Ep. 1208 - Why The Media Is So Eager To Smear The 'Blind Side' Family
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the media has been very excited this week by the supposed revelation that the family from The Blind Side are really villains who exploited a black kid for their own gain. But this narrative is almost certainly false. We'll talk about the latest in the Michael Oher saga, and what the Left's hatred of so-called "white saviorism" says about them and the culture. Also, a day after being attacked by a Republican congressman for declaring her faith in Christ, the same woman has now been fired from her position at Ohio Right To Life. What's going on there? And a mother brags about having her minor daughter mutilated for the sake of "gender affirmation." But I thought we were told that sort of thing never happens?
Ep.1208
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the media has been very excited this week by the supposed revelation that the family from the blind side are really villains who exploited a black kid for their own gain, but this narrative is almost certainly false.
We'll talk about the latest in the Michael Orr saga and what the left's hatred of so-called white saviorism says about them.
And the culture.
Also, the day after being attacked by a Republican congressman for declaring her faith in Christ, the same woman has now been fired from her position at Ohio Right to Life.
What's going on there?
And a mother brags about having her minor daughter mutilated for the sake of, quote, gender affirmation.
But I thought we were told this sort of thing never happens.
Well, we'll talk about that and much more today on The Matt Walsh Show.
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In the final seconds of the 2009 film The Blind Side, Leanne Toohey, played by Sandra Bullock, reflects on the murder of a 21-year-old black athlete in a local housing project.
The young man had dropped out of school, fallen in with the wrong crowd, and had died in a gang-related shooting.
That could have been my son Michael, Leanne says, right before the credits roll.
I suppose I have God to thank for that.
A decade later, it's hard to imagine a film from a major studio ending that way.
The film began with Leanne Tuohy seeing a homeless teenager named Michael Orr walking down the street in the cold.
She and her husband Sean decided to take care of the kid, and finally, after years of sacrifice, Orr goes to college and eventually goes on to become a successful NFL player.
In 2009, when audiences weren't lobotomized by procedurally generated Marvel slop, that plotline resonated.
And The Blind Side made over $300 million on a relatively small budget.
Sandra Bullock won an Oscar, although she herself admitted during filming that her acting wasn't even that good.
Leigh-Anne Tuohy used the film's success to help children find foster homes on social media.
And outside of a few whiny articles on NPR or The Daily Beast, people basically loved the movie.
The media loved the movie for the most part.
In the years that followed the film's release, though, the tone changed.
As Barack Obama set race relations in this country backwards by 50 years, academics, who are the source of most bad ideas and cynicism in the world, for some reason began obsessing over the blind side.
They kept writing about it years after everyone else had moved on.
In 2015, for example, a Clemson professor wrote this article in the journal Studies and Popular Culture.
Here's the title, Racial Discourse in the Blind Side, the Economics and Ideology Behind the White Savior Format.
That same year, a University of New Mexico professor authored a piece entitled, The White Cinematic Lens, Decoding the Racial Messages in the Blind Side.
As the years progressed, so did the left's obsession with the blind side.
Their fixation continued after the Obama years.
In 2019, a professor at Texas State University somehow attempted to connect Donald Trump with the blind side, with a piece entitled, Colorblind Racism, the Trump Effect, and the Blind Side.
And if you want to lose 50 IQ points, you can read the abstract online, but I'm not going to bother reading it to you.
That same year, 2019, the popular YouTube channel Be Kind Rewind released this video explaining that the movie has a white savior problem.
Watch.
This movie could have included the Black families that united to support Michael before he lived with the Twoies full-time.
It could have been about organizing pickup football games as a kid with his friends, fostering a love of the game that he honed in high school.
But John Lee Hancock chose not to do that.
Instead, he canonizes a singular white family and de-platforms the supportive Black community that Orr did have.
That decision empowered Sandra Bullock with ample opportunities to demonstrate wit, vulnerability, self-confidence, and kindness in the process.
To be the spitfire the critics noticed.
In other words, it gave her an Oscar bait role.
That's what white savior films do.
They shift focus and blame.
They implicitly tell audiences that white stories are more interesting or worthy of your time than the stories of people of color.
That's all you got.
The film should have been about all the people who didn't house or educate or care for Michael Orr.
It should have been about the kids who played basketball with him.
I mean, why?
Like, what kind of movie would that even be?
What's the story there?
Well, just because they're black, and the family that took care of Michael Orr is white.
That's the level of analysis.
All of these articles and videos, and plenty more examples I could have used, demonstrate that the blind side triggered a deep, underlying pathology that tortures the supposedly intellectual left.
They simply can't tolerate the film's message.
To this day, they just can't get over it.
And they definitely can't allow any other major studio to make a film like it.
I mean, that's never going to happen.
In the past few days, predictably, this effort has entered a new, somehow even more demented and tragic stage.
Michael Orr filed a legal complaint against the Twoies, as we talked about a few days ago.
The media is promoting it relentlessly.
They could not be more thrilled by this development.
Watch.
We all remember the 2009 Sandra Bullock movie, The Blind Side, the true story of NFL star Michael Orr, who was adopted out of poverty by a wealthy family.
But new court docs filed by Orr paint a far different picture.
I was just enthralled by her.
I didn't think I could play her.
It was just such a beautiful story.
Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for portraying Michael Orr's adoptive mother, Leanne Toohey.
The southern mother of two took in the six-foot-four, then-homeless and traumatized teenager when no one else would.
Michael was portrayed by Quentin Aaron.
Do you want to stay here, Michael?
I don't want to go anyplace else.
But now, the former NFL star alleges Leigh-Anne and her husband Sean never officially adopted him, but instead allegedly deceived him into making them his conservators just after his 18th birthday.
In a legal petition filed today in Tennessee, Michael claims the Twohys used the conservatorship to make themselves and their birth children millions of dollars in royalties from the blindside.
The Twohys haven't responded to our request for comment.
Back when the movie came out, Leigh-Anne told us Michael was proud of the film.
I sent him a letter yesterday I'd gotten from someone in Atlanta, and I forwarded it to him, and I got back the sweetest text, and he said, I'm really proud this is making a difference.
And so he knows it is.
Well, I'm glad we're past that.
