Ep. 1285 - Harvard's Diversity Hire President Finally Resigns. Is This The Beginning Of The End For DEI?
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Harvard's plagiarizing diversity hire university president has finally resigned. But how did someone so unqualified, unimpressive, intellectually vacuous and morally corrupt ever get into that position in the first place? We'll talk about it. And the media has humiliated itself in its attempts to defend the plagiarist. We'll look at some of the most egregious, and hilarious, examples. Also, Dave Chapelle goes viral with another joke that the trans activists don't like. Plus, Disney has hired the director for the next Star Wars film. She's a feminist, an activist, and her stated goal is to "make men uncomfortable." Disney is apparently determined to have its biggest flop yet.
Ep.1285
- - -
DailyWire+:
Become a DailyWire+ member to gain access to movies, shows, documentaries, kids entertainment and more: https://utm.io/ueMfc
Check out Bentkey Kids Entertainment here: https://bit.ly/46NTTVo
Shop my merch collection here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj
- - -
Today’s Sponsors:
Birch Gold - Text "WALSH" to 989898, or go to https://birchgold.com/Walsh, for your no-cost, no-obligation, FREE information kit.
- - -
Socials:
Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Rv1VeF
Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3KZC3oA
Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eBKjiA
Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RQp4rs
Today on the Matt Wall Show, Harvard's plagiarizing diversity-hire university president has finally resigned, but how did someone so unqualified, unimpressive, intellectually vacuous, and morally corrupt ever get into that position in the first place?
We'll talk about it.
And the media has humiliated itself in its attempts to defend the plagiarist.
We'll look at some of the most egregious and hilarious examples.
Also, Dave Chappelle goes viral with another joke that the trans activists don't like.
Disney has hired the director for the next Star Wars film.
She is a feminist and activist, and her stated goal is to, quote, make men uncomfortable.
Disney is apparently determined to have its biggest flop yet.
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh show.
As we head towards a presidential election in November, there's one thing you can be
2024 will be a tumultuous year.
How will your hard-earned savings fare?
Will you already see the impacts of inflation at the pump and the grocery store?
The dollar continues to lose buying power faster than wages can increase.
How are you protecting your savings?
Consider diversifying with gold from Birch Gold Group.
For decades, gold has been the choice of investors and central banks to hedge against inflation.
If you have an IRA or 401k from a previous employer that's just gathering dust, call Birch Gold
and they will help you convert it into an IRA in gold.
You won't pay a penny out of pocket, they'll simply convert the 401k into physical gold,
which unlike digital currency, can't be tampered with.
Just text Walsh to 989898 and Birch Gold will send you a free info kit on gold
with an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau, thousands of satisfied customers
and the exclusive gold company of The Daily Wire for the past seven years.
You can trust Birch Gold, too.
Text WALSH to 989898 to claim your free info kit.
That's WALSH to 989898.
to claim your free info kit that's Walsh 298-9898 and secure your savings now.
It was over a year ago in October of 2022 that a sub stack blogger named Chris Brunet
published an article warning Harvard not to name Claudine Gay the president of the university.
And here's what he wrote all the way back in October of 2022.
He wrote, quote, I can't stress enough how much of a tragedy a Claudine Gay presidency would be.
This must not be allowed to come to pass.
She will ruin Harvard.
She's an intellectual lightweight.
Her entire body of critical race theory research is flawed and or fake.
She's a far, far left DEI activist and corrupt as hell.
Now, you might point out that it's a little too late for anyone to ruin Harvard.
Harvard's credibility hit an iceberg and sank into the icy depths a long time ago.
You cannot destroy that which is already laying in ruins at the bottom of the ocean.
But even so, Brunet's point was, and he still had a good point, it was disregarded, along with all of his reporting about Claudine Gay's misconduct.
And instead, Harvard announced that Gay, who had never published a book in her life, only had a handful of publications, really hadn't achieved anything of note at all in her professional career, that she would become the university's next president.
When she formally took over the position this past summer.
But in December, everything began to change and unravel very quickly.
First, Gay told Congress that it's not clear whether a call for Jewish genocide
would violate Harvard's code of conduct. She said it depends on the circumstances,
you know, because you can't condemn genocide in principle, she's saying.
I mean, it really depends on the context and the nuances of the genocide, you see.
And then shortly afterwards, Chris Brunais and Chris Ruffo published evidence that Claudine Gay had plagiarized significant portions of her dissertation.
