Ep. 1203 - Police Arrest An Autistic Teenager For 'Homophobia'
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, an autistic girl in the UK was dragged out of her home and arrested for making an allegedly "homophobic" comment. Freedom of speech doesn't exist across most of the western world, and our country is headed in the same direction. Also, the new CEO of Twitter explains their new content moderation policies. I have concerns. Suicide reaches an all time high, and nobody seems interested in talking about what's really driving the problem. And a blue collar folk singer who lives out in the woods in Virginia has gone massively viral with his new song. We'll play a clip for you and you'll see why.
Ep.1203
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, an autistic girl in the UK was dragged out of her home and arrested for making an allegedly homophobic comment.
Freedom of speech doesn't exist across most of the Western world, and our country is headed in the same direction.
Also, the new CEO of Twitter explains what their new content moderation policies are, and I have concerns about them.
I'll explain.
Suicide reaches an all-time high, and nobody seems interested in talking about what's really driving the problem, but we will today.
And a blue-collar folk singer who lives out in the woods in Virginia has gone massively viral with his new song.
We'll play a clip for you and you'll see why.
All of that and more today on The Matt Walsh Show.
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There's not a lot of humor to be found in wokeism or safetyism or whatever you want to call modern left-wing ideology, but since it's Friday, it's worth acknowledging something that everyone knows deep down, which is that there are a few things about it that are, if we're being honest, pretty funny.
And here's one of them.
Most jurisdictions in this country used to consider it a serious offense to lie and call somebody gay.
You know, if somebody was straight and you started spreading rumors that they're secretly gay, then until very recently, New York courts would punish you for that without a second thought.
They'd call it defamation per se.
You're making up lies about somebody.
But in 2021, all that changed.
The New York Appeals Court ruled that, actually, you can call people gay all you want, and it's not necessarily defamatory.
Why is that?
Well, because according to New York court judges, if you lie and call somebody gay, if anything, you're probably improving their reputation in the community rather than harming it.
That's because being gay has become a status symbol, at least in places like Manhattan.
So, suggesting that somebody is secretly gay, it's like calling someone secretly a millionaire.
It's a compliment, whether it's true or not.
It's kind of amusing when you think about it.
New York is now so woke that gay slurs, at least in some cases, are now acceptable.
In that respect, strangely enough, New York is quite different from, say, the United Kingdom, another hotbed of leftism.
Over there, they don't take kindly to unfounded accusations of homosexuality.
We know that because this week, A team of police officers in Leeds raided the home of a 16-year-old autistic girl suffering from scoliosis.
What was the girl's crime?
Well, she said that one of the officers that was on this team of people arresting her looked like her lesbian relative.
That's all this girl did.
She didn't even imply that it was bad to be a lesbian in any way.
She just said that this woman, this cop, looked like a lesbian.
And for that, cops dragged her away.
Here's what that looked like.
She hasn't said anything to you.
Doesn't matter.
She's getting arrested.
She is getting arrested.
I've got units coming.
Don't worry.
She hasn't done anything.
She's autistic.
I don't care.
She's autistic.
I know you don't care.
I'm telling you, I've got units coming.
She's going to be arrested tonight.
I don't care.
She's autistic, I know you don't care.
I'm telling you, I thought you were gonna come and she's gonna be arrested tonight.
(all talking over each other)
You're a fucking bitch, what do you mean by that?
Calm down.
She's autistic.
She's got autism.
Can you just stand there?
She's in a cupboard.
She can't go anywhere.
She can't go anywhere.
Stand there.
They're going to remove her for what?
She said the word lesbian.
Her nana is a lesbian.
She's married to a woman.
She's not homophobic.
Look what you're clenching your fist at.
Go away from my teenage daughter.
What is wrong with you?
There is something wrong with you mate.
She didn't aim it at the police officer.
This is not homophobic remarks of my colleague.
This is what the British Empire has become.
They used to rule the world.
Now they scramble half the police department in response to a teenager who says, hey, you look like my lesbian Nana.
Now they're arresting a girl.
Police are arresting a girl because that girl hurt the feelings of one of those police officers.
It's quite a fall from grace, especially given that the police officer in question, if we're
being honest, could definitely pass as a lesbian.
Whether she's trying to look that way or not, it is a convincing display, let's just say.
And at least in civilized, progressive utopias like New York, they celebrate that kind of
thing.
You know, you go up to a cop and say, "You look like a lesbian."
The cop will say, "Well, thank you so much."
The UK obviously hasn't thought this all the way through, though, because by arresting
autistic kids who say that women look like lesbians, especially when they actually do
look like lesbians, they're sending the message that looking like a lesbian is a bad thing.
It's, you know, a horrendous insult.
But that's the opposite of what the UK intends to do here.
Really, they're trying to elevate LGBT people to a special, sacred status and protect their feelings with the force of law, even if it means dragging a teenage girl to jail, kicking and screaming.
But the truth is the United States isn't far from becoming the UK where children are sent to prison for offending the government.
What happened to that girl in the UK is quickly becoming a hallmark of so-called Western democracies.
Recently in Canada, for example, a pastor was arrested for the crime of protesting drag queens who were trying to indoctrinate children.
I want you to watch this news report carefully because it's one of the most incredible clips you'll ever see.
Watch.
They should feel safe.
There should never be an issue with safety.
A pastor who tried to stop a drug reading session for kids at the Seaton Library last week has been charged by Calgary Police.
Parents now questioning if these events are safe enough to attend with their kids.
Police were called when protesters interrupted the library's Reading with Royalty event that was being presented by drag personalities to kids, when several protesters entered the room shouting homophobic words at the children and their parents.
36-year-old Pastor Derek Scott Reimer was arrested and charged with hate-motivated crime for causing a disturbance and one count of mischief.
In addition, City of Calgary police officers have charged Reimer with six counts of harassment under the Public Behavior Bylaw.
Police say the disturbance scared the children who were at the reading sessions.
Now parents wonder if these events are still safe to bring their families.
Yes, there should never be an issue with safety, says the woman.
Police are questioning if the events are safe, says the reporter.
Meanwhile, they show footage of the mob throwing the pastor to the ground.
And the message is pretty clear.
By safety, they mean you don't get to question their behavior or their viewpoints.
You don't get to object when they sexualize children.