I'm glad we found a way to take this heartwarming tale and turn it into a problem.
Thank God.
You certainly can't have a story like that.
You can't have a story, especially of one race of people helping another race of people.
We can't have that.
We can't allow it.
Now the crux of the legal complaint is that the Twohys tricked Michael Orr into thinking that he was adopted when in fact the Twohys simply had a conservatorship over him, allowing them to take most of his money.
So they're not good-hearted white people helping out a black kid, they are evil white supremacist thieves.
That's the idea.
But before we get into the actual complaint, there's a couple of points.
First of all, That report you just saw implies that the Tooheys defrauded Orr because they wanted money.
And what they don't mention is that the Tooheys are extraordinarily wealthy.
Independently wealthy.
In fact, they're far wealthier than Orr has ever been, even after his NFL career.
But we're expected to believe that this family, which is worth well over $200 million, schemed to rip off Michael Orr.
Is that plausible?
I mean, right away, it doesn't pass the smell test, as I said a few days ago.
It sounds a lot like a washed-up athlete who burned through the cash he made in the league and now he's looking for a payday and some relevance.
And indeed, Orr's claim is especially suspicious since, according to the twoies, Orr has been shaking them down for $15 million for a long time now.
Allegedly, he filed this lawsuit only after trying to get the quick cash from a family he knows is rich and which still loves him.
But there are more problems with this complaint beyond the ones that I just mentioned.
For this accusation to make sense, for one thing, the Toohey's would have had to see this homeless teenager walking on the side of the road and say to themselves, this kid's gonna make us rich.
His grades are terrible, no college program is interested in him, his father abandoned him, his mother's a drug addict, but he's gonna make us a lot of money someday.
And then there's gonna be a movie about him, and we'll get royalties from that.
And then through all this, as they raised him and sent him to college, Orr would be blissfully unaware of this dastardly scheme for more than a decade.
And then it hits him, somehow.
Quoting from or his legal complaint quote the lie of Michael's adoption is one upon which co-conservators
Lee and Tui and Sean Tui have enriched themselves at the expense of their ward the undersigned Michael or Michael or
discovered this lie It was chagrin and embarrassment in February of 2023
When he learned the conservatorship to which he consented on the basis that doing so would make him a member of the Tui
family in Fact provided him with no familiar relations with the Tui's
So the claim is that Michael or realized only in February of 2023 that he hadn't been legally adopted
It took him until this year to figure that out.
Is that possible?
Well, corporate media is certainly buying it, with no skepticism whatsoever.
NBC wrote up the allegations without applying any form of scrutiny at all.
MSNBC wants you to know that this is all your fault, actually.
"Orr's lawsuit is an indictment of movie audiences that over and over again lap up
stories about white people saving some downtrodden black person."
Now you might listen to that quote from the MSNBC article and wonder what universe MSNBC
In fact, if you read any MSNBC article, you're going to wonder that.
But especially this, because in this universe, movies about white people saving black people are extremely rare.
And at this point, basically non-existent.
I mean, can you name the last one besides The Blind Side?
Go ahead.
What's the last major Hollywood film where the good guy, the protagonist, is a white person who is helping out a black person?
Really, none come immediately to mind.
Now, for its part, The Guardian brought out the big guns.
They report that, quote, the blindside's white savior tale was always built on shaky ground.
According to the piece, quote, the movie version of The Blind Side has come to represent a low point for the white savior trope, the unlikely story of the rich white lady who turns a downtrodden black teen Hulk into an improbable Sunday pro.
Jeffrey Montez de Oca, the founding director of the Center for Critical Study of Sport at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, took aim at the film's framing of adoption as a signifying act of whiteness that obscures the social relations of domination that not only make charity possible, but also create an urban underclass in need of charity.
In her seminal tome, White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo excoriates the film as fundamentally and insidiously anti-black.
What all these stories have in common, though, is that they don't interrogate the claims in Orr's lawsuit at all.
They don't spend any time looking at it.
The media is so giddy that the blind side is under attack that they don't care to actually do any journalism.
They just trot out the usual fake experts to call it racist, as they've been doing for a decade now.
Inside Edition even got in touch with the actor who portrays Michael Moore in the film to ask him whether Sandra Bullock should surrender her Oscar, which is a question so stupid that the actor should respond by just laughing hysterically at it.
But that's not exactly what happens.
Watch.
Michael Orr is now saying the Tuohy family never adopted him as everyone thought.
He claims in his lawsuit that the Tuohys tricked him into becoming his conservators, meaning they have control over his money.
What is your reaction to what he's alleging?
I wasn't expecting that.
I think a lot of people, myself included again, had such high hopes for the family and that union that we felt They had put together.
Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for playing Leigh-Anne Toohey.
But now, some people on social media are actually calling for Bullock to return her Oscar.
Can you tell me what you think about this call by some for Sandra Bullock to return her Oscar?
She was an actress.
Michael Orr, who went on to become an NFL star, also says he resented how the movie made him appear less intelligent.
Before the blindside.
It wasn't my intention to make him look that way, and I'm sorry that he took it that way.
Lawyers for the family say they are stunned by Orr's actions, which they say are designed to drum up publicity for his new book.
The twoies treated him like a son.
They loved him.
They don't need his money.
They didn't, they never needed his money.
Mr. Toohey sold his company for $220 million.
The Blindside movie grossed $309 million.
Got him at the end there, right?
Notice the snark at the end.
The movie grossed over $300 million, the anchor notes, implying that the Toohey's somehow received all that money, or even a significant amount of it.
Like, if someone writes a book about you and that's turned into a movie, if you're the subject of the movie, you get 100% of the profits, because that's the way it works?
No, in reality, they received less than 3% of the proceeds, which is nothing compared to the $200 million they sold their company for.
So this is the level of reporting we're seeing on this, with one exception.
Over at The Blaze, Jason Whitlock decided not to simply rewrite Orr's complaint to push a narrative.
He's written some fantastic articles on this topic you should read, and he motivated me to personally go and read some of the many pieces of documented evidence.
Contradicting Michael Orr's claims.
These are pieces of evidence that every major media outlet is ignoring.