Within 48 hours, the Washington Free Beacon followed up with many more examples of Gay's plagiarism, including entire paragraphs that she lifted for some of her peer-reviewed publications.
And all of this snowballed over the course of a few weeks, and then yesterday, as you've probably heard, Claudine Gay finally resigned.
So those are the very broad outlines of the story, which again, you've probably heard.
What you may not have heard is an explanation for how a blogger on Substack, with a few hundred thousand subscribers, Could possibly have more insight into Claudine Gay than Harvard's board, which supposedly spent months interviewing hundreds of candidates before promoting Gay.
How could this person, this Substack writer, somebody without any affiliation to Harvard whatsoever, understand that the university was going to destroy its own reputation, what's left of it, in a matter of months?
And then exactly that thing happens.
Is he some kind of Nostradamus?
Or was something else going on here?
Well, the truth is that, regardless of what you may have heard, what happened to Claudine Gay over the past few weeks was not shocking or unforeseeable.
It wasn't even unique, really.
It was, in fact, extremely predictable.
Chris over at Substack was able to post about Claudine Gay's corruption, not because he had any special insight necessarily, not because he had any, like, information that was given to him, some secret information, but only because he was one of the only people who were brave enough to publish what hundreds of academics have been saying in private for years.
If you're a conservative wondering when our national DEI fever dream is going to end, This is what makes the Claudine Gay story interesting.
Beneath all the Ivy League trappings, this is yet another manifestation of a phenomenon that we've seen repeated many times in just the past few years.
Once again, it's a prominent brand, really over the past year especially, where once again you have a prominent brand that's tarnished, Tarnishes itself in a predictable fashion that, for some reason, the powers that be decided to ignore until it was too late.
Target's brand collapse was predictable.
So was the collapse of Disney and Bud Light and Fox News.
In every one of these cases, major brands have decided to ruin their own reputations in obviously preventable ways.
All Bud Light had to do was talk to a single normal person before signing Dylan Mulvaney, they would have been told not to do it.
All Target had to do was not sell satanic merchandise and perverse clothing to minors.
Disney could have simply continued doing what it had done for generations, which is make cartoons that are, you know, and family-friendly shows that don't sexualize kids or teach them to hate this country or whatever else.
Fox News could have decided to treat its viewers with some respect instead of promoting Pride Month and shutting down the shows people actually watched.
But they didn't.
In all these cases, corporations decided to self-sabotage.
And now we can add Harvard and its governing body, the Harvard Corporation, to that list.
All they had to do was listen to the warnings about Claudine Gay, or look at her resume, what little there was to call her resume, and then go with a qualified candidate.
Instead, they walked directly into this debacle.
The question is why we keep seeing this happen over and over again.
Well, if you look deeper into the timeline of Claudine Gay's removal, you'll start to see what Harvard was thinking.
Put simply, as we saw in the case of all those other left-wing corporations, there's a lot of hubris involved here.
They thought that they could protect Claudine Gay.
They knew that she was a fake scholar long before Chris Ruffo and Chris Brunet and the Washington Free Beacon published a single story about her.
Well, they also believed that they had enough power and influence to sort of just power through the scandal.
And that's why in October, Harvard threatened to sue the New York Post, which was working on the gay plagiarism story.
You may not have heard about that either.
I mean, the media had this.
They knew about it.
Specifically, Harvard's lawyers told the Post that it was demonstrably false to say that Gay had plagiarized anything.
The lawyers claimed that Harvard had conducted a comprehensive review into all of Gay's writings, and they had cleared her, and so she's good to go.
And they went on to promise that they would sue the Post for immense damages if they went ahead with the story, and so the Post relented.
They didn't publish the story, even though they had it, even though they knew this woman was a plagiarist.
And for a while it appeared that Harvard's strategy had worked.
It wasn't until mid-December, two months later, that Chris Ruffo and Chris Brunet did what the New York Post was too afraid to do.
And by the way, if you notice, they're not getting sued into oblivion for it.
Because you can't sue someone for publishing correct information.
And Ruffo and Brunet, they circumvented the usual media channels, and they published the story themselves.
They obtained documents from a source, probably a professor at Harvard or a similar university, who had meticulously documented several clear instances of gays' plagiarism, and they released that document.
And then, and this is the key part, they didn't stop there.
It wasn't just like, one story, oh look at that, this person's a plagiarist, let's move on.
That's how conservatives have operated for many years.
Okay, we hit that.
Let's move to the next thing.
No, they kept up relentless pressure on Harvard.
