Ep. 1247 - Why Christians Need To Be A Lot Less Welcoming And Tolerant
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a christian music awards show became a forum for men to parade around in drag. In fact, this kind of debauchery is becoming increasingly common in supposedly Christian environments, including at church. Also, Joe Biden addresses the nation about the war in Israel, and tries to explain why Americans should fund two global conflicts at the same time. A college professor apologizes after saying that Israelis are pigs and savages who should burn in hell. Plus, Victoria's Secret tried to rebrand and get away from attractive female models. Turns out the new marketing strategy was not a major success. We'll talk about all of that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
Ep.1247
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, a Christian music awards show became a forum for men to parade around in drag.
In fact, this kind of debauchery is becoming increasingly common in supposedly Christian environments, including at church.
We'll talk about that.
Also, Joe Biden addresses the nation about the war in Israel and tries to explain why Americans should fund two global conflicts at the same time.
A college professor apologizes after saying Israelis are pigs and savages who should, quote, burn in hell.
Plus, Victoria's Secret tried to rebrand and get away from attractive female models.
Turns out the new marketing strategy was not a major success.
Imagine that.
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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As you may or may not have heard, something called the Dove Awards were held this week
here in Nashville, broadcast on TBN.
The Dove Awards are an annual award show held by the Gospel Music Association designed to celebrate and recognize achievements in Christian music.
Except this year, the headlines around the event had nothing to do with Christian music or Christianity in general.
Instead, the attention went to a man named Derek Webb, who gained prominence in the Christian music space as the longtime lead singer of a popular Christian rock band.
And then several years ago, Webb had an affair, left his wife, and then became an apostate.
And he's now remarried to the lead singer of another Christian rock band while he continues to put out albums with titles like The Jesus Hypothesis, which should give you a good idea of where he stands these days.
This year, after winning several Dove Awards in the past, Webb decided to attend the ceremony, except he was going to attend it dressed in drag, alongside his drag queen friend, who goes by the stage name Flamie Grant.
You may recall that we talked about Flamie Grant a few months ago, when one of his quote-unquote Christian songs briefly made it to the top of the Christian song charts.
Webb and Grant have made music together in the past, including a song called Boys Will Be Girls, and they put those lyrics into practice, I suppose, or tried, this week at the Dove Awards.
Webb tweeted out a picture of himself dressed in his drag outfit, along with the caption, 54th Annual Dove Awards, here we come.
As you can see with the picture, Flamie Grant is dressed in the customary drag queen uniform that makes him look like a character from a 90s Tim Burton film, while Webb looks like he's playing dress-up with clothes that he found in the clearance bin of the women's section at Goodwill.
And they both, of course, look utterly ridiculous and aggressively hideous, as men always do when they cross-dress.
After the event, Webb posted a video with the caption, Why did I wear a dress to the Dove Awards?
Now, I can easily answer that question, and I will, but first let's hear Webb's version.
Listen.
Why did I wear a dress?
To the devil wards.
As a cis, straight, white man, I walk into a room like that, and any room, with an incredible amount of advantage and privilege.
If I'm attending as an ally of friends and colleagues, I should do everything possible to surrender that privilege at the door.
If the way you look at my loved ones isn't the way you look at me, I'm not truly standing with them.
It's like Stan Mitchell says, if you claim to be someone's ally but aren't getting hit by the stones thrown at them, you aren't standing close enough.
Plus, I have amazing legs.
Now first of all, it's hard to take him seriously when he starts the video with fake news, calling himself a straight man.
If that doesn't deserve a community note on Twitter, I don't know what does.
Aside from that, Webb claims that he showed up to a Christian event in drag because he wanted to be an ally.
And apparently being an ally to attention whores means being an attention whore yourself.
And this is what most of this is about, after all.
Yes, drag.
...is an outlet for men with cross-dressing fetishes to get their thrills and to impose those fetishes on the world and flick them on the rest of us by forcing us to look at them.
But it's also just a simple expression of narcissism.
All of these people are narcissists going to absurd lengths to bring all of the attention back to themselves.
And that is the primary fetish that drives these people.
It's the fetish for attention.
And apparently it drives their allies, too.
Now there's quite a lot of this kind of allyship in modern Western Christianity.
Christianity.
Note the air quotes around Christianity.
It was just a few weeks ago that a cathedral in Dallas gave a blessing to drag queens during the church service.
Watch.
Dallas's Cathedral of Hope gave a blessing to drag queens today.
The church, which has a primary outreach to the LGBTQ community, hosted the event in response to Senate Bill 12, which criminalizes performers who put on sexually explicit shows in front of children.
Around 40 people protested in front of the church with signs condemning LGBTQ people.
Senior Pastor Neil Thomas called this a part of a growing persecution of drag queens and transgender people in the U.S.
But SB12 has quite sincere ramifications specifically aimed at drag community who are using this law potentially to discriminate against and to oppress a part of our community that has been a vital part since the movement of the LGBTQ plus community.
Now supporters say Senate Bill 12 is needed to protect children.
After the church service, local drag performers were invited onto the stage for a blessing.
Now you notice how the anchor claims that there were signs condemning LGBTQ people, and yet somehow their own news cameras never managed to get any of those signs on film.
The only sign we see is one that says, God created them male and female, which is a direct quote from the book of Genesis.
So if that is a condemnation of LGBTQ people, it's not the sign doing the condemning.
The pastor also tells us that a law criminalizing sexually explicit shows for children will have severe ramifications for the drag community, and it amounts to oppression against them.
Which, of course, in and of itself is a confession.
Indeed, LGBT activists have told us everything we need to know by their reaction to laws around the country that simply prohibit the sexual and physical abuse of children.
