's Day is tomorrow.
I feel like a mom, but Who celebrates me?
It's not a situation to pity me or anything.
I just genuinely want to know, is there other people out there that you don't know which one you fall under?
Are you a mom?
Are you a dad?
Where's parents day?
Why can't we just have a parents day?
Like you're a parent, that's worth celebrating.
Why does it have to be one or the other?
It actually bothers me a lot.
I didn't think about that till today.
I don't know.
Who celebrates me?
That should be engraved on the tombstone of the trans movement when this is all said and done.
Who celebrates me?
What about me?
Well, the answer is everybody celebrates you all the time, relentlessly.
You have entire months set aside to celebrate you.
So can you leave Mother's Day alone?
Can that just be its own thing?
Of course not.
No effort is being made here at all, either, by the way.
Of course, even if he took the drugs and his voice changed and he got the surgeries and all the rest of it, he would still be a man.
But he represents the increasingly common trend where there is just no effort, no attempt at all, to actually transform into a woman.
He's just a dude who grew his hair out and dyed it green.
But even if he had his hair up in a hat or something so you couldn't see it, he would look and sound exactly like a middle-aged dad that you might see in the stands at a Little League baseball game or something.
And in some ways, the people who transition just by throwing on a wig or dyeing their hair and doing nothing else are tacitly admitting that they are stuck with the sex they were born with.
It's like, what's the point of doing all that other stuff?
It's not going to change anything.
They're also, I imagine, leaving themselves an escape hatch for when they do change their minds.
But even so, he's not sure which day between Mother's Day and Father's Day he should celebrate.
Well, here, let me help you out, sir.
Which one do you celebrate?
Well, you celebrate Father's Day, assuming you have kids.
God forbid.
Your kids have a mom and a dad.
They don't have two moms.
You say you feel like a mom, but the only feelings you've ever had in your life are your own feelings.
You can't say you feel like a mom, because you have no idea how moms feel, since you're not one.
You can only feel like yourself.
So whatever feelings you're having, those are the feelings that you have.
You can only have the feelings that you yourself have, okay?
You have only felt like you.
You've never felt like anybody else.
Which means that your feelings cannot prove that you're something other than what you physically actually are.
It's more that your physical body proves that your feelings are a man's feelings because you're a man having those feelings.
How do I know that you have a man's feelings?
Well, because you're a man and this is what you're feeling.
The feelings that incline you towards claiming that you're a woman, and the feelings that would drive you to the point where you would make your hair look like that, those may not be normal feelings, they certainly aren't feelings that I can relate to, but they are your feelings.
And you are a man, so they are the feelings of a man.
I don't know how else I can, I don't know what else I need to say to make this clear.
The feelings of a man, the feelings not of all men thankfully, but yours.
And you are a man.
It wasn't just gender-confused men, though, trying to co-opt the holiday, however.
The media also took the opportunity to heap special praise on their second favorite kind of mother.
Their most favorite are people like that, dads who pretend to be mothers.
That's their favorite kind of mom.
In other words, their favorite kind of mom is someone who's not a mom.
But coming in at a close second are single moms of either sex.
To commemorate today, CNN published an article which, according to their caption on Twitter, purports to show that, quote, advantages of being raised by a single mother outweigh expectations and outlast childhood embarrassment.
Advantages?
This is not simply an argument that single mothers can make the most of their situation and mitigate the harm that broken homes do to children, ensuring that they have a good chance of living happy and successful lives.
If that was the argument, who could disagree?
Nobody doubts that children can live good lives in spite of being raised by single moms.
Sure, they can.
But that's not the argument the author here makes.
The argument is, again, that single motherhood is in some sense ideal.
There are advantages to it.
Let's go through some of this article.
Headline.
Let us now praise single moms.
As if we don't do that all the time already.
Because, like I said, anytime a politician brings up moms, As a politician going through the constituents and all that, the first kind of mom that will be mentioned, and usually the only kind will be, and single mothers, helping to make America great.
So it says, quote, roughly 24 million or one-third of all American children under age 18 are living with an unmarried parent, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center analysis of US Census Bureau data.
And 81% of those single-parent homes are headed by a mom.
This has been a growing trend since the late 1960s.
The number of kids being raised by mostly single moms has more than doubled between 1968 and 2017.
1968 and 2017. So far this is all true and it's catastrophic.
We've been running this social experiment for decades to see if fathers are expendable for children individually and society generally, and we've gotten an answer to that question.
The answer is the one that the moderately perceptive people decades ago already knew and warned about, but few listened.
The answer is no.
Every child has a mother and a father, which means that they need a mother and a father.
They may get by with only one parent, just as plenty of people have been forced to get by with only one leg.
But it's not ideal.
It's not the surest path to fulfillment and happiness.
The author seems to admit this fact early on, detailing his own trials and tribulations growing up in a single-mom household.
Then he tells us this, quote, There's been a lot of research over the decades that has shown children of single-parent households report more family distress and conflict and live at a lower socioeconomic status compared to those growing up in two-parent households.
Two-parent families usually have more income and are generally able to provide more emotional resources to children.
That's also a reflection of how little the United States in general does to support working mothers with parental paid leave and access to more health services and quality education.
Well, the first part of that is mostly right.
There's a ton of research measuring the effect of divorce or unmarried parenthood on kids, and the research almost always turns up the same results.
Kids without fathers in the home are worse off in nearly every way.
They're far more likely to be poor, far more likely to drop out of school, more likely to do drugs, to commit crime, to go to prison, to commit suicide, to end up homeless, and on and on.
The social experiment has given us our answer time and time and time again.
The answer is that kids who are conceived by one mom and one dad, which is all kids who have ever lived in history, or will ever live, need a mom and a dad.
It's no different than saying that kids need shelter and clean water.
Yes, some can survive without it.
Many will not.
But many will.
That doesn't change the need.