Even after Harvard's board put out a statement saying that they had cleared Claudine Gay of any wrongdoing, and they stood with her 100%.
Ruffo and Brunet didn't back down.
Neither did the Washington Free Beacon.
And now the New York Post, now that they felt emboldened enough to actually report the story.
I went back and checked, and these outlets published a new story on Claudine Gay pretty much every day from mid-December until now.
They found new instances of plagiarism, or they spoke to some Nobel Prize winner who thought that she had to resign, or they spoke to the black women that Claudine Gay had plagiarized from, etc.
Whatever it took, they kept the story alive, and that is not what Harvard was anticipating.
That's not how they thought this would go.
Because they thought, and really you can't blame them for thinking because this is usually how it goes, they thought that if people like Barack Obama lobbied on behalf of Claudine Gay, and he did, then the story would die off in a few days.
I mean, that's all it usually takes.
What they weren't taking into account is the lesson that conservative activists have learned over the past year, which is that it takes relentless and consistent pressure to hold anyone accountable when they are protected by the system.
It doesn't mean you can't do it.
I mean, you can do it, it just takes consistency and relentlessness.
Harvard and the media tried to circle the wagons around Gay until so many examples of her plagiarism piled up that it just became unsustainable.
By the same token, Bud Light thought that they could make their crisis go away by sponsoring the UFC and hiring Peyton Manning to shoot some ads.
But this kind of strategy doesn't work anymore.
It doesn't convince anyone.
It just highlights how inauthentic and desperate they are.
Now in the case of Harvard, keeping the pressure on is important because the longer these frauds have to defend their position, the more obviously indefensible it becomes to every sane and reasonable person in the country.
So here, for example, was a CNN expert making his effort to defend Claudine Gay yesterday, even after she resigned, and here's what he came up with.
These plagiarism allegations where Claudine Gay has had to issue corrections, multiple corrections.
Now, we should note that Claudine Gay has not been accused of stealing anyone's ideas in any of her writings.
She's been accused of sort of more like copying other people's writings without attribution.
So it's been more sloppy attribution than stealing anyone's ideas.
Oh, no, no, no.
She didn't steal ideas.
She just copied their writing.
You know, it's not plagiarism.
No, no, this isn't plagiarism.
I didn't plagiarize.
I just copied what these other people said and didn't attribute it to them.
I didn't steal your car.
I just got in it and drove it away without permission.
But you see?
That's the difference.
She didn't plagiarize.
She just plagiarized.
That's all.
Now, any high school student knows how absurd this all sounds.
Because, you know, from high school and before, they drill into your head what plagiarism is and why you shouldn't do it.
But they're trying to pass this off to adults watching CNN as the standard that should apply to the president of Harvard University.
But again, it's unsustainable.
I mean, the more they have to explain their position, the more this is dragged out, the more ludicrous they sound.
Not to be outdone, over at NPR, Eric Deggans had this observation, quote,
"The intimidation is the point. Will the next president of Harvard stand for diversity?
Will that person be female? Will that person be black? If not, they have forced several steps
back and everyone across the school gets the message." Now, it's not even worth addressing
what Deggans said there, but it is worthwhile to take a quick look at his bio.
It turns out that he's an adjunct professor at Duke University, which makes you wonder about Duke's academic standards.
And Deggans is also the author of a book entitled Ray Spader, How Media Wield Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation.
That's actually what his book is called.
And you know that saying about writing what you know, I guess.
Well, Deggans took that advice as literally as possible.
And we saw many other examples of this obvious desperation in her resignation letter.
Claudine Gay never apologized for her plagiarism.
You know, she never really admitted to anything, even as she was stepping down.
And instead, she claimed that she was the victim of racism, of course.
The Harvard board put out a statement basically agreeing with her.
That's especially galling, by the way, given that Harvard hosts events with titles like Disrupting Whiteness in the Classroom.
So, you know, the racism is coming from inside the house at Harvard, obviously.
And for their part, the state propagandists at NPR complained that gay had been targeted by extreme right-wingers.
There are many other examples.
Mark Lamont Hill demanded that, quote, the next president of Harvard University must be a black woman.
You know, we hired this person just because she's a black woman and she was a plagiarist, so let's do it again.
Just keep hiring black women until we find one that isn't a plagiarist.
Never mind the fact that Mark Lamont Hill, I mean, he can't even tell you what a woman is or explain why it's so important that the next president be a woman.
No.
As always, any time one of these people say, well, the next president needs to be a black woman, what's that?