They tell us themselves that these laws seriously cramp their style.
And that should tell you something about yourself.
It's like if they passed a special law saying, I don't know, you're not allowed to burn nursing homes to the ground, which is already against the law.
They passed another one.
And if I were to say, well, this is outrageous!
This is a personal attack on me!
Well, what would that tell you about me?
What does it tell us about the LGBT activists?
That when you simply say, you can't expose children to sexually explicit content, that's it.
When you simply say that, they react like you have personally attacked them.
And anyway, I believe them.
I guess it is a personal attack, which is why the laws must be in place.
But this drag and church combination has become increasingly popular.
Just this week, there was another drag event at a church, also hosted as a means of protest against laws that ban the mutilation and sexualization of children.
Watch.
Portland drag queen Poison Waters hosted a brunch event at a Northeast Portland church to raise money and share an important message.
The event, called Blessed Are the Drag Queens, happened this morning at Bridgeport United Church of Christ.
It was a celebration of the art of drag, as well as a fundraiser for the church's community partnerships, all in support of the LGBTQ community.
Reverend Tara Wilkins says the brunch was also a form of protest against anti-trans legislation and the use of religion as an excuse for discrimination.
Religious communities today often hide their prejudice in the name of religion, and we're here to show that we support and love the LGBT community, particularly our trans and non-binary siblings.
Man, Tony Soprano has really fallen on hard times there.
By the way, the drag queen's name is Poison Water.
Did I hear that right?
I didn't notice it the first time I saw it.
Poison Water is the name of the...
You're getting really on the nose with these drag queens.
You might as well name yourself Creepy Predator.
That's your drag queen name.
Now, you could point out that most of these churches that are inviting cross-dressing men to parade around on the altar are Episcopal or United Church of Christ or something similar, and therefore don't really count as Christian at all.
These are social clubs for left-wing boomers that happen to meet in buildings that vaguely resemble churches.
Which is true, and a fair point, but it's also true that Western Christianity as a whole has become increasingly infiltrated by this kind of madness and has generally failed to take a firm stance against any of this, much less effectively fight back against it.
You know, recently I told you about the major victory in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals which upheld the ban on child gender mutilation in Tennessee and Kentucky.
And after that decision was announced, a number of prominent Christian leaders went on Twitter to celebrate the decision.
Which we should celebrate.
But it was noted by many that most of these leaders, though they were eager to join the party celebrating the win and to tacitly take credit for it, were nowhere in sight when the battle was raging.
And the battle's still raging, by the way, and they're still not out on the battlefield.
In fact, transgenderism and LGBT ideology seized its stranglehold on American culture while most churches and most Christian leaders and most pastors and priests, certainly not all, not all, but most, said nothing at all about it.
You know, they may not have explicitly joined the other side and started waving the rainbow flag, though some of them did, but most of them hid from the fight.
Which is why, you know, of all the people who most prominently led the charge against gender ideology and are still leading it, precisely none of us are church leaders.
And some people at the forefront of this fight aren't even Christian.
Worse still, and I can say this from experience, while we went to war against this evil, many Christian leaders spent their time lecturing us for the way that we fought and the tone that we took.
And our harshness, and our meanness, and our supposed lack of grace and kindness.
All through the years of being in this battle, being in this fight, most of the time, if I hear a prominent Christian, Christian supposed leader, acknowledge my existence at all, it's going to be to, I don't appreciate your tone.
Your tone's a little upsetting.
Sitting on the sidelines, afraid to get their hands dirty, while lecturing those of us in the trenches for fighting in a way that they find personally displeasing to watch.
And this is the story of Christianity in the West, at least in modern times.
So, the Dove Awards are kind of a perfect encapsulation of this problem.
Sure, the Gospel Music Association did not, as far as I know, officially invite Derek Webb or Flamie Grant to attend, did not have them on stage to perform the heretical songs for the audience, but they also apparently didn't meet these men at the door and refuse them entry, which is what should have happened.
Instead, I guess they were welcomed in and they were apparently treated kindly, when in fact they should have been rebuked.
And turned away.
Yes, that would have been the Christian response, believe it or not.
The Christian response is not always to say, everyone come on in, do whatever you want.
No, the Christian response is to say, excuse me, you're not coming in the building looking like that.
What do you think you're doing?
No, you're not coming in dressed like that.
You look ridiculous, get out of here.
They should not have been permitted to turn, you know, to turn a Christian event Into a platform for narcissism and degeneracy.
To be welcoming as a Christian does not mean, or it should not mean, tolerating any and all forms of behavior and standing idly by while your own events and your own churches and your own communities are used to celebrate sin.
You know, I may welcome you into my home, but that doesn't mean you can wipe your muddy shoes on my carpet and use vulgarity in front of my children.
I'm welcoming you into my home.
My home, not yours.
Which means you have to live up to the standards I have established.
Least of all will I welcome you into my home and then let you set it on fire from the inside.
If I do that, then soon there will be no home left for anyone to be welcomed into.
And that is exactly what has happened with the Christian Church in the West.
It has welcomed in the arsonists who have spent the past several decades burning it down from within.
Which is what happens when you make tolerance your guiding virtue.
Very soon you find yourself tolerating your own destruction.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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Daily Wire has this report.
President Joe Biden addressed the nation Thursday night during an Oval Office speech following his visit to Israel, where he witnessed some of the devastation inflicted by Hamas terrorists.
The 80-year-old president called on Congress to pass a massive aid package that his administration is going to try to pass to support Israel and Ukraine.
How did Ukraine get mixed into this jumble?
That's a question we'll get to in a second.
