Ep. 1264 - Blue State Decriminalizes All Drugs. Total Societal Breakdown Immediately Follows.
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the advocates for drug decriminalization have gotten what they wanted across the country, especially in Oregon. But a new report reveals that what they wanted, apparently, was the total breakdown of society. A pop star plans to give out banned books at her concerts in Florida, which is a problem considering that no books are banned in Florida. Also, the NSA goes fully woke. And Marvel's new feminist superhero movie is their biggest flop of all time. We'll talk about all of that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
Ep.1264
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, the advocates for drug decriminalization have gotten what they wanted across the country, especially in the state of Oregon.
But a new report reveals that what they wanted, apparently, was the total breakdown of society.
Also, a pop star plans to give out banned books at her concerts in Florida, which is a problem considering that no books are banned in Florida.
And the NSA goes fully woke.
Finally, Marvel's new feminist superhero movie is their biggest flop of all time.
We'll talk about all that and more today on The Matt Walsh Show.
With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the left has lost their minds.
Leftism is their religion.
Abortion is their official sacrament.
Meanwhile, pro-life efforts, which are now more important than ever, are booming.
Despite the narrative, pro-lifers have not gone away.
In fact, they're getting more and more active.
As one of the largest pro-life organizations in the world, no one is in a better position than 40 Days for Life to end abortion state by state.
They've opened a record number of locations since Roe was overturned.
They continue to grow in volunteers.
They now have 1 million volunteers in 1,500 cities.
40 Days for Life holds peaceful vigils outside abortion facilities in an effort to change hearts and minds in the most blue pro-abortion states.
You can help 40 Days for Life fight ongoing legal battles to protect free speech for their volunteers by giving a tax-deductible gift of any amount at 40daysforlife.com.
That's 40daysforlife.com.
Shortly after an 18-year-old opened fire on children at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas last year, killing 19 students and two teachers, the New York Times published a lengthy front-page article on the killer's background.
One line in the Times report didn't last very long before an editor deleted it from the article without explanation.
The sentence in question quoted one of the gunman's co-workers at Wendy's as saying that, quote, That was never clear why that particular line was deleted.
his mother and grandmother whom he told her did not let him smoke weed or do
what he wanted. It was never clear why that particular line was deleted most
likely they wanted to push gun confiscation instead and it kind of
confused the narrative but in any event the New York Times didn't want to talk
about the shooters marijuana use.
If the blogger Alex Berenson hadn't spotted the change, it's likely no one would have ever noticed it.
What we do know is that if the shooter in Uvalde was indeed a pothead, then there are a lot of other examples just like it.
Many other mass shooters from Parkland to Aurora to Tucson to Sutherland Springs were reported marijuana users.
That dovetails with research showing that young people who use marijuana were more than twice as likely to commit acts of violence.
To just give one example, the American Journal of Psychiatry published a meta-analysis of several large-scale studies three years ago.
The conclusion was this, quote, "These results demonstrate a moderate association between cannabis use and physical
violence.
Cannabis use in this population is a risk factor for violence."
Now, you never hear about these studies, probably for the same reason that the New York Times censored itself for
mentioning marijuana in the context of the Uvalde shooting.
In elite circles, talking about the consequences of marijuana use is unpopular.
Anything that discourages people from smoking more weed is also disfavored.
It's almost like they want the masses to be drugged and passive, which might explain why the cigar tax in New York is 75% while the marijuana tax is less than 15%.
Regardless of what exactly explains that discrepancy, the PR effort to push marijuana has obviously been successful over the past decade.
Two dozen states have passed some form of legalization or decriminalization of marijuana.
And because slippery slopes are real, and anybody who uses the term slippery slope fallacy is lying to you, the decriminalization movement did not end there.
Instead, it progressed far beyond marijuana, as it was always destined to do.
Three years ago, on the heels of the race riots following the overdose of George Floyd, Oregon became the first state in the country To decriminalize the possession of all illegal drugs, not just marijuana, but every illegal drug.
Nearly 60% of voters in the state approved this measure, Measure 110, along with a separate measure that legalized the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms for therapy.
And the idea was that the laws against heroin and meth and other drugs were counterproductive and oppressive and, of course, racist, so they had to go.
And hopes were high, as Vox reported at the time, quote, Given that decriminalization is so far untried in the U.S., it's difficult to say how it would play out.
In that sense, Measure 110 would create a real-time experiment for Oregon and the rest of the country.
Well, not long afterwards, though, we started to see the results of this experiment.
Problems began to emerge, we might say.
In 2022, a local news station embedded with the head of a Portland drug interdiction task force, and here's what they learned.
Watch.
Back at the office, Ferguson is willing to show us drugs and guns seized recently in two separate cases.
Those little blue pills are fentanyl.
It's everywhere.
It's everybody we contact.
I have a couple of cases that are back-to-back cases we did this week.
And in each case, it's fentanyl possession and stolen handguns.
And this is almost everything we do right now.
How much does Measure 110 have to do with it?
Measure 110 has everything to do with it.
Ferguson said because Measure 110 reduced possession for small amounts of drugs, including oxycodone, the drug business has flourished.
The fentanyl pills are counterfeit oxycontin pills.
And by decriminalizing that, it's basically legitimized criminal organizations and the drug possession, use and sale is just rampant with very little consequences and it's taken away our tools as police officers to sort of interdict that.