You can deprive someone of what they need, and they may press on and thrive in spite of that deprivation, but the need is still there.
This, again, is not the argument that the author is making, though.
Continuing, a 2017 study, however, looked at the long-term effects of single parenthood on kids and found that it had nearly no impact on their general life satisfaction.
The authors found no evidence supporting the widely held notion from popular science that boys are more affected than girls by the absence of their fathers.
What mattered most in terms of thriving, they concluded, was the quality and strength of the relationship between children and parents.
A separate 10-year study on single parenting that collected data from 40,000 households in the UK came to a similar conclusion last year.
Quote, there is no evidence of a negative impact of living in a single-parent household on children's well-being with regard to self-reported life satisfaction, quality of peer relationships, or positivity about family life, the report states.
Children who are living or have lived in a single-parent families score as highly or higher against each measure of well-being than those who have always lived in two-parent families.
Ah, okay.
So, every objectively measurable indicator Things like crime rates, dropout rates, grades in schools, you know, prison, the number of people in prison, suicides, homelessness, like, we can objectively measure all of that without, and it doesn't involve a survey, okay?
We don't have to send a survey out and ask, are you homeless?
Are you in prison?
We can count that.
So by all of those measures, we clearly see that fathers are indispensable and kids who grow up without them generally fare worse.
But this is all a moot point somehow, because if you ask people about their general, quote, life satisfaction, most people, regardless of their upbringing, will say that they are satisfied.
But what is that supposed to prove?
All it proves is what people are likely to say when you ask them about their satisfaction.
The other thing is that people, you, just like the feelings of a person, and when someone says, I feel like a woman, well, you've only ever had your own feelings, you don't have anything to compare it to.
So you've only ever lived your life.
You can't really compare it to some other hypothetical life you could have lived.
And then say, which one are you more satisfied with?
So all we learn from these satisfaction surveys is that Americans are very likely to say that they're satisfied with the way they're living.
Which you could interpret that as complacency.
You know, people are, we're a complacent culture.
Or it's just an indication that people, you know, on the positive end of it, people try to be positive and optimistic and, you know, that's good.
Which is why I'm willing to bet that if you ask, let's say, child abuse survivors about their life satisfaction, you know, you go to an adult who was abused as a child 25 years ago, many of them will say that they're satisfied with their lives.
Does that prove that child abuse is the best way to achieve life satisfaction or that it doesn't matter whether a child is abused or not?
I recently watched a pretty remarkable video about a person who had been horrifically burned over a third of his body and yet still seems to be happy and well-adjusted.
We see these kind of stories all the time about people that suffered immensely and still have managed to keep a positive outlook on life, which is great and admirable.
Does that mean that the best way to make someone happy is to throw them into a fire?
No, obviously not.
The question is what things are likely to directly lead someone to happiness, and what things can a person be happy in spite of?
So it's a because of, in spite of situation.
The answer to that latter question is almost anything.
People can be happy in spite of almost anything.
But almost anything is certainly not the answer to the first question.
What things are most likely to cause happiness or lead you directly to happiness?
The answer to that is not almost anything.
Now you may be thinking there must be more to this article, there must be more to the argument the article is supposed to present, but there isn't.
The author leaps from these statements to the conclusion that there are actual advantages to being raised by a single mom, and we should especially celebrate single moms because of it.
He ends with this note, quote, let us now praise single mothers, all of them, the weird ones, the struggling ones, the driven ones who choose to parent alone, the widowed who didn't.
The brave ones who divorced for their well-being of their kids and or themselves.
They're all raising about 19 million children right now, and they need all the support that they can get.
Well, the fact that they need all this support, you know, all the support they can get is actually pretty good evidence that single mom households are far less than ideal.
I can tell you that in my house, two-parent household, six children, we need very little help from the outside world, okay?
We don't need all the help we can get.
All we really need is for the outside world, the culture, to stop trying to actively sabotage us.
That's all I'm asking for.
Like, leave us alone and let us parent our own kids.
Single moms need much more support because they aren't getting it from the fathers of their children.
Which is where the support is supposed to come from.
Which isn't to say, by the way, that single moms are all, you know, the victims of deadbeats who ran out on them.
Far from it.
In fact, one of the reasons why we should not be throwing parades for single moms is that many of them choose to be this way.
They choose to be single moms.
The majority of divorces are initiated by women, and the majority of divorces cite things like money and irreconcilable differences, quote-unquote, as the reason for the split.
So, these are not all or even mostly women who had to flee from horribly abusive men.
In many cases, these are women who chose single motherhood as a lifestyle.
Believing that the father of their children is expendable.
It's like an ego trip.
Well, I can do both.
We don't need you.
Our kids don't need you.
And this is a message that society seeks to reinforce.
That's why they really want us to celebrate single motherhood.
The left sees stable two-parent households as an existential threat to their agenda, which they are.
Children from those kinds of households are going to be less vulnerable, less susceptible to the push and pull of the greater culture.
Not immune from it, obviously, but less susceptible.
And that's the problem the left has with two-parent households.
They don't want us raising and caring for our own kids.
They don't want the home to be a fortress protecting against insidious societal influences.
They want our kids vulnerable, exposed.
And that's why they present single motherhood as an ideal.
It is ideal to them and their agenda.
I just forget to mention that part.
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Beginning with this report from the Daily Wire, it says, a legal defense fundraiser for Marine veteran Daniel Penny continues to skyrocket, hitting the million-dollar mark on Saturday.
And now it's, of course, over a million dollars.
Penny, 24, was charged on Friday with manslaughter in the death of the 30-year-old Jordan Neely by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Video footage showed the Marine veteran putting Jordan Neely in a fatal chokehold after witnesses say Neely was threatening passengers on a New York City subway.
Penny's attorney started a Give, Send, Go fundraiser to help him with his legal defense and has nearly 25,000 donations totaling over a million dollars as of Saturday afternoon.