For example, here's what Orr himself wrote in his own memoir in 2012.
in 2012, quote, "Since I was already over the age of 18 and considered an adult by the state of Tennessee,
Sean and Leanne would be named as my legal conservators.
They explained to me that it means pretty much the exact same thing as adoptive parents,
but that the laws were just written in a way that took my age into account."
Honestly, I didn't care what it was called.
My mother was going to be at the hearing to agree that she supported the decision to have the Twoies listed as my next of kin and legal conservators.
So that was more than a decade ago.
Michael Orr, an adult in his mid-20s at the time when the memoir was published, clearly acknowledges the distinction between being adopted and being a legal conservator.
Clearly acknowledges that he was not adopted.
He uses the term conservator several times in the book.
But we're told to believe that more than 10 years later, he finally decided to look into it and realized he had been tricked.
We're supposed to believe that He just realized some truth that he himself had already publicly acknowledged in a book he published over ten years ago?
So, how was Michael Orr supposedly not aware of this?
Did he not read his own memoir?
Did he not watch the movie The Blind Side?
There's a scene in the film where Leigh-Anne establishes legal guardianship over Michael Orr.
There is no scene where she says that she's legally adopting him.
That claim was never made by anyone, ever.
Now, to be clear, I can't say for sure who's right or wrong in this case, but I have my very strong suspicions.
I wouldn't be surprised if all parties concerned, or at least partially in the wrong to some extent, that's usually how these kinds of conflicts go.
And if the media wants to tell us that the Toohey's aren't really saviors, I'd certainly agree with that.
There's only one savior, his name isn't Toohey.
But then again, the Toohey's, to my knowledge, have never claimed to be saviors.
They also never claimed to be saints or martyrs.
They did a nice thing for a kid who needed help.
That's a fact, and that's all.
Does this conflict stem from the fact that although the Toohey's became Orr's guardians and treated him like a son, they didn't intend to actually pass their fortune down to him because they wanted to go to their actual kids?
Is Michael Orr upset that he's not now, today, as a 37-year-old man, reaping the financial benefits of being a blood relation to the Toohey's?
I mean, these are purely speculations, but I think reasonable ones.
But I don't know.
The key point is that the media's complete lack of curiosity on all of these obvious red flags tells you everything you need to know about the left's perspective on race.
A decade ago, only a handful of insufferable outlets complained about the blind side, and now all of academia and the major media outlets are doing it.
They're united to smear a family that helped save a young black teenager's life without any regard for facts or contrary evidence.
They're just running in and running with the narrative.
After eight years of Barack Obama and all those BLM riots and George Floyd funerals, we've arrived basically at this moral guidance.
Let the black teenager on the side of the road freeze to death, don't help him, or you're a racist.
Well, at least we now have some clarity from the party of Black Lives Matter and from the corporate media.
Somehow a sports movie from 2009 has led them all to admit what they really think.
Which is, better to leave the black kid languishing in the gutter than reach out and help him.
Better to look the other way than be a white savior.
That's the message coming in loud and clear.
And I suspect that a lot of white people who have watched this Michael Orr saga play out, and who have seen everything that's happened over the past decade or so, are going to take that message to heart and respond accordingly.
The next Michael Orr, the next disadvantaged black kid who needs a helping hand, might not get it.
He might end up suffering the fate that Orr likely would have suffered had the Twoies not stepped in.
That's apparently what the left wants.
And now, tragically, that's what they'll get.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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So we told you yesterday about the story of the GOP congressman who attacked a woman because she posted about her Christian faith on Twitter.
She said that there is no hope but in Jesus Christ, which is a very standard Christian belief and sentiment statement.
And this guy, Representative Max Miller, told her it was bigoted and she needs to delete it.
Miller is Jewish, not Christian, so he found her statement of her Christian faith to be somehow offensive and excluding to him.
Now, he did apologize later, but, you know, as I said yesterday, the apology only goes so far because he still expressed something he truly believes, which is that it's bigoted to profess your Christian faith.
He said that.
And my suspicion was that the apology wasn't exactly sincere, and that has now been lended some extra credence after this development.
This is from the post-millennial A woman who worked at Ohio Right to Life has been fired after posting the gospel on social media.
Lizzie Marbach was given the opportunity to resign or to receive a transition period before her official dismissal, but reportedly declined both per the Sentinel.
There's no hope but for any of us outside having faith in Jesus Christ alone.
Marbock wrote on August 15th stating that a tenet of Christianity that Jesus Christ is the Savior, Son of God, and one true God.
In response, Ohio Republican Representative Max Miller quoted the Post with the statement, This is one of the most bigoted tweets I've ever seen.
Delete it, Lizzie.
Religious freedom in the United States applies to every religion.
You've gone too far.
So somehow, that was also, putting aside how outrageous it is to have a congressman, especially a Republican congressman, telling someone not to express their Christian faith, but to suggest that her tweet was somehow an infringement on his religious freedom?
So you hear someone else, not even hear, you see them expressing their religious faith on Twitter and that infringes on your freedom somehow to practice your own religion?
That's what he said.
Sorry, Congressman Marbach replied, but these are the words of Jesus himself.
Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and life.
No one comes to the Father but through me.
No one has hope outside of Jesus Christ and every knee will bow one day declaring Jesus Christ as Lord.
Miller's wife, who sits on the board of the organization from which Marbach has now been terminated, also said that she should delete the post.
And now she's been fired.
So that's what happened.
Ohio Right to Life, who she worked for, fired her the day after all this and it just so happens that Miller's wife is on the board of this organization.
Now the organization did put out a statement saying this, quote, Ohio Right to Life can confirm that Elizabeth Lizzie Marbach is no longer employed at Ohio Right to Life.
This decision was not based on any single event, as some social media claim.
We appreciate Lizzie's service and wish her the best in future endeavors.
Okay.
Well, notice what they don't say.
They don't say that the post had nothing to do with her termination.
They just say that it's not one single event.
So...
I don't know what's going on here.
I can tell you I am very familiar with the Right to Life organization on the national level.
Not as much with the Ohio chapter, although I'm sure I've worked with them in the past at some point, as I have with Right to Life across the country.
And the organization nationally has done great work for many years.
I've been to many Right to Life events.
