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Sept. 5, 2023 - The Matt Walsh Show
01:09:30
Ep. 1215 - We Have To Stop Letting The Porn Industry Hide Behind 'Free Speech'

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the Left is normally very opposed to free speech in this country. But they do make one exception: pornography. While attacking free speech everywhere else, suddenly they've decided that even the most basic regulations on the porn industry are an untenable assault on the First Amendment. Also, BLM has come out of hibernation just in time for the election. We'll take a look at the police shooting that spurred their reemergence. Plus, disaster strikes at a drug fueled hippy sex fest in Nevada. And Fauci is confronted about a new study showing that masks are useless. Interestingly enough, this confrontation happened on CNN of all places. Ep.1215 - - - Click here to join the member exclusive portion of my show: https://utm.io/ueSEm  - - -  DailyWire+: Want to work at The Daily Wire? For more information, click here and select “Careers”: https://bit.ly/3JR6n6d Get 25% of your DailyWire+ membership: https://bit.ly/3VhjaTs Represent the Sweet Baby Gang by shopping my merch here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj   - - -  Today’s Sponsors: Birch Gold - Text "WALSH" to 989898, or go to https://bit.ly/3LjDxuA, for your no-cost, no-obligation, FREE information kit. Renewal By Anderson - Get your FREE Consultation Text WALSH to 200-300 40 Days for Life - Help defend free speech today! https://bit.ly/3LfFsAf - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Rv1VeF  Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3KZC3oA  Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eBKjiA  Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RQp4rs

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Today on the Matt Wall Show, the left is normally very opposed to free speech in this country, but they do make one exception, pornography.
While attacking free speech everywhere else, suddenly they've decided that even the most basic regulations in the porn industry are an untenable assault on the First Amendment.
Also, BLM has come out of hibernation just in time for the election.
We'll take a look at the police shooting that spurred their re-emergence.
Plus, disaster strikes at a drug-fueled hippie sex fest in Nevada.
And Fauci is confronted about a new study showing that masks are effectively useless.
Interestingly enough, this confrontation happened on CNN, of all places.
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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On the afternoon of April 6th, 2022, employees working for MindGeek, which is the company that runs some of the biggest porn sites in the world, including RedTube and PornHub, began exchanging frantic text messages.
One of the messages read, quote, Yo, sorry man, can you make sure you're not CCing the manager of the site on the CSAM reports?
CSAM stands for Child Sexual Abuse Material, and for some reason, This employee wanted his colleague to stop alerting a manager to the presence of this content on MindGeek's porn sites.
That request, understandably, shocked the MindGeek employee who received it, and this was the reply that came back, quote, And that message, in case it's not obvious, CP stands for Child Pornography.
Now, these texts and many more incriminating documents surfaced last week in an ongoing lawsuit against MindGeek by the alleged victims of child sex trafficking in California.
It's one of several lawsuits filed against MindGeek across the United States and Canada that accused the company of willful and malicious conduct involving minors.
According to one of the lawsuits, for example, Pornhub took a large cut of the profits from videos of a 12-year-old boy being raped.
Now, amid all this litigation, payment processors like Visa and MasterCard have dropped Pornhub, though not before a judge ruled that Visa had facilitated the dissemination of child pornography.
In other documents that have been unearthed in Discovery, MasterCard confronts MindGeek over apparent child pornography on their platform, prompting officials at MindGeek to brainstorm a crisis response to all of this.
And at one point, Both the CEO and the owner of MindGeek admit that they had only one staff member reviewing videos that are flagged for containing child sex abuse content.
At the same time, they acknowledge that there's a backlog of nearly 700,000 potentially illegal videos that hadn't been reviewed at all.
And by the way, from what I could find online, it appears that MindGeek has well over 1,000 employees.
So, of those more than 1,000 employees, they had just one dedicated to removing child rape from their platform.
That tells you how much they prioritized the issue, which is basically not at all.
In the meantime, as usual, conservative politicians in this country are taking half measures in response to all this.
These politicians are currently attempting to keep pornography websites out of the reach of children instead of shutting them down entirely.
Pornhub is a hub for hundreds of thousands of videos and images of child rape.
It should simply be shut down completely.
And that's it.
But that isn't happening.
Instead, we have these efforts to put age restrictions into place on the user end.
And to be fair, that is something, at least.
Even if it clearly doesn't go far enough, it's better than nothing.
To that end, Texas, like several other states, recently passed a law requiring that users of Pornhub provide proof that they're 18 years or older.
Visitors to Pornhub and several websites like it have to upload some kind of identification proving their age.
The law also requires Pornhub to inform users that, quote, pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography, which is all obviously true.
Now, to be clear, the law in Texas would not prohibit any adult from accessing pornography.
The law also would not stop any adult from producing pornography.
But even this timid attempt to keep children away from some of the most debased sexual content known to man, something that everyone in the country should easily agree on, was too much for MindGeek and PornHub.
So they filed a lawsuit to strike down the law.
Watch.
Pornhub and several adult entertainment workers are suing the state of Texas to block its impending age verification law.
Under the law, porn sites would be required to display a Texas Health and Human Services warning on their website in 14-point font or larger.
They're saying it violates both the Constitution and the Federal Communications Decency Act.
The law will take effect on September 1st unless the court blocks it.
The law against showing pornographic content to kids, we're told, violates the Communications Decency Act.
So any measure preventing a minor from viewing content on a website that hosts child sex abuse content is indecent.
That's what they're saying, without a shred of irony.
Not that we should be surprised by that total lack of self-awareness.
After all, MindGeek is owned by a Canadian private equity group called Ethical Capital Partners.
So double-speak is all the rage among pornographers, as you might expect.
And predictably, these same pornographers are also saying that somehow the right to free speech grants all Americans the inalienable right to watch other people have sex.
And what's more, they say, the First Amendment also grants other people the right to have sex in front of strangers.
Now, it doesn't take a lot of sleuthing around in arcane legal textbooks to figure out how nonsensical that position is.
Pornography, as we all know, is cyber prostitution, and most states already ban prostitution.
But that's all academic.
Again, Texas did not ban pornography, and there's no serious effort to ban it anywhere, unfortunately, nor is there a strong support for those kinds of measures on the right.
So that just isn't happening.
What's the actual argument, then?
Well, here's another news segment to flesh this out a bit more.
This segment features a representative from the porn industry which runs a front group with an innocuous-sounding name called the Free Speech Coalition.
And this is the case that they're making against these laws.
Watch.
Members of the pornography industry are suing the state of Texas over a new law set to take effect September 1st.
That law requires users of adult websites to send their government-issued identification to those websites to verify the user is of age.
The Free Speech Coalition, which represents businesses and people in the adult content industry, says the law violates free speech and is too broad.