Reported drug offenses in Portland dropped from 880 the year before Measure 110 went into effect to 364 the year after.
Police still do have some tools, and Ferguson was involved in a bust last June in which investigators found 500 fentanyl pills, along with 44 firearms, two of which were machine guns, and 1,000 grams of methamphetamine.
Okay, so Measure 110, the officer says, is the reason that fentanyl and stolen handguns and machine guns are flooding Oregon.
Measure 110 has everything to do with it, he tells the reporter.
Well now, three years after Measure 110 was passed, voters are tired of it.
It only took three years.
Polls now show that a majority of residents in Oregon want to re-criminalize hard drugs.
After they just decriminalized it, now they want to re-criminalize it, and a ballot measure doing so is expected next year.
And that's because, predictably, decriminalizing cocaine and heroin and everything else has led to nothing less than a breakdown of society in Oregon, to the extent that there was a society there before this.
This week, the Wall Street Journal published an extensive analysis into the effect of Measure 110 on the state.
It's a report that everybody should read, as it just I mean, it entirely annihilates the case for drug legalization.
I don't think there's ever been a side of an issue that has been this thoroughly and completely debunked, using not just studies or speculation, but real world.
Now we see in the real world what actually happens when all drugs are legalized, and it is a disaster.
And yet still, almost all the pro-drug legalizers are simply ignoring it.
They've gotten what they wanted in Oregon and to a lesser extent all across the country.
But you notice that they're not out like touting the success of the policy they advocated for.
Maybe you notice that and that's because there is no success.
It has been a catastrophe.
The paper reports that as a result of the law, quote, people sprawled on sidewalks and
using fentanyl with no fear of consequence have become a common sight in cities such
as Eugene and Portland.
From May of 2022 to May of this year, the number of fatal overdoses in the state increased by more than 20% to 1,500 overdoses.
That is the third highest jump in the entire country.
Police in Eugene, Oregon report that this year there have been 858 calls for overdoses.
In 2020, the number was 438, which was already high.
And now it's like double.
The whole point of Measure 110 was to force these people to go to rehabilitation services instead of jail.
But of course, that hasn't worked either.
Quote, some 6,000 tickets have been issued for drug possession since decriminalization went into effect in 2021, but just 92 people have called and completed assessments needed to connect them to services, according to the Journal.
The only penalty for those who don't call is a $100 fine, which is rarely enforced.
So, in sum, Oregon's decision to decriminalize all drugs has been an abject and totally predictable disaster.
It turns out that when you invite people to do drugs whenever and wherever they want, you end up with a lot more people doing drugs whenever and wherever they want.
You know, advocates for decriminalization have always claimed that somehow decriminalizing drug use will not lead to more drug use, as though the law has no effect on people's behavior.
But that flies in the face of everything we've observed about human behavior since the dawn of civilized society.
Okay?
To put it simply, laws matter.
When the law allows a certain behavior, you get more of that behavior.
Like, it's not hard to figure out this equation.
It's actually very simple.
And that's why, unless we want a lot more overdose deaths and illegal guns in major cities, we should be taking a very close look at all forms of drug decriminalization, including the more limited and, you know, efforts that we've seen across the country.
As I mentioned earlier, weed is legal in most places now.
How is that working out?
Is there any evidence that it's making anything better?
Can we look at the promises that were made by the weed legalization side?
Look at their promises.
Has any of that panned out?
I mean, by the naked eye, it certainly seems to, rather than helping anything, seems to be contributing to our social decay.
It has a demoralizing effect, at the very least, to walk through any city in America now and smell the stench of weed everywhere, with people walking around stoned anywhere you go.
And I say this, by the way, as someone who, for a time, believed that weed, and not any other drug, should probably be, you know, just be legalized, or at least decriminalized, as much as I personally don't like the drug.
There was a time when I bought into that same idea, but I can look around at our cities and smell the stench everywhere and see people high on drugs everywhere, and I can ask myself, has this made society better?
Or has it made it worse?
I mean, that's the question everyone should be asking themselves.
Now, aside from the naked eye test, what does the data say?
For a lot of reasons, it's hard to measure the precise impact of marijuana decriminalization on people's quality of life.
There are so many variables, including the decision by leftist DAs to stop enforcing a bunch of other laws.
And because of that, you know, it's difficult to ascribe any particular blame to one specific policy or another.
It's all kind of like a jumbled mess.
Now to be sure, a lot of jurisdictions that have legalized or decriminalized marijuana have seen significant increases in crime.
New York legalized cannabis in 2021, for example, and then immediately saw its overall crime index jump by more than 22%.
Along the same lines, after Washington's Supreme Court struck down the state's drug laws, effectively legalizing all drugs until legislators could fix the problem, crime spiked.
Washington's rate of violent crimes jumped from 337 per 100,000 people in 2021 to more than 375
per 100,000 people in the following year. Now there's no easy way to determine with absolute
certainty at this stage what role drug legalization is playing in all of these numbers.
Specifically, there have been some attempts at drilling this down.
A couple of years ago, analysts at the Justice Research and Statistics Association looked at the impact of marijuana legalization or decriminalization in 11 states, including Washington, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nebraska, and others.
And they did this by speaking to local officials and law enforcement personnel and hearing what they had to say.