Because they want to sexualize children safely, and you're making it unsafe.
And if you do, you'll get attacked and thrown in jail.
That's what they mean when they say safety.
Safety no longer means safety in the traditional sense.
For a long time now, it's meant something closer to emotional comfort.
Like, that's what they mean when they say safety.
To be safe is to feel good.
It is to have nice feelings.
And anyone who causes you to have not nice feelings and to feel not good is compromising your safety.
This has been true in Canada for a while.
A couple years ago, a man who was down on his luck went on a rant at the office of his local member of parliament, who was a woman named Catherine McKenna.
And here's what he said.
Watch.
Can you help me?
She says she's spending $5 billion, $10 billion a year on infrastructure.
The PBO office, Yves Giroux, says she's only spending $5 billion a year.
What's up with that?
I don't go to work every day and bust my *** for this ***.
You're all scumbags!
You're all f****** pieces of trash!
You f****** scumbags!
You're all kids f****** pieces of trash!
Just like Justin Trudeau!
Raping kids!
We charity!
Sorry kids in Africa!
This money isn't for you!
This money's for Justin Trudeau and his family!
They need it a lot more than you!
They need a bigger yacht!
They need a bigger watch!
They need 5 watches that are 20 grand!
The f****** scumbag pieces of s***!
I hope you all burn in f**king hell.
You're all gonna get what you deserve, you f**king traitors.
F**king scumbag pieces of f**king s**t!
Alright, so he yells a few harsh words, including a few that were bleeped out.
Makes some valid points as well, we should admit.
But he never met any violent threats.
And for that, Catherine McKenna called for a hate crime investigation, and authorities opened one.
You see, in Canada, no one's allowed to say mean things to politicians.
You can call conservatives white supremacists all you want, but don't you dare attack the people in power.
In a free country, which Canada, of course, isn't, you know, cussing out politicians would be considered a virtuous act, if not a national pastime.
A way to keep our leaders humble and on their toes is a good thing.
But in Canada, it's a potential hate crime.
Now we'd like to think that these attacks on freedom of speech couldn't happen here, but the truth is, they're already happening here.
They're just not getting a lot of coverage.
Recently in Watertown, Wisconsin, police arrested a young Christian man for simply reading the Bible on the sidewalk in the vicinity of a public drag event.
But that was all he was doing, standing on the sidewalk, reading the Bible, and watch what happens to him.
Serve one another.
For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.
But if you bite and devour one another, beware lest you be consumed by one another.
What is the problem?
my location. What's wrong I don't know. You didn't
grabbed the money. This i we had. Yeah, that was in
here. What are you doing?
guys. They say we can have we can speak out here on
You can speak, but there' How come there's no amplification?
You guys are acting like thugs, man.
You're acting like straight up thugs.
He has every right to be out here engaging in speech.
The guy holding the camera says, and he's right, but we don't live in a country that cares about that sort of thing anymore.
Marcus Schrader, the man who was arrested for reading the Bible there, later spoke to the city council about what happened, and I want you to listen to what he said.
Intolerance is an interesting word.
Tolerance, intolerance, hatred, love, bigotry, things like that.
Because, really, every culture has something that it's intolerant towards and something that it's tolerant of.
I mean, there are things like murder and rape and, you know, stealing and just crimes that we are intolerant towards as a society.
And so, every society has something that's intolerant towards.
The question is just, what is our object of intolerance and what is our object of tolerance?
When I showed up Saturday, all I did was read from Scripture on the sidewalk.
I read from the Bible Galatians.
And by the way, I wasn't reading Romans 1.
I wasn't reading any passage that spoke against homosexuality or anything like that.
I was reading a passage from the Bible about love.
And I was arrested.
No reason, not given any warning, not told anything about my amplification needed to be turned down.
I was arrested and taken into custody simply for reading the Bible on the sidewalk.
One thing to keep in mind there when you watch that is, I don't know if the police will try to claim that, well, he's disturbing, you're using the megaphone.
You know, trans activists, you flip this around and no one's getting arrested, obviously.
You know, I've had trans activists many times show up to my events and they can have bullhorns, they can have sirens.
You know, they show up with bullhorns, air horns, sirens that are going off the whole time to drown you out.
Cops will not step in.
They will not say a damn word.
One guy reading a Bible gets arrested, on the other hand.
Now, anyone watching that man knows that we just saw there, he knows that he's a far better person to have around children than men pretending to be women who talk to kids about their sexual fantasies.
But Marcus Schrader was arrested anyway, and the drag queens were able to continue indoctrinating kids as the mothers of those kids looked on approvingly.
It's the same thing that happens in Canada.
Preach the gospel, go to jail.
Preach perversion, police protect you.
In many states in this country, this will soon become the norm.
A bill that recently passed in the Michigan Statehouse called HB4474 would make it a hate crime to cause someone to, quote, feel terrorized, frightened, or threatened.
And the bill specifies that sexual orientation and gender identity or expression are protected classes.
If you make someone feel threatened because of their gender identity, you can go to prison for five years.
Now, what does it mean to make someone feel threatened because of their gender identity?
Well, you know the answer to that question.
Trans activists have been screaming for years at maximum volume that unless you affirm them, unless you affirm everything they think and feel, then you're committing literal violence.
You're a terrorist.
You're engaging in genocide.
So yes, this bill means that if you refuse to lie about basic facts of biology in the state of Michigan, then you'll go to jail, just like that girl in Britain.
They'll haul you out of your home, and they'll arrest you for telling the truth.
Just as we're seeing in other parts of the world that also allegedly are or were free They'll take the fight right to you.
And if you don't believe that, consider what happened on Wednesday to an elderly man in Utah named Craig Robertson.
Robertson was obese, old, 75 years old, used a cane to get around, went to church on Sundays, took care of his blind son.
But he also liked to post angry memes and comments on social media, mocking and threatening Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, other random political figures.
In response to those memes, before dawn on Wednesday, the FBI went to Robertson's home.
Now, neighbors report that as many as 50 agents were on the scene.
Craig Robertson, soon after, was shot dead in a hail of bullets.
Now, why did FBI agents kill Robertson exactly?
We don't know.
The FBI won't tell us.
We asked them yesterday.
They refused to explain.
The New York Post now reports today that Robertson allegedly pointed a gun at the agents, and maybe he did.
We don't know that at this point.