Biden called for $14 billion in funding for Israel as it fights off attacks from Iranian-backed terrorists throughout the region.
The funding will go towards sharpening Israel's military edge to replenish its Iron Dome and to send a message to Iran that the U.S.
stands with Israel.
However, he also called for a much larger aid package for Ukraine, an additional $60 billion in funding for their war against Russian forces who invaded their country.
So we're just gonna, let's just fund all the wars all over the, all over the, all over the world.
Why not?
Biden called out the lies from the Hamas-run Palestinian Ministry of Health who falsely claimed that Israel bombed a hospital that killed 500 people.
Those claims have been thoroughly refuted by top officials and experts.
Okay, so, that was, that was the, The basic crux of the speech, and it was hailed as a great speech by, you know, predictably by some in the media, maybe slightly less predictably by some on Fox News.
Brit Hume, for example, on Fox News said it was a great speech and said it was the best speech of Biden's presidency.
Which, in fairness to Brit Hume, that might be true.
But the bar is so low that it doesn't mean anything.
I mean, it's the best speech of Biden's presidency if you can understand what he's saying.
Putting aside what he's actually saying, if you can simply understand it, if it's comprehensible, then I guess automatically it becomes the best speech of his presidency.
So we'll play a few clips and see if it at least gets over that bar.
Here he is tying Israel and Ukraine together as kind of a package deal.
Watch.
We can't ignore the humanity of innocent Palestinians who only want to live in peace and have an opportunity.
You know, the assault on Israel echoes nearly 20 months of war, tragedy, and brutality inflicted on the people of Ukraine, people that were very badly hurt since Putin launched his all-out invasion.
We've not forgotten the mass graves, the bodies found bearing signs of torture, rape used as a weapon by the Russians.
This is the best speech of his presidency.
Like, he can barely speak, but at least you can understand most of the words that are coming out of his mouth.
And so, yeah, it's the best speech of his presidency.
Because it is speech.
It's human speech, at least, and not just vague mumblings.
So, and he goes on in the speech to do this and to tie the two things together because he's trying to use what's happening in Israel as kind of his ransom, it's his ransom, his blackmail to get funding for Ukraine.
He wants more funding for Ukraine and so he's using Israel to do it.
Because otherwise there's no reason, like no matter how you feel about funding the war in Ukraine, or no matter how you feel about funding the war in Israel, or if you don't want to fund any of it, there's no reason why these things should be together in a package deal.
They are two separate conflicts with different ramifications for the United States.
And also Ukraine has already gotten billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars to fund their war.
But this is also, this is the way they see it.
I mean, Biden as a globalist, this is how he sees it.
It's just, it's one's, they're both conflicts overseas and it's our job to be involved in everything all the time.
And so let's put them all, let's put them both together.
There's also a lot of moral equivalency that he drew in his speech, because he could never denounce anti-Semitism without also throwing in Islamophobia.
Play clip five.
We can't stand by and stand silent when this happens.
We must, without equivocation, denounce anti-Semitism.
We must also, without equivocation, denounce Islamophobia.
And to all you hurting, those of you hurting, I want you to know I see you.
You belong.
And I want to say this to you.
You're all America.
That's his best speech.
It's all you're hurting.
If you're hurting.
If you're hurting.
I want to say this.
He's barely awake, but it's the best speech of his presidency.
He says that there's no equivocation, so he condemns anti-Semitism with no equivocation, but then actually he proceeds in the very next sentence to equivocate, because then tying in Islamophobia, so-called quote-unquote Islamophobia, is an equivocation.
You're drawing moral equivalencies.
Yeah, I'm going to condemn this, but I'm going to condemn that also.
And no, we condemn all bad things altogether.
Everything's the same.
And, you know, it was, of course, for people that remember going through 9-11, it kind of harkens back to that.
And as soon as the towers fell, the first thing we started hearing from the media And from government officials is that, well, the most important thing now is the Islamophobia.
Gotta make sure.
Gotta make sure we don't end up with Islamophobia.
That obviously is our number one priority.
So he could say he's not equivocating, but that is precisely an equivocation.
Speaking of anti-Semitism, anyway, New York Post has this report.
A Chicago art professor who was blasted online for calling Israelis pigs And, quote, very bad people after the Hamas attacks has said she is deeply sorry and does not stand behind her anti-Semitic comments.
Dr. Micah Tosca, a climate scientist and associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, issued an apology on her Instagram Wednesday for her incendiary post amid the Israel-Hamas war.
She said, quote, yesterday I wrote some things on my Instagram story that I unequivocally reject and do not stand behind.
I'm deeply sorry for writing what I wrote and for hurting many people with my words.
And I am especially sorry to the Israeli people that I broadly placed at fault for the war.
Earlier this week, Tosca came under fire when she called Israel's retaliatory offensive against Hamas downright evil and propaganda.
And she continued and said, Israelis are pigs, savages, very bad people, irredeemable excrement.
After this past week, if your eyes aren't open to the crimes against humanity that Israel is committing, and has committed for decades and will continue to commit, then I suggest you open them.
It's disgusting and grotesque.
May they all rot in hell.
So that's what she said.
That was her original statement.
Pigs, savages, very bad people, irredeemable excrement, human excrement, and they should all rot in hell.
Now, a couple of things here.
Obviously, this apology is nothing but self-preservation.
You know my stance on public apologies, and I'm against them.
I'm especially against public apology when you didn't do or say anything wrong.
That obviously is going to be the worst kind of public apology and the most pathetic public apology.
But even if you did do, in this case, she said something wrong, what she said was wrong and horrible.
But I still am not in favor of the public apology because it doesn't mean anything.
Like, it means nothing.