And the researchers found that after Washington State legalized recreational marijuana use in 2020, arrests for both the possession and distribution of heroin and methamphetamine increased significantly.
And remember, we were always told that the whole thing about the Gateway drug is a myth.
It's a fallacy.
It's a myth.
It's not what the numbers show.
Meanwhile in Colorado, which also decriminalized pot a decade ago, the researchers found that quote
"respondents in particular reported an increase in the homeless population from individuals moving to the state
for jobs in the marijuana industry that failed to materialize other concerns expressed by interviewees
related to criminal behavior associated with the marijuana business such as attempts to steal marijuana and take over
selling from locals."
In Oregon, there were similar concerns.
Quote, an Oregon respondent reported a 55 to 60 percent increase in marijuana related DUIs following marijuana decriminalization.
Along the same lines, a separate research team from the University of Utah scrutinized crime data
from Oregon and they found that quote, "Results provide some evidence demonstrating a crime
exacerbating effect of recreational marijuana legalization as reflected by substantial
increases in the rates of multiple types of serious crime in Oregon relative to non-legalized
states following legalization, including property and violent crime overall, as well as other crimes
such as burglary, motor vehicle theft, larceny, and aggravated assault."
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Now, none of this is really particularly surprising given that marijuana is a psychoactive drug that's been linked to violent behavior.
What is perhaps surprising, though, is that given what we know and don't know, several states are still pushing the decriminalization agenda.
Ohio, for example, is set to decriminalize the drug in just a few weeks.
And I want you to watch how local news is covering this.
Watch.
Well, marijuana will be legal to buy and sell in the Buckeye State in just 24 days.
But that doesn't mean that marijuana shops will be open just quite yet.
Our Michael Sandlin, he joins us live from the East Side tonight.
And Michael, I understand you spoke to a professor who kind of broke down the timeline until people can actually buy marijuana?
Yeah Jeff, I spoke to Professor Brandon Cohen, who teaches multiple cannabis management classes at UToledo.
He said looking at how things went in Michigan and Colorado, he expects it'll be a little over a year before we start seeing marijuana shops pop up in our local neighborhoods.
He walked me through the process it's going to take to get there.
Saying that once Issue 2 makes it through the legislature, it's passed off to the Department of Commerce, the same group that regulates and works with legal medical marijuana and liquor.
They sent all the rules and regulations for sale, which will take at least a few months.
Once that's finished, it'll ask the public to submit proposals for businesses.
And once those are reviewed and the best candidates are selected for licenses, we should start seeing businesses for recreational use start to pop up around Q4 of next year.
Now if you voted for Issue 2, you know on the ballot it says these new businesses will bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue.
And the report goes on like that for a few minutes longer, but you notice that they're not talking about how decriminalizing marijuana is going to make everybody more productive and happier members of society.
They're not claiming that it's going to make the state a better place to live, which is really what every law ultimately should be designed to do.
Every law ultimately should have the objective of making life better for people.
Before you talk about rights and freedoms, that ultimately is supposed to be the goal.
And if there's a law that's going to make life worse for people, then it's a bad law.
That's the number one way that you know it's a bad law.
It's making life worse.
It's really not.
It's actually a pretty simple test.
So they're not talking about how safe the schools in Ohio will be after young children with mental disorders are granted even easier access to psychoactive drugs.
Instead, they're talking about tax revenue.
You know, they're telling you how much money the state will make.
That's the whole pitch.
They're not even pretending otherwise.
And that tells you something that even left-wing voters in Oregon are now realizing, which is that the more recreational drugs you legalize, the more crime and urban decay you have to deal with.
This really should not be a surprise.
People are, again, more likely to do something when there is no legal ramification for doing it.
That doesn't mean everyone stops doing drugs when you make it illegal.
It just means that the fewer obstacles in the way, the fewer consequences, the more of that behavior you get.
And so before you legalize drugs, you should ask yourself, is it going to be good for society if more people are doing this?
Do we want that?
Is that a positive?
Is that something we want to facilitate that as voters?
And if you answer no to that question, then you don't legalize it.
And it's not just because of the practical obstacles put in place when something is illegal, it's also because the law is a teacher, as the saying goes.
A thing begins to seem less objectionable to people when the law endorses it.
That's the problem.
And also, there's something else that's been revealed by the decriminalization across the country, especially in Oregon.
So the other thing that we hear from the libertarian types is that, well, if you could decriminalize drugs, and it only, it just affects, when someone decides to do drugs, it just affects them, it just affects their life.
Let people do what they want to do with their own lives.
If they want to poison themselves, it doesn't affect anybody else.
Okay, well, it's very clear that that is not the case.
See, it turns out when you've got a bunch of people who are all deciding to poison themselves, it has an enormous impact on everybody else.
The breakdown of society actually affects everybody.
So ultimately, there's no upside for anyone but the state treasury and also the politicians who desperately need voters to be as stoned and submissive and out of it as possible.
Otherwise, if voters aren't high out of their minds, they might realize what these politicians are doing to their communities.
They might realize that destruction and decay are a choice.
And then, like the voters in Oregon, they might decide they've finally had enough of it.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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So there's a big exclusive report from the Daily Wire today.