Maybe we'll find out more.
Maybe we won't.
But we do know that the neighbors are all confused and disturbed trying to figure out why the federal government would need to send dozens of armed agents to a disabled elderly man's home because of things he posted online.
Now, if you saw them swarming his house and didn't have any context, you'd think that they were taking down a drug kingpin.
You'd never guess that the guy's crime was a Facebook meme.
So the question that many are asking, especially those in Robertson's community, is whether this level of response was actually necessary.
Did the FBI really consider Robertson a credible threat to the President of the United States?
It's hard to believe.
Now, it's not to defend the things that Robertson posted online, obviously.
The point is that the most powerful law enforcement organization in the country, which is funded by our tax dollars, is completely unwilling right now to explain why they killed an American citizen two days ago.
They have no justification for why they decided to go after him at 6 a.m.
in the morning.
They don't seem interested in providing a justification.
If you're living in the UK or Canada, then it's quite possible that none of this is particularly shocking to you.
You're used to this kind of thing.
But if you thought the United States could never descend into totalitarianism, as those countries have, then what's happening in many states across this country should disabuse you of that notion.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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I think this is a good place to start coming off of the opening monologue.
I want you to listen to this brief conversation that happened on CNN yesterday.
Listen.
When you hear the Ukraine exchange there, it's like watching the open of an old Tucker
He's not there anymore, but that's what it is.
And these are busy people.
These are hard-working people.
There are too many Democrats who want to say they're deplorables, or, you know, why talk to these people?
There are millions of them.
This is a family that literally is an economic anchor in the community.
The business started in the basement employs 80 people.
The new solar company employs 15 people.
In a part of the country that has been devastated economically and challenged economically the last 25 years.
They're good people.
They raise money for the Girl Scouts.
They go to church.
But they believe things that would break our fact check machine.
That's just a fact.
And they don't trust us.
They think we're part of the problem.
Yes, that's right, John.
They do.
But here's why I like this, because this is one of those moments, and you see it every once in a while on CNN, one of those moments where someone seems to be getting dangerously close to self-reflection.
He is standing at the precipice.
He has walked right up to the edge of some kind of honest self-analysis, of self-awareness.
He's like, he's almost there.
He is so close.
But he won't make it over the hill.
He's not gonna make it there.
All the way.
And they never do.
Yes, John, they think you're part of the problem.
Because you are.
You've lost the trust of the people.
The media has lost our trust.
Do you ever stop to ask yourself why?
So, sometimes they will... Much of the time we get open contempt for the people that he's talking about, which is just like regular Americans, right?
Sometimes they'll cloak it in this kind of like sympathy.
We get that from John King there.
He says, well, we shouldn't call them all deplorable.
We should treat them with respect.
Which, okay, great.
Good for you.
But now we're getting into pity and it's patronizing and it's, no, let's not attack them.
They're just confused.
These are very confused people.
Well, that's no better than just calling them all deplorable.
In fact, I'd prefer that.
I'd prefer that you just call us all deplorable and awful than to go the other way and say, oh, these poor people.
They're so confused.
They don't know what's going on.
They're so misled.
They don't know any better.
Let's not insult them.
So let's not be impressed with that.
That's no better.
In fact, again, I think it's worse.
Because if you really cared, if you really had any kind of empathy, then you would stop and think, well, why do these people not trust us?
And the reason they don't trust you is that you've revealed yourselves to be partisan hacks and liars.
And there's only, there's just only so many times that you can say things that turn out to be untrue before people don't trust you anymore.
That's the way trust works.
It works that way in a relationship.
It works that way in a friendship.
It works that way in any context.
And it works that way when it comes to the public's relationship with the media.
Or any institution.
There are only so many times you can be misled before you say, well, I can't, I don't trust anything you say anymore.
I can't.
I wish I could.
It'd be nice if we had an honest media.
It would be a useful thing to have, but we don't.
And we hear about how they believe all these things that would break the fact-check machine.
Of course, lots of the things that they believe are true.
And if they break the fact-check machine, it's because the fact-check machine is already broken.
It's designed to be broken.
But then there are also, look, there are plenty of things that, you know, if you go up to an average person on the street and you talk to them, yeah, you might find plenty of things they believe that aren't true.
You might even find dreaded conspiracy theories that are outlandish.
Many of them are not outlandish and in fact are also true.
But there are outlandish ones as well.
And maybe some of those are becoming more common also.
But that again goes back to the distrust.
People know they can't trust You, they can't trust the media, and so that leaves a void.
People want to know what's going on in the world, and they want explanations for things.
And if they're not going to get it, the media exists as the mechanism to sort of find out these things.
And if we can't trust that, that leaves us to speculate.
That's all we can do.
That's a natural reaction.
So when people look at something and say, well, why is that happening?
What's going on there?
What's up with that?
The media comes with their nerves.
They say, well, this is what's really happening.
And we know, well, we can't trust that.
And so then either we could say, well, I won't think about that anymore, then.
People don't do that.
That's not human.
Instead, we have this gap here, and we fill it in.
We just start thinking, well, it could be this, could be that.
Who knows?
That all goes back to you.
That's your fault.
In the media, that is.
The Hill has this report.
The CEO of X, formerly known as Twitter, said in a Thursday interview with CNBC, the platform is healthier and safer than it was a year ago.
Linda Iaccarino said, by all objective metrics, X is a much healthier and safer platform than it was a year ago.
Since acquisitions, we've built brand safety and content moderation tools that have never existed before at this company.
Yaccarina also referenced the company's recently introduced freedom of speech not freedom of reach policy and she explained what this means and we'll go to the clip where she talks more about this.
Staggeringly they take it down and that reducing that hateful content from being seen is one of the best examples how X is committed to Encouraging healthy behavior online.
And today, I can confidently sit in front of you and say that 99.9% of all posted impressions are healthy.
How do you define healthy though?
Is porn healthy?
Are conspiracy theories healthy?
You know, it goes back to my point about our success with freedom of speech, not reach.
And if it's If it is lawful, but it's awful, it's extraordinarily difficult for you to see it.
But how many millions of people follow Kanye West?
Lawful, but awful.
And he's allowed back on.
You know, Kanye, who hasn't rejoined the platform yet, but is planning to do so, will operate within the very specific policies that we have established, that we're clear on, that everyone who's watching this or listening on spaces can access themselves.