Many of the donations come from anonymous donors giving small amounts.
Comments praising the Marine for his actions on the subway and expressing disbelief that he was charged with a crime flooded the fundraising platform.
One of the comments says, I'm a 76-year-old male, a wounded combat veteran of the Vietnam War, also a retired sergeant from the NYPD.
I just can't believe how this country has become.
Another one says, when somebody steps in defense against a terrifying, ranting bully, that somebody should be applauded and not persecuted.
We need more Daniel Penneys in this world.
So, a million dollars they've raised for Daniel Penney, and he's going to need all that and more to defend him against this outrageous persecution.
I'm not going to call it a prosecution, because this is persecution.
He's being singled out, made an example of, for political reasons, for ideological reasons, and because the DA is kowtowing to public pressure.
Keep in mind that when this incident first happened, the police did an investigation.
They talked to witnesses.
They reviewed footage and camera footage and all the rest of it.
They interrogated Daniel Penny about it and then they let him go without pressing charges.
And by all indications, that's what it was going to be until this became a viral thing and the protest started and you had high-ranking Democrats, very prominent people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, demanding his head on a platter.
And so that's what they're gonna get.
This is... It's saying quite a lot because we get examples of this.
We get new examples every year, but this is one of the most outrageous miscarriages of justice I've ever seen.
To my mind, this is worse than the Rittenhouse and him being prosecuted, which he never should have been.
This is worse than Chauvin, who also never should have been prosecuted.
As bad as those are, this one is even worse.
When you look at the basic facts of the case, like there is no gray area here at all.
Okay, you can't even try to hang your hat on something like with Rittenhouse.
Well, you shouldn't have been there to begin with.
No, he drove in from another county or another state.
He crossed state lines.
Not that that matters, or that made a difference.
Although we can say that, you know, kids shouldn't have gone to... If it was my own kid, if it was my own son, I would say, you're not going there.
That doesn't mean that he sacrificed and forfeited his right to self-defense when he's being pursued by a violent, gun-toting mob, as he was.
But my point is that in this case, you don't even have that.
Daniel Penney was just on the subway with all the other riders.
He was going to work.
He's commuting!
It was Jordan Neely who decided to get onto the subway train and instigate this incident.
And we know from witness reports that he absolutely was making physical threats.
Like, we know two things about him.
We know that he was making physical threats, saying that he was going to hurt people on the train, and that he's willing to go to jail.
Although he did say, reportedly, he did explicitly threaten physical harm, even if he didn't, when you've got someone ranting that they're ready to go to jail, there's really only one way to interpret that.
You interpret that as, oh, they're about to do something that would get a person sent to jail.
That alone is a physical threat.
It's just icing on the cake that he also explicitly threatened physical harm.
So we know that fact.
We know that he threatened physical harm.
We also know from his history that he followed through many times in the past.
So when he threatens physical harm, there is very good reason to believe that he means it.
This is someone who assaulted old ladies, who tried to kidnap a seven or eight-year-old child, along with 40-plus other offenses that he was arrested for and then let back out.
Oh, but Daniel Penney wouldn't have known about those other cases.
Well, how do you know that, first of all?
How do you know he didn't know about any of this?
This person was well-known on the subway system.
That's why there are Reddit posts going back a decade about this guy.
So we know that he's a known entity and has been on the subway system for years.
And yet you hear people on the left simply assuming he didn't know any of that.
No, the safest assumption is that he probably did know some of that because apparently most people or rather many people who take the New York City subway system knew about this guy and the kinds of things that he did in the past.
If Daniel Penney didn't know it, still doesn't matter.
Because then all he would know is that there's this crazy guy on the subway, and he's ranting and raving, and he's threatening people.
And it is not our legal responsibility, or our moral responsibility, to just sit there and wait for someone to make good on the threat.
Like, if somebody comes up to you on the street and says, I'm gonna shoot you in the head, You have every legal and moral right to pull out your gun if you have one and shoot him first.
Because he just said he was going to do it.
He made a physical threat against your life.
And to say that you wouldn't have the right to react that way is to say that your responsibility is to wait until you're actually shot in the head before you respond.
But by then, of course, it's too late.
So what you're really saying is that we have a responsibility to lay down and allow ourselves to be assaulted and killed, which is actually the position that many on the left are taking.
In fact, I had someone tweet at me yesterday, was talking about the explicit threats that Neely was making, and somebody said, well, they're just words.
Just words.
And this is coming from the kind of person that I guarantee you would, just words, yeah, but if this was someone on a subway train misgendering someone, saying things that are considered transphobic, quote unquote, well this, I guarantee you this guy, this guy on Twitter or any leftist, they would not be waving it away by saying, it's just words.
These are the people who accuse us of being terrorists.
Because of the words that we say.
These are the people that accuse us of committing genocide by saying words.
They tell us that simply by saying words, you can actively kill people.
You can commit genocide with language.
And that very same crowd is now saying about Jordan Neely, oh, they're just words.
To be expected, of course.
These people have no integrity.
And this has nothing to do with the facts of the case.
They don't care about the facts of the case.
All they care about is that Jordan Neely was black and Daniel Penney is white.
That's the only detail that matters to them.
That's it.
Nothing else matters.
And so they want his head.
They want him as an example, another trophy of racial justice.
They want a trophy for racial justice.
Another head they can mount on the wall.
And they've chosen Daniel Penney, and at the same time, in the process, they have only further demoralized the public and made people even more hesitant to step up and do the right thing and defend themselves and defend their community, defend innocent people.
This Daniel, already most people have gotten to the point where they're not going to step in no matter what because it's not worth the risk.
And they know that if they have to, that if it comes to violence, that they're going to get thrown under the bus immediately.
So it was already the case.
And now you've got some of these stragglers who remained, some of the holdouts who still may have been willing to step in and do the right thing in a situation like this.