I've given speeches at many of them.
And the Christian faith is central to what they do.
I mean, they've always been extremely open about it.
In my experience, you go to one of their events, there's going to be a prayer before, you know, a banquet, and I've spoken at many of their banquets, and they're open with a prayer.
You know, in my speeches, I always talk very openly about my faith.
It's never been a problem.
So, the idea that they would fire someone for expressing their faith is like, it's, I mean, it's shocking to me.
It's not remotely consistent with the organization as I have known it.
Now, I have been told behind the scenes their claim is that this parting of ways was in the works for months.
So that's what I was told.
And the timing of the tweet is just really bad.
But if it was in the works for months, and then this happens with the tweet, you don't pull the trigger on the firing the very next day after this.
You just don't do that.
So it's been in the works for months, then what's another month?
You might as well wait another month.
You just don't fire a woman a day after she was publicly rebuked for her faith by a congressman whose wife is on the board of your organization.
You just don't do that.
And at a minimum, if you do fire her, and it's all just bad timing, quote-unquote, you would unequivocally state publicly that it wasn't because of the tweet where she professed her faith.
You would say that explicitly.
Your statement would be, this had absolutely nothing to do with that tweet at all.
Many of our members are open Christians and we think it's a wonderful thing.
It had nothing to do with that.
You would just be very clear about it.
But they weren't.
So, it just doesn't make any sense.
And like I said, you know, I like these people.
I like the organization.
I've heard their version behind the scenes from people who've reached out to me, but I gotta call balls and strikes as I see them, and I have to be honest about it.
This story from Ohio Right to Life doesn't make sense to me.
It just doesn't.
I'm sorry.
Like, I mean, you call it bad timing.
Yeah, that's some real bad timing.
Every part of this.
Like, if Max Miller's wife was not on the board, That would make it a little less suspicious, but she is apparently.
So this woman, Lizzie Marbach, is attacked by a Republican congressman and by the wife who's on the board, and a day later she's gone.
I don't know what's really going on behind the scenes, but the story doesn't make sense to me at all.
But it also doesn't make sense that they would fire someone for expressing their Christian faith, because like I said, this is something that, like, everyone in Right to Life, pretty much.
I mean, it'd be very hard to find someone who works in Right to Life who is not an open Christian.
I mean, there are some, but there are not many.
The vast majority are open, professed Christians.
So the whole thing, it just doesn't make sense, and it's very bad.
And this, for me, still goes back to Max Miller.
Who is the representative here, who's a government official, and he's the one, first and foremost, who owes an explanation.
Like, what did you mean by the original tweet?
I don't care about the apology.
I mean, you know how I feel about public apologies and all the rest of it.
I don't care about that.
What did you mean by it?
See, the other problem with public apologies, aside from the fact you know all my issues That genre, the public apology genre, but they can also be sort of a dodge sometimes, a way of changing the subject.
And so to just come out and say, oh, I'm sorry I said that.
Well, okay, you're sorry, but what did you mean by it?
What you said was that this expression of, this standard expression of Christian faith is bigoted.
That's what you said.
What do you mean?
So you said it because you believed it.
Did you not believe it?
Was this like a personal grudge?
Were you just trying to attack this woman?
That's not good either.
Is that what you want to tell us?
So either you said something, either you attacked a woman personally by saying something you don't even believe, which makes you a hypocrite and a pretty bad person, or you did believe it and that's why you said it.
Which means that's how you feel about the Christian faith.
You feel that it's fundamentally bigoted.
Right, Max?
I mean, it's one of those two.
I don't know, what's the third option here?
And I think you need to flesh that out a little bit more.
Because you are a government.
You represent the voters in your district in Ohio, and I think that they probably want to know.
And I'm going to guess that the majority of them are Christian.
So which is it?
Are you saying things you don't believe because you have a problem with this particular woman and you just wanted to send the hounds after her by calling her a bigot?
Or do you really believe this?
That anyone who believes that Christ is the way, the truth, and the life is a bigot.
So we're gonna need a lot more.
Jen Psaki is an MSNBC contributor now or host.
I don't know what she is, but she works for them.
And here's the level of analysis that we get from her.
Watch this.
If you take a step back from all the developments of the legal trials and tribulations of Donald Trump, is that the Republican Party has moved in a direction that's out of touch with the American electorate.
And you gave a number of examples there.
Any party, a political party, is trying to make it harder and more difficult to vote, which is something we've seen the Republican Party do in a number of states across the country over the last couple of years.
It's because they don't want more people to go out there and voice their view and voice who they want to support.
That means, fundamentally, you're scared of more people being out there voting because they're going to vote for your opponent.
And the Ohio example you gave is such a good one.
Unfortunately, there's a number of other cases in states across the country where there have been efforts to make it harder for people in red states and purple states and lavender, whatever states, color states they are, to express their support for abortion rights and the ability of women to make choices about their own health care.
Because there's a fear that women will do exactly that, that men will do exactly that, because those positions are popular in the country.
Even as we're working through navigating, litigating, explaining every detail of Trump's
legal issues, the challenge here is that the positions that the core candidates and leaders
of the Republican Party have on issues people care about, whether it's access to voting,
choices about your own health care, all of these crazy, wackadoo cultural debates about
gay marriage.
First of all, gay marriage is the law of the land.
It's out of touch with the public, and that is a core problem for the party.
I think that it's important to see that because they're in the process of talking about Trump's
indictment and his supposed efforts to overturn the election and calling our elections into
question and claiming that they're rigged.
But what she's describing here, what she's advocating for, is in fact the primary way
that the Democrats go about rigging elections, which is by...
Opposing any effort to ensure any kind of election integrity whatsoever.
And there's a reason why they don't want that.
When she says, oh, they want to make it more difficult to vote.
They can never explain that.
They can never explain what they mean by that.
In what way?
You know, I don't want to, we don't need generalities here.
Give me specific examples.
Of people who, because of some Republican law or policy that's passed, are now having a difficult time voting.
And in what way is it difficult for them?
Because voting is, it is intentionally made to be idiot-proof.
And it is that way all across the country.
And as you know how I feel about it, I don't think it should be.
I don't think we should idiot-proof voting.
I think we should go the other way.