Consumers are very worried about uploading their ID or letting the government know that they're visiting these types of sites, right?
People can lose their jobs.
They can, you know, harm their marriages.
There's all sorts of reasons why people want to keep this information private and requiring that people go on and submit an ID or submit to a background check in order to protect, to access legal content is, you know, un-American and unconstitutional.
The lawsuit filed in federal court aims to block the Attorney General from enforcing the new law.
The AG's office has not commented on the suit.
The guy just, he just looks like a representative for the porn industry, doesn't he?
But he says people could lose their jobs and harm their marriages if they're caught browsing a website that allegedly hosts child pornography.
Imagine that.
And so these privacy concerns that they talk about, which by the way, just so you know, If you go to porn sites, if you frequent porn sites...
No matter what the law says, even if there's no identification requirement, these websites already know everything about you.
That's the way the internet works, okay?
All these companies, they know everything about you already.
You are giving up that information just by going to the sites.
So, if you say to yourself, you know, I don't really think that I want to give personal information to these websites.
Well, then here's a solution.
Don't go to the websites.
There's an idea.
Now, the porn industry says that it's un-American and unconstitutional to require ID to watch porn.
For that logic to make any sense whatsoever, it's very important that you don't live in the United States or have even a passing familiarity with what life is like in this country.
It's important that you don't realize that adult-oriented products in every other context are age-restricted with IDs required to obtain them.
And there's no concern about privacy being violated.
Okay, if you go to the gas station to buy tobacco products or alcohol or scratch-off tickets, you have to provide an identification.
And it would be useless to say, well then my privacy, well I don't want this person to know this information, well then I guess you're not buying the alcohol.
Tough luck.
In fact, even physical porn, physical porn, like DVDs and magazines, require identification to purchase.
Okay, anything that you might buy at some skeevy sex shop on the side of the highway requires an ID to purchase.
Nobody ever complains about any of this or claims that their First Amendment rights are being destroyed because they have to show their license to buy any of these things.
And indeed, if that skeevy sex shop looked the other way while hundreds of ten-year-olds came in and browsed around, everyone would agree that the shop should be shut down and the owner's employee should be thrown in prison.
And yet with online porn, and only online porn, suddenly the imposition of any age requirement, any ID requirement, is an untenable attack on free speech.
It doesn't apply to any other adult-oriented product.
Every other adult-oriented product in every other context, including online.
If you want to gamble online, you have to show ID.
So, again, in every other context where there is adult-oriented products, online or offline, everybody agrees that you should have to show ID.
It is only with pornography that suddenly it becomes, you're abolishing the First Amendment by simply requiring it.
It is a ridiculous argument.
Can it hold any water whatsoever in court is the question.
Well, remarkably enough, a Reagan-appointed federal judge in Texas appears to think that it does.
The judge, David A. Ezra, just struck down the Texas law, saying that it chills the speech of plaintiffs and adults who wish to access sexual materials.
The judge added, quote, The court agrees that the state has a legitimate goal in protecting children from sexually explicit material online, but that goal, however crucial, does not negate this court's burden to ensure that the laws passed in its pursuit comport with established First Amendment doctrine.
Now, to be clear, this judge's ruling is not the final word.
It's already being appealed, and it has no weight in the several other states that have already passed similar ID requirements on pornography websites.
So, it's important not to blow this out of proportion.
We've seen, you know, a lot of insane rulings from individual federal judges that are quickly overturned, including judges appointed by Republicans.
It just happened in Tennessee when Judge Eli Richardson, the guy who keeps hiring left-wing clerks, tried to strike down the state's ban on child genital mutilation, and he was quickly overturned.
At the same time, it's important to read the Pornhub judge's decision carefully, because the truth is that, as insane as his ruling is, the conservative politicians bear some of the blame for it.
If these politicians want to make any headway in stopping the depravity and cultural rot that these pornography sites are responsible for, then they have to start crafting better laws.
And this decision makes that clear.
There's no way around it.
The free speech argument from the judge is blatant nonsense, but he does raise another point that is not so nonsensical.
One of the problems that Judge David Ezra identified with the law is that it didn't really accomplish the goal that the legislation said it would.
So I'm going to quote a long paragraph from this decision because it's important to highlight the exact reasoning behind the decision if conservatives want to have any hope of getting decisions to go their way in the future.
So here's what it says.
The law will do little to prevent children from accessing pornography.
Search engines, for example, do not need to implement age verification even when they're aware that someone is using their service to view pornography.
The same is true for blogs posted to Tumblr, including subdomains that only display sexually explicit content.
Likewise, Instagram and Facebook pages can show material which is sexually explicit for minors without compelled age verification.
In some, the law is severely under-inclusive.
It nominally attempts to prevent minors' access to pornography, but contains substantial exemptions, including material most likely to serve as a gateway to pornography use.
The judge continues, quote, In other words, the law in Texas doesn't really stop minors from accessing pornography.
It's not much of a roadblock at all because minors can just go on Reddit or use Twitter or use search engines like Bing and watch porn there.
dedicated to posting online pornography with no regulation.
In other words, the law in Texas doesn't really stop minors from accessing pornography.
It's not much of a roadblock at all because minors can just go on Reddit,
or use Twitter, or use search engines like Bing and watch porn there.
So this is a very important distinction.
As arbitrary and frustrating as it is, it's a distinction that conservative politicians need to
grasp if they want to have any chance of protecting children
from the never-ending fountains of filth like Pornhub.
Voters in several states, including Virginia, Mississippi, and Utah, have passed age verification laws that apply to porn sites.
There's not a lot of dissent on this issue among sane people.
And yet conservative politicians have found a way to bungle this issue.
They've passed flimsy laws that can't stand up in court.
Of course, even if the Texas law had loopholes that will allow children to access pornography, still you would think that a flimsy attempt to protect kids is better than no attempt at all.
But the flimsiness of the law provides a pretense for striking it down entirely, and that's the issue.
So the solution is obvious.
First, these politicians should come out and say what everyone knows, which is that the left's concerns about free speech are a smokescreen.
Sites like Pornhub protest age restrictions because they stand to lose millions if minors aren't granted access to their platforms.
They are knowingly profiting off of the sexualization and trauma of children.
The average porn user, on the other hand, protests these age restrictions because he doesn't want to be hassled or inconvenienced in his pursuit of masturbatory material.
That's the only reason he cares about it.
Both groups cry about free speech, but they couldn't give less of a damn about it.
Right now in the United States, actual free speech is infringed every day.
Pro-life activists are hunted down by the FBI, right-wingers are jailed for posting memes, and yet suddenly the courts and the left have decided to become free speech absolutists when it comes to porn and sexual depravity.
That's the only area where they care about free speech.