It is quite apparent that you're only saying that because you're trying to save your job.
Okay, you don't go from thinking that all Israelis are pigs and human excrement who should rot in hell.
You don't go from thinking that to, like, a day later, I love everyone and everyone is great.
That doesn't happen.
She said in her lengthy statement, apologizing, Israelis did not and do not deserve what I said and I was wrong to post what I posted.
I know that my words perpetuated harmful stereotypes.
And then she talks about we have to love and accept everyone.
I'm sorry, you obviously don't think that.
Okay.
And also it's not like, you know, if she had said that in any context it would have been wrong, but it wasn't, this is not a heat of the moment thing where she's in an argument with someone and she just blurts that out, which would be bad enough.
She had to, she had to think to herself, she had to formulate this thought, oh Israelis are pigs and human excrement, they should all die and rot in hell.
She had to think that and say, well that's good, I need to tell the world that.
I have to write this, I have to write it and hit post on it.
And you only do that if you actually think it.
So are we supposed to believe that a day later, she's changed her mind?
You went from, I mean, presumably, you didn't just decide yesterday that Israelis are pigs, you probably thought that for a while.
And so you thought that, you said it, you thought it strongly enough to announce it to the world.
And then we're supposed to believe that within hours, you've changed your mind about that.
Oh, you know what?
Actually, they're not.
I realize Israelis are not human excrement.
I've thought, you know, I was convinced.
People presented arguments, and I've been persuaded.
I don't think that happened.
So it's, this is why the public apology, it's always insincere, because either you've been hectored into apologizing for something when you didn't do anything wrong, or you did do something wrong but you're only saying it because you're trying to save your ass.
Either way, why do we need to see it?
It doesn't, it means absolutely nothing.
Um, should she be, uh, fired for this?
Well, yeah, of course she should.
But obviously there should be consequences for something like that.
And she's not the only person who works, a lot of them have worked in academia, we should tell you something, but she's not the only person who has a kind of public position somewhere who has said similar things since the war broke out a couple of weeks ago.
And most of them have not lost their jobs, but they all should.
Same as anyone would be fired for saying that about any other group.
Okay, if there was a college professor who had said this in the reverse, about Palestinians, and said that their human excrement should rot in hell, they're pigs and savages, you guarantee that that professor is not gonna have that job anymore.
They're gonna lose that job in about 30 seconds.
Doesn't matter how much they apologize.
And the same standard should apply.
You say that about any other group, With the exception of white men, well then it's okay, you're allowed to say that.
You know, like Nick Cannon actually said something very similar about white men, that they're savage and animals and never got in any trouble for that.
But when I say that she should be fired for it and held accountable, is that cancel culture, because we're also hearing that a lot the last couple of weeks.
That people come out and say horrible things like this, openly, you know, there's been plenty of examples of people openly supporting terrorism, cheering on You know, Hamas parachuting into a music festival and just slaughtering innocent people indiscriminately.
And those of us who have said, well, that's horrible, you should lose your job for saying that, we've been accused of perpetuating cancel culture and being somehow hypocrites about cancel culture.
Well, no, this is not cancel culture, okay?
Because there are two hallmarks of cancel culture.
And that allow us to differentiate it from just a person being held responsible for what they say and do.
Those of us who are opposed to cancel culture, who have been talking about cancel culture for years, we never said that, you know, you should be able to say whatever you want publicly all the time with no consequence at all.
That no one should ever lose their job for saying anything.
No one should ever be upset about anything that anyone else says.
Like, obviously that's not our position.
There are times when you can say things publicly that, yeah, of course you should lose your job for that.
So how do we distinguish between someone who is a victim of cancel culture and someone who is just simply being held responsible for saying a horrible thing?
Well, there's two things, two hallmarks.
One, cancel culture usually penalizes you for saying something true.
Most of the time.
One of the big ways you know that this is a cancel culture situation is if someone is being held accountable for saying something true or innocuous.
That's mostly cancel culture.
You said something true, common sense, or you told a basically innocuous joke.
Something like that.
And then someone's getting their life destroyed over it.
That's cancel culture.
That's one of the ways that you know that it's cancel culture.
And that's why we talked about moral equivalencies.
You cannot draw an equivalency between someone saying all Israelis are pigs and are excrement and should rot in hell.
You cannot compare that to someone saying, you know, men can't have babies.
And what we hear from the left is that, you know, if you think that the person who said that men can't have babies shouldn't be fired for that, and yet you think the person who said Israelis are pigs should be fired, then you're a hypocrite.
No, one of those things is just common sense and true, and the other is horrifically wrong.
And so there's plenty of consistency here.
I believe that there should be no negative consequences anywhere in society for saying things that are common sense and true.
Yet there are plenty of contexts where there should be penalties for saying things that are horrifically wrong.
So that's one of the hallmarks.
And the other one is that cancel culture, and this is a big one, cancel culture is a tool wielded by institutional powers.
So it's kind of like, it's what the left says about racism, that you can't really be racist unless you have systemic power or whatever nonsense.
That's totally bogus.
But it's actually true of cancel culture.
That you have to really have systemic power in order to wield cancel culture.
Because cancel culture means that someone's whole life is being destroyed.
It means that powerful institutions are conspiring to destroy someone's life.
To kick them off, de-platform them, take away their job opportunities, that sort of thing.
But when you have just like the peanut gallery that have no real power, who are upset that you said something stupid, that's not cancel culture.
That's just people reacting the way people do.
To dumb, horrible things.
And I think these distinctions are rather clear.
Okay.
What else we got?
Reuters has this.
Jordan's King Abdullah on Tuesday warned against trying to push Palestinian refugees into Egypt or Jordan, adding that the humanitarian situation must be dealt with inside Gaza and the West Bank.
