Ep. 1243 - Harvard Pretends To Support Free Speech
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the president of Harvard refuses to punish her pro-Hamas students, claiming that her university believes in free expression. If only that were actually true. It turns out that Harvard's commitment to free speech is extremely selective, to say the least. Also, Ron DeSantis says that the United States should not accept any refugees from Gaza. He's right of course, and we'll talk about why. Will Smith responds to his wife's latest public humiliation of him. And scientists now claim that junk food is just as addictive as heroin. If you're a fat glutton, it's not your fault, they claim.
Ep.1243
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Today on The Matt Wall Show, the president of Harvard refuses to punish her pro-Hamas students claiming that her university believes in free expression.
If only that were actually true.
It turns out that Harvard's commitment to free speech is extremely selective, to say the least.
Also, Ron DeSantis says that the United States should not accept any refugees from Gaza.
He's right, of course, and we'll talk about why.
Will Smith responds to his wife's latest public humiliation of him, and scientists now claim that junk food is just as addictive as heroin.
So if you're a fat glutton, it's not your fault, they claim.
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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You know, no matter what you may think of Harvard University, one thing you can't dispute is how important the institution used to be in previous generations.
It was a Harvard faculty member who first popularized the smallpox vaccine in the United States.
Harvard researchers developed some of the world's first computers.
A Harvard scientist named James Watson famously modeled the DNA double helix.
Harvard was an institution that made real-world discoveries that changed the lives of millions of people.
And when you heard from Harvard professors and administrators, you took them seriously back in those days.
They weren't cynical political actors.
They were competent and serious.
That was the whole point of Harvard.
With that history in mind, it was both depressing and a little bit surreal to watch this recent video message from Harvard's new president, who's a political scientist named Claudine Gay.
And in case you missed it, Gay took over as Harvard's president this year to much fanfare For the simple reason that she is now the first black president of the university.
It was her skin color and her gender that were the primary qualifications.
And nobody really denies that.
It's how Harvard admits students these days and it's how Harvard selects faculty members and administrators as well.
In the video, Claudine Gay responds to nationwide outrage that many Harvard students have just decided to publicly support Hamas in the wake of its terror attack on Israel, which killed more than a thousand people.
In the aftermath of that attack, nearly three dozen student groups at Harvard signed on to a statement saying that Israel was, quote, fully responsible for the massacre of its own people.
And this was a big problem for Harvard, as you might imagine, because it's completely and utterly psychopathic.
And naturally, a lot of people were calling for Harvard to take action in response to what these students were saying.
So, after hearing all of that, here's how Claudine Gay, the new president of Harvard, responded.
Watch.
This is a moment of intense pain and grief for a great many people in our community and around the world.
I feel that pain and grief myself.
As members of a university community, we have a choice.
We can fan the flames of division and hatred that are roiling the world.
Or we can try to be a force for something different and better.
People have asked me where we stand.
So let me be clear.
Our university rejects terrorism.
That includes the barbaric atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.
Our university rejects hate.
Hate of Jews, hate of Muslims, hate of any group of people based on their faith, their national origin, or any aspect of their identity.
Our university rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs.
And our university embraces a commitment to free expression.
That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.
You know things are going well when you have to put out a statement saying that you reject terrorism.
To be clear, this university rejects terrorism, cannibalism, drowning puppies.
We're against all of it.
To be clear.
Now, first of all, this needs to be said, Claudine Gay sounds indistinguishable there from a random fourth grade teacher in that clip.
I mean, if you watch that footage without any context, you'd have to ask yourself, you ask yourself this, could you tell that that was the president of Harvard?
I mean, if you still thought that Harvard was a place for smart people, would you be able to tell that that was the president of Harvard?
Probably not.
And to prove that point, Helen Andrews at the American Conservative went back and looked at speeches from the president of Harvard from 50 years ago, and Andrews found that Harvard presidents, maybe not surprisingly, used to sound a lot different from Claudine Gay.
You could tell that they were the presidents of the leading university in the country just by listening to them.
Now you'd have no idea.
Claudine Gay sounds like a random middle manager somewhere, or like a substitute teacher at some middle school.
She sounds like she should be running the HR department at some moderately-sized company.
There's nothing special about what she's saying.
It's not intelligent or insightful.
It's not especially eloquent or wise.
And insofar as Claudine Gay said anything at all, here's the crux of it.
She said, "Our university embraces a commission to a free expression.
That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous."
Now if you take that at face value, it's a reasonable sentiment.
Speech on college campuses shouldn't be suppressed or punished, even if it's gratuitously wrong.
That's understandable enough.
I mostly agree with it.
It's why we have universities, allegedly.
One of the reasons.
I mean, the free exchange of ideas is supposed to be a big part of the program.
As long as you're not threatening anybody with imminent violence, then you should be allowed to say what you think.
And universities in this ideal world would be places where young people can experiment with ideas, where they can adopt positions that are perhaps radical, and then try to defend those positions intellectually in open debate.
That's one of the ways that you can find out that your ideas are wrong is by having them challenged and trying to defend them.
And if you're never in a position where you have to defend your ideas, then you may never discover that you are horrifically wrong about everything that you think.
So, that's how universities should work.
Maybe it's how they once did work.
It would be nice if they still worked that way, but they don't anymore, and that's the point.
So the problem, and it's a very big problem, is that Claudine Gay clearly does not agree with her own statement.
Like so many leftists, she's pretending to embrace some kind of universal principle of open expression, even though she's more than willing to renege on those principles when it's convenient for her to do so.
She embraces free expression if the expression excuses terrorism, but she certainly doesn't embrace speech that contradicts her preferred narratives about, say, gender ideology or BLM.
And we don't have to guess about that, by the way.