We should put things in place intentionally that would make it difficult for idiots to vote.
We should have filters in place to try to filter out the idiots, because we don't want them voting.
I mean, that's how you really undermine our democracy and our way of life, is by having a bunch of oblivious idiots flooding the voting booth.
And basically negating the votes of all of the people who are actually contributing members of society who know what's going on.
And that is precisely the plan.
That's what the Democrats want to do.
That is their whole strategy and it's been incredibly effective on a political level.
You know, they're worried about people like you, people like us, people who just, we don't have to be geniuses, okay?
People who pay attention and know what's going on.
And you go to vote, and you are a sentient, conscious human being, and you go to vote, and you have a basic idea of what's going on in the world.
They don't want that.
They don't want us to vote, but they can't really stop us at this point.
And so instead, the plan is to just send, like, for every vote made by a sentient, aware human being, they want to have a busload of morons to cancel it out.
Literal busloads.
Which means making voting as effortless and easy as possible.
It's important to understand this.
It's not all about the early voting and mail-in voting.
We'll give you seven and a half months to vote and we'll send ballots to your house and we'll have someone come and fill it out for you.
We'll have someone come and pick you up and carry you to your own mailbox so that you don't have to make any effort whatsoever, right?
And when conservatives criticize these kinds of policies, usually what we're worried about is fraud, which is something that we should worry about because it does happen.
It's a considerable problem.
But what I'm trying to say is the problem is bigger than that.
Because, you know, when they go out of their way to get people to vote who have no idea what's going on in the world, And are not interested in exerting any effort towards voting at all.
Yeah, those are actual votes.
That's not fraud.
But it is a way of rigging the system.
When if we actually cared about our precious democratic system, what we would do is we would have a system in place that actually tries to weed out fraud, make sure that you're of legal voting age, you're an American citizen, you've only voted once, this is not your third time.
All of that.
But then we would also have a system to make sure that on top of that, that's just bare minimum, that's entry level.
And then, as well, we would make sure that you are a contributing and aware member of society.
So, if you really care about the democratic system, that's what you would do.
If you really want to protect it, if you actually cherish it as some sacred thing, then that is what you would want.
But that's not what they want, very clearly.
All right, this is from Yahoo.
Posting to TikTok, a mother named Jana shared her reasons for allowing her 17-year-old son Cody to undergo top surgery, and she couldn't be more proud to be his mother.
And, of course, when Yahoo says son and he, they mean daughter and she.
You know, we understand that.
Top surgery, also known as chest surgery, or masculinizing chest surgery, is a type of gender-affirming medical procedure that alters the chest area that requires the removal of breast tissue.
It is typically performed for transgender men or non-binary people who are assigned female at birth.
So this is what this woman does and she's got a big following on TikTok and she talks all about her daughter who she's abusing and who has been mutilated with her help and her funding.
Let's just watch one of these.
This is clip six.
Let's watch one of these videos.
Why would I ever allow my 17-year-old to have top surgery?
Why would I do that?
That's insane.
That's crazy.
It's child abuse.
Until you look at the really, really happy kid who walked out of the doctor's office today feeling really great about himself for the first time in I don't even know how long.
His chest looks great.
It looks absolutely great.
And here's how my kid feels.
Here it is from the horse's mouth.
Enjoy.
So how are you feeling?
Really good.
What did it feel like when you saw your chest for the first time?
Normal.
Wow.
I'm super excited for you.
I'm happy.
Wow.
This is amazing, isn't it?
You look so amazing.
You look so good.
It finally feels right for the first time.
Right?
That's just it.
It feels right for the first time.
You look so good.
I'm so proud of you.
I love you so much.
Thank you.
There's one other clip that we were going to play, but I can't.
I just can't watch clips like this.
I can't.
I think we've seen enough of this, of Munchausen mommy here.
And you get the idea, it's always the same, you know.
And once again, I don't know where the dad is in this, I assume he's nowhere, but it's like, it's always the mom, almost always the mom.
With the exception of Dwayne Wade, it's almost always the mom.
And when you see these videos, we've seen a million of them, it's always the same video, it's the same.
It's like, the moms don't even look the same.
They're just, they're interchangeable, everything about them.
Telling her daughter, oh, you look amazing.
She doesn't, though.
I mean, she looks mutilated, butchered, and confused.
It's not amazing at all.
And you just have to, let me ask you this.
This mom, what was her name again?
Jana.
Okay, Jana.
If you walked into your daughter's room and she was cutting herself, You know, mutilating herself, cutting herself, cutting her wrists, let's say, with a razor blade.
And you said, oh my God, what are you doing?
Don't do that.
And she said, well, it makes me feel good to do this.
Would you then say, oh, well, okay, if it makes you feel good.
And then would you pull out your phone and do an inspirational TikTok video with the inspirational piano music in the background?
You know, many people say that my daughter shouldn't cut her wrists with a razor blade.
But, you know, what they don't understand is that she feels good when she does it.
Would you do that?
Now, I might not be making the point I'm trying to make here, because when you hear that question, because you're a psychotic barbarian, you might, yeah, for all I know, that it might be exactly how you respond.
Because you're a monster.
But any parent who actually loves their child, and you don't love your child at all, Any parent who actually loves their child would not respond that way.
You walk in and see your child hurting herself, the fact that it makes her feel good, that it gives her some kind of release because she's confused and lashing out, and this is the way that she's looking for this release.
You would not be okay with that.
You wouldn't say, well, as long as it makes you feel good.
If you are an even halfway decent and competent parent, and again, you love your child, you're never going to think, because it feels good, is a good enough justification for anything that your child does.
Instead, as the parent, what you say to your child is, yeah, you might think that this makes you feel better in the moment, but this is not the right way.
You're not making anything better.
You're hurting yourself.
You can't do this.
And you would try to get your child the help that she desperately needs.
And this is no different.
Every video or image we see of a girl who's had quote-unquote top surgery, it is no different in kind.
To a girl who cuts herself.
And in fact, it's not a coincidence.
Also, by the way, there's a lot of crossover here.
Very often, the girl who goes on to get top surgery also has a history of cutting and self-mutilation.
Because it's the same kind of thing.
She's confused.