To give another recent example, after a lawsuit from the ACLU, a federal judge in Tennessee just blocked a local DA from enforcing the state's law protecting kids from sexually explicit performances at so-called pride events.
Or, you know, drag, so-called family-friendly drag shows and all the rest of it.
That's banned in Tennessee.
There's a law passed that bans it.
And all this DA did was send word to organizers of this pride thing, telling them that they cannot involve kids in any of these performances.
Which is a reasonable thing to say, especially if you've seen any of the millions of videos of, you know, naked adults twerking in front of children from the past few months at these pride parades.
But the left pretended that it wasn't reasonable, and they shut the DA down.
And this is, among other things, hypocritical.
The same people who believe that basic political speech should be outlawed and prosecuted as hate crimes are suddenly starting to care about free speech, the moment the right makes any effort to protect children from degenerate sexual content.
But the right can't simply scream hypocrisy and call it a day.
It doesn't accomplish anything.
Leftists know they're being hypocritical.
They know they're using the court system to overturn the will of the well-adjusted, sane majority.
They don't care.
The correct response from the right, as the Texas Pornhub case shows, albeit in a roundabout way, is to one-up these degenerates.
Stop passing half-measures into law.
Stop with the flimsy, thrown-together legislation that doesn't remotely accomplish what you say you want to accomplish.
Start, instead, with a total ban on pornography for children across all platforms.
Search engines, websites, social media, everything.
And it should be a ban that extends not just to websites, but to the devices that are used to access the website.
There should be laws in all 50 states mandating that cell phones used by children have filters and blocks on them that prevent the user from accessing this material.
Cell phone companies should be required by law to sell devices that are safe for kids as long as kids are going to be using them.
And really, kids shouldn't be using phones at all, but millions do, and so we should have a law that takes that into account.
Ironically, that kind of law is more likely to withstand scrutiny from federal judges.
It's also more likely to bring about what every responsible adult should want, which is the safeguarding of our kids.
You know, our kids didn't choose to be born into a depraved society filled with degenerate filth.
But they were.
And the least we can do is make even the slightest effort to protect them from it.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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Well, we're getting into election season now, which means that it's time for two things to make a
comeback and that would be COVID and BLM.
And right on cue, you know, we have this resurgence, this supposed resurgence of COVID and the new COVID variant.
They're talking about masking again and everything else.
And also, BLM is marching in the streets again.
The interesting thing, of course, is that BLM basically took a break for the entirety of Biden's tenure up until right now, I guess because racism had been solved.
You know, it's a fascinating thing.
A Democrat gets elected and racism is solved.
There's no more racism.
Until now.
Racism is back, just in time for the election.
So here was BLM marching in Columbus, Ohio, this weekend.
Let's watch.
[MUSIC]
Good, there we go, black lives matter.
There we go.
Black Lives Matter again.
It's good that they're walking in the streets chanting that because, you know, we weren't sure.
I wasn't sure.
Do black lives still matter?
Because if no one is chanting it, then how are we supposed to know?
And now they're chanting it again, and we can go, oh, so black lives matter.
Well, that's good.
Now, the ostensible reason for this demonstration is the The police shooting of a woman named Takiyah Young in Columbus, Ohio.
And we're told by the BLM and the media, and this is their approved narrative, that Takiyah Young was executed, that she was shot dead by racist cops nearly for trying to shoplift.
And that's all. So she was shoplifting. The way that they frame it, you're imagining,
the way what they want you to imagine is that she was shoplifting.
And so some cop just walked in and shot her dead, said, you're being executed for the
crime of shoplifting. And that's all that happened. Meanwhile, Takiyah was six months pregnant.
Her unborn child was also killed, tragically. And the media, actually, it's been interesting.
The media has been using the phrase unborn child to describe Takiyah Young's child in the womb.
So that they have also just now discovered the humanity of the unborn, at least for as long
as this story is in the news. So good news for all the unborn children of the world right
now, that for right now, you get to be human beings.
For the sake of this Takiyah Young story.
And once it's out of the news, then of course, unborn children will go back to being inanimate clumps of worthless matter, but for right now, they are unborn babies.
Somehow.
Is it true that Takiya Young was killed for shoplifting?
Well, no.
Of course that's not true.
Of course that's nonsense.
She was killed because what began, the reason why she was having an interaction with the police in the first place, is because she was allegedly shoplifting.
So that's what started this incident.
Um, and by the way, another point about that, that I think is relevant, is that she was allegedly shoplifting alcohol.
Okay?
She was six months pregnant, allegedly shoplifting alcohol.
So that's something to keep in mind.
Really for two reasons, because number one, we're told that the reason people go and shoplift is because they're desperate and they're hungry and they're starving and they gotta feed their kids.
And Takiya Young is 21 years old, had two other kids as well, so this is what we would normally be told, is that she was shoplifting because she's that.
Well, except that she was shoplifting apparently, according to the reports, alcohol.
Is she gonna feed that to the kids?
Well, she was going to feed it to her unborn child, apparently, if she was planning on consuming it herself.
So, that's something to keep in mind.
But she stole the alcohol, allegedly, got into her car, cops tried to stop her from leaving because she had potentially committed a crime, and that's what cops are there for.
If you're committing a crime, they're going to come up and stop you.
And if you say, I don't want to be stopped, I'm just going to leave.
They can't just let you leave, because then there's no point in having law enforcement at all.
And if there's no point, if we don't have law enforcement, there's no point of having law in the first place.
And then we can just have chaos, which of course is what many on the left want.
But if you want to live in any kind of civilized, functional society, you have law.
And law means law enforcement.
And enforcing the law means that when the law enforcement shows up, you can't just decline to be... You can't just say, well, you know what?
I'd prefer not to be arrested today, officer.
Oh, well, if you don't want to be, never mind.
Okay, well, I didn't... Oh, you don't want to be arrested?
Okay, well, forget it then.
Just go ahead.
What did you steal there?
Oh, you got a couple bottles of whiskey?
Well, enjoy.
Go enjoy yourself.
That's not how it works.
So, she tried to leave, and she was in her car at this point.
She refused to get out of the car, and instead she started to drive away.
And one of the problems with driving away is, well, number one, you're under arrest because you're trying to steal something, so you can't just leave.
But number two, there was a cop standing in front of the car when she started to drive.
And so she was driving into a police officer, and that cop then fired a single shot, and Takiya Young was killed.
That's what happened.
Now, was the cop in the wrong in this shooting?
Well, as far as I can tell, if he violated any protocols, it was that he stepped in front of the car of the suspect.
Now, he stepped in front of it before it was moving.
He didn't jump in front of a moving vehicle.
She was parked, and there was one cop to the side trying to get her out of the car, another cop in front of the car.
And she was well aware that the cop was there.