Consider that it was just a year ago that Harvard told students that if they, quote, misgender a fellow student, meaning if they use the appropriate pronouns to describe a student's gender, if they use grammatically correct language, then they are potentially guilty of abuse.
Every undergraduate at Harvard was told that if they use the wrong, quote, unquote, wrong pronouns for a fellow student, or if they do anything to, quote, lower a person's self-worth, then they're subject to disciplinary proceedings.
This is all according to reporting from the Washington Free Beacon, but Claudine Gay never issued any impassioned video message in defense of Harvard students' rights to refer to one another by their actual biological sex.
She never affirmed the right of Harvard students to express their belief in things like reality and biology.
Instead, she sat idly by, approvingly, nodding her head, as students were told that they'll suffer severe consequences unless they affirm the delusions of their mentally ill classmates.
There are many other examples of Claudine Gay's apparent lack of commitment to freedom of speech.
To give just one more example, it was just a few years ago that Claudine Gay oversaw the destruction of a black Harvard professor named Roland Fryer.
Fryer ruffled a lot of feathers at Harvard because of his heterodox findings on race and policing.
Specifically, Fryer found that there's no statistical evidence that police use disproportionate lethal force against black suspects.
Even though this is everything we've been told by BLM and the race hustlers, what he found is that it's all bunk.
It's not true.
Fryer also found that black students who perform well in school are often shunned by their black peers for being, quote, too white.
Now, how did Claudine Gay respond to this?
Well, she tried to burn the heretic, of course.
Here's the backstory.
Friar fired a staff assistant who then accused him of sexual misconduct.
And Harvard's own investigators found that the staff assistant's claims were mostly bogus, and they recommended that Friar receive some HR training, and that's it.
But Claudine Gay, who saw Friar as an existential threat because of his views on things, decided to overrule that recommendation from Harvard's own investigators.
She wanted Friar fired.
There's a short documentary on YouTube about this case.
Here's a relevant piece of it.
Watch.
One thing the Harvard investigator found was that Rowan Fryer never, never sexually propositioned or made sexual advances on a single woman in his office.
Not once.
So that's it?
Josh, that is it.
Harvard's own investigators determined that Roland's punishment should be some training.
Some workplace sensitivity training.
Okay.
I feel like you're about to tell me something a little bit more.
He didn't just get training.
They passed their recommendation to a small committee of high-ranking administrators.
I was only able to figure out the identity of two members of that committee, okay?
One of them is Claudine Gay.
The other one is Larry Bobo.
Yeah.
Like, champagne, silver spoon, liberals.
Right, right.
People whose careers and reputations were directly threatened by Roland's work.
Those are the people that get to determine Roland's punishment.
What happens next?
Larry Bobo came in and he read out the punishment.
It started with, the lab is going to be permanently closed.
And I was like, what?
And then it goes on to all of the projects that you've been working on have been halted.
So this is free speech on the Harvard campus.
Claudine Gay and one of her colleagues correctly identified Friar's research as completely contradictory to their own research.
Friar was saying that the police aren't racist, and Claudine Gay was saying that we live in a white supremacist terror state, and lo and behold, Gay has a chance to adjudicate a complaint against Friar, so she decides to throw the book at him in contradiction to what Harvard's investigators had recommended based on their own findings after actually doing the investigation.
In fact, she petitions Harvard's president to revoke Friar's tenure so he'd never be allowed to step foot on Harvard's campus ever again.
This kind of retaliation, this hostility towards disfavored speech, is the norm at Harvard.
It has been the norm for a very long time.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, Harvard has a, quote, dismal record of responding to deplatforming attempts, attempts to sanction students, student groups, scholars, and speakers for speech protected under First Amendment standards.
Of nine attempts in total over the past five years, seven resulted in sanction.
FIRE also declared that Harvard had received its, quote, worst score ever in FIRE's college free speech rankings.
Its worst score.
Fire specifically notes that, quote, from 2019 to this year, Harvard sanctioned four scholars, three of whom it terminated.
In 2020, Harvard revoked conservative student activist Kyle Kashuv's acceptance over comments he made on social media as a 16-year-old, for which he had since apologized.
In 2022, Harvard disinvited feminist philosopher Devon Buckley from an English department colloquium
on campus over her views on gender and trans issues.
Fires report goes on to explain that according to survey results, many Harvard students self-censor
their political views.
They're also subject to hostility if they espouse pro-life views on campus, etc.
So it's everything you'd expect.
At Harvard, you're allowed to say that men can instantly transform into women or anything
along those lines, but don't you dare suggest that the police aren't hunting down black
men and murdering them in cold blood.
That crosses a line.
That's because at Harvard and many other so-called elite universities, the only sort of speech they have a problem with is true speech.
The war on free speech on campus is a war on truth.
Harvard and Claudine Gay simply cannot tolerate the truth.
Which is much worse than simply not tolerating opposing ideas.
What makes the situation on American campuses so dire is not just that speech is suppressed, but it is specifically the type of speech they suppress.
True speech.
If you're going to suppress any speech, and I'm not saying you should, but if you do, it should be false speech, untrue speech, delusional and crazy, and morally deranged speech.
But Harvard, along with many other college campuses, most college campuses, goes the other way.
Untrue speech is welcomed.
True speech is not.
Now, I'm happy to be wrong about all this.
I'd love nothing more than to be proven incorrect on this point as it pertains to Harvard.
I've already announced that I'd love to come to Harvard and give a talk so that Harvard can really have a chance to prove its free speech bona fides.
This is the generous offer I made on Twitter the other day, and I mean it.
What better way for Claudine Gay and Harvard leadership to demonstrate their support for diverse viewpoints than to host somebody like me on their campus?
And I'd be happy to.
I'd be happy to show up.
I'll clear my schedule.
I'm sure many of my colleagues would as well.