Let's listen to this clip from King Abdullah.
Just a part of the question on the issues of refugees coming to Jordan, and I think I can quite strongly speak on behalf not only of Jordan as a nation, but of our friends in Egypt, that is a red line.
Because I think that is the plan by certain of the usual suspects to try and create de facto issues on the ground.
No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt.
Okay, so as we've been talking about the coming refugee Crisis which should not be a crisis for us that we have to deal with the United States, but You know I've said many others have said that There's no reason no, I don't we should not be taking a single refugee from Gaza at all and and there's also no reason to because that responsibility if it falls on anyone outside of You know the direct conflict it should fall on the Arab countries
That are in that region.
Because if those, you know, they should be the first place that these refugees go.
Why?
Because, like, geographically, they're right there.
They're next door.
And also because culturally, that is where the refugees have the best chance of assimilating.
It's the most sensible transition for someone who's a refugee from Gaza.
Is to go to another Arab country.
Doesn't mean not all Arab countries are the same.
Doesn't mean the culture is going to be exactly the same.
But it's certainly United States Western culture is going to be an even greater departure.
So what's going to happen though is that all the other Middle Eastern countries, they're all saying, we don't want them.
And they're not going to be blamed for that.
So here's what's going to happen.
Already is happening.
White liberals in this country will call us bigoted, ethnocentric, and so on, xenophobic.
They'll say that we're bigoted and xenophobic and callous and cruel if we won't take Gazan refugees.
And yet they will not say that about the Middle Eastern countries that are right there and have already said, red line, we're not taking a single one of them.
They're not going to say that about them.
It's just like every other country.
They can build a wall around their entire country.
They can militarize their border.
It's completely understandable.
We don't blame them for that.
Yeah, we're the one country where it's an issue.
We're not allowed to.
Well, that's the game they're going to play, and we should not fall for it.
This is it.
It's up to those countries to take these refugees.
If they won't do it, then what?
What happens to these refugees?
I don't know.
I don't know, but frankly, it's not our problem to solve.
That's it.
Actually, it turns out that it's not up to the United States of America to solve every problem in the world.
It's not up to us to solve most of the problems in the world.
Especially when we have so many problems in our own country that are not being solved.
So it's like a false choice.
We're told, well, if the United States won't take them, then where should they go?
What's your answer?
I don't have one.
War is a horrible thing.
It's an awful thing.
And it's awful no matter what.
And I wish it wasn't happening, but it is.
I don't have a solution for it.
It's not up to us to come up with a solution.
And if you want to scold someone for it, then turn to the countries that are right there and are refusing these people.
That's where the...
That's where the onus should lie.
All right.
Let's see.
One other.
Well, maybe two others.
I wanted to briefly mention this.
It hasn't gotten a lot of attention.
Post-millennial.
It says, NFL legend Rob Gronkowski recently spoke out against the idea of men playing in women's sports, telling Fox News that there's really no argument one could otherwise make.
There's been a push over the last several years by trans activists to force women to accept men who identify as transgender into their sporting competitions.
Obviously, we know that.
Gronkowski said in a recent interview on the subject, there's really no thoughts to really share.
It's obvious.
There are men's sports for men.
There's women's sports for women.
It should just stay like that.
It's just as simple as that, man.
There's really no argument.
There should really be no conversation about it.
How it's been is how it should be.
Men play men's sports.
Women play women's sports.
It's as simple as that.
It's really unfair if a man went into a women's sport and played it.
It just doesn't make much sense to me.
And, obviously, he's right about that, it's good that he's saying it, but I just think that this, you know, we talked in the opening about Christian, the failure of Christian leaders across the country to speak up against the gender ideology madness, or, you know, and many of them waiting until it's safest, until other people have done the work so that they can swoop in and say, oh, this is good, I'm happy about this.
And even pat themselves on the back for it.
And I think we see a similar thing happening in athletics with some of these, you know, a few professional athletes or former professional athletes now coming out and saying, yeah, this should be happening.
When it's completely, when it's much safer, it's much safer now.
Well, number one, because you're not in the league anymore.
And number two, because There were many, there were actually a small number of people who were willing to make this point back when it was unpopular.
And now we finally have some people jumping on the bandwagon.
But just imagine, you know, even taking the men and women's sports issue on its own.
Imagine if, I don't know, five years ago, A large percentage of professional athletes, men and women, had simply come out and said, this is wrong.
We can't do this.
This is crazy.
Of course we can't do this.
Imagine if that had happened.
I mean, this issue would have been solved pretty quickly.
But they were terrified to say anything, and now we're hearing from them.
Okay.
CNBC is, one other thing is from CNBC, this is important.
Tipping 20% at a sit-down restaurant is still the standard, according to most etiquette experts in the U.S.
After holding steady for years, though, tipping at full-service restaurants fell to 19.4% in the second quarter of 2023, according to online restaurant platform Toast's most recent restaurant trends report, notching the lowest average since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That's the headline, is that the tipping is falling.
People are tipping less.
Tip fatigue is largely to blame, the report found.
During COVID, everyone was feeling generous, said Eric Plom, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based startup Uptip, which aims to facilitate cashless tipping.
The problem is that it reached a new standard that we all couldn't really live with.
He added, particularly when it comes to tipping prompts at a wider range of establishments, a trend also referred to as tip creep.
Now I'm reminded of, so I saw this pop up and there's also this kind of viral post making the rounds on Twitter.
This is, I don't know where this is from.
Some restaurant owner, I saw somewhere in New York, which sounds about right, but some restaurant owner apparently posted this message, which says, directed at her customers, which says, we expect you to tip 20% minimum.