Many of those people are now going to throw up their hands and say, never mind.
You know, I don't want to be the next Daniel Penny.
And that's part of the point as well, obviously.
It's about demoralizing people.
Jordan Ely's family, of course, they've been all over the news and cameras and they have lawyers and everything else.
Here's the family lawyer of Jordan Ely's family saying what he thinks and what the family thinks ought to have happened that day.
No one on that train asked Jordan, what's wrong?
How can I help you?
He was choked to death instead.
So for everybody saying, I've been on the train and I've been afraid before, and I can't tell you what I would have done in that situation, I'm gonna tell you.
Ask how you can help.
Please.
Don't attack.
Don't choke.
Don't kill.
Don't take someone's life.
Don't take someone's loved one from them because they're in a bad place.
No one on that train said, you started out by saying, I'm hungry.
I need food.
I'm done with it.
I don't know where to get food.
I don't care if I die.
I don't care if I go to jail.
I'm just done.
No one said, here you are, sir.
Let me meet your need or help you in a situation or give a word of encouragement.
That's not what happened on that train.
Oh yeah, he's just hungry, he needed food, that's all.
Was that the idea when he was punching old ladies?
Assaulting random people?
Trying to kidnap a child?
He was looking for food?
Is that it?
And another point about that, by the way, before we get to this, but just to emphasize once more, the reason to bring up this guy's rap sheet is because, as we covered, There's a very good chance that the people that were on that subway and the multiple people that were involved, it wasn't just Daniel Penny, there's three men were involved in restraining him.
Very good chance that they knew something about that history because this guy was a known entity.
But the other point too is that the over-the-top mourning Like, even if his death was completely unjustifiable, if it was an unjustified, if he was straight-up murdered in an unjustified way, which isn't what happened, but if it was, the over-the-top mourning and crying about it still wouldn't make any sense, because this guy is a scumbag.
He tried to kidnap a child.
I'll tell you right now, people who assault old ladies and try to kidnap children, I don't care if you live or die.
I don't.
I'm not going to cry over that.
No, like, if video exists of him dragging a seven-year-old girl down the street, trying to kidnap her, and then all you had was that video.
You had no other context.
And you saw that video.
And then I told you afterwards, oh yeah, you know, that guy was killed on a subway train a few years later.
How would you react?
You would say, okay, he's a guy's absolute scum.
What, you want me to fall down in tears over it?
If there was a video of him punching a 67-year-old woman in the head, sending her to the hospital, you would know their context.
And then I told you that, you know, shortly after this video was taken, this guy died.
He went on a train, started threatening people, and he ended up dying.
Would anyone break down?
Oh, not him?
Not him!
No, everyone would say, well, it's unfortunate he chose to live his life that way, but this is a terrible person.
And the community's better off without him.
Like, everyone is safer without him.
Let me tell you something, the community, this community pretending to mourn, you are better off without this guy.
You're all safer now because he's gone.
That's a fact.
That alone, on its own, does not justify anything, any kind of violence somebody might have perpetrated against him, which is why we don't need those facts in order to justify the way people responded on the train.
They were just responding in the moment, and that's all we need to justify it.
So that's not my point.
My point is the over-the-top weeping and wailing, not Jordan Neely, no!
What are we going to do without this guy who kidnaps children and assaults old ladies?
Thousands of people die every single day.
And we don't talk about almost any of them.
You can see little blurbs, little news reports that come up here and there, if someone dies, this or that.
And we all continue living our lives because it's sad.
Death is sad, but it's just a part of life.
But then we choose specific people of all the death and suffering in the world.
We single out certain people and we choose them.
And we say, these are the ones we are going to especially mourn.
How does Jordan Neely make the cut for that?
Now to the lawyers claim that we should, they should, someone should have gone up to him and offered
to help him. No, no.
No.
When you've got a man making threats of violence, the last thing that you want to do is go up and, let's talk through this together.
That'd be a very stupid thing to do.
You shouldn't do that, and it's not your responsibility.
You know who had a responsibility to help Jordan Neely?
And I wish that he did get the help that he needed.
I wish he got it years ago before he became a serial criminal.
But do you know who should have helped him?
His family.
And I am really sick and tired of these families coming out after the fact, like you left your loved one to live on the street, this psychotic, violent criminal.
You just left him on the street for a decade, and now you want to come back around and pretend that you're upset and tell the rest of us that we should have helped him?
He's your family member.
Where the hell were you?
That's what I'm gonna ask the family of Jordan Neely now with your lawyer at the press conference.
Where were you for the last 10 years?
He's your loved one.
What the hell did you do for him?
You didn't do anything.
You did nothing.
That's the case for almost all these BLM martyrs that we get.
The families come out afterwards, oh my dear lord, my dear sweet boy.
Where were you?
You were nowhere.
You didn't care about him.
And now because you see the dollar signs, you want to cash in on his death?
That's all this is.
And I know, I know that we're supposed to speak in hushed and reverent tones about the families.
Oh, the poor families.
How about holding the families accountable?
Take care of your own.
It's your responsibility, family.
Your responsibility.
Take care of your own.
It's not up to the rest of us.
You put the rest of us in impossible situations.
By not taking care of your own, you put the rest of us.
You inflict this person on the rest of us.
And then you dare to question after the fact?
When we are forced to do things we don't want to do?
Daniel Penney didn't go to work that day or get on the train that day wanting to get into a physical altercation.
He's not the one who instigated it.
He's just sitting there.
He wants to get from point A to point B. It's the only reason he's there.
Jordan Neely put him in a situation where he had to make a choice.
And you, as the family, put Daniel Penney in the same situation.
By not taking care of your own.
Didn't take care of him, now you want to cash in and make tens of millions of dollars, and it'll probably work too, won't it?
Because that will heal.
That's the only way to heal now.
Completely abandon your own family members, and then, and then, well, I need money, I need to heal.