Tell me what that is and we can talk about it.
But he's just making incoherent demands at maximum volume because he's, you know, agitated.
This is what they do.
This is what happens when the right refuses to relent.
The more these race hustlers are forced to explain themselves, the more they discredit all of their social engineering.
They fall back on these crude non-arguments that amount to racism on their own, you know, from them, and just sort of screaming into the void.
I mean, they can't defend anything that Claudine Gay actually did.
All they can do is lash out at people based on their skin color.
And that's what Henry Rogers, a.k.a.
Ibram X. Kendi, did.
He wrote that, "Racist mobs won't stop until they topple all black people from positions of power and influence who
are not reinforcing the structure of racism.
What these racist mobs are doing should be obvious to any reporter who cares about truth or justice as opposed to
conflicts and cliques."
So, if you're upset about the president of Harvard plagiarizing 50 separate times, then you're racist.
There's a word for this, and it's "projection."
As we know, they always accuse you of doing precisely what they are doing.
And all that said, there was one moment of truth in what these DEI pushers said yesterday.
Al Sharpton called gays removal, quote, an assault on the health, strength, and future of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Well, yes.
I mean, that's exactly what this moment represents.
If the conservative movement follows through, this could be the beginning of the end of DEI.
Which, by definition, punishes certain Americans based on their skin color while rewarding others.
This certainly is.
You know, this attack on Claudine Gay, it's an assault on two things.
On plagiarism, and yes, on DEI.
It is that too.
And it could be, as I said, the beginning of the end of DEI.
Now, will it be?
Well, let's see.
According to the New York Post, Harvard's current plan is to keep Claudine Gay on the faculty and pay her a salary of around $900,000 a year.
And I didn't add a zero in there.
That's actually what they're planning on paying her.
$900,000 a year.
Even after she's been outed as a plagiarist.
And that's a pretty clear sign that they don't actually plan to change anything.
Harvard's hoping that the right will celebrate this victory and then forget all about the broader war on DEI.
And you know what, that would have been a safe assumption a few years ago.
Thankfully for everyone who cares about merit and morality, and unfortunately though for frauds like Claudine Gay, I don't think it's a safe assumption anymore.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
And so, it's the attempt by the media to cover for Claudine Gay.
That becomes the story in and of itself.
I mean, they could have just said, After she was exposed as a, the first time that a plagiarism example, because really it should be a one and done with plagiarism when you're an academic and you're the president of what's supposed to be one of the most prestigious schools in the world.
Should be like one example of plagiarism and you're done.
And so the media, the left, all the, they could have just said after the first example, oh, okay.
Turns out she's a plagiarist.
We condemn that.
She should be fired.
And then you move on.
And then if you're on the left, yeah, you try to go find some other quote-unquote diverse person who's not a plagiarist, and they could have just done that.
And then the whole thing wouldn't be nearly as embarrassing for them.
But you've got all these media outlets who have decided to just continually step on the rake.
In an effort to defend Claudine Gay, you know, and so you end up with men.
It's like, of course, the infamous moment from CNN where they described the BLM riots as fiery but mostly peaceful.
And so there have been many little fiery but mostly peaceful moments from the media about this story.
And we went over a few of them in the opening monologue.
This is maybe the worst one.
And it only, it just, you start reading it and it gets worse and worse and worse.
So we'll walk through this.
But here's the AP headline about this.
All this.
Headline is, Harvard President's Resignation Highlights New Conservative Weapon Against Colleges.
Plagiarism.
Let's just stop there for a second.
Just like, pretend you didn't know anything about any of this.
Okay, you didn't know anything about the Claudine Gay story.
And you saw that, and you also didn't know anything about the AP's political leanings, so you've really been just living in a cave somewhere.
And you read that headline.
How would you even interpret that?
I mean, it certainly sounds like conservatives are plagiarizing themselves.
Okay, so conservatives are somehow using, are committing plagiarism in some sort of effort to attack universities.
Like, plagiarism is our weapon that we are using.
So it makes it sound like we are the plagiarists.
But no, in fact, the weapon is the plagiarism that the university president herself committed.
So our weapon is pointing it out, it's noticing.
So really what the headline should say is, Harvard's president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges.
Noticing plagiarism.
That's our weapon, is that we've noticed it.
And as we've learned, when it comes to plagiarism, and when it comes to so many other things, that the cardinal sin that you can commit as a conservative is to notice things.
You're not supposed to notice, really, anything.
Until they give us permission.