She chose to drive into him.
Now, you know, I'm not an expert in police procedures.
I'm pretty sure it's not proper procedure for an officer to physically step in front of the car of a suspect.
Cops aren't supposed to use their own bodies as barricades, as far as I know.
So that was dumb on his part.
No question about it.
However, the fact that he's standing there doesn't give the suspect the right to drive into him.
And once she is driving into him, which she was, even if he shouldn't have been standing there, he has every right to use force to protect himself.
Because now this is a lethal weapon.
A car is a lethal weapon being used against him, and he responds with lethal force and was entirely justified in doing so.
So Takiya Young is not a victim here, except of her own poor choices.
And that's the thing that, as always, is missing from this discussion.
That if black lives matter, And of course they do.
Then the people who really need to hear that message are people like Takiyah Young.
She did not treat her own life or her unborn child's life like they had any value at all.
So she's the one who needs the newsflash.
It's the BLM martyrs themselves that act like black lives don't matter.
They throw their lives away for no reason.
They do suicidally stupid things, make these recklessly self-destructive decisions with no upside, with no possible chance of it working out in their favor, and yet they do it anyway, and they die in the process.
Like, you're shoplifting alcohol to begin with, so you're not starving and desperate, you're stealing booze, and you're pregnant.
Already, that's a decision that has zero chance of making your life any better at all.
But then you get stopped by the cops.
Okay, well, you're caught.
It's done.
They got you.
That's it.
They got you.
You're done.
It's finished.
And here's the thing.
They're not even going to put you in prison.
Nobody goes to prison anymore for a little thing like stealing.
You might get a fine or something.
Maybe you have to do some community service, at most.
So it's a relatively minor, low-stakes situation.
Now, I think that shoplifting should be dealt with much more severely than it is.
I don't think it should be just a slap on the wrist.
I think there should be real prison time, but that's not the situation in our society today.
So you can just take your slap on the wrist and move on with your life and live to steal another day, or you can try to run away.
Which in the best case scenario will mean that when they do catch you, you're going to have additional charges and now you really will do prison time, whereas before you wouldn't have.
That's the best case.
The moment you decide to drive away, best case is that now you're going to spend more time in prison than you would have otherwise.
Worst case scenario is that you get shot.
There is no scenario.
No scenario where you drive away and things work out better for you because of it.
That scenario is not on the menu of options.
It doesn't exist.
And that's the case for all of the BLM martyrs.
I mean, every single one.
They're in a situation where the cops, they're having an interaction with the police officers because of the things that they were doing, because of crimes they were allegedly committing, And rather than just accept the fact that you're committing a crime and now the police are here and that's it, they do everything in their power to make the situation as bad as it can possibly be for them.
And then we're supposed to turn around and cry tears like they're the victims.
And no one ever says, hey, you know what?
When the cops stop you because you're committing a crime, Just don't be suicidally stupid.
That's it.
Value your own life enough to fight it out in court.
Okay, if you really were being, if you really are innocent of stealing the alcohol, then fight it out in court.
You decide to fight it out in the parking lot and now you're dead.
And, you know, all of the people Who go around chanting Black Lives Matter.
None of them will say this.
All of these situations are extremely avoidable.
The reason why I am not currently dead right now in a parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, is because, number one, I would not steal alcohol to begin with.
I'm just not going to do that.
And number two, if I was suspected of a crime, I would not try to drive away.
Because I would recognize that that is going to make all of my problems so much worse.
So is it because I'm a genius or I'm some great saint?
No!
It's a basic self-preservation.
I don't want to make my problems worse.
I don't want to make a situation worse for myself.
So I'm not going to.
Right?
That's why I'm not dead in a parking lot.
That's why you're not.
It's not because I'm white or you're white.
It's got nothing to do with it.
People who make suicidally stupid decisions oftentimes end up dead.
People who don't will live longer.
And that's it.
And that should be the message.
Just have a little bit of common sense, a little bit of personal responsibility, and value your own life.
And the problem is, in these communities, this is the thing that plagues these communities.
Total lack of common sense, total lack of personal responsibility, and a total lack of valuing your own life and your own freedom.
And anyone who actually cares, this is what they would be saying.
All right, well, it had been a couple of years as we move on since the last festival-related disaster, so we're due for another one.
And Burning Man has stepped up to the plate to deliver.
Burning Man is the festival out in the Nevada desert where a bunch of hippies and tech bros gather together to do drugs and have sex and not shower and smell each other's body odor for four days.
A lot of pagan symbolism and various rituals, and it's all very satanic and bad and gross.
But this time, the satanic rituals went awry because it rained, and there was a lot of mud, and people couldn't leave.
They couldn't get out because the roads weren't usable.
So, they were stranded for several days without proper facilities, without, you know, bathrooms.
The bathrooms were overflowing.
It's all very disgusting, which meant that the very gross event was even grosser than usual.
But this is the internet age, which means that every event has to spawn eight or nine different conspiracy theories, because everyone feels like— everyone thinks they're living in a movie all the time, because they despair of their own lives, and, you know, they find their own lives so dull and uninteresting, so they want to pretend that they're living in a movie.
And that's what happened this time, as this is all unfolding over the weekend with Burning Man.
You have all of these people posting on social media, on Twitter, on TikTok, saying, what's really going on?
What's really going on there?
There's something going on.
So here's just one example.
This is a citizen journalist, I suppose, on TikTok, revealing some of the sinister secrets at Burning Man.
Let's watch this.
Most of y'all have probably heard that Burning Man was declared a national emergency, but there's some pretty crazy stuff coming out.
So it was announced earlier that Burning Man was declared a national emergency because it was flooded.
And so they sent in FEMA, which already seemed kind of like a weird reason to send in FEMA and keep anyone from leaving the festival.
73,000 people they're keeping locked in there for flooding.
Now there's some new terrifying information coming out that there's a virus on the loose in the festival and that people are getting really sick with boils, vomiting, hemorrhaging.
To me, this makes way more sense than flooding in terms of what their response was to the situation.
This is a text from one of the festival goers and he said, Yo, just figured you should hear from me first.
Daryl is crazy sick with something that has him coughing up really coagulated blood.
Medic showed up wearing a full suit.
No idea where he is now.
I would stay inside your camper.
And he goes on to say that an outside agency is putting up a fence.
This is a different festival-goer that said, you're never gonna f***ing believe it.
They're saying it's Ebola.
Freaking Ebola at Burning Man, guys.
If this is true, that is insane.
I just hope that everyone ends up being okay and that they make it out.
It's not true, first of all.
That's my favorite TikTok video, which is a bunch of nonsense.
This is true, and there's something going on.
Yeah, it's not true.
What's going on here?
Something.
Flooding?