It says the National Security Agency, responsible for monitoring threats, both foreign and domestic, from the U.S.
military, assumed a new responsibility under the Biden administration, creating a massive glossary of woke terms for employees ranging from anti-racist to the gender-neutral pronouns zay and zur.
A copy of the NSA's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Glossary, obtained and verified by the Daily Wire, shows that the agency now provides definitions for terms such as Queer theory and white fragility as part of its expansive guide for 327 social justice terms that blame white Europeans for engaging in settler colonialism and warns of trans misogyny.
And all of those are in quotes.
White Europeans, settler colonialism, trans misogyny.
The 34-page document, published internally on May 6, 2022, but never released publicly before the Daily Wire's investigation, pushes blatantly left-wing views on race and sex.
It explicitly endorses the tenets of critical race theory and queer theory, both of which are included as terms on the glossary.
The leaked, unclassified NSA document identifies itself as a glossary of terms and language commonly used in dialogue regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice.
It also cites Robin D'Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi as sources.
The DEI Glossary goes on to list a plethora of different vocab words associated with queer theory, like transmisogyny, which is defined as the intersection of transphobia and misogyny.
Then we hear about ZZer, and so on and so forth.
There's also demigender, demiboy, and demigirl.
All this is in the Glossary.
Okay, so, This is the NSA we're talking about.
So what we're seeing is the, of course, the further ideologizing, which isn't a word, but I'll make it one, the further ideologizing of what are supposed to be non-political, non-partisan areas of government.
And now I realize that non-political area of government is like an oxymoron.
It's kind of an impossibility.
But even so, the idea is that agencies like the NSA are supposed to be non-ideological.
Yet, as we see, the Biden administration, because they're Democrats, because they are modern leftists, they do not believe in allowing anything to be non-ideological.
They don't even agree that that should be a goal, even if it's ultimately an unachievable goal, because people individually are political and ideological, and so you put them together in any context and that's going to be a part of it.
But they don't even see that as an ideal goal.
For them, everything and everyone must not only conform to leftist doctrine, but must make the spread and promotion of leftist doctrine into their primary goal and their primary function.
And this is one of the defining features of modern leftism, that everything and everyone exists primarily to spread the ideology of leftism.
That that's what every institution, no matter what its charter is, no matter what its function is supposed to be, coming before that always is the spread and promotion of modern leftism.
But there's also a deeper strategy at work here that we have to understand, which is that Democrats are continuing to ensure that they control the government.
Whether or not they win the presidency, whether or not they control the House or the Senate, that they still control the government.
Day by day, year by year, they work to make elections effectively irrelevant.
Everyone talks about the need for election integrity, which is an extremely important issue, but I think what's missed is that the ultimate kind of like rigging that they're up to right now is making it so that the elections don't even really matter because it doesn't matter what what essentially the elected officials become like figureheads and standing sort of at the top of this of this bureaucracy that is fundamentally to its core left-wing.
That is the goal here.
And they have Succeeded wildly here.
The federal government is far left.
It is ideologically captured, no matter who is running it.
Even if Trump wins the White House in 2024, he still will have a national security agency staffed by Zsers and centered around DEI, just like the rest of the federal government.
You know, if the bureaucracy is left-wing, then it will advance left-wing causes no matter what figurehead sits at the top of it.
That's the ultimate goal here.
And that is also why draining the swamp, which I've noticed has not been a phrase used as often this time around, we don't hear it as much among Republicans, which is troubling because that should still be one of the primary goals of any Republican.
is to quote-unquote drain the swamp.
But it's a massive, massive undertaking.
It requires extreme measures.
We talked a few days ago about Vivek Ramaswamy's plan to fire half of the federal government immediately, at random, just based on their social security number.
Fire half of them.
And that is the kind of thing, that's the kind of plan That's needed here.
Just take a hatchet to this thing.
Take a buzzsaw to it.
And when we talked about a couple days ago, we were focused on the fact that the government's too big, it's too expensive, too costly, and all those things are true.
But what is more important is that the government is also a radically left-wing, behemoth, blob-like organism, and radical solutions are necessary for that.
And, you know, firing half of them right out of the gate, it's still a good place to start.
It certainly makes the whole thing more manageable.
So, the question to ask all the Republican candidates is, what exactly are you going to do?
Explain, in detailed terms, what you plan to do to deal with this problem.
To deal with an enormous bureaucracy of astronomical size that is fundamentally left-wing to its core, ideologically captured by the left, that will work against you every step of the way, and is also working, more importantly, against the people every step of the way.
What will you do about that?
We've heard Vivek's plan.
We've heard Ron DeSantis speak.
In detail about this, like what are some practical things that can be done?
We've heard him speak in detail about it.
We need the detailed plans.
Daily Wire has this.
Pink posted a list of what she said, the singer Pink, posted a list of what she said were banned books that she planned to give away during her four concert stops in Florida.
Um, this was a few days ago, but the problem is that they aren't really banned in the state.
The 44-year-old pop star recently announced that she's teamed up with a non-profit called Pen America to hand out 2,000 banned books while touring the Sunshine State.
Pink said in a press release, Books have held a special joy for me from the time I was a child, and that's why I'm unwilling to stand by and watch while books are banned by schools.
It's especially hateful to see authorities take aim at books about race and racism and against LGBTQ authors and those of color.
She said in the statement, we've made so many strides towards equality in this country and no one should want to see this progress reversed.