And we have an extraordinary team of people who are overseeing hands-on keyboards, monitoring
all day, every day to make sure that that 99.99% of people can access them.
There are far too many rhyming policies.
That's my first problem.
I'm okay with policies that rhyme, easier to remember, but you can't overdo it.
And she had two in one sentence.
Well, the thing is with our speech not reach policy, that if it's lawful but not awful, let's calm down, Willy Wonka.
More importantly, This is the kind of thing that definitely worries me.
Not because it rhymes, but because when you start evaluating speech based on whether it's healthy, or whether or not it's awful, or whether or not it's hateful, that's where you ultimately end up basically enforcing the same rules that every other social media platform enforces.
And if you don't ban people, but you just make it so that nobody can see their account or interact with their content, then you've effectively banned them, and arguably it'd be better to just ban them outright.
Right, I would, at least if a platform comes in and bans someone, then they know that they've been banned.
But if you limit their reach, there are ways you could do it where they would know about it, and there are ways where they might not know.
And we know the old Twitter was doing that all the time, putting people on blacklists and that sort of thing.
Limiting their engagement, limiting their reach.
These are more underhanded tactics.
I don't consider this better for free speech.
Now, at the same time, we should acknowledge that this is not quite as simple as some people on the right make it out to be.
There are some who say, hey, free speech, let people post whatever they want, and that's it.
Well, no.
It's not that simple, because if you just let people post whatever they want, then you have porn, and you have spam all over the place, and you have doxing, and death threats, and a platform can become just unusable.
Because at that point, you can't even use it anymore.
It's just not an experience that anybody, that any normal person would want to have.
So obviously, there does have to be certain kinds of content that you don't allow.
I think almost everyone agrees with that.
For me, once you take that factor into account, the rest really is pretty simple.
Because I don't see why the policy can't just be this.
Okay?
If you value free speech, then the policy ought to be this.
You can post whatever opinion you want.
Period.
All opinions, all perspectives are allowed.
Doesn't matter what it is.
Okay?
And yes, that opens the door for all kinds of opinions people can have that are objectionable, crazy, offensive.
But it's your opinion.
It's your perspective.
That's allowed.
We're not going to amplify or de-amplify anyone based on their opinions.
We're not going to play favorites.
We aren't going to juke the stats at all.
We're not going to prop you up if we like your opinion.
If it's an opinion, if it's a perspective of some kind, it's allowed.
Say what you want, as far as that goes.
Which means that sexually explicit content You know, porn would not be allowed.
That's not a perspective, that's not an opinion.
If you're posting just spam, that's not allowed.
If you're actually threatening people, like I'm gonna come and kill you, that's not allowed, shouldn't be.
Doxing, posting someone's personal information, shouldn't be allowed.
And none of those things are opinions.
None of those things count as a perspective that you might have.
And so, look, no matter how you slice it, no matter how you decide what kind of content is allowed, and it won't be, there are always going to be gray areas, there are always going to be some difficult cases, things that are like, right, wherever you draw a line, there are always going to be things that get close to that line, and then that's when things get maybe a little bit complicated.
But I think this is the clearest possible line you can draw.
Yeah, you're not allowing literally everything.
You can't do that.
You shouldn't do that.
Right now on Twitter, the CNBC host asks, I think, a valid question, which is, well, okay, we're not going to allow awful content or unhealthy content.
What about porn?
And right now there's porn all over Twitter.
Sexually explicit content all over Twitter.
It shouldn't be there, in my opinion.
That's an easy one.
Of course you ban that.
That's not valid expression.
That's not like expression that we need in order to have any kind of dialogue.
Again, it's not an opinion.
It's not a perspective.
If you just tell people, no, you can't post graphic sexual content, you're not preventing them from sharing their perspective on things.
And right now, that stuff is all over Twitter.
It shouldn't be.
That stuff should be banned.
So, this to me is a Pretty simple policy that rules out all the kinds of stuff that you really do want to rule out.
And it allows everything that should be allowed and that can't really hurt anyone.
It's the thing.
When you have pornography on a platform where children are also allowed.
Then, that's harmful.
You're exposing people, especially kids, to content that could be harmful for them.
Emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, in every way.
Obviously, you dock someone.
That's harmful.
That's real-world harm that you are doing to them.
You start threatening death.
Again, that's harm.
No one is harmed by an opinion.
Even if you hate the opinion, even if it's the worst opinion, even if it's the worst perspective that you've ever seen, you think it's the most outrageous thing, you're not harmed by that.
No harm is done.
So if you really value free speech, that ought to be the policy.
All right.
Here's a pretty terrible story, unfortunately.
Well worth discussing.
The AP reports about 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever according to new government data posted Thursday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which posted the numbers, has not yet calculated a suicide rate for the year, but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S.
than at any time since the dawn of World War II.
There's something wrong.
The numbers should not be going up.
Christina Wilbur, a 45-year-old Florida woman, whose son shot himself to death last year.
My son should not have died, she said.
I know it's complicated, I really do, but we have to be able to do something, something that we're not doing, because whatever we're doing right now is not helping.
Experts caution that suicide's complicated, that recent increases might be driven by a range of factors, including higher rates of depression and limited availability of mental health services.
But a main driver is the growing availability of guns, said Jill Harkavy-Friedman, Senior Vice President of Research at the America Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Suicide attempts involve guns and death far more often than those with other means, and gun sales have boomed, placing firearms in more and more homes.
And from there, we get into a long diatribe about how guns are the problem.
Everyone acknowledges that we have a major crisis.
More people are killing themselves than at any other point in history.
It's true, of course, that more people exist today than at any other point in history.
So in terms of raw numbers, you're going to have more suicide.
You're going to have more everything because there are more people.
But it's not just the raw numbers.
It's also the suicide rate that, even though that hasn't been officially calculated for last year, all available evidence points to the fact that that is also going up to historic highs.
And there should not be 50,000 people killing themselves in a given year, obviously.
I mean, something is not right, to put it very mildly.
Something is wrong, as the woman who lost her son says in the article.
So what is it?
Of course, the media falls back on its common themes, which is it's guns.
And it's mental illness.
We need fewer guns and we need more drugs.
That'll solve it, they say.
But this suggests that a suicidal person who's in a state of total despair and has given up on life, that they will continue living if you simply take the gun away.