You're telling me they couldn't leave because of flooding?
That doesn't make any sense.
Why doesn't that make any sense?
It makes perfect sense.
It rained.
Like, there's flooding.
That's it.
So, there's no conspiracy.
Here's what happened.
It's exactly what I already said.
A bunch of hippies and tech bros with no survival skills went to the middle of the desert to have sex with each other and use drugs, and they gathered together on a dried-up lake bed, and then it rained, okay?
And the ground didn't absorb the moisture very well because it's the desert, so it's like raining on concrete.
Plus, they're on a lake bed.
Okay, they're on a lake bed, so the water pools, and it creates a lot of mud, and then you can't drive your vehicles and your hippie RVs and all that on it, and you have to wait for the mud to dry up, and that's it.
That's all.
That's all you need.
Were people getting sick?
Yeah, probably.
95% of the attendees already had chlamydia before they showed up, so they're all bringing, it's like a potluck of viruses at Burning Man.
They're all bringing their own viruses with them to begin with.
Okay, they're all a bunch of disease infested, disgusting people.
And then they come together, if you'll pardon the expression, and they're there and all the diseases are being spread around.
So again, we don't need any kind of, it's a petri dish of disease.
Were there people vomiting?
Yeah, probably.
Okay, I want to vomit just thinking about Burning Man.
I can't actually, actually being there.
There's an important lesson here, and by the way, the latest update is that everyone's going home now.
So the mud's dried up enough, and now they're all leaving, and they're not, okay, the government's not there rounding them all up and sending them off to FEMA camps, which, you know, you can make an argument that maybe we should do that anyway.
You know, if we were to round up everybody at Burning Man and send them to FEMA camps, Like, I mean, there's already, as I said, there's a lot of probably contagious disease already there.
But anyway, that's not happening.
So, I think an important lesson here, and the first one is don't go to Burning Man, okay?
In general, like, don't go out into the wilderness unless you're well-prepared and have survival skills.
And certainly don't go out into the wilderness with a bunch of sex-crazed druggies.
That's the worst thing you can do.
So that's the first lesson.
And the second lesson is that, you know, you shouldn't hatch conspiracy theories unless a conspiracy is needed in order to explain something.
And sometimes it is.
So sometimes you have something going on, and it doesn't make sense, and they're telling us something, and it doesn't add up.
And then you need to introduce, speculatively, an element of conspiracy in order to make sense of what you're seeing.
And that's where conspiracy theories can be legitimate.
At the very least, they can be defensible.
But then you have the other kind, which is like what came with the Burning Man, which we don't need any, you don't need any kind of conspiracy theory to explain this.
It's all very simple to understand.
It all makes a lot of sense, actually.
And yet we introduce it anyway because, you know, we want to make a, we want to make it more interesting.
Although, look, it would be an interesting film plot, like a zombie virus breakout at Burning Man.
Great movie idea.
Somebody should make that movie.
I will make that movie, and nobody does.
That's a great movie idea.
Not reality, though, unfortunately.
Okay, briefly, one other thing before we move on.
This is from the Daily Wire.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked to respond to a study that raised doubts about face masks being able to curb the spread of COVID.
The exchange happened on CNN over the weekend when host Michael Smirconish brought up an analysis released in January about masks and their lack of efficacy.
Let's watch a little bit of this exchange.
I would hope that if in fact we get to the point where the volume of cases is such and organizations like the CDC recommend, CDC doesn't mandate anything, I mean recommends that people wear masks, I would hope that they abide by the recommendation and take into account the risk to themselves and to their families.
And again, we're not talking about forcing anybody to do anything.
Totally understood.
There is a perception out there by many.
That's nonsense.
Pause for one second.
Of course, that's nonsense from Fauci.
This has been the The false narrative the whole time.
Well, if CDC says something, we're recommending it.
It's not a mandate.
So all throughout the COVID panic, this is what we always heard.
It's not a mandate, it's just a recommendation.
And of course, what he knows, and what we all know now, and he still lies about because he has no respect for our intelligence, he thinks we're all a bunch of cattle, a bunch of sheep.
I guess in his defense, many people did in fact act like cattle and sheep during COVID.
But anyway, yes, the recommendation, this is the process.
The COVID, we're talking about conspiracies, here's one.
You have these, the CDC, these other organizations that make recommendations.
And then the governmental agencies come along and translate those recommendations into the mandates.
That's just, that's how, that's how the sausage is made.
And he of course knows that, but doesn't want to admit that.
Let's keep going.
That they don't work, and that the data concludes that they didn't work in the first go-round.
Respond to that on masks.
Yeah, well that's not so.
I mean, when you're talking about at the population level, that the data are less strong than knowing that if you look on a situation as an individual protecting themselves or protecting them from spreading it, there's no doubt that masks work.
Different studies give different percentages of advantage of wearing it, but there's no doubt that the weight of the studies, and there have been many studies, indicate the benefit of wearing masks.
I'm going to refer to one of them.
You've heard about it before.
I heard about it from a number of radio callers.
Bret Stephens in the Times talked about Cochrane.
Put that on the screen.
The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy
of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illness, including COVID-19, was published
last month.
Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is the lead author, were
unambiguous.
There is just no evidence that they, masks, make any difference, he told the journalist
Mayenne DeMasi.
Full stop.
But wait, hold on.
But wait, hold on.
What about the N95 masks as opposed to the lower quality surgical or cloth masks?
Makes no difference.
None of it, he said.
Well, what about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose mask mandates?
They were convinced by non-randomized studies, flawed observational studies.
How do we get beyond that finding of that particular review?
Yeah, but there are other studies, Michael, that show at an individual level for individual, when you're talking about the effect on the epidemic or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong.
But when you talk about as an individual basis of someone protecting themselves or protecting themselves from spreading it to others, there's
no doubt that there are many studies that show that there is an advantage.
When you took it to broad population level like the Cochran study, the data are less
firm with regard to the effect on the overall population.
So this is, first of all, there were some people giving CNN some credit.
Oh my gosh, CNN.
I mean, they're actually challenging masks like that on CNN.
I can't believe it.
Well, I don't give them any credit for this.
This is three years later.
Okay, this exact segment three years ago, I give them some credit for that.
Okay, if this is like the summer of 2020, or the spring of 2020, and they're holding Fauci's feet to the fire about masking, saying, where's the data on this?
How do we know that this works?
Where are you getting this from?
Okay, but they didn't.
And so they waited three years until everyone had already figured it out, and now they come around and say, yeah, you know, that whole masking thing was, there's probably, there was no evidence for it.
I don't give him credit for that.
No credit at all.
In fact, I'd rather you just keep it.
If anything, it's less annoying if you just keep up the lie or just drop it and move on, pretend it never happened.