No more, no more banned books.
And she mentioned some of the books that she would be giving out that were banned in Florida.
To Kill a Mockingbird, A Catcher in the Rye, The Kite Runner, The Bluest Eye, The Diary of Anne Frank.
She's claiming is banned in Florida.
Um, but all that is just a lie.
So it's the banned book narrative, as always, is a lie.
And here's what's really happening here.
If Pink is giving out banned books at her concert, then she won't be giving out any books at all.
Which is probably the best strategy, because I don't know who's going to a Pink concert in the year of our Lord 2023, but I don't think these are people that do a lot of reading anyway.
And second, the list of banned books is zero books long, so you're giving out zero books.
Which kind of makes sense, because if they were banned in the state, then you wouldn't be able to announce ahead of time, hey, I'm going to this state to hand out this banned substance.
And if it's true, as Pink and anyone on the left would say, that not only is Florida banning books, but also Florida is run by a fascist dictator named Ron DeSantis, then, you know, that's all the more reason why you wouldn't be able to do that.
You wouldn't be able to just say at it, hey fascist dictator, I'm going to come into your state and break your laws.
So the fact that the left feels It feels perfectly comfortable saying that, I think, kind of proves that they don't believe their own nonsense.
Because you could, I mean, look at any country in the world that we could accurately say is run by a dictator, and you aren't going to do that.
You aren't going to say, hey dictator, I'm coming in to break your laws, get ready.
No, in fact, Florida has not banned any books, no state anywhere in the country has banned any books.
You know, banning a book would mean passing a law prohibiting the book from being sold.
That is what a ban means.
And that doesn't exist anywhere.
It's not happening.
The book-banning narrative is a total fabrication.
It is a complete lie.
It is something invented by the left.
It has no basis in reality.
It's not happening.
It's about as real as the noose that was in Bubba Wallace's garage.
I mean, it is in the same vein as a hate crime hoax.
It's that sort of thing.
This is Jussie Smollett-level stuff.
That's how fictional and absurd it is.
But!
There are some books that have been removed from schools.
That's not a book ban.
You know why?
Because there are thousands of books in the world that have been... I mean, probably millions.
How many books exist in the world?
How many individual titles exist in the world?
Many, many, many thousands.
Only a relative few of those many, many countless thousands are available in schools.
Right, because a school cannot make every single book that's ever been written available.
They can't stock it all in their library.
They can't put it all in their curriculum.
So, decisions are made about which books to assign in schools or to make available in schools.
And guess what?
The vast majority of books that have ever been written will not be in the schools.
You could say that you take any school in any state and you could say that Almost none of the books that have ever been written are in this school.
Because there are so few books in the school compared to all the books that have been written.
Only the smallest little sliver of a selection will be in the school, and all the rest will not.
So, does that mean that every school has banned almost every book ever written?
No.
It just means that only a small selection in a school of books are judged to be appropriate, one, And relevant to school-aged children.
And some states and districts have arrived at the obviously correct conclusion that, for example, gay pornography is neither relevant nor certainly appropriate for school-aged children.
So books like Genderqueer and other books like that have either been removed from schools or not put in schools to begin with.
And when the left talks about book banning, that's what they're referring to.
Those books.
Which means that Pink, I guess, is apparently planning to give out gay porn at her concert.
And she should be arrested for that.
Now, does that mean that book banning isn't happening at all?
Well, I guess it kind of depends on how you look at it.
But I would say yes, book banning is not happening anywhere.
Does that mean that all is well and good in the land of books, in literary land?
No.
Because something worse than book banning is actually happening.
There is a worse form of quote-unquote book banning.
And it's all being done by the left.
And for the left, for the most part, they're not trying to ban books.
Because, you know, banning a book would be too honest.
It would be too forthright.
It's too transparent.
If you just flat out say, this book is not allowed because we don't like it, that in fact would be much better than what the left is really doing.
Instead, they are keeping the book on the shelves, you know, the title, the cover.
So all the books are allowed to stay on the shelves, but they're changing the content inside the book.
That's the game.
And this is what we've talked about on the show before, which is a topic that should get a lot more attention than it does.
Especially in response to the left constantly screaming about book banning.
The answer from the right should be, no, book banning isn't happening, but let's talk about what you guys are doing, what they call quote-unquote sensitivity readers.
And as I said, we spent plenty of time on the show talking about this phenomenon, which is far more insidious than book banning.
And that is when you have publishers hiring radical leftists To come in and rewrite books according to leftist sensibilities.
And they are doing this oftentimes to dead authors who obviously have not consented to having their own writing.
I would much prefer, I would much prefer if the left came along and said, you know, in this state, you can't, those books are not allowed because we don't like them.
I'd much, I wouldn't approve of that.
I wouldn't like that.
I would much prefer that.
Over them saying, oh yeah, you want that book?
Here it is.
This is that book that you want.
But little do you know that they have changed the content of the book and put words in a dead author's mouth and on his pen according to their sensibility.
Because that is what's happening.
And it's happening all over the publishing industry.
It's extremely common.
So that's what we should be talking about.
Another report from Daily Wire says Target is once again under fire for offering over-the-top leftist merchandise in its stores.
The company faced criticism and boycotts earlier this year for its Pride merchandise, which included tuck-friendly female swimwear and children's merchandise emblazoned with Pride messaging.