It's disgusting.
It really disgusts me.
All right.
Anyway, here's one from Yahoo News.
Oh, hold on a second.
Actually, I'm skipping ahead.
We didn't get to that one yet.
Starting with the Daily Wire report, President Joe Biden ginned up racial tensions at the graduation, because we need more of those, at the graduation ceremony for Harvard University on Saturday, claiming that America's greatest threat comes in the form of white supremacy.
Biden gave the commencement address for the Historically Black College and University at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., and we have a nice little clip of that.
Let's check it out.
The stand up against the poison of white supremacy, as I did my inaugural address to a single out
as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.
And I'm not saying this because I'm at a black HPCU.
I say it wherever I go.
Greatest threat to the homeland is white supremacy, he says.
Greatest threat.
It's not guys like Jordan Neely that are walking around in our cities and randomly assaulting and killing people.
I mean, that's happening every single day.
Every single day in this country.
There are people being randomly killed and assaulted and accosted as they're walking down the street or sitting on trains or doing anything else every single day.
Every day there are gas station clerks that end up trembling on their knees on the ground begging for their lives when a gun-toting criminal comes in to rob them.
That happens every day also.
Every day there are people sitting at stoplights, they look over, they've got a gun stuffed in their face, they're getting dragged out of their own car and possibly killed in the process by some nihilistic, empty person with no regard for human life at all and will happily kill you over a few dollars or a car or something.
That's happening every single day.
And in almost none of those cases are they white supremacists who are perpetrating these crimes.
Almost none of them.
I mean, it's so rare that a white supremacist does something like this that anytime, every single day, if you hear a story about someone being randomly shot or killed, You can just immediately assume.
You can make some assumptions about the perpetrator and none of them should be that he's a white supremacist.
But Biden says they're the greatest threat.
DHS Secretary Mayorkas was interviewed shortly after the speech and he concurred.
The president yesterday, at his commencement address for the Howard University graduates, called white supremacy the major domestic terror threat in this country.
Is that correct?
It tragically is.
You know, in the terrorism context, domestic violent extremism is our greatest threat right now.
Individuals are driven to violence because of ideologies of hate.
Anti-government sentiments, false narratives, personal grievances and the like.
And regrettably, we have seen a rise in white supremacy.
Anti-government sentiments.
Yeah, that's the thing that they're really worried about.
That's the kind of quiet part out loud aspect of this.
What they're really worried about are those anti-government sentiments.
And they want to tie quote-unquote anti-government sentiment to white supremacy.
So if you have anti-government sentiments, then you're a white supremacist.
Which makes most of us white supremacists.
Because there are a lot of reasons to have anti-government sentiments about this particular government.
And when I say this government, I mean the one that we've had for a long time.
A lot of reasons to have negative sentiments about I don't know.
Unless, of course, your anti-government sentiment is focused entirely on local police departments, who you say should be defunded and wiped out so that you can carry on committing all the crimes you want.
They're not worried about that kind of anti-government sentiment.
So the anti-government sentiment that drives mobs of people to invade a police station in Minneapolis, for example, and burn it to the ground, okay?
Or drives people to set federal courthouses on fire.
They're not worried about those anti-government sentiments.
Those are okay.
Those are understandable.
Those are just people who are hungry and want some bread, and this is the only way they know how to do it.
If your anti-government sentiments are more intelligent than that, and more well considered and thought out, then it's white supremacy, according to them.
There's no, you know, there's no factual basis to any of this, of course.
There's no way to justify any of it.
The claim that white supremacy is the thing that we're... Like, it is... For anyone who is worried about this, you're worried about the rise of white supremacy, I can tell you right now, you are eventually going to die.
And depending on where you live, there's a not insignificant chance that you will be killed one of these days.
But, fear not, It is not going to be a white supremacist who does it.
And I can just say that to you right now.
Everyone who happens to be listening to me say these words right now.
It is nearly certain that you will never be physically attacked by a white supremacist.
It is not nearly certain that you'll never be physically attacked or killed at all.
But it won't be a white supremacist.
Alright, one other...
Skip ahead a little bit.
Went slightly long on the first story, I think.
I did want to mention this, though.
It would behoove me to mention it.
I think that I should, because I give Pope Francis a hard time, rightly so.
This I did appreciate.
This is from the BBC.
Pope Francis has suggested that people who choose to have pets over children are acting selfishly.
The Pope's comments came as he was discussing parenthood during a general audience at the Vatican in Rome.
Today we see a form of selfishness, he told the audience.
We see that some people do not want to have a child.
Sometimes they have one and that's it, but they have dogs and cats to take the place of children.
This may make people laugh, but it is the reality.
The practice is a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and diminishes us, takes away our humanity.
It is not often that I get to agree with Pope Francis when he is pontificating about this and that subject.
On this one thing, though, I certainly do agree.
And it's not because, as you know, And I'm not claiming the Pope listens to my podcast.
Maybe he does.
But I've been on this theme for a long time.
And it's not that there's anything wrong with getting a pet, having a cat or dog in the house.
It's that prioritizing being a pet owner over having children, that's the problem.
Or seeing pet ownership as a form of parenthood in and of itself, when it certainly is not, is the problem.
And that is selfishness.
The drive to try to replace the parental instinct, the desire to have kids, trying to replace that with pet ownership, trying to fill that void with pet ownership, is driven by selfishness.
And the reason is that having a pet, it's easier.
It doesn't demand nearly as much of you.
And pet ownership can become this very self-centered relationship where you like having the pet around because of how the pet makes you feel, right?
It's a cute little pet, and you get to pet the dog when you come home from work, and the dog's always excited to see you, and animals are a lot more predictable in that way.
And their needs are much more simple.
Especially if you have a dog, they're obsessed with you and they're always there to make you feel better all the time.
Human beings are not quite like that because human beings are much more complicated and require much more of us.