As if there aren't a thousand other ways to kill yourself.
Right?
And besides, even if it's true, That a suicidal man could be kept around, kept on earth for longer by taking his gun away, that doesn't solve the problem of his despair.
You've still left him in despair.
Are we satisfied with that?
I'm not.
So can you solve it with drugs?
Well, no, that's clear.
More people are on psychiatric drugs than ever before, and more people are depressed and suicidal than ever before.
So the strategy isn't working.
There's just no evidence on a culture-wide scale There's no evidence that just getting more and more people on drugs, more and more people getting help, mental health services, that it'll prevent this.
All the evidence goes the other way.
And there's a reason for that because depression is despair and despair is the loss of hope.
It's the loss of meaning.
A person in despair This is the point I'm always trying to make, and I harp on it because I think it's really important, and I rarely hear anyone bring this up, which is amazing to me because it's so basic.
A person in despair isn't crazy, okay?
He isn't sick in the traditional sense of the word.
His despair isn't even unreasonable.
In fact, there are plenty of valid reasons to feel despair.
The world's a difficult place.
And many terrible things happen every day.
I always hear that depression is clinical if you feel depressed for no discernible reason.
And that's one of the ways you know that it's a clinical issue.
Because someone's depressed and you look around their life and there's no reason for it.
There's no such thing as being depressed for no reason.
The very fact of being a conscious human being in a world full of pain and death and suffering, the very awareness of the world and of your own human condition and your place in that world, the awareness of pain and death that we all have because we're sentient creatures, all of these are reasons to be depressed.
Reasons to be in despair.
Reasons that aren't That makes sense, actually.
Which isn't to say that you should be in despair, or that we should leave people in despair.
Doesn't mean that when someone is in despair, we say, well, of course you feel that way.
You know, go away.
Obviously not.
My point is simply that we should actually start by acknowledging that those who are in despair are feeling that way because they've noticed and experienced some very real things about the world.
They aren't delusional.
Okay, we are just awful at handling depression in this culture, and nothing we're doing is making anything better.
And yet nobody wants to even think about it.
There's no conversation.
Maybe we should radically change our approach to this.
Because the more that we medicalize it, the more that we make this clinical, the worse everything is getting.
And so at what point?
I've been shouting about this for years, and it only just gets worse.
So the point that I'm making is ignored.
The problem just keeps getting worse.
It's like, no, we're not going to do it that way.
We'll keep doing it our way.
Okay, well, what, when we get to 500,000 suicides in a year, will you then stop and think, like, maybe our fundamental approach to this is just wrong.
When someone is depressed, You know, what we do basically as a society is we look around and we feign surprise and we say, depressed?
Well, what possible reason could you have to be depressed?
You must be sick.
Here's a drug that will make those thoughts go away.
There's some kind of imbalance.
You're depressed.
There must be an imbalance in your brain of some kind.
That's the only reason I could possibly see why you would be depressed.
But that depressed person, you know, is justified in responding like, dude, look around.
What do you mean?
Why am I depressed?
Why wouldn't I be depressed?
Have you seen life recently?
So I think it's better to acknowledge that there are many reasons in life for feeling despair.
And the next step is to help people navigate their way through that darkness by helping them to have a sense of hope and meaning in spite of all that.
The problem, though, is that a drug cannot give you hope and meaning.
I'm sorry, but they just can't put that into a pill.
They can't.
There's no meaning pill.
Take this pill and life will have meaning.
They can't do that.
They can numb you.
They can change chemical balances in your brain, perhaps.
They can do things like that.
But they can't give you meaning.
You can't take a pill and say, well, now I know my life has meaning again.
And all despair, all depression, all suicide ultimately traces back to this, to this loss of hope and meaning.
And that's why we're seeing so much depression and suicide in the culture, because the culture instills this meaninglessness into the population, into kids from a young age.
That's it.
That's why it's happening.
That's why it's a crisis-level event in our culture.
Why do we have a lot of suicide in our culture?
Well, because we have no meaning in our culture.
And people live these lives devoid of meaning, again, from a very young age.
They, just their whole life, they're staring at screens, they watch TV, they go on social media, they play video games.
There's not a lot of real human connection.
There's not a lot of, you know, religion is declining.
Church attendance rapidly declining, kind of that spiritual bedrock of people's lives is slipping away, and it's being replaced.
So our culture came along and said, well, that's not what life is all about, actually.
See, for thousands of years, people assumed that life is about, is all about, really about faith and about And about, you know, pointing yourself towards the eternal.
And then our culture comes along and says, well, that's not it.
No.
And people listen and they say, okay, well, so forget about all that.
But that source of meaning hasn't been replaced by anything.
They say, no, don't find meaning in that.
Find it in nothing.
There you go.
Here's nothing instead.
And until we address that, until we get rid of the fundamental nihilism that lies at the heart of the culture, this will not get better.
And in fact, it will get a lot worse.
And so, this, what I'm saying, can be ignored for another decade, and we'll check back in a decade in the suicide, and there will be 100,000 suicides a year.
Like, it's just going to continue in that direction.
It will not change until we actually deal with this issue on a much more fundamental level.
And until people are willing to talk about things like depression
in a way that goes beyond the simply clinical, sanitized language that we always use.
One other brief thing, on a much, much lighter note, before we get to the comments.
This is from The Mirror.
So this is a story that's been sent to me, I don't know, 600 times maybe in the past couple of days.
I'm not complaining, by the way, for good reason.
So, the Mirror reports, a group of Peruvian villagers are living in fear.
As they believe they are under attack by mysterious seven-foot-tall aliens that they've named Los Palacaros, which translates to The Face Peelers, in a remote district of Alto Nanay.
Nanay?
I don't know.
N-A-N-A-Y?
Nanay?
Located northeast of Lima, members of the Iquitu tribe, hailing from the San Antonio native community, have recounted chilling encounters with these extraterrestrial beings.
Descriptions of the alleged extraterrestrial beings include large heads, yellowish eyes, and immunity to the villagers' hunting weapons.
Some villagers have likened the aliens to the mythical pelicaras from folklore, creatures said to feast on human faces, fat, and organs.
Villagers claim that these enigmatic figures, often shrouded in dark-colored hoods, have been targeting their community for nearly a month since July 11th.