Now they're back at it with their Christmas decor section and the account nwokeness shared some images apparently from a target.
I think we have those images.
Let's put those up.
So we've got a gay trans nutcracker.
It's just... I'm just now processing that for a second.
A trans nutcracker.
It's so, so on the nose that it's... How is that even real?
Apparently that's real.
I mean...
Okay, and then next we have the disabled black Santa, as well.
So, you know, Target is fully still embracing the trans nutcracker.
I almost intended to not object to that, because like it kind of, it actually makes sense in a certain way, but just be careful what kind of nuts you're cracking with that nutcracker.
This is obviously crazy woke nonsense at Target.
I don't shop at Target.
They've decided to stay in this lane and take the sales hit, I guess.
They're too far in at this point.
They're too bought in, and they can't get out.
So, we could talk about that, but I'm more focused on the fact that Santa is disabled.
There needs to be more of a conversation about that.
There's got to be a whole backstory.
To that, like, how did that, did he fall off a rooftop?
Did he have some kind of collision in his sled?
It's like, that's a tragic story, really.
So I'm not, when I see the disabled Santa, this doesn't make me mad.
I'm concerned.
I was like, what's the story here for Santa?
And also, I think maybe even a greater concern is like, how does this work logistically?
How does Santa get on and off of his sleigh?
Or does the wheelchair fly?
How does he go down chimneys in his wheelchair?
Do we need to build wheelchair ramps to make our chimneys handicap accessible?
It's all kinds of questions.
And I'm just trying to understand.
We should always ask questions, and those are the questions I have there.
All right, finally, you've probably already seen this, but I've had it on deck here for a few days and haven't mentioned it, and it's... I'm not gonna say it's worth mentioning, but we are.
Anyway, Megan Rapinoe tore her Achilles apparently in the last game of her career, and this happened a few days ago, and she was asked about that, and she finds kind of a cosmic significance in that event.
Let's watch.
This is a long one, although I'm going to get the Aaron Rodgers treatment, whatever that is.
So I'm going to be calling him or whoever did his surgery because we need to speed this up.
But yeah, I thought about it a little bit.
I mean, you know, I'm not a religious person or anything.
And if there wasn't God, like this is proof that there isn't.
This is f***ed up.
So, yeah, it just, it's just f***ed up because it's six minutes in.
It's kind of amazing this to someone who is so just so dedicated to being as viscerally unlikable and unappealing as she can possibly be like everything always anytime you see her on camera before you hear what she's saying you take one look at her you're already annoyed and then you hear what she has to say and she's just there's a there's a level of consistency To that, that you almost find impressive.
Like, she's like the Cal Ripken Jr.
of being unlikable.
She just keeps putting in the hours every single day, and she doesn't take a break from it.
You know, it also doesn't make any sense.
If there was a God, this is proof that there isn't.
Doesn't make any sense.
And of course, as many people have pointed out, if anything, her injury is proof of the opposite proposition.
If anything.
It is proof of divine justice.
And actually, if anything in her career would call into question divine justice, it is that she had a career in the first place.
If you're going to pull anything from Megan Rapinoe to say that it calls into question anything, it's like, how did a person like this, how were they allowed to be prominent and financially successful in the first place?
But I think ultimately Rapinoe's unearned prominence and financial success does not disprove God or his justice because we live in a fallen world.
And it's just, that's a symptom of it.
Though it is a world where in the end justice prevails.
And I think we've seen that in this case.
God bless us all.
Let's get to Wes Walsh.
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Wayne's Borough Observer says, Matt, be careful wishing for more involuntary commitments to insane asylums.
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Waynesboro Observer says, Matt, be careful wishing for more involuntary commitments to
insane asylums. I think today's government would put Americans believing in traditional
gender norms there before schizophrenics.
I share the same concern.
I don't know if this is one where you win the game here for Waswell Strong.
No, ultimately you don't, because I share your concern, but, and I think that you're, I mean, I'm worried about the exact same thing, which is why, you know, it took me maybe a little bit longer to jump on the Bring Back Insane Asylums bandwagon because of this exact Concern.
Because we know who the powers that be consider to be insane.
And we also know that there is this considered process that's been happening for decades now to slowly but surely medicalize and kind of psychologize the entire human condition.
And so that eventually everybody counts as being insane.
And So you combine that with if they did bring back Insanus Alms and you worry about it.
So it is a real concern, but it's also... We have discovered the other option is untenable.
The other option is to have actually insane people just walking everywhere in society.
And we've seen what that means.
And it's just not tolerable.
Terry says, you are complicit in the incivility in political and social discourse.
You and all your colleagues make a living on spreading hatred and divisiveness.
So the fact that right-wing zealots are trying to start fistfights in the Senate is a direct result of people like you.
I don't think I deserve, Terry, the credit for that.
I don't think I deserve the credit for that wonderful Quite wonderful moment that we played on the show yesterday of a fistfight almost breaking out during a Senate hearing.
I don't think I deserve credit for that, but I'll take it.
I'm happy to take the credit for that.
You know, I'm going to guess that that is a charge you have, you know, interestingly enough, fascinating to think that that's a charge that you probably have never leveled at anyone you disagree with.
And so, like most people, Terry, when you say divisive, when you complain, oh, you're being divisive, all you mean is that I am disagreeing with you.