Raising a child requires much more of us.
Your child is not a little panting dog.
As long as you keep them fed, they're happy.
Now, there's much greater joy to be found in parenthood, but you have to find it.
You have to work for it, and you have to earn it in a lot of ways.
And that's why people don't like it.
So, put one in the win column for Pope Francis there.
That's pretty big news there.
Let's get to the comment section.
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By the way, a fun little tidbit from my own life.
A big moment for me, actually.
I officially entered middle age over the weekend by throwing out my back.
Completely threw my back out.
First real experience with this.
So, I could hardly breathe or, like, walk over the weekend.
I can do those things a little bit better now because they put me on a bunch of drugs.
And I usually don't like taking medicine at all.
Like, I won't even take Tylenol most of the time.
And it drives my wife crazy because any time, like, she just...
I'm like a little kid.
I'll say I have a headache and she'll hand me some Tylenol and I'll hide it.
I won't even put it in my pocket.
I won't take it.
But I've made two exceptions to the don't take medicine rule in my own life.
One is when I blew up my Achilles and then the other one is right now.
And the worst thing is that the way that it happened was a combination of both stupid on my part And also being lame on my part.
I woke up early Saturday morning with my back feeling very sore.
And I guess I pulled something while I was sleeping.
Because, you know, kids, this is one thing to look forward to, kids, as you get older, that you can injure yourself while sleeping.
Like, sleeping becomes a dangerous time.
And it's not sleepwalking.
It's not like I got up and I was running a marathon in my sleep.
I was just laying there.
Just laying there asleep.
And I managed to injure myself.
But then, I wasn't I wasn't completely crippled, and I wasn't satisfied with that, so that afternoon I took my kids out to the garden center, the nursery down the street.
We were getting some Mother's Day gifts for my wife, and one of the things we got her was this 70-pound statue of St.
Francis of Assisi to put in the garden.
My wife loves these little statues.
And so we got her this thing, it was 60 or 70 pounds, and I knew it was a bad idea, given the back issues, to lift it.
And I was about to lift it, you know, because I had to lift it, put it on the cart, bring it out to the car, lift it in the car, lift it out of the car when we got home.
My nine-year-old daughter is there, and she's got, already has maternal instincts.
And so she's kind of, she's telling me, no, Daddy, no, get one of the workers here.
Why don't you get one of them to lift the statue up for you and bring it to the car?
She's being the sensible one.
And I said, no, I'm fine.
You know, you think I can't lift a statue?
Come on.
You think your dad can't lift a statue?
It'll be fine.
And I did, and then shortly after that I was almost entirely disabled, and I required all the drugs just to function.
So that's the story.
I guess I'm in that difficult period of a man's life where your body is getting older but your mind hasn't caught up to that reality yet, and that's kind of where I'm living right now.
Bubba says, I haven't seen the Lion King remake, but the technology they used is at least interesting because they created the virtual environments and were able to physically move virtual cameras within the space.
That tech led to the void used in the Mandalorian.
On the same topic, Josiah says, man, I never thought about how awkward and dull and uncanny, uncanny valley-ish that those Disney remakes might be with the lousy live-action animation.
The clip of that, of the Little Mermaid remake, looks just god-awful and unwatchable.
Yeah, it is.
And, you know, I was thinking about this, too, as well, talking about these live-action remakes of Disney's cartoons and how terrible they are.
One of the things that makes them so awful, and this was especially the case with the Lion King quote-unquote live-action remake that was not live-action because they were still talking lions and those don't exist in real life, so it was still animation.
It was just a different kind of animation.
But you don't even You can't really quite follow a lot of these live-action Disney remakes unless you've seen the original.
You don't actually know exactly what's going on unless you've seen the first one to give you context.
Because with the live-action thing, especially from the non-human characters, you don't get the emotion, the facial expressions, or any of that.
So there are so many scenes where you wouldn't even, unless you had the context of the older film, you don't really know exactly what they're trying to do here.
You're not sure what emotion they're trying to capture because you can't see it with the way they've done the animation.
So you need that.
And so all these adults that go and watch these films because it reminds them, oh, it's my childhood all over again.
Reminds me of my childhood.
And so many millennials are pathetic and that's all they want from their art.
All they want from their art is to be reminded of things that existed before.
Never mind the fact that you can just go back and watch those things if you really want to.
They still exist.
You can watch them.
But I think they don't even really... They go into it with that framework in mind, and then they watch these scenes, and they know what it's supposed to be trying to do because they've seen the original.
Kids who see the live-action stuff without seeing the original, they might still enjoy it, because kids enjoy watching anything.
But they're not getting anything close to the full experience of what these stories really are.
Riz Kitkat says, I had a team lead at Walmart come to the register to ring me out, and he said, be sure to press the five star on your keypad for me.
Just told me to give him five stars.
As an ex-Walmart employee, the store is awful, and I was happy to quit.
So they want you to... I don't think I've ever had that at a Walmart register.
They're asking you to give a rating, like they do with Uber Eats.
I'm not even sure I remember that.
And then Moose Vector says, it terrifies my wife and I with making a family.
Will our future kids be coerced and groomed outside our purview to mutilate themselves like this?
Yeah, I hear this so often from young parents or people that, young couples that are considering having kids.
And so often I hear, well, I'm afraid to do it because we live in a fallen, broken world and all the rest of it.
And that is, it can be a scary thing when you have kids.
Like, the worst decision you could make in response to that is to decide not to have kids at all, to give up on that experience, and to give up on your own legacy and bloodline because you're afraid of the effect the culture will have on your kids.
And that's when the insidious powers that have made things this way in our culture, they win.
That's what they want.
I always talk all the time about demoralization.
They're trying to demoralize us.
And when you give up and you throw up your hands and say, never mind, I'm just going to give up on my bloodline, my legacy.