Would Ben Shapiro be welcomed at Harvard right now to give the alternative viewpoint to those pro-Hamas student groups?
Maybe we could do a whole Daily Wire symposium right on campus.
Just a suggestion.
If Harvard and Claudine Gay are serious about their commitment to freedom of speech, no matter how odious they think that speech may be, then this should be a no-brainer.
I haven't heard back from Harvard since my tweet a few days ago announcing my interest in speaking on campus, so right now I'll ask student groups directly, if you'd like to host me on campus, just say so.
I'm ready and willing to show up.
And unlike Claudine Gay, my commitment to free speech and debate isn't conditional or opportunistic.
You invite me, I show up.
It's that simple.
And if Harvard students and faculty can defeat me in open debate, then I'll have no problem with that.
That's the way it goes.
I'm happy with the whole world seeing whatever transpires.
I didn't graduate from Harvard, or any college like it, or any college at all, and yet despite all of that, I will show up.
I am nothing more than a high school graduate who is willing to openly debate Ivy League students and faculty live on camera.
How could they do anything but jump at that opportunity?
I'm not afraid.
So I have this simple question for Claudine Gay and all the administrators and student leaders at Harvard.
What exactly are you afraid of?
enough.
Now let's get to Five Headlines.
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the left has completely lost their minds, making
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With one million volunteers in 1,500 cities, 40 Days for Life holds peaceful vigils outside abortion facilities You can help their volunteers fight ongoing legal battles to protect free speech for their volunteers by giving a tax-deductible gift of any amount at 40daysforlife.com.
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Ron DeSantis appeared on Face the Nation on Sunday where he was questioned over his stance on refugees, specifically his stance that the United States should not take in any refugees from the current Middle East crisis.
Let's watch a little bit of that exchange.
The two million people who live in Gaza, half of them are under the age of 18.
Let's take a listen to something you said yesterday.
We cannot accept people from Gaza into this country as refugees.
I am not going to do that.
If you look at how they behave, not all of them are Hamas, but they are all anti-Semitic.
I'm sure you know all Arabs are Semites, but how can you paint with such a broad brush to say 2.3 million people are anti-Semitic?
Well, first of all, my position is very clear.
Those Gaza refugees, Palestinian Arabs, should go to Arab countries.
The U.S.
should not be absorbing any of those.
I think the culture... So, they elected Hamas.
Let's just be clear about that.
Not everyone's a member of Hamas.
Most probably aren't.
But they did elect Hamas.
In 2006, and then the military occupation happened after that, where they went in and haven't allowed elections since 2007.
So in 2006, there was an election.
a lot of there was a lot of there was a lot of celebrating of those attacks in
the Gaza Strip by a lot of those folks who were not Hamas but if you look at
their education system this has been an issue for a long time they teach kids to
hate Jews the textbooks do not have Israel even on the map they prepare very
young kids to commit terrorist attacks So I think it's a toxic culture, and I think if we were to import large numbers of those to the United States, I think it would increase anti-Semitism in this country, and I think it would increase anti-Americanism in this country.
And that's something, after seeing those demonstrations pop up in our country, just with blood still flowing amongst Israeli citizens over the weekend, you had people taking to the streets, cheering on the barbarism of Hamas in our own country.
That was a chilling thing to see, and I don't think that that's something that we should ever think is acceptable.
No, but no one's talking about getting Gazan refugees here right now.
They can't even get out of Gaza at the moment.
Well, people have mentioned it.
I think some of the far left have said this is something that we should do.
The U.S.
has done similar things in the past, and so I just put my stake in the ground.
That's where we're going to be.
I love that bit at the end there.
Well, the whole thing, but especially, well, no one's talking about this anyway.
What do you mean?
You're talking about it.
You just brought it up.
Okay, governor, let's talk about bringing refugees in.
And he gives a response.
Well, no one's talking about bringing refugees in, except for me right now, bringing up this subject to you in the middle of an interview on national television.
You also have to love the anchor there taking issue with Ron DeSantis painting with a broad brush, quote unquote, and saying that he shouldn't be accusing wide swaths of people of being bigots.
Because, of course, if he had said that exact same thing about Trump voters or conservatives, CBS would have no issue with it.
In fact, they'd make him a paid contributor to the network if he had done that.
So they are very selective in the broad brushes that they want people to use.
And really, it's kind of like on college campuses, the only kind of speech that isn't welcome is true speech.
In this case, the only kind of broad brushes that are allowed are the ones that are not accurate.
That's basically the rule.
As to DeSantis' position on this, he's obviously 100% correct.
He's correct on every part of it.
And to begin with, as he points out, there's no reason, and really we shouldn't have to go beyond This point, which is that Arab countries are right there, right next door.
They're all around.
So why would they not take the refugees in?
Why would you put the refugees on a plane and fly over that entire region to bring them here?
It doesn't make any sense.
And you would think that the refugees themselves, and the Middle Eastern countries themselves, would prefer that.
They prefer for these refugees to stay in the Middle East.
They're much more likely in the Middle East to find a culture and community similar to the one that they had at home.
You're not going to find that here.
Even if you go to Dearborn or something, where there's a heavy Muslim population, that's still a city in the middle of an American state.
So, if you really want them to be able to remain in their own culture, then they would stay in the Middle East.
And by the way, I'm not saying this sarcastically or facetiously.
It's totally sincere.
I really do believe it's better for the refugees themselves if they are given safe harbor in a country that has a culture that is much more familiar to them, which shouldn't even be controversial.
It's not a bigoted statement.
I would say the same thing in reverse, okay?
If there was a refugee crisis in France, for example, I mean, there is one in France, but I mean, if it was going the other way, there was a bunch of French people who had to flee their homes, then I would say that other European countries should absorb them.