But to admit it years later, after you just spent three years, or certainly at least a year and a half to two years of those three years, Calling people who question masks, you know, genocidal, grandma-killing psychopaths.
You know, to do that, that is what's the most frustrating, especially when there's no accountability.
You know, there's no one apologizing.
There's no one saying, yeah, you know, we got this one really wrong.
And the people that were raising questions about masks, they were very valid questions.
You know, pointing out things like, hey, the COVID virus It's like we can actually see, well we can't see it with the naked eye, but you can see it.
We know how big the actual virus is itself.
Okay, that microscopic, tiny little virus.
And then it's just a question of that virus, can that, is that actually blocked by the fibers of the mask or can it just travel right through?
So it's actually a very simple question.
Now, there are other contaminants and bacteria and viruses and things that might be bigger.
I mean, there's a reason why it makes sense for a surgeon in a hospital performing surgery to wear the mask, because there's all kinds of different things that that could potentially block against.
But when it comes to COVID in particular, you can look at the virus, a little microscopic virus.
Can that fit through these masks?
And according to the studies we're seeing now, it's like, well, yeah, it can.
So it's not doing anything.
But that's a point people were making years ago.
Now Fauci, for one, he can't even bring himself even now to admit that it was all bogus.
And so instead he has this equivocation that makes no sense at all.
Say, well, he works on the individual level, but on the societal level, the data are less strong.
Which is another way of saying there's no data.
Or the data, in fact, works against his hypothesis entirely.
Why does that make any sense?
So it works on the individual level, but not on the society.
So when one individual wears the mask, it protects them from COVID, but a bunch of people together are not protected?
How does that make sense?
So what are you saying?
So an individual, like, by himself on a mountainside, there's no one else around, wearing a mask, probably won't get COVID.
Well, yeah, true.
But without the mask, you also wouldn't be getting COVID.
If you're telling me that when you add everyone together, the data are less strong than it protects against COVID, well, that's just another way of saying the masks are useless.
Which even now, CNN is saying three years later.
All right, now let's move on to a new segment on the show today, Was Walsh Wrong?
If you want some positive news in the culture war, since Roe v. Wade was overturned, the left has lost their minds, making abortion their official sacrament.
The pro-life efforts, which are now more important than ever, are booming.
You heard that right.
Despite the narrative, pro-lifers didn't go away.
They've increased in number.
As one of the largest pro-life organizations in the world, no one's in a better position than 40 Days for Life to end abortion in each state in a post-Roe America.
40 Days for Life is changing hearts and minds in the most blue pro-abortion states.
They've had a record number of location since Roe was overturned and they grew in both
volunteers and locations.
With about a million volunteers in 1,500 cities, they hold peaceful vigils outside abortion
facilities. You can help them fight the ongoing legal battles by protecting free speech for the
volunteers by giving a tax-deductible gift of any amount at 40daysforlife.com. That's 40daysforlife.com.
Okay, so we've got a new segment, exciting times.
The old comment section is still alive and well.
We're not getting rid of it.
That'll be a special extended segment that we do on Fridays now.
But the other days of the week we're doing Was Walsh Wrong?
Because for one thing, who doesn't love a good alliteration?
And also, this is a chance to highlight the people who are challenging the things that I said on the show, presenting counter-arguments.
And this is where we'll find out if I was wrong, you know, as a chance to highlight people who actually disagree.
So for this first segment, I'll read comments relating to the cancellation we did on our last show, which at this point was like a week ago.
And in the cancellation we talked about, if you can remember it back to ancient history, we talked about The child-free movement and people who promote childlessness as a superior path to happiness.
And I disagree with that idea, to put it mildly.
Here are people who disagree with me, though, in the arguments that I made.
Okay.
First comment says, I think some people are happier with children and some people are happier without children.
Just because you're happy with having children does not mean that I would be happy if I had children.
Well, it's true that, and I've said this many times, it's true that not every single person on earth is called to have kids.
Most people are, okay?
Most people are called to have kids.
But not everybody is.
You know, that's not a blanket statement that can apply to every single person on earth, obviously.
And there's going to be a minority of people who are called to a different path in life.
And I fully acknowledge that.
But here's the point.
Everybody is called to a life of service.
And what I always say is that in effect, not everyone is called to have children.
Most people aren't.
Not everyone is called to have children.
But every man is called to fatherhood, and every woman is called to motherhood.
It's just that in a minority of cases, that may take on a different form.
So, just as one example, let's say, and this is something someone raised to me also, they said, well, you know, you think everyone should have kids.
Well, what about someone who decides that they want to, you know, go out into a third world country and they want to be, you know, they want to be a minister to the poor.
They want to, you know, live a life like that, a missionary, you know, something like that.
And maybe they've decided that if they have kids, it'd be harder for them to fulfill that calling, that vocation.
But that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
There are people that are called to a life like that.
It's a perfectly, obviously noble and beautiful vocation.
And there's a lot of joy and happiness to be found in it.
But it is also a paternal thing.
It is also a paternal vocation in its own way.
It's just a different kind of form.
So, everyone is called to that.
Here's the point.
Nobody is called to a life of self-centeredness.
Nobody is called to a life that revolves entirely around their own amusement.
And that's one of the biggest issues with the child-free movement and this move away from having children, is what it's being replaced with.
There are a lot of problems with people not having kids, but one of the biggest issues is what it's being replaced with.
And what it's being replaced with, because these are not, you know, when you see these TikTok videos of people saying, oh, don't have kids, they're not saying, you shouldn't have kids so you have more time to do charity work.
Okay, you shouldn't have kids so you have more time to go to Africa and be a missionary.
That's not what they're saying.
They're saying, don't have kids so you have more time to go on vacations.
So you have more time to watch TV.
You have more time to scroll on your phone.
You have more time to sleep in.
No one is called to a life like that.
And that's not a life that can make anyone actually happy.
A life that centers around yourself and your own amusement cannot make you happy.
It cannot fulfill you at the deepest levels of your being.
And that's the point.
Another comment says, Dear Matt, people are individuals.
There's a tremendous variety of human personalities.
Don't assume that what's been right for you is right for everyone.
Some people simply don't have parenting skills.
They know that and they accept it without regrets.
They follow other life trajectories that are enriching and fulfilling for them.
It's presumptuous to insist that only your way is right because it's been delightful and fulfilling for you.
In a long life, I've met happy, contented people and also very frustrated, discontented people.
I've seen no evidence of any correlation with whether or not they've produced offspring.
A lot of this, just what I just said, can apply to a lot of your comment here.
But I would note that you say that there are people who don't have parenting skills.
Well, very few people have tangible, noticeable parenting skills before they have kids.
When you're not a parent, you probably don't have a lot of parenting skills.