I'm going to end it here because it's not worth it.
That's when they really win.
So that can't be our response.
The response is have kids, love your kids, be attentive, raise them, and even in our Awful satanic culture, they'll still have a very good chance of being good people and living good lives as long as you hold up your end of the bargain.
That's all.
A popular professor who's been on the job for 30 plus years was put on leave for the crime of passing out Jeremy's He-Him and She-Her chocolate bars.
Just giving people chocolate.
You know, free chocolate.
Somehow gets them suspended.
Well, Jeremy believes that every free American should have the right to hand out chocolate.
That is why Jeremy has taken his delicious He-Him and She-Her chocolate bars and reduced them down to a tasty little micro-aggression size.
You can head over to jeremyschocolate.com.
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You can get your microaggression-sized Jeremy's Chocolate bars conveniently available for Halloween, which is a ways away, but still you can stock up now.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Well, I don't consider the American Psychological Association to be an authority on very many things, but I do think that the organization's website provides a simple yet accurate definition of trauma.
It says that trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event, and mentions as examples accidents, natural disasters, and rape.
So if your house was hit with a tornado while you were huddled in your basement with your children, or if you were involved in a high-speed collision on the highway and you nearly died, or if, God forbid, you were sexually abused in the past, Then there's a good chance that the experience will have a psychological and emotional impact that will stay with you for a very long time or possibly forever.
And the APA says that a traumatized person will typically experience shock and then denial in the short term and long term.
They may find that their relationships become strained.
They may have flashbacks.
Trouble sleeping, you know migraines, insomnia, all of these are symptoms of experiencing that trauma. It's a very
it's very real, you know You can go through things in life that will have this kind
of effect. But the good news is that for most of us These sorts of events will be rare
Life is difficult because we are conscious agents living in a fallen world full of pain and suffering, and there's a certain amount of existential anxiety that comes with that, and is always at least bubbling under the surface of our everyday life.
But everyday discomfort is not traumatic, or at least it shouldn't be.
Which means that if you find yourself frequently describing your everyday experiences as traumatic, And if you can do an assessment and see that things other people cope with relatively easily are somehow sources of trauma for you, then that's a good indication that you are the problem.
If you're constantly talking about your trauma and finding new things to be traumatized by, that means either that you're being whiny and hysterical because you want attention, Or you really do feel traumatized by everything, which means that you are emotionally fragile to an extreme degree.
Either way, the problem is you.
And that sets us up for this story, published on Friday by Rolling Stone.
They tweeted the story with this caption.
Exclusive!
Current and former staffers tell Rolling Stone that the Kelly Clarkson show is toxic behind the scenes.
They say Clarkson is fantastic, but allege that they are underpaid, verbally abused, traumatized, and put in uncomfortable positions.
Yes, we have yet another tale of a hostile work environment, a story of trauma and emotional abuse and other things like that.
It was only a couple weeks ago that we heard about the alleged hostile work environment over on the now-defunct Tucker Carlson Show on Fox News.
In the past, we've heard tales of hostile work environments on shows like Ellen DeGeneres and Dr. Phil and others.
Now, this could be a sign that people working in television are slaves suffering horrific abuses.
It could mean that being a 27-year-old PA for Kelly Clarkson is more grueling and taxing than being a 14-year-old in the coal mines in 1873.
It could mean that.
Or it could mean that the media business is fast-paced and high-pressure and results-oriented, and it attracts a lot of young adults.
And this is a bad combination because many young adults these days are too weak and too timid and too incompetent to keep up in that kind of environment.
It could go either way.
Let's investigate and find out.
Reading from Rolling Stone, it says, quote, When the Kelly Clarkson Show debuted on NBC in the fall of 2019, the talk show immediately became a beloved fresh addition to the traditional daytime lineup, with a built-in fan base from Kelly Clarkson's singing career, who have been rooting for her since she first won the American Idol competition in 2002.
The show captivates audiences.
Over the past four seasons, the pop singer has interviewed guests like Hillary Clinton and Dolly Parton.
She's performed kelly-oke segments where she sings covers of other people's popular songs, like Whitney Houston's Queen of the Night and Adele's Rolling in the Deep, and has maintained a level of candor and relatability with viewers at home.
But behind the scenes, employees say they were overworked, underpaid, and that working at the show was traumatizing to their mental health.
A former employee adds, quote, I remember going up to the roof of the stage to cry and being like, oh my gosh, what am I doing?
Why am I putting myself through this?
Wow, I mean, what was she put through?
I say she because I'm assuming this is a woman, though unfortunately that may not even be a safe assumption anymore.
But what happened?
What would cause a grown adult to take time out of her day while she's still on the clock to cry like a baby?
Do they keep her in chains in the basement and force her to do her job against her will while her manager comes by with a whip and beats anyone who isn't keeping up?
Is working the Kelly Clarkson Show kind of like being a galley slave on a Roman ship in the first century?
Is that how bad it is?
Well, we'll have to keep reading and find out.
Former employees say the toxic behavior behind the scenes starts with executive producer Alex Duda, who shields Clarkson from what staffers say they're enduring because of the climate Duda created.
I think Alex Duda is a monster, a former employee says.
I have a friend who's an executive producer who warned me about taking this job because apparently she has done this on every show she's worked on.
As for Clarkson, their current employees, as well as 10 former employees, are under the impression she isn't aware of how bad things are for lower-level staffers.
Some of whom say they've taken on other jobs as babysitters, dog walkers, and Uber Eats drivers to pay their bills.
Now notice how we've made it several paragraphs into this epic tale of woe, and we've yet to hear any specific examples of trauma being inflicted on the staff.
The only specific detail we get, so far, is that low-level staffers have to take on second jobs.
My God, the humanity!
You mean to tell me that when you're just starting out in an industry and you're a low-level employee, you might not make a lot of money and so you have to do other things to pay the bills?
How terrible!