That's the end of the story, period.
The number is even printed right there on the check, so you don't have to do any math.
When you walk in the door, you enter into a covenant.
If you feel any kind of way about this other than 100% accepting, you should stay home.
Invest in your own sound system, get some nice glassware, install dimmers on your kitchen lights, put on some candles, and make your own cocktails.
I won't say that you should go elsewhere, because 20% is the minimum expected tip in bars and restaurants all over this city, and your feelings about the fact are irrelevant.
And if you're uncomfortable with a woman having the agency to explain any of this to you, again, stay home.
Go ahead and go buckwild in the comments if you feel the need.
So, this attitude, by the way, we hear about the tip fatigue.
This is part of the reason.
This totally entitled attitude.
And, you know, we've talked about tipping over the years, really, because it's such an important issue.
And I will tell you that this is one issue.
I have been radicalized on this.
I have been.
My own position on tipping has radically changed.
I mean, I used to be I used to be a big tipper.
I used to be, you know, and there's times in the past you could probably find things that I've written or things that I've said years ago.
Just passionately defending the practice of tipping.
And now I find myself way on the other end of it.
Where I don't want to tip anyone anymore.
And I certainly, I used to be 20% at a minimum.
That's, you know, that's your baseline.
And you'd have to try really hard to get less than 20%.
So if you, like, C minus service, this is how I used to operate.
C minus service is 20%.
And if you get up into B or A plus, now I'm going 30.
I might tip 35, 40%.
Very generous tip.
Now, that's not how I look at it anymore.
And 20%, it's like, that's almost a maximum.
Now your baseline is zero, and you gotta earn the tip.
And I talk to a lot of people that feel the same way about it, and it's, look, it's not our fault.
You just, you pressed it way too much.
In the customer service industry, everyone wants a tip now, everywhere you go.
Even places where they're not doing anything.
Like, you go to a coffee shop, and you ask for a coffee, and they just pour the coffee into the cup and hand it to you.
Well, I could do that.
And there are plenty of other... You could just do self-service, and I could do that.
There's nothing about your performance of that job that I feel I need to especially reward.
You're already rewarded with your paycheck.
And whatever you get paid, it may not be a whole lot, but it's probably basically what that is worth.
So you go everywhere.
It's the...
How ubiquitous tipping is, how prevalent it is everywhere, and the entitled attitude that people have about it.
And all of that has made me go all the way to the other end, and now I'm saying, you've just got to earn it.
So it's fine.
You want to put tipping prompts everywhere now, everywhere you go, whether you're going to a restaurant, or you're going to a grocery store, or you're going to the dentist.
And now everyone wants a tip.
Fine, I can't stop that.
But my approach to everybody, including the restaurants, is that you really gotta earn it.
Give me a reason.
Like, I don't know.
When I go to a convenience store and buy a couple items, and then they flip the iPad around and say, do you want a tip?
I always say, no.
I'm not sure what they could do that would Inspire me to say, oh, I really, the way they rang up that bottle of water, I gotta award that with a tip.
So I'm not sure, I'm not sure what they could do.
But it's possible.
But you gotta earn it.
That's the way tipping, that's the way tipping always should have been, and that's the way it is now.
And if you're in the service industry and you don't like that, well, honestly, you have your own industry to blame.
Let's get to the comment section.
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Here's a comment on the story about Britney Spears in her memoir admitting to getting an abortion.
It's complete hypocrisy coming from the pro-choice side because it was Britney's choice to walk in the abortion clinic.
Doesn't matter what Justin said.
She agreed to the abortion.
Yet pro-choicers argue that women are now victims of their own actions and Justin should have supported her.
What happened to being strong and independent?
Yeah, that's one of the many hypocrisies, and it has been interesting to see the pro-abortion side react to this.
We talked about a couple days ago that it doesn't make any sense how they respond to this news by saying that it's heartbreaking and sad, because if the child is not really a human person, as they claim, then there's nothing sad about it.
But also, your point is correct as well.
You know, they're angry at Justin Timberlake for supposedly pressuring her or whatever.
Well, I thought you said that women are strong and independent and make their own choices.
Abortion is a woman's choice and nobody else's.
You know, what if Justin Timberlake had said, was thrilled to be a father?
And what if he had gone the other way?
And that does happen.
You know, we hear about the cases of men pressuring women to get abortions, and those men are scumbags.
Don't get me wrong, Justin Timberlake, if this is what he did, he's a scumbag.
There's plenty of other cases the other way, though, where men want desperately to keep the child and are thrilled to be fathers, and plead with the mother of their child to not kill their child, and their pleas are not heeded, which is a terrible tragedy.
But in those cases, what does the pro-abortion side say?
They say, well, it's none of your business.
One way or another, it doesn't matter what you say.
It's a woman's choice.
And yet, in Britney Spears' case, it's, oh, what should the poor put upon a woman?
It just doesn't make any sense.
On the silent walking trend, Mishim Possible says, her boyfriend is the genius, basically told her to shut up and take a walk.
The silence he receives must be glorious.
It is pretty smart.
I didn't think about that with the so-called silent walking trend.
This really, this didn't start with the girlfriend.
It started with the boyfriend, apparently, who suggested it as a brilliant idea.
Here's a challenge.
What if you stop talking and walk away for a bit?
Very smart.
Ramana Goldie says, imagine being so unwell that two minutes of walking without AirPods triggers a wave of anxiety.
And Johnny agrees and says, the lengths people go to avoid being alone with their thoughts is incredible.
That, and I really believe that this is a, this is like a crisis, it's an unspoken about and mostly unnoticed crisis in our society.