Multiple incidents have been reported, with the most recent involving a 15-year-old girl who was hospitalized after a confrontation with the aliens.
There have been other... As I've said, I've read... This is not just the mirror.
You might say, well, this is the mirror.
What is that?
What kind of publication is that?
That's not credible.
Well, I'll have you know that this invasion of the face peelers has been reported by many media outlets.
And in some of the reports, what they're saying is that actually these aliens look a lot like the Green Goblin from Spider-Man.
So, that's the story.
Now, I have also seen videos that purport to show I don't know what they're supposed to show.
I've seen videos where lots of things are happening in the videos, and it appears that there's disturbing things happening, but you can't really see the aliens.
But by no means should that dissuade us from believing this.
Look, these face peelers...
They're hiding in the woods.
They're not just going to come out.
I mean, you pull your phone out.
This is one of the many ridiculous points that Ben Shapiro brought up in our debate where I destroyed him.
He said, whoa, why aren't the aliens on video?
You think it's that simple?
You think you just pull your phone out and the aliens are going to say?
You think the face-peeling alien is going to say, OK, here we go.
Let's take a selfie before I eat your face.
Is that what the alien is going to say?
Let's be realistic about this.
So it's not that simple.
I don't want to hear that.
I've heard too much of this.
The skeptics that don't believe these people.
Skeptics online, well, I want to see video.
I need to see video.
Oh, you want to go down to Peru with your camera phone and try to get the face peelers on video?
You want to do that?
One of the face peeling aliens comes up to you, is that what you're going to do?
You're going to pull your phone out right away?
So you can get it on social media, so you can get it on Twitter for your Twitter likes, huh?
No, what you're going to do is you're going to run away from the face peelers.
So that's why they're not on video.
In fact, the fact that they're not on video is all the more proof that they're real.
Think of it that way.
So, I believe them.
I believe them and I think that, frankly, if you doubt this story, that not only are you denying the evidence and you're denying the science, but even, and I don't use terms like this very often, I don't throw this kind of charge around very often, but I would even say that it's culturally insensitive and, frankly, you could argue racist to not believe these Peruvian villagers who are speaking their truth and talking about their experiences with the face-peelers.
And I believe them.
And so the aliens are here.
And they're peeling faces down in Peru.
And soon they'll be here.
Okay?
And, you know, why do they want to peel faces?
I don't know.
The aliens have been coming.
They came a long way.
They've been doing their research.
They've been on TikTok.
They've seen what people look like these days.
They've seen a lot of faces.
And they said, we got to peel those faces off.
That's gross.
We can't invade Earth with people looking like that.
So it could be, that could be that.
I don't know.
I don't know the motivation.
Anyway, it's real.
It's happening.
Let's get to the comment section.
[MUSIC]
As many of you know, we've been giving our dog rough greens for a while now and
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Naturopathic Dr. Dennis Black, the founder of Rough Greens, is focused on improving the health of every dog in America.
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It supports healthy joints, improves bad breath, boosts energy levels, and so much more.
We are what we eat, and that goes for dogs too.
Naturopathic Dr. Dennis Green is so confident Ruff Greens will improve your dog's health, he's offering my listeners a free Jumpstart trial bag so you can try, well, you don't want to try it, your dog can try it, or either one of you can try it together.
A free Jumpstart trial bag can be at your door in just a few business days, so go to freeruffgreens.com slash Matt or call 844-RUFF-700.
That's freeruffgreens.com slash Matt or call 844-RUFF-700 today.
OK, well, speaking of the face peelers, you know, well, let me start with a brief story of hope and dreams.
I was told a couple of weeks ago, I think I mentioned on the show, in fact, it was McKenna who texted me and said that Paint Your Life, a wonderful sponsor, wants to come back on the show.
And is there any painting that I would like for them to do for me so that I can talk more authentically about my experience with Paint Your Life?
And they've done paintings for us in the past that were great.
And I was asked, well, is there a picture of your kids or a vacation with your family that you would like memorialized in a painting?
And I said, no.
We have enough of that.
Like, I know what my kids look like.
We don't need any more pictures of it.
What I said is, I would like something that maybe doesn't memorialize an event that has technically really happened, or maybe it does, but instead it speaks to a deeper truth.
And so I asked, can I get a painting Of me greeting our alien overlords when they land on Earth.
Will you paint that for me?
Paint your life.
And well, this was their answer.
Let's unveil for everyone to see.
Sean is here.
Thank you, Sean.
And there it is.
Can we see that on camera?
That is the painting.
I just want to say, You know, I don't get emotional very often on the show.
I try not to get emotional, and I'm holding back my emotions now as much as I can.
But when I lay my eyes on this, I see such beauty, such raw beauty and truth that it does.
It makes me well up with... I mean, it almost brings a tear to my eye, almost.
And there are so many details of this.
You know, I just had this...
Vision in my head, but I didn't have it fully formed.
And so they were able to take that vision and even include details that I never expected.
I mean, we've got the wall, we've got the product placement in the, which I think, I think it makes it even classier.
So this is already a very classy painting, but having the product placement in the painting as well is so much classier.
So we've got our merchandise, we've actually have, and I don't know, how do you explain this?
Greet the aliens with merchandise from the Matt Walsh store on dailywire.com.
Is this a gift that I gave them when they landed?
Did they already have it themselves?
Did they land because they're big fans of the Matt Walsh Show?
Did they come all this way to have me sign the merchandise?
These are all... That's what's so wonderful about this piece of art, this masterwork, this masterpiece, is that that's a story you can decide for yourself, you know?
And I think that through the ages, when people look upon this painting that will one day be in the Smithsonian, they'll debate this.
They'll say, did this happen?
Did it not really happen?
Did it happen only in spirit?
But before it makes it to the Smithsonian, at least for the rest of my lifetime, this painting will be hanging in our living room.
Above the fireplace.
I did tell them, I said, make the painting as big as you possibly can.
And they made it even bigger than I thought.
And so, I'll be bringing this home to my wife.
And I, you know, based on my experience with this sort of thing, if I know my wife, and I think I do, she is going to love this.
She's going to look at that and say, can we get five of them made?
Can we get a painting like this in every room of the house?
That's what she'll be mad about.
She'll say, oh, Matt, you only did one of these?
Well, that's just for the living room.