I mean, that's only been the experience of literally millions of people since jobs have existed.
I had to do the same thing when I was in my early 20s.
I've worked two jobs at various points.
I've worked three jobs.
I've had times when I worked multiple jobs, and one of the jobs was an overnight shift.
So imagine getting off of work at like 10.30 p.m., and instead of going home to go to bed, you have to start a whole new job at midnight.
Well, many of you can imagine something like that because you've done something similar.
It's not unusual.
It's not harrowing.
It's certainly not traumatic.
It's just work.
And you'll be fine.
So where is the real trauma here?
Well, let's keep reading.
One former employee says that they recently quit working at the show because a producer who reports to Duda yelled and cursed at them multiple times on stage.
They say they developed so much anxiety from the way they were treated at work that they would regularly vomit and exhibit physical signs of sickness.
This job deteriorated my mental health, they say.
The second former employee says that they took a leave of absence because their mental health was also suffering.
They say they were bullied and intimidated by producers who went out of their way to make staffers feel scared to ask questions and get their work done.
According to the staffer, this prompted them to take a month away from the job and see a psychiatrist for the first time in their life because they truly couldn't handle it mentally.
The former staffers say they've worked in the entertainment industry for years on different sets, but The Kelly Clarkson Show is by far the worst experience I've ever had in my entire life.
It deterred me from wanting to work in daytime ever again, they say.
When I say I was traumatized, I was really traumatized.
Oh, you were really traumatized, were you?
Really, really traumatized.
When other people talk about traumas they've suffered in life, they're referring to things like watching a parent die of cancer, watching a friend get blown up on the battlefield.
And, you know, those are traumatic experiences.
You feel comfortable using that same language to describe your experience of getting yelled at by your boss.
There's no reason to keep reading, by the way.
This is it.
This is the one single scandalous detail we're given.
Some people yell sometimes.
Traumatic.
You know, I once had a boss, years ago, in a meeting, cuss me out at the top of his lungs and throw a book across the room in a fit of rage.
I wasn't traumatized.
I didn't lay awake that night trembling with tears in my eyes.
I never sought therapy to help me recover or cope.
I think later on I told one of my co-workers about it and we laughed because the guy's a psycho.
And I think that's the last time I ever brought it up to anyone until this very moment.
Now, should your boss scream and use foul language in the workplace?
No.
Is it inappropriate?
Yes.
Should it be a crisis in your life and a source of deep emotional trauma?
Should you be crying and vomiting because of it?
No, absolutely not.
People lose their tempers sometimes.
It happens.
It'll happen at work.
If you're working with other human beings like yourself.
If you're working in a high-pressure competitive business like media, it's even more certain to happen.
Tempers, you know, emotions run high sometimes.
You don't need to alert the media about it.
We already know and we don't care.
At the beginning, I said that we can interpret all this whining over insignificant things as either disingenuous and performative or a sincere expression of extreme emotional fragility.
But I think the second option is the more concerning one.
And unfortunately, I think also the correct one.
We have bred a generation of Americans to collapse under the slightest pressure, to recoil in horror at any amount of discomfort and difficulty.
At the root of this disease is their belief that they have the right to a life free from discomfort and difficulty.
They haven't been raised to understand that hardship is an absolutely inseparable part of life, of the human experience.
They truly believe that a life of total ease and luxury is available, is possible, and anything that interferes with that pursuit of this fantasy is therefore a violation of their human rights.
People in the past didn't complain nearly as much about their toil and suffering, even though they experience both to an infinitely greater degree than we do, because they recognized that this is the price of admission for conscious beings in a physical world.
That's why even if you've suffered actual trauma, real trauma from a truly traumatic experience, it's still not a good idea to harp over it the way these people harp over every stubbed toe and paper cut.
You know, one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite stories ever put to screen, the Western miniseries Lonesome Dove, happens right after Diane Lane's character, who's a prostitute named Lori, is kidnapped and then terribly abused by an outlaw named Blue Duck.
Robert Duvall's character, Gus, kind of this grizzled old western guy, rescues her and later that night when they're sitting together, Laurie breaks down in tears and says, they shouldn't have done that to me, Gus, they shouldn't have taken me.
And Gus gives her a hug and pats her shoulder and says, I know, honey, but they did.
I know they shouldn't have, but they did.
They did.
Dumb modern audiences may watch that scene and interpret it as Gus being uncaring or dismissive, but it was the opposite.
His point was that you won't gain anything by dwelling on the fact that your past sufferings shouldn't have happened.
Yes, it shouldn't have happened, but it did happen.
And the point Gus was making is that you'll never be able to function in the world and truly heal unless you accept reality for what it is.
It shouldn't have happened, but it did.
Now what?
If Gus would say that to a woman who'd just been kidnapped by outlaws in the Old West, what would he say to a grown woman crying on the roof at work because her boss was kind of mean to her?
She shouldn't have yelled at me for being seven minutes late to our production meeting, Gus.
She shouldn't have done that.
Maybe if he was in a kind mood, he would pat her softly on the shoulder and deliver the same message.
I know, honey.
She shouldn't have, but she did.
But if he did that, he'd probably end up getting fired and then sued for sexual harassment because he touched her shoulder and called her honey.
I think the better response in the latter case would be something like, yes, honey, she yelled at you.
People yell sometimes.
That's life.
What did you expect?
Did you expect that nobody would ever lose their temper at you ever in your life?
Even when you're doing annoying things like showing up late to a meeting that everybody else managed to get there on time for?
So you want everyone else to exercise total and perfect emotional restraint, but you're the one up here on the roof crying like a toddler in the middle of the workday?
At least the mean people are productive.
You're useless, look at you!
Now get back to work or you're fired.
That's what I would say, anyway.
Which probably is why I'm not in management.
But at least I can still say to literally everyone who has ever complained about a hostile work environment, you're cancelled.