That we've got millions of people, and this silent walking trend kind of shows it, millions of people, they don't know how to be alone with their own thoughts.
They're terrified of just having their thoughts to themselves.
And how do you function in a society like that?
How do you function in a society where people are afraid to think?
Because that's what it means.
If you can't put your phone down for five seconds, and if anytime you are doing anything, you need to be listening to something, you need stimulation all the time, it means at a minimum that you don't know how to entertain yourself with your own thoughts.
You're uninterested in your own thoughts.
Or at even worse, you're terrified of your own thoughts.
And I think we have both going on and I'm not sure how you have a functioning human society that way, which of course it's not functioning.
And finally, on Harvard's claims of being pro-free speech, Vikra says, "The views at Harvard didn't turn asinine
overnight.
We should question what went wrong over the last couple of decades.
The problem is more endemic than just the current set of administration at one university.
It's like waking up to find that your kid has overdosed after decades of drug abuse
and telling yourself, 'Why didn't I do more that day?'"
Well, of course.
The entire university system has been corrupt for a long time, and it took decades to get to this point.
Which is why, if the education system broadly, and especially higher education, if there's going to be any kind of real reform, it will take decades to achieve.
Which is why, in the meantime, you should just keep your kids out of it, as best you can.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
[MUSIC]
If you decided one day to rank the worst business decisions in all of recorded human history,
you'd have a lot of options to choose from.
Maybe you'd go with Blockbuster's refusal to buy Netflix for the bargain price of $50 million, or you might point to all the publishers that passed on the first Harry Potter book.
More recently, of course, there's Bud Light.
There's also Target selling a satanic merchandise that sexualizes children.
Whatever comes to mind when you think of massive business failures, as of today, you should know that there's yet another contender for the throne of worst business decision in history, or at least for maybe one of the runner-up positions.
It is perhaps the most foreseeable financial disaster of all time.
A couple of years ago, the lingerie store Victoria's Secret opted to replace its world-famous Angels, their supermodels, with obese women and profoundly unhappy lesbian feminists.
They literally hired Megan Rapinoe, the purple-haired soccer player, just to give you an idea of how sexless and androgynous the marketing became.
Now, to anybody with two working eyes or a basic understanding of human sexuality, it was obvious from the beginning how this strategy would turn out.
It would be a complete embarrassment to everybody associated with it.
It would make millions of people dramatically less likely to buy products from Victoria's Secret because not very many people want to look like Megan Rapinoe or look at her.
No offense to her, it's just the reality.
But our moral superiors in the news industry didn't see it that way.
Two years ago...
They were convinced that Victoria's Secret, with its bold decision to reject beauty and replace it with whatever they replace it with, was about to bring about a sea change in human sexuality.
They were going to fundamentally alter the entire concept of attractiveness in one fell swoop.
So, look at this footage of a local news station in Minnesota from back in 2021 covering this new initiative from Victoria's Secret.
Listen to every moment of this because, honestly, it belongs in a time capsule.
Watch.
Welcome to our Sunrise Live with a story gaining steam online.
Victoria's Secret's changing their image, trying to answer the age-old question of what women really want.
And apparently it's not wings or stilettos.
Yeah, the company announcing their new initiative, the Victoria's Secret Collective, which includes women famous for their various achievements and not their proportions, like soccer star and gender equality advocate Megan Rapinoe and actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas.
The brand is looking to be more inclusive, bringing sexy back by representing real women that come in all shapes and sizes from all different backgrounds.
The company is hoping these diverse leading icons and changemakers are going to do just that.
As of late, the company has been viewed as outdated and has been accused of fostering a sexist brand image.
But now the company's executive team is mostly all women.
Martin Waters, who's chief executive of the brand, said, Folks, of course, sounding off this person here, writing in saying that it was never made by women for women.
It was what men wanted women to be.
And another writes, the sexy underwear garbage was always about satisfying the male fantasy.
It had nothing to do with women at all.
So, I think it's an interesting shift.
And last but not least, this one here from Sharon saying, no problem with angels, just the lack of comfort, size, diversity and fit.
So you guys, yeah, I feel like after going through a lot of the comments, a lot of people are saying it's about time they changed their image.
Yeah, I mean, the world has evolved and women know that we've known this for a long time.
We come in all shapes, sizes, colors.
So I think this is a good move.
So Victoria's Secret is bringing sexy back, says one of the newsreaders, quoting the great Justin Timberlake.
And then comes the anchorwoman to tell us what to make of all this.
The world has evolved, she says, and now in this enlightened era, we've made an astonishing discovery.
And that discovery, says the anchorwoman, is that women come in all shapes, sizes, and colors.
Imagine that.
I mean, before the year 2021, nobody knew that women were individuals instead of complete carbon copies of one another.
We didn't know about that.
In fact, we just figured out a couple of years ago, after all this time.
And therefore, the anchorwoman concludes, it's a good move by Victoria's Seeker to feature a bunch of women who are morbidly obese in their advertising.
Now, for a moment, if you can, forget about the stupidity and the ignorance of what all these people are saying.
Pretend that local news stations aren't completely brainless collections of NPCs who just read whatever script they're given.
Focus instead on the sheer hubris of it.
I mean, what you have here is a media outlet proudly proclaiming, without any hesitation, that all of human history got it wrong.
What this anchor was saying, and what Victoria's Secret was saying, is that the innate sexual impulses of millions of Americans can be basically reprogrammed overnight.
Their conception of aesthetics and beauty is, you know, not inherited.
They can be easily changed.
And all people have to do, she's saying, is accept their internalized misogyny and promise to be good allies to corporate America and unattractive women everywhere.