She's in despair.
She hates herself.
She hates her body.
What she needs is someone to help her accept herself for who she is.
And because she doesn't get that, in your case, because she has a terrible mother who hates her, she just ends up looking for even more ways to harm herself.
So it's a very similar kind of thing.
The only difference—top surgery and cutting, very similar—only difference is that top surgery is so much worse, obviously, because it's a permanent damage.
This again is something that any decent parent understands.
But what we've learned time and time again is that there are a lot of very not decent parents out there.
Let's get to the comment section.
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Okay, so this is an interesting comment section today, because I'm going to pull all these comments from the video we posted from a segment, I guess it was two days ago now, where I was responding to a woman on TikTok, a childless woman, who was giving her rules for where you as a parent are allowed to bring your kids in public.
And she was taking a special exception to parents who bring their kids to bars and breweries, but then she went on to explain that you really can't bring your kid to anywhere that has quote-unquote age-restricted items.
She said you're an a-hole if you do, and she doesn't want to be around your kids because she wants to be able to be vulgar and crass and talk about sex really loudly, and she can't do that when your kid is there.
I disagreed.
I obviously, well I thought it was obvious that I would disagree with that position.
I explain why.
And I'm getting killed in the comments by it.
By a bunch of people that are completely wrong.
You know, it happens sometimes with the SPG.
It doesn't happen very often.
Every once in a while with the SPG, you guys are all just wrong.
And as the cult leader, I need to be here to let you know that.
That's one of my sacred, solemn responsibilities.
So let me just read a couple of these comments.
Swifty says, "As a father, I agree with her.
Not sure why you'd want to take your child to a place where drunk adults are likely to
be."
Porter Wake says, "Eh, you made a mountain out of a molehill here, Matt.
Don't take your kids to taverns, drinking, or weed-smoking places."
Latch says, "I don't think it's good for children to be surrounded by a bunch of intoxicated
adults, so I'm siding with her."
Lara says, "I'm sorry, but kids absolutely do not belong in bars, and a restaurant is
Bars are for drinking.
What parents bring a child to a bar while on a night out of drinking in a place filled with drunks?
Carfty says, nah, she's right for this, children shouldn't be in bars.
Mary says, I'm shocked that people glare at Matt's family in restaurants, it's just weird.
But I'm also shocked at his response to this woman.
The bar is a place where there is bound to be raunchy talk, for instance, dirty jokes.
It's also a place where hostilities could break out.
Bars are an adult venue, just like drag shows should be.
I don't know where you guys are going to bars or what, or where are you getting your, where
are you getting your perception of a bar from like Pirates of the Caribbean or something?
But you're all missing the point by a country mile.
First of all...
The woman says in the video, you should not bring your kid to any place that sells, quote, age-restricted items.
She includes cigarettes on that list, okay?
So I have to assume y'all didn't hear that part of the video, even though I specifically highlighted and centered my entire argument around it, but somehow you didn't hear.
To exclude children from all places with, quote, age-restricted items, which is what she was talking about, is to exclude them from all restaurants, all gas stations, basically all of society, okay?
That's my point, okay?
It's the whole point of the video.
I don't know how else to put it.
Also, obviously, you know, obviously you shouldn't bring your kid to a rowdy bar with a bunch of drunken pirates.
You shouldn't bring them to, like, a college bar at 2 a.m.
The reason you don't bring them to places like that is that it's not appropriate for them.
It's inappropriate for them.
And I also say at the beginning of my video that there are places you don't bring your kids because of the effect it would have on them.
Okay?
Obviously.
But there are like thousands of bars, you know, bars and restaurants, sports bars, beach bars, etc, etc, etc, that serve food, that are perfectly family friendly.
You can go there at lunchtime and nobody is drunk.
Where we used to live right down the street, there was a sports bar.
I'd take my kids there all the time.
I would get them chicken tenders from the kids menu.
It's a sports bar.
Nobody was drunk.
Everything was fine.
It was good.
There were lots of families there.
I don't know, are people not aware that this exists?
It's not just that there are some bars that are this way.
It's like most of them.
If I say to someone, "Hey, I'm gonna meet you at the bar down the street," it's almost
always a bar and restaurant.
Now there are some bars that are just bars, where it's like you literally just sit at the bar and all they have is liquor and beer.
And yeah, obviously you're not gonna bring a kid to a place like that.
But it's also clear, I would think, that I'm not talking about that.
And to drive the point home, and so that's what she wants to exclude kids from, those places.
You know, like a bar and restaurant.
Buffalo Wild Wings is a bar, okay?
And to drive the point home, her video starts by showing one of those places that she wants to keep kids away from.
The video starts by it.
It shows one of the places that she thinks kids shouldn't be allowed at.
And it's an outdoor spot with sand and picnic tables and families.
And it's the middle of the day.
Clearly a family-friendly place.
Clearly a place where they want families to come.
And she's saying, I don't want kids there.
That place specifically.
And what's her reason?
See, that's the third point.
The third point is the reason.
Her reason for not wanting kids is not that it's bad for them to be at these places, but that she wants to be able to curse loudly and talk about her sex life.
That's her reason.
And that's also why she doesn't just want to exclude them from the kinds of places that everyone agrees kids should be excluded from.
She wants to exclude them from anywhere that she likes to hang out.
That's what she says.
That's her whole reasoning.
So I don't know how else to put this.
And there is no one or almost no one who thinks that you should actually bring a kid to a
college bar at 1 a.m.
Or bring them to the kind of bar where there are a bunch of drunk, rowdy adults and fights are breaking out.
If you've ever been to a bar like that, you've probably never seen a kid there.
So that's not an issue.
Of course you don't bring a kid to a place like that.
So that's not a viewpoint that exists, okay?
So that's one of the reasons we know her video wasn't targeting those kinds of parents.
Because those parents don't exist!
You ever been to a bar at 1am?
I have.
Have you ever seen a kid at 1?
Never.
Ever.
Ever.
It doesn't happen.
So that's not something that exists.
So she wasn't targeting this thing that doesn't exist.
What she was targeting is when you just bring your kids to any place that she wants to hang out.
But that mentality on her part does exist.