It would be crazy to send them to, I don't know, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or whatever.
The goal for refugee settlements should be a place with a culture that they can easily assimilate into.
And again, this should not be controversial.
It's best for the refugees themselves, and it's best for the nation that takes them in, and so it's a win-win as far as like, it's as much of a win-win as you can possibly have in a situation where there are refugees in the first place.
Also, he's correct, obviously, that a great number of refugees from Gaza probably aren't going to like Jews very much, and that is not a broad brush, or if it is, it's an accurate one.
That's also not the only issue here, and it's not the only point that DeSantis made.
They just cut the clip off right at that.
You could tell he was listing.
He was saying they're anti-Semitic, and there's more to it, but they cut off right there.
Because the bigger problem is that a great number of refugees from Gaza are not going to be big fans of the United States and our culture.
Now I don't know if anybody has ever conducted a survey in Gaza to measure the pro-America sentiment there, but I think we can assume that it's probably rather low.
If you were to go to Gaza and ask people, you know, list like your top five favorite countries on the map right now.
I don't think America is going to make it onto very many lists in that part of the world.
And, you know, it doesn't even matter the reason for them being anti-American.
Justified or unjustified, that's irrelevant.
The point is that it's suicidal to bring in a flood of people who come from a very different culture and actively hate the country that they are settling in.
That's not going to be the case for all of them, obviously.
You might find a few really pro-American people in there, potentially, but it's the case for a large percentage.
So, that's it.
There's no reason why anybody should be looking at us and saying, why aren't you bringing in these refugees?
What do you mean, why aren't we?
Of all the countries in the world, why would we be doing it?
Doesn't make any sense.
There are dozens and dozens of countries that you should be making that demand of before you even get to us.
You should never get to us, actually.
Because the onus should fall on all those other countries.
And if those countries refuse, and then these refugees have no place to go, where does the moral blame and fault lie?
Not with us.
Because it's not our responsibility.
It doesn't make sense for us.
And it's not just not our responsibility, but in fact, our responsibility, the responsibilities of the people who lead our country is supposed to be To protect and preserve American lives first.
And you are not doing that by bringing in a flood of refugees when a large percentage of them are hostile to the country that they're assimilating into.
Not everyone agrees with this, though.
Of course, the New York Post has this report.
Experts predict a million refugees might flee the Gaza Strip amid the war between Israel and Hamas, and socialists and far-left lawmakers said America should welcome them.
Representative Jamal Bowman, who was most recently seen pulling a fire alarm in the House Cannon Office building earlier this month, said 50% of the population in Gaza are children.
The international community, as well as the United States, should be prepared to welcome refugees from Palestine while being very careful to vet and not allow members of Hamas.
How does that work exactly?
How do you vet?
Bringing in thousands of refugees, how are you vetting them, Jamal?
That's the kind of thing that you, you know, he knows he has to say it.
Well, we'll vet them.
Really?
How?
What, are you going to ask them?
Like, once they get here, hey, by the way, do you hate America?
You planning any terrorist attacks?
Nope, not at all.
Oh, well, okay then.
You see, we vetted them.
And what, are you going to vet the, what about the children?
Do they get vetted?
Now, if you've got a 16-year-old male, let's say, from Gaza, who really hates America, is that part of the vetting process?
And I just love it anyway when the leftists use this.
But think of the children line.
American children aren't even welcomed in this country, okay?
We kill hundreds of thousands of American children before they're even born, before they have a chance to become legal, recognized citizens.
Those are some children that could use protecting before we worry about the children all over the rest of the globe.
But of course, those children are killed with the full support and approval of Jamal Bowman and every other Democrat.
So, and even aside from that, we see how Jamal Bowman makes no attempt to deal with any of the objections that people raise.
And he especially doesn't explain why we would be taking in these refugees when there are all these other Arab countries where the refugees would certainly be a better fit.
All right, Post Millennial has this report.
A federal court struck down a lawsuit backed by the Biden administration which claimed Georgia's new election integrity laws are discriminatory towards black voters.
Judge J.P.
Bulley, Issued the ruling for the U.S.
District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on Wednesday, according to the Federalist, Judge Bouley said that the Biden administration and other Democratic groups failed to show a substantial likelihood of success on the merits as to their claims that the provisions intentionally discriminate against black voters in violation of the 14th Amendment, 15th Amendment, and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
In other words, the Democrat Party claims that election integrity laws are racist, have been found to hold no merits.
Let's see, there's one other part of this that I thought was really important I want to find.
Okay, he also wrote in his opinion this, "However, Judge Bulley struck down claims and argued
that the plaintiffs presented no evidence that black registered voters failed to have
the other acceptable forms of identification allowed by the statute at a statistically
higher rate than white voters."
He wrote, "These other forms of identification include utility bills, bank statements, paychecks,
and other government documents that include a name and an address.
Ultimately, without this additional evidence, the court cannot find at this time that the identification provision has a disparate impact on black voters.
Now, it's great, obviously, that the law was struck down, that the lawsuit, rather, that the lawsuit was struck down, and the judge Brings up a point here that I have rarely heard proponents of voter ID laws mentioned, including myself.
I don't think that I've ever made this point either.
As obvious as it is, I think we tend to overlook it because the left says that it's racist to require people to have IDs like driver's licenses because for some reason they claim black Americans in particular are unlikely to have IDs and are somehow unable to obtain them, which by the way, Even if that happened to be true, which it isn't, because there's nothing preventing someone, a black person, from getting a driver's license, but even if it was true that somehow the driver's license requirement had a, quote, disparate impact on the black community, that would not prove that we shouldn't have the requirement.
All that would prove in that case is that there's something going on in the black community where so many people have trouble completing such a basic task.
And so, there's a problem there.
So, either way, the argument doesn't work.