So that's what divisive is to you.
It's anything you disagree with.
And finally, Shaking My Head says, Matt, the federal government can already trace any post to a specific computer and address.
They already did that to Douglas Mackey.
The story of how they found him via a chat room stunk up my whole house.
She wants to legalize, she being Nikki Haley, wants to legalize what they're already doing.
Yeah, we don't need to follow the Nikki Haley path of forcibly unmasking every anonymous account on the internet so that she can know, what was her exact phrase?
I want their names.
Because she said that exactly, talking about anonymous accounts.
I want their names!
Even if you don't do that, yes, the federal government can find out.
Whatever you've ever done on the internet, the federal government already knows about it.
And if they don't, they can find it out.
And so we know that's true.
But it just goes to show that Nikki Haley, that is a problem.
The lack of privacy, the fact that we have this politicized apparatus tracking people down, putting them in jail for memes and jokes, depending on their political persuasion, that is, to put it mildly, a major problem.
And Nikki Haley is not interested in solving it.
In fact, she just wants to make it worse, which is what she's talking about doing.
Black Friday sales are coming, and there's one in particular that you need to know about.
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(upbeat music)
You know, the world can be a bleak place and getting bleaker by the day,
which is why it's all the more important to celebrate the good news when it comes.
Rejoice in the victories, which brings us to this past weekend and the opening of the latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a phrase that I prefer not to use because the universe itself is vast and varied and fascinating, but the Marvel Universe, on the other hand, is repetitive and dull and tedious and pointless.
Not really a universe at all, it turns out.
It's just a series of films where each film exists only to set up the next film, which exists to set up the next one, and the whole thing altogether primarily exists to sell merchandise.
The only similarity between the actual universe and the Marvel universe is that the actual universe has lots of black holes, and the Marvel universe is a black hole.
It is a giant, gaping vacuum that has expanded by consuming the rest of the movie industry, so that at this point in 2023, nobody in the movie industry knows how to make a movie unless it involves people in rubber suits kicking each other.
All that to say, the latest Marvel movie, creatively titled The Marvels, was a massive, humiliating flop.
And thank God for that.
We should also note, as this is likely not a coincidental factor, that the film is a female-led girl power fest starring a team of women superheroes headlined by feminist actor Brie Larson.
The abysmal numbers show just how thoroughly uninterested audiences seem to be in this kind of content.
The Marvels opened with a $47 million weekend, which is a number that, you know, Might seem high, given that $47 million would be enough to feed 9,000 African villages for 100 years or something.
But in terms of Marvel movies, it is a catastrophic failure.
Easily the worst opening weekend in the history of the Marvel franchise, generally.
And made all the worse when you compare the box office receipts to the production budget.
Reportedly, the Marvels cost something like $275 million to make.
And that's just the production budget of the film.
It doesn't count the many millions spent on marketing.
Yet just to recover the production budget, the Marvels would have to earn somewhere just south of half a billion dollars at a minimum.
And based on the opening performance, it is extremely unlikely that that will happen.
The film is doomed to go down as yet another recent big-budget Hollywood flop.
In fact, the performance has been so bad that according to The Hollywood Reporter, it has Marvel Studios rethinking their whole strategy for making and releasing films.
Watch.
This isn't the first warning sign that something's been amiss within Marvel in terms of quality control, as Kevin Feige's team has been in overdrive producing shows for streaming.
Features Eternals and Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania also received B Cinema scores, while audiences began complaining about keeping up with an increasing number of shows on Disney Plus to understand the overarching MCU story.
Behind the scenes, Marvel Studios and Disney were well aware the Marvels was in trouble before it hit the big screen.
Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter there was also a recognition that Feige and his team needed time to take stock of their theatrical tentpoles.
On November 8th, Bob Iger said on an earnings call that Disney's movie empire has, quote, lost focus because of an emphasis on quantity over quality in the rush to feed Disney Plus under the Bob J. Peck regime, though it was Iger himself who initiated this push before J. Peck's reign.
Sources say Feige and his team felt this mandate keenly to the detriment of Marvel's movies.
The next day, Marvel and Disney revealed they were scaling back the number of superhero films they will release in 2024 from three to just one.
Well, if I could offer some solace to audiences, you don't need to keep track of the overarching Marvel story because there is no story.
You're watching a series of extended toy commercials, and the narrative is very much a secondary concern if it ranks even that high, which I don't think it does.
But this leads to the question of why a redundant, lifeless, big-budget, but weirdly cheap-looking feminist superhero girl power movie would perform so poorly.
No, that's not a question that any sane person has to think very hard to answer.
You know, I just kind of answered it in the question itself.
The question answers itself.
The media isn't thinking very hard either.
They've, of course, decided that it must be sexism.
So here's an article in The Stylist laying the groundwork for this excuse before the box office receipts were tallied.
That's how you know Right, that a movie is good is that before it comes out, they're already telling you that if you don't watch it, you're a bigot.
Quote, fresh off the back of first reviews, fake takes about the film have sadly started to circulate on X, formerly Twitter, from people who have not yet seen the movie.
This might sound familiar, the first trailer stirred the sexist trolls from their slumber And after they review-bombed Captain Marvel, it was almost inevitable that they would return to do the same for the sequel.