That's a common thing, and that's why I talked about it in that segment, that I know, you know, bringing my kids, when I go out as a family, and we got six kids, and we go to a place, we go to a restaurant, it's a perfectly appropriate environment for kids, and, you know, we get the dirty looks and all that, and the reason is people like her, who just, like, no, I just don't want your kid here, because to me it's, I consider it annoying just to have them in my presence.
That's a very common mentality that people have, as evidenced by that.
You know, I talked about this on Twitter, and I talked about the dirty looks that big families get.
And of course, I heard from a lot of people, none of them actually have big families, but a lot of people who just denied that.
Okay.
Yeah, it doesn't.
I don't know.
It's just what I've... I grew up in a big family.
I have a big family.
It's been... I've experienced it countless times in my entire life.
And you talk to any parent who actually has a lot of kids and they will tell you.
It's a very common thing.
As I said, I don't care.
It's not a big deal.
It doesn't bother me.
But one of the ways you know that that does happen is because of people like this one.
And in fact, even though there were those denying, no one has that attitude, no one shoots dirty looks, at the same time, even under the comments on those tweets, you had a bunch of adults saying things like, well, your kid shouldn't go to any restaurant where there's not a kid menu.
Like that kind of thing.
Which is crazy, by the way, and I don't abide by that.
Yeah, one guy told me, just bring your kid to Chili's.
Okay, yeah, so if you have a family, you have to relegate yourself to bad restaurants with crappy food.
That's where the family should go, as a second-class citizen.
Stick with Applebee's and Chili's.
Don't go to the actual good restaurants, because he doesn't want to be around your kids.
Again, this is an actual common attitude in society that people have, and it's worth explaining why that attitude is wrong.
All right, good.
So, you're all wrong.
We'll do better next time.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
A few years ago, the author Ross Douthat wrote a book called The Decadent Society, and in the book he argues that we're not headed for any kind of catastrophic civilizational collapse, but rather we are on our way to, and in fact already in, a period of stasis, of cultural paralysis, what he calls decadence.
A decadent society is one that treads water, that goes nowhere in particular, and kind of drifts along to various dead ends.
One of the hallmarks of the decadent society is that it has no new ideas.
Instead, it simply repeats itself and repeats old ideas over and over again.
Constantly recycled and remade movies and lifeless movie franchises that never end are the perfect example of this kind of thing.
Another is the endless invention of new sexualities and genders, which are all just different versions of being gay.
A slightly less noticeable, but for me, even more annoying example is this insistence On taking normal things and making them into trends.
Every week there's another trend taking social media and Gen Z by storm.
But when you investigate, you discover that this is something people have always been doing.
It's just that they never felt the need to make it into a hashtag.
I've just been made aware of a particularly egregious variation on this theme.
For example, this is a new trend that's been written about in many media publications.
It's called Girl Dinner.
And here's the National Geographic report, because this is the kind of thing the National Geographic now concerns itself with.
Long gone are the days when you, you know, go to National Geographic to learn about a lost tribe in South American jungle somewhere.
Now you learn about the eating habits of 23-year-old women on TikTok.
So here's what they say.
Quote, picture this.
You're home alone and it's nearing dinner time.
You grab a box of crackers from the cabinet, some olives, baby carrots, and leftover falafel from the fridge.
You can take your masterpiece to the table, but why bother?
There's something satisfyingly deviant about eating it right off the kitchen counter with your fingers.
All told, the meal takes five minutes, one plate, no utensils.
You, my friend, have just made yourself a girl dinner.
What once may have been a sheepish, solitary tradition has recently attained viral internet status thanks to Olivia Marr, a TV showrunner's assistant, who first christened the phenomenon in a TikTok posted in May, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure tasting platter.
Girl dinner can include anything, and often includes everything, from applesauce and salami to Cheetos and guacamole.
The trend has since amassed nearly one billion views on TikTok, where users have started sharing their own smorgasbord creations and absurdist parodies.
Social media hype aside, might the girl, dinner girls, and their fellow partakers be on to something?
Food experts weigh in on the potential merits and pitfalls of this low-effort, snack-forward meal and what it reveals about our relationship to food and each other.
Now, first of all, this is not an innovative trend.
You haven't discovered anything new.
You're eating.
You're consuming food.
That's what it's called.
People have been doing that for as long as people have existed.
And second, to the extent that there is a particular method or approach here, it's not fair to call it girl dinner.
I would go so far as to label this a form of cultural appropriation.
Single men have been doing this forever.
Maybe not with falafels and olives, but the general strategy is very familiar.
When I was a single man, I don't think I ate a dinner on a plate with an entree and a side dish even one time.
If I was hungry, I went to my kitchen, opened up the fridge, I stood facing the fridge with the door still open, and I ate whatever random items I happened to have in there, which wasn't much.
Never heat anything up.
You know, I didn't put it on a plate and sit by myself at the dining room table.
Mostly because I didn't have a dining room table.
Or plates.
Or a dining room.
Or really any furniture at all except for a couch and a mattress and box spring with no bed frame.
The point is that the girl dinner trend directly steals from ancient bachelor tradition.
Our culture is not your TikTok trend, you damned plagiarists.
When it comes to doing something that people have been doing forever and pretending that you invented a hot new trend, nowhere is this more common than in the workplace.
We've discussed several times in the past these alleged new workplace trends that are not new at all and are almost always just a version of being lazy.
Quiet quitting is one we've discussed.
There have been others in that same vein.
And now Business Insider has compiled, for whatever reason, the whole list.
So we now have all of the workplace trends, quote-unquote, that Gen Z has invented this year in one handy list.
Headline, From Lazy Girl Jobs to Loud Quitting, here are the biggest workplace buzzwords of 2023 and what they mean.
The article begins, FedUp employees are starting new workplace trends that push back on exploitative employers.
Enter Lazy Girl Jobs, Loud Quitting, and Bare Minimum Mondays.
Check out these and other big workplace buzzwords of 2023 and what experts have to say about them.
Now a few of these buzzwords actually have the effect of taking a healthy and productive thing and making it sound worse than it really is.
So here's one.
Rage applying.
Business Insider says, Rage applying is the practice of mass applying to jobs fueled by feelings of unhappiness at work.