But we spent a lot of time knocking down this claim as it pertains specifically to driver's licenses.
We forget this whole other point, as this judge points out, that there are other forms of ID that you can use if you don't have a driver's license.
Yes, anybody can go to a DMV, anyone can get a driver's license.
If you somehow as an adult have been unable for years to obtain a driver's license, that shows that you are grossly incompetent and not fit to vote regardless, no matter what your race is.
But it's worse than that because the statute allows for other forms of ID.
It actually does not require that you have a driver's license specifically.
It said utility bill, bank statement, paycheck.
Are we saying that black people don't have any of those either?
I mean, this is apparently the claim that the left is making.
So black people, according to the left, don't have driver's licenses for some reason.
And they don't have utility bills, and they don't have paychecks, and they don't have
bank statements.
So they just have nothing at all.
Because apparently, according to the left, black people can't drive, they don't have
jobs, they don't pay their utility bills, and they don't have bank accounts.
Which how are you even, you cannot function as an adult in this country if you don't have
any of those things.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
No bank account?
No driver's license?
You don't have a utility?
You don't have electricity wherever you live?
So, the picture that's being painted is one of black Americans who are just totally helpless and incompetent in every way, according to the left.
Which is ridiculous, obviously.
It's all completely fake.
And anyway, if there is anyone out there who, again, doesn't matter what their race is, if there's anyone out there who doesn't have an ID, doesn't have a bank account, doesn't have a paycheck, doesn't have a utility bill, That is 100% someone who we don't want voting anyway.
So there's no problem here.
If you're saying, well, yeah, if we have these, but what about the people who are unable to get any of those things at all?
They can't pass a driver's exam.
They can't get any kind of job at all.
They can't even get a job at Burger King.
They can't figure out how to open a bank account.
Well, how do we include them in the voting process?
How do we make sure that their vote is heard, that their voice is heard?
Well, my answer is, no, we don't want their voice heard, actually.
That is a group of people who, we do not want their voices on election day.
These are, what you will be talking about, regardless of race, you'll be talking about the most incompetent and clueless people conceivable.
And if the only effect of these kinds of laws is that it filters out those sorts of people and prevents them from voting, then I would say that's a reason enough to have the law in place.
Really, this is about election integrity, this is about avoiding voter fraud, and that sort of thing, and I think that it will Be relatively successful in that regard, but even if it totally fails somehow in ensuring election integrity and getting rid of voter fraud, even if it failed in that regard, still having the law in place is a good thing.
If it prevents just even like the 10 dumbest people and most incompetent people from being able to vote, then that's good.
That's a win, I would say.
And in fact, that is, that in and of itself, is a win for election integrity.
Because as I've always argued, when we talk about election integrity, it's not just voter fraud that we should be worried about.
Yes, that's a big part of it.
But there's also a problem with a lack of election integrity when you've got abject Imbeciles, incompetent imbeciles, who are just wandering in there and casting a vote randomly, having no idea about anything.
No clue what's going on.
Don't even know who the candidates really are, what they stand for, anything like that.
Don't know anything about our country, about the government, nothing.
And having them just sort of randomly cast a vote, like they're casting, like they're, you know, like it's dice.
Like, they have a blindfold on and they're throwing a dart at a dartboard.
I mean, that is an election integrity problem.
Also.
In my mind.
All right.
We talked last week about Jada Pinkett Smith and her never-ending Will Smith humiliation tour, which has been kicked into a new gear recently with the release of her memoir.
And in the memoir, She reveals even more embarrassing things about Will Smith, including the fact that she left him in 2016.
So she was the one who cheated on him, and then the marriage broke up.
And it's at least heavily implied that she's the one who broke it up.
And so then that leads to the conclusion that Will Smith, when he did the infamous slap of Chris Rock, he was doing that in defense of a woman who's not even living with him anymore and hadn't been for years, which is even more embarrassing.
So she brought that out to embarrass him again.
And now we have Will Smith's response to all of this.
So the New York Post has this.
Will Smith has broken his silence about the bombshells dropped by his estranged wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, about their 25-year marriage.
The Men in Black star, 55, sent the New York Times an email saying the revelations, quote, kind of woke him up, adding that Pinkett Smith, 52, was more, quote, resilient, clever, and compassionate than he'd understood.
Quote, when you've been with someone for more than half of your life, a sort of emotional blindness sets in, Smith wrote according to the Times article published Saturday, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.
That was Will Smith's response.
So, after being publicly humiliated again by his apparently estranged wife, he responds by blaming himself And his emotional blindness.
So he's the one who's emotionally blind.
She is just ripping him to shreds in public constantly.
No concern for his own emotions.
She's the one who brings him on camera to talk about her affair while he sits there, clearly like on the verge of tears as an utterly broken man.
And she doesn't notice or doesn't care, or both.
And yet, Will Smith says that he's the one who is emotionally blind.
And then, he extols Jada's hidden nuances and subtle beauties.
And it's true, by the way.
I don't deny that if Jada Pinkett Smith has any beauty, it is very subtle.
Very, very subtle.
If there's beauty there, it is extremely... It's so subtle that it's invisible.
It's so subtle that it doesn't exist.
That nobody can find it.
But this is how he responds.
It's why...
To my point last week about this, it's why Will Smith is not a victim.
And I think that's an important point because it seems like the public is mostly against Jada Pinkett Smith.
Maybe surprisingly enough, based on what I've seen, this may be the only bipartisan issue left in America.
This might be the only thing left that everybody agrees on.
On all sides of, every side of our fractured culture, everyone seems to agree that Jada Pinkett Smith is an awful witch.
So, in a weird way, she's like bringing the country together so that everyone can just hate her.
So that's kind of a service that she's providing.
Maybe we should thank her for it.