Before I was a parent, I think back to when I was 23 years old, I didn't have kids, and kids at the time didn't even seem to be on the horizon for me.
What parenting skills did I have then?
None.
Zero.
I had zero parenting skills.
And if anyone had looked at me then, they would not have said, oh, there's a guy with a lot of parenting skills.
Because here's the thing.
It's very difficult to develop skills without doing the thing.
So you can read about it.
You can talk about it.
You can hear other people talk about it.
People can give you advice.
They can give you pointers.
And all that is fine.
But to really develop the skills, you have to do it.
This is true when you're working a job.
Everyone knows that any job you've ever worked, 95% of it, there might be training that goes into it ahead of time, maybe you go to school and you major in something that ostensibly relates to your job, but 95% of the skills are going to be learned on the job.
That's just the way it is.
So people who don't have kids saying, well, I'm not going to have kids because I don't have parenting skills.
Well, by that logic, you're never going to do anything.
You'll just never, ever do anything of substance in your life because you won't have the skills to do the thing until you start doing it.
And you've got to learn a lot of it on the job.
That's just the way it goes.
It certainly goes that way for parenting.
Final comment says, this shouldn't even be an issue if you want children, have them.
If you don't want them, don't.
Matt is such a bully to people who live their lives differently from the way he does.
Here's what would make me a bully, okay?
If I went up to some random person, say there's a random woman sitting at a cafe somewhere, and I went up to her and I said, do you have kids?
Huh?
No?
You loser!
Go have kids immediately!
If I did that, I'd be a bully, and I'd also be insane.
But I'm not doing that.
When people go to the internet and speak publicly about their life choices, and they promote those life choices as a path to happiness, Well then, you have submitted that to the public.
You have said, hey public, here's something I want to tell you about.
And members of the public, of which I am one, will then respond to that.
And they'll give their own views.
And they might disagree.
They might disagree strongly.
And they might say, I think that's a terrible, I think what you're saying is terrible.
And here's why.
That's not called, that's not bullying.
That's called just having a conversation.
That's how that works.
So good.
Was Walsh wrong?
Turns out for the very first segment that I wasn't, but we'll try again tomorrow.
Well, we have a very exciting offer coming up for all Daily Wire members.
Early access to a first look at the highly anticipated 10-part original series with Candace Owens, Convicting a Murderer.
Early access to view the series is September 7th only on Daily Wire+.
Get ready, Candace is about to expose Hollywood's representation of the highly controversial Stephen Avery case.
That was made famous by the popular series Making a Murderer.
Hollywood portrayed Steven Avery as an innocent victim of corrupt law enforcement, which was very convenient in a time when the anti-police movement was raging.
Candace, doing what she does best, blows that narrative wide open.
Candace exposes Hollywood and the media for carefully crafting stories to elicit an emotional reaction and manipulate the public in the process.
We've seen this time and time again in politics and the media, but we're Different.
We're here to give you the whole story and let you decide for yourself what's true.
In Convicting a Murderer, Candace uncovers a shocking amount of details in the Stephen Avery case that paints quite a different picture than the one that you were shown in Making a Murderer.
You will not believe the evidence that we've uncovered that the filmmakers did not include in Making a Murderer.
Take a look at the season teaser to get a glimpse into what the series has in store.
Check it out.
Coming up on Convicting a Murderer.
Part of me don't want to believe that he did this.
The blood that was on that back area was indicative of the head wound.
My brother likes to push a lot of people around.
How were these filmmakers able to convince so many people that a man like Stephen Avery is innocent?
How many times did he stab her?
Once.
And show me where.
Right here.
They gave him power.
They're trying to get everything out of me that they can.
It's not good for an Avery to have power.
I told you all along, keep your f***ing mouth shut.
That can hurt, Steven.
I'm not going to lie for him no more.
I can't do it.
Watch Convicting a Murderer, a new 10-part series on Daily Wire+.
Again, early access to watch Convicting a Murderer will be available to Daily Wire+
members on September 7th.
It's free to watch for members, so there's no reason to miss it.
The official premiere for Convicting a Murder will take place on X, formerly known as Twitter.
I still just call it Twitter.
On September 8th at 9 p.m.
Eastern, Candice will be live chatting with special guests at the X event at 5 p.m.
So make sure that you head over to the X space to join the conversation.
The full series will be available only on DailyWire Plus, so head over to dailywire.com slash subscribe to join us and use code truth for 25% off your Daily Wire Plus subscription.
Everyone's going to be talking about Candace's take on this series, so don't miss out and subscribe today.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Today our daily cancellation brings us around full circle.
We began the show talking about the efforts to place age restrictions on pornography.
Efforts that have been furiously protested and denounced by smut peddlers and smut consumers alike.
Both groups having placed their own satisfaction far above our basic responsibility as human beings to protect children.
And we end the show now on a related topic.
Now I make no secret of the fact that as I I mentioned in the opening that I oppose pornography across the board as a general principle.
Yes, I want to see age restrictions put in place, but if I had my way, the entire industry would be dismantled, torn apart, set on fire, and burned to ash while we all gather together and dance around its smoldering corpse.
If I could do this by banning pornography entirely, then I would.
As I said earlier, porn is nothing but cyber-prostitution and can be prohibited under the same pretense and for the same reason that prostitution is prohibited already in most parts of the country.
But a general porn ban is not going to happen anytime soon, much to my chagrin, which means that we can only chip away at this demonic behemoth, piece by piece, by individual people deciding to liberate themselves from its clutches.
If we're going to land a blow, it will have to be landed by porn consumers deciding to respect themselves and value their own souls enough to do something else with their time and stop watching porn.
It's at this point that I'm often told that Well, it's not that simple.
Porn users can't just stop.
It's an addiction, just like being hooked on drugs.
Literally no difference at all.
That's what I'm always assured.
I heard a lot of this same rationalizing on Twitter this weekend when the subject came up and one commenter said, quote, Do you think it's easy for those who are hooked on porn to just simply stop watching porn?
Think again.
It's an addiction, maybe worse than alcohol and drugs.
Another agreed and said, Matt, I think you're amazing, but you must not have experience with a loved one's addiction.
You're right that an addict can just stop if you incentivize them to do so, but it's rarely that easy.
It's so much more complicated than that.
Another chimed in, quote, the dopamine release from porn is worse than most drugs.
You can't just stop.
There are ramifications.
Many more where those came from.
You get the idea.
These are the kinds of things you'll hear anytime this topic is discussed.
So is it true that porn is an addiction?
Is porn addiction a real disorder?
Now typically critics of the porn industry will say that porn addiction is real because addiction has a negative connotation and they recognize that porn is a negative thing so they want to talk about porn addiction.
Defenders of the porn industry will deny that porn addiction is real because addiction has a negative connotation and they refuse to recognize that porn is a negative thing.