But what are we going to have in our bedroom, for example?
So anyway, I'm very much looking forward to bringing this home and how it will help to also strengthen my marriage as well.
So this is great.
Thank you to Paint Your Life.
Go to paintyourlife.com and get your own.
I don't even know if they'll make a painting like this for everybody, but they made one for me.
So great.
We'll just keep that in the background as we move on to some of these comments here.
I don't know how we can move on from that.
I almost feel like there's no point, but...
Sweet Momster says, I wonder which edited clip will Jason Campbell post about today's show.
I'm fascinated by his commitment to amplify Matt Walsh content.
Well, it was a comment from yesterday, and there were, I don't think there was any, I don't think Media Matters pulled any clip from yesterday, from the show yesterday, which, whenever that happens, I honestly feel bad about myself.
Like, that was a waste of, apparently I wasn't doing my job yesterday if there was not one clip that they could pull and be offended by.
So, I deeply regret that.
Butts LaRue says, the Pence ad was bad but still doesn't compete with the Terry McAuliffe July 4th ad.
That may be the GOAT.
Yeah, that was the one.
I think I kind of referred to that yesterday.
Not the only ad of this type, but it was one of those ads where he was at the grill, wasn't even turned on.
He's wearing a, if I remember correctly, that was the one where he had an apron, you know, he's at the grill, as if we just caught, oh, you caught me at the grill, grilling up some burgers for the fam, and he had an apron that still had the creases in it.
You could tell he just took it out of the package.
That was great.
Ray Zist says, Matt, how can you reconcile saying both, if being pro-life causes people to lose, then so be it, and also, the only issue that matters in a primary is electability?
Well, that's a fair question.
I guess when I talk about being a single-issue voter in the primaries, and the only thing that matters is can you actually win the general.
I sort of, when I say that, I sort of assume I'm talking to an audience that understands some basic things about me.
And one of them, one of the, one of those is that when I talk about electability, I don't mean it in the way that it's traditionally meant.
Because usually when someone says, well, you gotta be electable, they mean you have to be a moderate.
You have to be, basically, you have to be a liberal.
You have to be a left.
You have to be a left leaning on everything, especially social issues, in order to be electable.
I don't mean it that way.
So, I mean, starting from Starting from the basic premise that the candidate is actually conservative.
So if we are dealing with candidates who are, if they're not actually conservative, then no.
Voting for a liberal candidate because you think they're going to win the general and beat the other liberal candidate makes no sense.
You might as well, there's no point then.
Just, you could just vote for the Democrat then.
So if the candidates that you're considering are actually conservative, And you're trying to decide, of the conservative candidates, which one do I want to represent that viewpoint in a general election?
The only thing that matters from there is whether or not they can actually win.
So, that's what I mean there.
And finally, Polling Station says, I don't understand why trans people are so important that you've devoted years of your life to talking about them.
Well, they're not.
Don't worry about that.
What is important, though, is the truth.
Reality is important.
Many would say, I would say, it's the most important thing.
And it's not my fault or my choice that trans activists have decided to be the greatest enemies to truth in the world, in our lifetime.
Trans activists are the greatest enemies to truth in the entire world.
And that's what they've decided.
The decision they've made.
That's the battle they've decided they want to have.
That's who they've decided they want to be.
And so, what that means, if I'm going to defend truth, it means that I'm fighting with these people quite a bit.
I wish it wasn't that way.
And I wish that there was not this group of people who are devoted to denying the most basic facts of physical reality, but they do exist, and so I have to fight against them, because if we're not going to defend reality, then there's really nothing else worth talking about.
If we're not going to defend, for example, the reality of me meeting aliens and giving them my Johnny the Walrus merchandise.
It's one of the very real things we need to talk about.
Candace Owens just wrapped the 10-part series, Convicting a Murderer, that you don't want to miss.
It's one of our most ambitious projects yet.
You might think you're familiar with the Stephen Avery case and everything that happened in Manitowoc County.
This is especially true if you watch Making a Murderer, but it turns out the filmmakers only told you part of the story, and coming soon, Candace Owens will unveil the shocking parts of Avery's story that were omitted in the Netflix series.
I'm so excited to present the Convicting a Murderer trailer.
Check it out.
This is a collect call from an inmate at the Calumet County Jail.
The man served 18 years in prison until DNA evidence cleared his name.
The Two Rivers man was convicted of sexual assault in 1985 but exonerated with DNA evidence in 2003.
So this is the infamous Avery lot.
Now, two years later, he again finds himself tied to a police investigation.
Accused of murdering Teresa Hallbuck on the Avery property.
Stephen Avery's 16-year-old nephew admitted his involvement in the rape and murder of Teresa Hallbuck.
The car is discovered just around the bend.
It was just this worldwide phenomenon.
They think they framed this guy.
I think he intended to crush the vehicle, but ran out of time.
Avery thinks the $36 million lawsuit he filed is why he's being targeted in this investigation.
10-21 at 24 Main Street.
Do we have Steve Avery's custody?
Netflix made millions of dollars from making a murderer.
But the filmmakers left out very important details.
Mountains of evidence that you have not yet seen.
The blood vial.
The most egregious manipulation from the movie.
Interrogations.
That's when he started beating me because I told him that he's sick.
Cell phones.
And I saw melted plastic parts of a cell phone.
Interviews.
Her arms were pinned behind her head.
They made Steven Avery look like a victim.
You don't believe your brother's guilty?
I don't know if I'm a suspect.
I'm getting sick and tired of media deception.
Evidence piling up.
Why would they omit so many different things?
Why are you editing my testimony?
I am not going to make the same mistake that the filmmakers did.
Rearranging the testimony.
They delete a portion of it at the end.
How could they claim to care about the truth?
They all know that Stephen Avery committed this crime.
911, what is your emergency?
The evidence forces me to conclude that you are the most dangerous individual ever
to set foot in this courtroom.
you Well, to get the rest of the story, you have to watch the series, which is coming up this September.
This 10-part series is exclusive to Daily Wire Plus, so join now at dailywire.com slash subscribe to get 25% off your new annual membership, so you can watch Convicting a Murderer when it premieres.
Trust me, you don't want to miss it.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Well, you know, this segment, The Daily Cancellation, is special to me.
Indeed, I think it's probably special to the entire world.
Some would even say that it is sacred.