Maybe that's the hidden nuance and subtle beauty that Will Smith was talking about.
And far be it from me to, you know, try to, when we have this kind of unity, I would like to join in, but I would like to say that I think sometimes it goes too far on the other end where people talk about Will Smith like he's some sort of helpless victim.
Who's in this abusive marriage.
But what we see is that he's not a victim at all, really.
I mean, Jada Pinkett Smith is an awful witch, no question about it.
But Will Smith is a willing participant in his own humiliation and degradation.
And I do hold him responsible for that.
And now he's encouraging his estranged wife to embarrass him even more and respect him even less by responding in a way that is not respectable.
So Jada Pinkett Smith is going to see his response and just despise him even more, and have even less respect for him, which is not a defense of her, but it also just goes to show why Will Smith is not a victim.
And this is, like we talked about last week, you know, respect in a marriage is not just important, it's foundational.
And especially for the man.
The man has to feel respected in a marriage.
He has to be respected in his marriage.
And if there's no respect in the marriage, then it's a recipe for total collapse and disaster.
Every bad thing that can happen in a marriage will happen from that starting point.
And that's where you get into infidelity and everything else.
Oftentimes it begins there, with a lack of respect.
But the There's a calling on both ends here.
So the wife has called.
It is her duty and her responsibility to respect her husband and treat her husband with respect.
And she has that responsibility regardless.
It's not okay to disrespect your husband, to treat him with contempt.
And you have a responsibility to respect your husband.
On the other hand, not on the other hand, but on the other end of it, the husband also has a responsibility to be respectable.
And to, not just respectable, but to command respect.
And there is a difference.
I think last week when we talked about this, I said that Will Smith should demand respect in his home.
Or should have.
It's probably too late for that.
They don't even live in the same home anymore.
But long ago, he should have demanded respect in his household.
And if he had, maybe things would be different now.
You know?
But I think demand is the wrong word.
Because if you get to the point where you're demanding, that's already, that's a sign of weakness.
If you have to demand it.
I want to be respected!
Respect me!
Now if you feel that you need to express that and say it out loud, then you should, but that's already a sign that things are not going well.
And it's a sign of, it can be a sign of desperation and weakness on your end.
What you should be doing as a man in your home is commanding respect.
So you don't have to say it, but you're commanding with your presence in the home and the way you conduct yourself.
You command it.
And it's clear that Will Smith never did.
So, no excuse for Jada Pinkett Smith at all.
No excuse for Will Smith.
This is just one of those situations, in so many cases, when marriages fall apart like this.
You know, sometimes you can point to one person and say, well, that person's clearly the bad guy, it's all their fault.
Most of the time, you can look at both sides and say, you know, it's obvious what you did wrong here.
So I think that's the case here.
Let's get to, was Walsh wrong?
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Mr. Big Deal says, there's a lot of hate towards gay people in this country, so don't say we aren't oppressed.
If you want, I can give you many, many examples.
Okay?
What are your examples?
Actually, I don't need examples because, and I think this, this, I'm glad you said this, because it does, I think, reveal what a lot of the confusion is here.
When LGBT people talk about being oppressed, most of the time they're talking about what you, what they're saying, what you're saying, which is that, well, there's, there's hate towards us.
Now, I don't think that there is a lot of hate towards gay people or the LGBT club anyway.
I don't think that there's, you know, you look at all the different groups in America and the amount of hate directed at them, I think that LGBT is actually pretty far down on that list.
And there are groups that get a lot more hate.
Like, for example, straight white men than LGBT people do.
Insofar as there is hatred towards gay people, LGBT people, that is not oppression.
Okay, just having people hate you doesn't mean you're oppressed.
Doesn't.
Like, someone can hate you, that doesn't mean they're oppressing you, they just, they hate you.
I'm not saying it's good, but that's, people feel how they feel.
And there are going to be people in life who don't like you.
No matter what demographic group you fall into, no matter what your sexuality is, there are going to be people in life who don't like you.
There are going to be people who hate you.
For whatever their reasons are.
Justified or unjustified.
It's part of being a person, living in the world.
There's a lot of people who hate me.
Okay?
I guarantee you.
A lot more people hate me than hate you or hate any one individual LGBT person.
A lot of hate out there towards me.
Does that make me oppressed?
Just because of the hatred?
No.
It's just... It's an unpleasant fact.
And not every unpleasant fact about your life is an example of oppression.
Oppression is when people in positions of power are using that power to deprive you of rights or persecute you in some way.
That's what oppression is.
And that is not happening to LGBT people.
It's not.
There's no legal, systematic oppression going on.
Period.
None at all, anywhere.
If there's hatred, then, I don't know, you just deal with that.
Like, just deal with it.
Stop whining about it.
People don't like me!
Okay, that's so they don't.
It's your problem.
Stop crying.
Thanks for the comment.
Papa Salt says, I know your main thing isn't discussing politicians, but your state of viewpoint is literally exactly what DeSantis has said and done it clearly with a presidential voice.
Not to mention he flew planes to Israel to get Americans out.
You know DeSantis is the clear choice.
Yeah, I think DeSantis has been good on this issue ever since over the last week, week and a half.
And his response has been, you know, whether it's talking about, we just played the clip of him talking about, we don't want to bring refugees here.
We don't want to get involved in World War III.
I know he said that openly as well.
I know that Vivek Ramaswamy has expressed similar things.
Trump has.
But it is a, it's a very troubling thing.
That there are so few candidates, and even more troubling, actual politicians who are running the government right now, who have come out and said anything like, hey, you know, our first priority here is preserving and protecting American lives.
Our first priority, amid all the chaos, is to avoid getting America involved in a disastrous overseas conflict.
That should be the first thing that every politician in the country feels the need to say, even if they don't believe it, even if they don't think it.