So I find myself on a lonely island, because I am certainly not a porn defender, though on the addiction issue, I think that they, the porn defenders, have arrived at the correct conclusion, even if their motives are totally deranged.
Meanwhile, the porn critics have the best intentions, but when it comes to this issue, they're not only wrong, but they are inadvertently making the problem worse.
So what is addiction?
The important point about addiction, as it's understood today, is that it is considered a disease.
The American Psychiatric Association calls addiction, quote, a complex but treatable disease that affects brain function and behavior.
The NIH calls it a disease that is, quote, a lot like other diseases, like heart disease.
It goes on to explain that addiction is a brain disorder.
The Mayo Clinic also calls it a disease.
As for the nature of this disease, the NHS on its website says this, quote, Addiction is defined as not having control over doing, taking, or using something to the point where it could be harmful to you.
So addiction, then, is a disease that takes away your ability to control your own actions.
It is a dependency, a disorder.
Now, I think talking about any addiction this way can be potentially dangerous, as you're entirely removing free will from the equation.
But when it comes to something like heroin addiction, you can see where it might apply.
Heroin takes over an addict's brain to such an extent that if they simply just stop taking it one day, they might actually die.
I mean, they literally can't stop.
Not all at once, anyway.
Their body depends on it.
Porn is not like this.
If you lose your internet connection for three days and you can't watch porn, you're not going to go into withdrawal.
You're not going to break out into hives.
You won't collapse on the ground in convulsions.
You're not going to have a high fever and seizures.
You aren't going to have a heart attack and die.
You'll be fine.
You can go without it.
You might be a little bored, a little bit restless, but you will be fine.
You're not physically dependent on it.
In fact, you could stop watching porn today without much trouble.
If I incentivized you enough, right?
If you were incentivized enough, you could... So if I were, just to take an absurd hypothetical, if I were to offer you a million dollars not to watch porn for a week, you could do it.
Anyone could.
Now, a million dollars might be enough to help you break a heroin or alcohol addiction, but probably not.
And besides, you'd still suffer the potentially fatal ramifications of going cold turkey off of those substances, even if there was a million dollars on the table.
In other words, a fat check could not instantly release you of a true substance addiction, but it could release you of your porn addiction.
In that, like, you would be, you would, with a million dollars on the table, you would stop watching porn easily, without any struggle.
Because the incentives are that high.
What that means is that these addictions are not the same.
Because one is an addiction, and one is not.
The other is a choice.
It's an impulse.
It's a temptation.
You might very much enjoy watching porn.
It might give you a dopamine hit.
Everything you enjoy gives you a dopamine hit.
That doesn't make it an addiction, though.
Unless, of course, we've decided that literally everything is an addiction, which means that nothing is an addiction.
See, that's the thing here.
It's possible to define the term addiction broadly enough that you can include pornography.
Somebody sent me an article from a site called Medical News Today that defines porn addiction this way, quote, So sure, if that's how we define the term, then porn addiction is a real phenomenon.
But then, you know, an emotional dependence that interferes with daily life describes literally anything that you enjoy doing too much.
And in our modern age of materialism and overindulgence, that means we all have like 50 different addictions.
Which means, again, that the term is effectively meaningless and functionally useless.
We're using the same term to describe the meth addict lying on a cardboard box out on the street and the woman who spends too much on Amazon packages.
Or the man scrolling Pornhub.
The latter two cases are obviously not in the same ballpark as the first.
The only thing we achieve by calling everything an addiction, by using clinical terminology to describe all sin, all temptation, all vice, is that we let everybody off the hook.
We've removed choice.
We have obliterated free will.
Nobody has any control over anything they're doing.
Which, as we recall, is the definition that the NHS provides for addiction.
When everything is an addiction, we all become pre-programmed robots, right?
Victims of our own behavior.
Our bad choices are like cancerous tumors.
They are an affliction, a disease, something we cannot control and therefore cannot be blamed for.
That's exactly how the ashamed porn user has been conditioned to see his situation.
He can't control it, he can't stop, so he doesn't.
This is how everybody has been conditioned to view all of their personal flaws and sins and vices.
And so we have become a society of pathetic weaklings swept along helplessly by the current.
Doing things, making choices, while telling ourselves that we have no control over the things that we are willfully doing right now.
This is why we need to bring back a concept called simple but not easy.
Remember what that one commenter said?
He said, do you think it's easy for those who are hooked to porn to just simply stop watching porn?
The answer is no and also yes.
I don't think it's easy.
I don't think it's easy.
But I do think it's simple.
Hard things are not always complicated.
Oftentimes they're very simple and straightforward.
Running 10 miles is extremely simple.
It's a very simple thing to do.
It's also very hard.
And when it comes to pornography, the task is as simple as it can get.
Just stop watching it.
It's not making your life better, it's harming you psychologically, spiritually, emotionally.
You're sitting there and watching someone else have sex on camera.
Someone who's almost certainly on drugs, was probably abused as a child, may very well have been trafficked, could actually be a child.
This is a desperate, self-loathing person whose dehumanization and objectification and despair you are consuming.
Now, you don't feel good about that, and you shouldn't.
If you could go back and reclaim all of the many hours you've wasted on porn and retroactively dedicate it to something productive and beautiful instead, you would.
You would like to stop watching it.
You'd like to be free of it.
Because porn is dirty and disgusting and unmanly and undignified and embarrassing and shameful.
And you realize all that intuitively.
You want to be done with it, which brings us to the good news.
You can be done with it.
You can stop watching it.
You can decide not to watch it, and then not watch it, and that's it.
You don't need any drug or any treatment plan or any special facility.
You can just not watch it.
And that's all.
Now, this may sound like the least helpful advice of all time, but in many cases, it's the only kind of advice that means anything.
If you want to do something positive with your life, The best advice, really only advice anyone can give you, is to simply go and do that thing.
You can sit around saying, I really wish I would do this.
Then just do it.
That's it.
That's the only thing the world can tell you.
Oh, you want to do that?
Well, then go ahead and do it.
But I can't.
Well, yes, you can.
But I can't.
Oh, okay.
Then just sit there saying you can't.
What do you want us to tell you?
And if you want to stop doing something negative, again, the best advice and only advice anyone can give you is to simply stop doing that thing.
I'm doing this, but I don't want to do it.
Well, then don't.
But it's hard.
Okay.
Well, then it's hard.
So just... It's a difficult thing.
That's it.
Endure the difficulty.
That's it.
And that's advice that you can follow with porn because it's not an addiction.
It's a lot of other things.
None of them good.
But it's not an addiction.
And that is why porn addiction, as a concept, is today cancelled.
That'll do it for the show today.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Have a great day.
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