And then, soon enough, they'll come to believe that fat lesbian women are attractive.
Now fast forward just two years into the future, and it goes without saying that this master plan to re-engineer all of human sexuality has failed from an empirical perspective.
In 2020, the year before this campaign began, Victoria's Secret posted $7.5 billion in revenue.
This year, the company is projected to hit just $6.2 billion in revenue.
Their stock price is down something like 50%.
That's 5-0 in the past year.
As a result, predictably this week, CNN reported that Victoria's Secret is in panic mode, and they're reversing course.
Quote, the Victoria's Secret rebrand is over.
That was CNN's headline.
CNN then quoted the company's chief executive as saying, quote, despite everyone's best endeavors, it's not been enough to carry the day.
So this new master plan has collapsed.
It's not viable.
They're losing a huge amount of money, and so they're giving up.
None of that's surprising.
I mean, any normal human being could have predicted this outcome a long time ago.
What's interesting about this whole situation is that Victoria's Secret chief executive and their friend at CNN desperately don't want to talk about the key question underlying all of this.
And that key question is, why did this initiative fail exactly?
You can understand at some level why Victoria's Secret wants to punt on that question.
They don't want to accuse their customers of being sexist pigs who objectify women.
Well, they also don't want to go into any great detail about why they thought this rebrand was a good idea in the first place.
So they're just papering over the whole thing.
But it's not that simple.
And everybody involved in this catastrophe knows that.
The truth is that...
You know, Victoria's Secret did not go rogue.
They didn't make some uniquely poor business decision.
It was a poor business decision, but not unique.
Instead, they were doing what the rest of the fashion industry and the media are doing.
They were following in the footsteps of Target and Bud Light or Calvin Klein, who started using morbidly obese underwear models a few years ago.
Many other fashion companies, you know, look at Runways now.
And it's like, you know, you see characters that you would have seen in sideways, you know, in sideshow freak shows in the past.
On runways.
You may remember this billboard from Calvin Klein.
This is a, you know, morbidly obese woman on the billboard.
It's all social engineering.
They wanted to redefine what heterosexual males find attractive.
They thought they had that power because, well, they know best.
And they truly believe their customers are stupid and impressionable.
And they thought they could transform them into pronoun-toting lefties and do it pretty easily.
A lot of major media corporations still subscribe to this God complex, by the way.
Take Maxim Magazine, for example.
This is a publication that used to be dedicated to printing pictures of scantily-clad women, so it was never really a high-quality magazine to begin with.
But what are they up to lately?
As the Daily Wire reports, Maxim Magazine named a biological male and former Australian Rules football player, Danielle Laidley, to its hottest 100 women list in Australia for 2023, with the trans-identifying man landing in the number 92 spot.
Laidley, who played and coached in the Australian Football League, joined actress Margot Robbie on the hot list, who was named the hottest woman for the fourth time.
Now for the record, and you know, just for your own edification, if you're wondering, here is Daniel Lately.
You know, I was in the 1.8% of transgender people who hid it from the world.
Be vulnerable, find some people who you can trust, who you can talk to, and they'll support you.
There's the sun there, having to pretend to be proud.
my truth, which was to help dad out and tell her story the best way that I could.
So can you imagine if you were the woman who landed at 93, or 4, or 5, 6, 7, 8, 9?
Like, can you imagine making it on the list below him?
Now there's no point in being cruel here.
Let's just state this as objectively as we possibly can.
A men's magazine that used to be dedicated to scantily clad women is now trying to convince us that a dude who looks like a middle school gym teacher is not only a chick but a hot chick who we should find attractive.
They're trying to gaslight heterosexual males into being something other than heterosexual males.
Just like Victoria's Secret was trying to do.
It's laughable and nobody takes it seriously.
It will fail like the Victoria's Secret campaign failed.
But the financial implications of all this are irrelevant in the big scheme of things.
What's really interesting about these debacles is what they tell us about the dominant ideology among American leftists.
For one thing, they really think they're gods.
They believe that millennia of human development are not important.
Leftists truly believe that they have the power to alter something as fundamental as human sexuality.
They think they can convince women that deep down they want to be fat and unappealing.
As the chief executive of Victoria's Secret put it, quote, "We needed to stop being about what men want
and we want to be more about what women want."
But the truth is, women don't want to be gross or obese or unhealthy.
They have agency regardless of how aggressively the supposed feminists in corporate America want to deny it.
And from the past two years and from all of human history before that,
it's clear that women do value the ideal of beauty.
They aspire to it just like men do.
And the more people of either gender are told to rebel against those basic instincts,
the more they inevitably rebel against the charlatans who are lying to them about it.
For Victoria's Secret, this has been a very costly but important lesson.
For everyone else on the far left, this would be what Barack Obama calls a teachable moment.
They could choose to stop denying the innate differences among the sexes.
They could decide to stop pretending that they can override thousands of years of human evolution.
They could choose instead to embrace humility and common sense, if only for their own self-interest.
Or these companies can continue on their quest to convince Americans that somehow they don't actually find beauty attractive.
Victoria's Secret and Maxim and Calvin Klein and every other company that believes it can change human nature through woke scolding and sanctimonious TV news hits.
They can continue to thrust obesity and other forms of ugliness in our faces and insist that we pretend they're attractive.
If they go down that path, they'll continue to bleed money.
No matter how much they're promoted on MSNBC and The View, they'll lose billions more dollars.
Until they come to terms with reality and they renounce their perverse attempts to re-engineer human psychology and sexuality, they will suffer.
They'll hemorrhage employees and money.
They'll wage a losing battle against human nature itself.
And they will remain, indefinitely, cancelled.
And that'll do it for the show today and this week.