And it seems it has the potential to pay off.
After being passed over for a promotion, Jordan Smith, a 28-year-old working in the music industry in LA, rage applied for five jobs and landed a better-paying role within a week.
However, rage applying might not be the best approach for everyone.
Career coach Kelsey Watt advises against conducting a job search from an emotional place of fear, resentment, or burnout.
Okay.
Well, this is not rage applying.
This is just applying.
This is the standard application process.
If you're looking for a new job, especially if you're looking for an entry-level job, it's a good idea to fill out multiple applications or send in multiple resumes.
Applying for five jobs is not anything excessive or impressive.
It's what you do if you're serious about finding a job.
You probably don't want to be in a state of rage while you're filling out the application, but I don't think that's happening anyway.
I'm not even sure what that would look like.
Like, a guy sitting at his computer, face is red, frothing at the mouth, trembling with rage while filling out his employment history and contact information.
It just seems somewhat incongruent.
You can't maintain actual rage while filling out a form.
It's more of a feeling of numbness and quiet despair, if anything.
But now we get to the fancy workplace buzzwords that all describe the same kind of laziness and incompetence.
Now, reading from the article, it says, quote, As major tech companies continue laying off significant numbers of workers, another workplace trend has emerged.
Resenteeism.
It describes the act of staying in an unsatisfying job due to a perceived lack of options, even as resentment grows.
After resenteeism came the synonymous loud quitters and grumpy stayers.
Gallup's 2023 State of the Global Workplace report found that roughly one in five workers are allowed quitting at their jobs, which means just that they're actively disengaged at work, as opposed to quiet quitters who are simply not engaged.
Wait, what?
So, on one hand, you are disengaged.
On the other hand, you are not engaged.
Wow, that's quite a distinction.
Now, just as a quick note, though it goes without saying, if you have ever referred to yourself as a grumpy stayer, You should not only be fired from your job, but you should also be deported to Venus.
But there's a lot more in this vein.
There's also Bare Minimum Monday, which we're told is a way to ease into work at the start of the week.
TikToker Marissa Joe popularized the term, which describes a way to resist the Sunday scaries and the pressure many people feel to hit the ground running full speed when they return to work again on Monday.
Quote, the second I got rid of the pressure and allowed myself to have whatever kind of day unfolded, I was able to do stuff, she said.
In a video documenting one of her bare minimum Mondays, Jo goes through activities like journaling, her skincare routine, making progress on a creative project before beginning work, which she notes doesn't start until noon on bare minimum Mondays.
Yes, you know, it's important to ward off the Sunday scaries by having a bare minimum Monday so you don't become a grumpy stayer who is quiet quitting.
And if you've not already overdosed and died of cringe just from hearing that sentence, don't forget about chaotic working.
Business Insider explains, chaotic working, aka malicious compliance, involves employees using their position at work to help customers or clients at the employer's expense.
Though it often entails breaking some rules, workers may do it without fear of repercussion because they're simply fed up with their job, their employer, or their general state of work.
Anti-work sentiments have helped the trend grow.
Now that last sentence is really the key here.
Putting aside how unfathomably cringy all of this is and how it's all just trying to make trends out of simply being a garden variety loser with no work ethic, the real point is that it grows from, as Business Insider says, anti-work sentiment.
Now to a certain extent, everybody has experienced anti-work sentiment.
Everyone who, you know, everyone who among us has not had the alarm go off in the morning and thought to themselves, damn, I don't feel like going to work today.
We all have, and everyone has lapsed into laziness, some more often than others.
So that isn't new.
But these days, thanks in part to the trend-defying of everyday life, if I can coin my own dumb and clunky term, being lazy and anti-work is now presented as a legitimate lifestyle choice.
It's one thing to have lazy moments.
Everyone does.
It's another to declare your laziness proudly, to participate in laziness like it's a valid life strategy.
And that's where we are now, especially with the younger generations.
I mean, you can feel anti-work sometimes, everyone does.
But to make that into your motto, to march under that banner, is to embrace failure and misery and mediocrity.
And this is the part that gets me.
Because look, If you want to be mediocre, unimpressive, unproductive, achieve nothing of value with your life, that's your choice.
It's a bad choice, but it's yours to make.
The problem, though, is that the people who openly admit that they do the bare minimum and that they walk around at work with open resentment and hostility to their own employer, they put in no effort, etc.
These people will still complain.
In fact, they will complain the loudest about their financial hardships and their lack of opportunities and so on.
You know, if you want to work little, and you want to have little, and you want to live a humble life without much luxury or comfort, if you want to go, you know, live in a one-bedroom cottage in the woods somewhere with no streaming services or designer clothes or anything else, if you want to embrace a very modest life so that you can devote more of your time to your hobbies or your art or simply to contemplating the mysteries of the universe, that I can more than respect.
That's a respectable choice.
If you want to leave, quote, hustle culture behind and go full monastic or close to it, great.
That is an absolutely respectable approach to life and you can find plenty of joy and fulfillment living that way.
But that is not what most of the quiet quitters and bare minimum Monday participants are doing, not even close.
Because they still want to live a fully modern life with all the trappings, all the luxuries, all the streaming services, all the nice clothes and gadgets.
But without putting in any of the effort to obtain and maintain that kind of lifestyle.
So they are the worst of all worlds.
That's the point.
It's materialistic and lazy.
Okay?
It's one thing to choose one of those.
So if you've got, if you have to be like, at least choose one.
Okay?
Do you want to be lazy but not materialistic?
Then we can say, oh yeah, they're lazy, but they're not materialistic at all.
They don't need to own anything, and they don't care about it.
Or you could be materialistic but ambitious.
And people could say about you, yeah, he's real materialistic, but man, he's ambitious.
He's a real go-getter.
That's something.
I mean, you could work with that.
And you could be a successful person in your own way that way.
You could be happy, too, that way.
The problem is that modern people, many modern people, want both of those vices.
You can't have both of them.
You gotta choose one.
You can't be materialistic and lazy.
Because that's where it all breaks down.
That's a recipe for being eternally frustrated and unfulfilled.
And that is the fate of so many people in our culture today.
Which is why all the people participating in these trends that are not really trends are today cancelled.