We should just live in the kind of country where, if you're a politician, you know you at least have to say that your first priority is protecting America.
But very few have even said it, because they don't think that they need to go so far as to pretend that they believe that.
Which is quite troubling.
Let's see, Zandra says, Matt, I love watching your show almost every day, but I feel like you're wrong on one aspect.
Two women can have children together.
My wife had our children and they are her biological children.
Then I adopted them, making my legal children our children.
Well I don't know if you're a man or a woman, so you could be, I'm assuming from the context you're saying that you're a woman in a lesbian relationship, but I'm not, I don't know, I don't know that.
What I will say is that, I can only restate what I've already said, two women cannot have children.
It's not possible.
In any respect.
Because a child has a mother and a father.
Someone who is not a biological mother or biological father can step into that role and be the mother or father.
And sometimes you could have both mother and father who are not biological parents that can step into that role, otherwise known as adoption.
And they are now the parents.
And there's no asterisk on it.
There's nothing like that.
They're the parents.
Um, because they are, uh, because the biological parents are unwilling or unable for whatever reason to fulfill that, their, their responsibility.
And, uh, and then other parents do.
And now they are the parents, mother and father.
Um, but there cannot be two, uh, in, in any sense playing the role of mother playing the role of father, because that doesn't exist.
That's not the natural order of things.
Every child has a mother and father.
Most children, hopefully, are raised by their biological mother and father.
In some cases, someone else steps in.
And it's very good when they do.
Okay, but that's because there's a vacancy, right?
There's a vacancy.
A mother and father, one or both are not present.
Someone else can step in to fill that vacancy.
Okay, but then if you bring a you bring in if you got a mother and the biological mother is there and then another woman comes in There's no vacancy.
There's no open spot that she needs to fill Okay, because she's not a father.
She's not a man So she cannot be the father cannot be there already is a mother and children don't have two mothers so that's Not just my opinion.
This is not ideology speaking.
It is again the natural order of things and And it simply is how it is.
Don't forget to tune in today at 3 p.m. Eastern for a live event and special announcement.
You can catch it on Daily Wire Plus or other social platforms like X, YouTube and Facebook.
I promise you don't want to miss it.
So tune in today at 3 p.m. Eastern.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
The New York Post this week reports some major breaking news.
You are basically a crackhead.
And so am I, it would seem.
Everyone is a crackhead.
The world is full of crackheads, which on second thought might not come as news at all.
Though the reason may be a bit of a surprise.
It turns out that if you really enjoy eating potato chips, and if you struggle to stick to the serving size on the nutrition label, then you are an addict.
And of course, everybody struggles with that because, frankly, the serving sizes are a joke.
If you look on the back of your bag of Lay's barbecued chips, it will tell you that the suggested serving size is like one chip per person per week.
But if you struggle to keep your consumption down to that level, you might as well be shooting up heroin, according to The Science.
The New York Post reports the news with this headline, quote, Ice cream and potato chips are just as addictive as cocaine or heroin.
Research.
That's according to research.
Research says that.
Reading on.
Can't put down that bag of potato chips?
Science says it's not you.
It's the junk food.
Ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, are just as addictive as nicotine, cocaine, or heroin.
Experts say more than 1 in 10 people are hooked.
A new analysis of 281 studies across 36 different countries have uncovered that a staggering 14% of adults are hooked on UPFs.
The finding is shocking, given that UPFs—think sausage, ice cream, biscuits, soft drinks, sugary cereals—have previously been linked to cognitive decline, cancer, psychological distress, and even an early death.
The analysis was led by University of Michigan professor Ashley Gearhart.
Who previously created the Yale Food Addiction Scale by applying the same criteria that experts use to diagnose substance addiction.
The criteria includes uncontrollable and excessive consumption, cravings, and continued intake despite potential negative health effects.
Quote, the combination of refined carbohydrates and fats, often found in UPFs, seems to have a supra-additive effect on brain reward systems above either macronutrient alone, which may increase the addictive potential of these foods.
Gerhard and the study's authors wrote in their new findings, published in the BMJ.
Well, we're then told that scientists want a cigarette-style warning label on processed food, cautioning the poor, addicted, helpless consumer that the ice cream he's buying is unhealthy and won't help him achieve his weight loss goals.
This is necessary, they say, because the food is addictive, just like heroin and cocaine.
Which is, of course, why our streets are riddled with homeless bums whose lives have been destroyed because of their junk food addiction.
You know the stories.
First, a guy buys a pack of Oreos, and next thing you know, he's robbing a Cold Stone Creamery and stealing the ice cream, not the cash.
In fact, they even made a movie about a man's plunge into ice cream addiction.
It was called Requiem for a Cream.
Which is a joke that I saw on Twitter, but I wish I'd thought of myself.
Anyway, this is a real issue, is the point.
That's why junk food withdrawal can be so severe.
You know, you go to your pantry, find out that you're out of Pop-Tarts, then you start sweating, you have chills, a fever, you begin vomiting, you're on the ground shaking, having a seizure.
Many people have died from Pop-Tart withdrawal.
You know, because it's just like being addicted to heroin.
Exactly the same.
I recently read a story about a woman who turned to prostitution just to feed her Pringle addiction.
Pringle prostitutes, they call them on the streets.
Pringle-toots, in fact, is the word.
You can find them on the same street corner as the donut dealers selling black market Krispy Kremes to a bunch of strung out junk food junkies.
Again, this is all very real, except for the fact that it's entirely made up.
And we've talked before about the modern propensity to avoid personal responsibility and deny free will by turning everything into an addiction.
There are many made-up addictions these days, but none of them are as absurd as food addiction.
Okay, I'm just going to tell you right now, food addiction is not a thing.
You are not an addict.
You're just a glutton.