And I consider it a privilege, but also an important responsibility, to cancel someone at the end of every show, every day, forever, until the end of time.
But on rare occasion, very, very rare occasion, I find it necessary to dedicate this portion of the show to something other than canceling some evildoer.
And usually this happens when there's something else I want to talk about for 10 minutes, but I can't find any other space for it in the show.
So that's how we end up here.
Anyway, the point is that today is one of those very rare days.
So I want to tell you about a man named Oliver Anthony.
He's a blue-collar guy, lives way out in the sticks in Virginia, basically off the grid.
In his free time, he likes to play and sing songs that he writes.
For the past few years, he's been occasionally recording his songs on his phone, posting them to his YouTube channel, which had, I don't know, maybe a few hundred subscribers, and his videos would get maybe a few dozen or a few hundred views.
But that has changed rather suddenly over the last few days.
This man and his music have gone massively viral, thanks primarily to one song of his called Rich Man North of Richmond, which made its way from YouTube to Twitter, where it caught fire.
In the video of him performing this song while standing in the woods in front of his deer stand has now been viewed millions of times.
The song is currently trending nationwide on Twitter, and he's even had public offers, including from our friend John Rich, to produce and distribute a studio album.
Oliver Anthony has gone from full obscurity, about as obscure as a musical artist can possibly be, playing songs in the woods by himself, to musical fame in the span of, like, two days.
And it's a great story.
The best part is the song that has driven all of this, and there are a few points to make about that.
But first, let's play a clip of the song.
Here it is.
I've been sellin' my soul Workin' all day Overtime hours For bullsh** pay So I can sit out here And waste my life away Drag back home And drown my troubles away It's a damn shame What the world's gotten to For people like me People like you Wish I could just wake up And it not be true But it is Oh, it is living in the new world with an old soul.
♪ These rich men, North Richmen ♪ ♪ Lord knows they all just wanna have total control ♪
♪ Wanna know what you think ♪ ♪ Wanna know what you do ♪
♪ And they don't think you know ♪ ♪ But I know that you do ♪
♪ 'Cause your dollar ain't (beep) ♪ ♪ And it's taxed to no end ♪
♪ North Richmen, North Richmen ♪ ♪ ♪
♪ I wish politicians would look out for miners ♪ ♪ And not just miners on an island somewhere ♪
♪ Lord, we got folks in the street ♪ ♪ Ain't got nothing to eat ♪
♪ And the obese, milk and welfare ♪ Well, God, if you're 5'3 and you're 300 pounds, taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds.
Young men are huttin' themselves six feet in the ground, cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them down.
Okay, so that's a clip of it.
Now, first, needless to say, I love the song.
This is my kind of music.
I could listen to this sort of stuff all day.
Just a guy with a beard, standing in the woods, singing about his troubles and playing the guitar.
That's my vibe, as the kids would say.
It's also what all country music should sound like, instead of sounding, as it so often does, like generic pop music with a slight twang.
Most country music these days, like all other kinds of popular music, sounds like it was made by an algorithm, not a person.
And this song, on the other hand, sounds raw and real and human.
But it's interesting that a song like this has become an internet sensation, because normally when you hear about a song that's gone viral, you assume that it must be Taylor Swift singing for the 90th time about one of her ex-boyfriends, or maybe another rap song about the female anatomy, or whatever.
You imagine a song that people can dance to in TikTok videos, which they record in public somewhere, like at the grocery store, while confused shoppers look on.
You don't necessarily imagine a low-tech, low-budget recording of a folk song where a bearded guy stands in the woods and sings about the pain of being a working-class American.
So, why has this one caught on?
Well, I think there are two reasons.
First of all, you know, it's...
Just good music.
Oliver Anthony has raw talent, and sometimes the combination of good music and raw talent is hard to ignore.
Second, it's the message.
Anthony is singing about the forgotten American, the working class man who breaks his back all day only to have his pockets picked by the IRS while the people in charge of this country ignore his concerns and spit in his face whenever he tries to convey them.
He's speaking up for people who don't have a voice.
And although there's real poetry in his lyrics, he's expressing those concerns using the same language that they would use.
Now, we hear so much about the need for representation in our culture, but the fact is that there are millions of people who are not represented anywhere.
Not in media, not in Hollywood, not in popular music, not in government.
Nowhere.
And those are the people who look and live like Oliver Anthony.
It's also worth noting, I think it's interesting, those lines, that's why I wanted to play that much of it so you could hear the lines at the end, the lines about the welfare state.
This song is being called a populist anthem, which it is.
I think it may become the protest song of this generation.
But conventional wisdom says that attacking entitlements, attacking welfare, is not populist.
In fact, we're told, if you really care about people like Oliver Anthony, you should defend entitlement programs and insist that we should continue spending hundreds of billions on them.
But the truth is that guys like Anthony, they work all day to provide for themselves and their own families.
They're not fans of the fact that their money is being taken from them, food is being taken out of their children's mouths, in order to prop up this system of entitlements that really functions as nothing more than a vote-buying scheme for Democrats.
Okay, go up to almost any guy at any bar in any blue-collar part of the country and ask them about welfare, and they will say something very similar to what Anthony says in that song.
Almost all of them will.
And yet Republicans are afraid to even mention the subject for fear that they'll lose the votes of the very people who are being scammed by this system.
I said there are two reasons why the song's popular.
Actually, there are three, so I lied.
Because there's something else, too.
It's not just that the message is resonating.
I think there's something deeper, too.
It's authenticity, okay?
People in this country are starved for authenticity.
Everything is fake, right?
Everything around us is fake.
The music is all basically computer-generated.
The movies are full of CGI.
Most of what you see on the news is fake.
Most of what you find on social media is fake.
We've got filters and Photoshop and AI and deepfakes.
We're just surrounded by artificiality.
We're drowning in it.
And that's why a video of a guy pouring his heart out while he plays his guitar in the woods in front of his deer stand with his dogs laying there in the grass and the cicadas buzzing in the background, that's why it resonates with people.
It's a glass of cool water for people who are thirsting for something real.
And that's why it went viral.
And also, again, it's just good music.
It's simply good music.
And maybe it doesn't need to be any more complicated than that.
And for all of those reasons, Oliver Anthony is today certainly not cancelled.
And that'll do it for the show today and this week.