Within two days of its release, the teaser became the most disliked video on YouTube, with one user labeling it, which is great.
It seems that the toxic underbelly of the comic book franchise is back on display, as some misogynistic fans attempt to slander a brilliant film simply because it's led by three women.
Slander!
Yes, the toxic underbelly is slandering again.
Gotta watch out for that toxic underbelly.
And of course, this has to be the explanation.
Why else wouldn't people flock to see a movie where a bunch of annoying women run around punching people?
That's the conclusion shared by the director of the film, too, Nia DaCosta.
As Breitbart reports, she was making these kinds of excuses well ahead of time.
Quote, "As Disney's 'The Marvel' goes down as the biggest flop in Marvel Cinematic Universe
history, the movie's director, Anita Costa, has played her final three cards, race, gender,
and sexuality.
The Marvel's director lashed out at haters, calling them bigots in a recent interview
with Variety.
But the irony is that her movie's largest group of ticket buyers has turned out to be male and white.
Nia DaCosta sounded off on the negative fan build-up to the Marvels during the interview, quote, There are pockets where you go because you're like, I'm a superfan, I want to exist in the space of just adoration, which includes civilized critique.
Then there are pockets that are really virulent and violent and racist and sexist and homophobic and all those awful things.
And I choose the side of light.
That's the part of fandom I'm attracted to.
So did you catch that?
It is not only racist and somehow homophobic to dislike the Marvels, it is also violent.
Not paying 30 bucks for two tickets to the Marvels this weekend is an act of violence.
Choose the side of light, the director implores you.
Choose goodness.
Choose love.
Choose to give her your money.
Now, the problem with blaming the movie's horrible performance on sexism and racism, one of the dozens of problems anyway, is that, as it said in the article, by far the largest demo who went to see the film were men.
And most of them were white men.
Presumably blind and deaf white men, but those details aren't recorded.
So, perhaps Nia DaCosta needs to take this up with all the women and racial minorities who arrogantly and violently declined to go see the movie in theaters.
I mean, they're the ones who failed her.
Or maybe, alternatively, she is the one who failed by failing to make a movie that anyone wants to see.
Yes, now I think maybe we're on to something here.
So why did the movie actually flop?
I think there are two reasons, both of which we've already alluded to.
The first is that, for the most part, the truth is nobody really wants to see female-led action movies.
People are not that interested in female action stars.
Hollywood insists that we should be interested, but we just aren't.
Female audiences are, it turns out, especially not interested in female action stars.
Now, there are some exceptions to this rule.
There are a few iconic female action heroes, like Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in the Alien films, and a couple of others.
But as a general principle, action movies are a man's domain.
They are for men, they are about men, and that's just the reality.
You could be sad about it.
You can insist that it should be different, but it is what it is.
And that's why if you look at a list of the top 50 highest grossing action films of all time, maybe two of the top 50 were led by women.
And one of them was Captain Marvel, coming in at 19 on the list, which grossed about a billion dollars.
But that film was sandwiched in between Avengers Endgame and Avengers Infinity War, both in the top five, and it rode their coattails to box office glory.
So Captain Marvel is kind of like the WNBA of superheroes.
Her existence depends on the success of her male counterparts.
Although, in fairness, people did actually go to see Captain Marvel, but literally nobody in history has ever seen a WNBA game.
In any case, the point is that audiences aren't generally interested in female action films.
It's not because of sexism, given that female audiences are also uninterested.
It's more that men, by and large, Just they make more compelling, more convincing, more entertaining action heroes.
That's not my opinion.
I mean, it is my opinion, but it's not just my opinion.
All of the objective evidence suggests that it is the opinion of almost all moviegoers, men and women alike, whether they put it so bluntly or not.
Also, the audience for action movies is primarily male.
Especially superheroes.
So, like, when an 8-year-old boy goes to see Spider-Man, he likes to imagine himself as the hero.
No 8-year-old boy is running around the house with a bath towel made into a cape, shouting, I'm Captain Marvel!
That's not happening.
Hollywood has tried to turn the action genre into a women's domain.
They've tried to feminize it.
Like, they've tried to feminize everything.
But the social engineering just hasn't taken hold, and probably never will.
And second, as I've already covered, female-led or not, the superhero genre has long since grown stale.
Now it is moldy and decomposing on the counter.
There is just a limit to how long you can convince the audience to come back and watch the same story over and over again.
It turns out that the limit is about 20 years.
That's the limit.
Now, for me, it was like 20 minutes.
I saw 20 minutes of one superhero movie.
I said, yeah, I kind of get it.
Like, it's fine.
I get it.
I understand.
I understand superhero movies.
I understand what you're doing.
I get it.
I don't need to re-watch it a million times.
I don't need to spend two decades of my life watching this same thing over and over and over again.
But a lot of audiences, apparently, they needed to do that.
But even those audiences are the ones that have a much greater tolerance for repetition, even though they have grown tired of it.
I would say that their tolerance for repetition is too great.
But at least now most of them seem to agree that if Marvel wants us to watch their movies, they need to start making actual movies, rather than, as Martin Scorsese would say, amusement park rides that go around in circles forever, never ending, never saying anything, never bothering to tell a story.
Or they can keep on their current track and continue losing money, which is perfectly fine with me.
Either way, it's not just me saying, but all of America apparently saying, that the Marvels is today cancelled.