And despite what psychologists who want to medicalize every human vice or virtue might claim, gluttony is not the same thing as addiction.
Now, how do they justify inventing this food addiction concept?
How do they know that food is addictive?
I mean, how do they distinguish someone who eats junk food because it tastes good and they like it from somebody who eats junk food because they have a medical addiction?
Well, there seem to be two reasons typically given, and the first is the bit about reward systems in the brain.
An article in Healthline about food addiction puts it this way, When acting on cravings, the brain gets a reward, a feeling of pleasure associated with the release of dopamine.
The reward is what cravings and food addiction are all about.
People with food addiction get their fix by eating a particular food until their brain has received all the dopamine it was missing.
And this is how it always goes, right?
Anytime somebody wants to justify a new, newly invented addiction or mental illness, they talk about brain reward systems and dopamine and so on, and they expect us to just accept it because it sounds super science-y.
But if we use our minds, we might start to question this logic.
And for one thing, your brain is supposed to have a positive chemical response to food.
We are wired that way for a reason, mainly so we don't starve to death.
Junk food has lots of fat and sugar, which are things that your body needs and craves.
And that's why people like to eat it, because that's why your body rewards it.
Your brain gives you a pleasurable chemical response to those things because you need those things.
Now, it's true that junk food has too much fat and too much sugar, and the wrong kinds, because they're all processed, or ultra-processed, apparently.
But your brain responds positively to it anyway, because it tastes good.
The taste is pleasurable, and that's why people eat more of it than they should.
It's really not any more complicated than that.
Okay, we don't need 300 studies into it.
Why do people like to eat potato chips?
I can't understand it.
Why do people eat chocolate chip cookies?
Why do people like to eat cake?
Because it tastes good!
That's why they eat it!
That's it!
That's the only reason!
End of discussion!
In fact, this is the essential reason why people do every bad or unhealthy thing that people do.
They do it because it gives them pleasure.
They do it because of the brain's reward systems.
That is the fundamental, carnal motivation that lies behind literally all bad, self-destructive behaviors.
So if this is a reason to call junk food an addiction, then all bad behaviors are addictions.
Anything that a person does that they know they shouldn't do, but they do it anyway because it feels good, ...is now in addiction.
So everything from eating a bag of Doritos, to procrastinating on a school assignment, to calling in sick to work when you're not really sick, to robbing a bank or having an affair.
All bad things, big and small, all of them are addictions.
People do them because they derive some kind of pleasure from doing them.
If they didn't derive pleasure from it, they wouldn't do it.
They do them because, in Healthline's phrasing, they get a feeling of pleasure associated with the release of dopamine.
Okay, it's not, people talk about dopamine like it's some sort of magical elixir.
Oh, there's dopamine, so that must mean it's some kind of medical thing.
No, that's it.
It's just, you like it.
That's all it means.
If this is reason enough to justify classifying food as an addiction, then it's reason enough to justify all vice, all sin, all bad habits, all bad choices as addiction.
The same logic applies to all of them, with no exceptions.
Now, we'll be told that there's a difference, though, here, because An addicted person is so enthralled by the chemical reward that they can't help themselves.
A different Healthline article on food addiction quotes a psychotherapist who says this, If you can't stop yourself from eating something, overeat, or if you find yourself being secretive about eating something, or even have a withdrawal such as feeling sick or having blood sugar imbalance, that is an addiction.
If you can't stop yourself, it says.
Well, how does that work?
Is there some kind of mystical, unseen force compelling you against your will to stuff a chocolate chip muffin into your face?
The guy going back for his fourth helping at Golden Corral can't stop himself?
He has no free will at all?
What is he, possessed?
Is he inhabited by some kind of fat demon who loves fried chicken?
Really, what do you mean he can't stop?
Here are some things that I can't stop doing, okay?
I can't stop being six feet tall.
I can't stop being someone who was born in 1986.
I can't stop obeying the law of gravity.
These are all things I literally cannot stop doing no matter how hard I try.
Does the Golden Corral Buffet fall into this category for some people?
Is it like gravity?
Is it an inevitability?
Is it a thing that exerts control over them?
So that while they're walking to the buffet, if you tried to talk to them, they'd have this glossed, glazed look in their eyes, like there's zombies walking towards.
Are they like moths flying into the porch light?
No, of course not.
I mean, they might look like it and act like it, but that's not really what they are.
The food addict can stop eating.
He can eat healthier.
He can put down the fork.
He can put down the tray.
He can put down the bag of chips.
He can.
He just doesn't want to.
He's not forced to eat.
He just really, really wants to eat.
And he does the thing that he really, really wants to do, even though he knows he shouldn't.
Because he is weak and he has very little self-control.
He could have more self-control if he put effort into it, but he doesn't feel like it.
It's a character flaw.
It is a moral defect.
One of his own making entirely.
There's nothing medical going on here except his hypertension.
There's no medical addiction though.
There's no overwhelming compulsion that overrides his free will.
So why do we really have this concept of food addiction?
Where did it really come from?
Well, that same Healthline article that I mentioned earlier provides the real answer.
The chief medical and clinical officer at something called the Eating Recovery Center is quoted as saying this, quote, in my experience, some affected people find the term food addiction validating, empowering, and useful for their recovery.
There it is.
Food addiction may not be an accurate concept, it may not be true, but it is validating, it is useful, it is empowering.
Why?
Because it makes the glutton feel better about his gluttony by pretending that it's not his fault.
It gives him an excuse.
He's not the one in the Dairy Queen drive-thru.
That's his addiction.
His addiction is doing all that.
His addiction is to blame.
Now, he gets to drink the milkshake without any of the guilt.
Though he still gets all of the diabetes.
Because he can't pawn that off on his addiction.
Especially because it doesn't exist.
And that is why food addiction is today cancelled.