There's certain things we're allowed to notice, but only very specific things.
So let's just read a little bit of this article.
American higher education has long viewed plagiarism as among the most serious of offenses.
Accusations of plagiarism have ruined the careers of academics and undergraduates alike.
The latest target is Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned Tuesday.
Reviews by Harvard found multiple shortcomings in Gay's academic citations, including several instances of duplicative language.
While the university concluded the errors were not considered intentional or reckless, Oh, they're just duplicative.
It's not plagiarism.
You see, this language is not plagiarizing something else, it's just duplicating it.
Without attribution.
While the university concluded the errors were not considered intentional or reckless and didn't rise to misconduct, the allegations continued, with new ones as recently as Monday.
Many came not from her academic peers, but her political foes, led by conservatives who sought to oust Gay and put her career under intense scrutiny in hopes of finding a fatal flaw.
Her detractors charged that Gay got the top job in large part because she's a black woman.
Which, of course, is exactly why she got the job.
And also remember, that's actually, of course, everything I'm reading now is all nonsense, obviously.
And this is not how it actually worked.
It didn't work, like, she got the job, and then conservatives said, oh, we're really mad that they gave, that they have this diversity hire, and so we're going to find a way, we're going to go looking for something, you know, we're going to go looking for ammunition.
If that is what happened, it would still be fine.
It doesn't actually matter what the motives are of the people who find the plagiarism.
What matters is the plagiarism.
But that's not even what happened.
As we went over in the opening monologue, this stuff was known before she was even hired.
And there were some conservatives who were trying to help Harvard out by saying, hey, she's a bad choice.
Don't hire her.
You're going to embarrass yourselves.
And they chose to do it anyway.
AP continues, in Gaye's case, many academics were troubled with how the plagiarism came to light.
As part of a coordinated campaign to discredit Gay and force her from office, in part because of her involvement in efforts for racial justice on campus.
Her resignation came after calls for her ouster from prominent conservatives, including Representative Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna, and Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager who donated millions to Harvard.
So at the top of the article, they indicated that this wasn't actually plagiarism.
And then a little bit later, a few paragraphs down, they say, what's really troubling is how the plagiarism came to light.
So it is plagiarism then.
But the plagiarism isn't troubling, it's how it came to light that's troubling.
So, you notice that they aren't really disputing the plagiarism charge.
What they're saying is, yeah, she's a plagiarist, but you only care about that because she's black.
They, you know, they're, what they're doing, they're basically treating, to use a football analogy because I try to fit them in wherever I can, they're basically treating plagiarism like it's holding in football.
And you know, fans, if you're a fan of a team, anytime the ref calls holding, you're going to complain about it, and you're going to say, and when it comes to holding, you're kind of right, that, well, you could call holding on every play.
Everybody holds.
So it always feels a little bit arbitrary when they call it, because you could look for holding and charge everybody on the defense with holding, everybody on the offense with holding.
And that's kind of what they're doing with plagiarism.
Suddenly, what was once considered the greatest sin for an academic has become something that, according to the media on the left, it's like everyone does it.
So we should just let it slide.
I mean, yeah, if you go looking for plagiarism with an Ivy League university president, of course you're going to find it.
And I've seen this from the left, too, where they say, oh, well, you know, if you're going to hit Claudine Gay for this, well, then you should scrutinize every college professor and every president to see if they plagiarize, too.
And I guess we're supposed to object to that.
But instead, we say, yeah, absolutely.
Sounds good.
But, like, yeah.
Let's do it.
Let's look at all these people.
I mean, if Claudine Gay's plagiarism is actually as routine as they make it sound, then by all means, let's fire all the other university presidents too.
Including the white ones.
That, definitely.
In fact, I'd be in favor of this, just to show you how much I believe in racial equality.
I say, maybe we should just fire all of the university presidents automatically, in one fell swoop, and then look for the plagiarism afterwards.
So when it comes to- I'm all for a shoot first, ask questions later kind of approach when it comes to this.
Whatever results in more university presidents and university administrators unemployed, I'm in favor of.
But if you don't like that approach, then I guess we're left with only firing them after the plagiarism has been proven, and with gay it has been proven, literally 50 times.
I mean, this whole thing is just... The left claims that They aren't lowering standards in the name of diversity, right?
They say that we can prioritize diversity and inclusion, but not lower standards, they claim.
And we already know that's a lie, because obviously, if you are hiring somebody based on anything other than merit, you are lowering standards.
But here we have the most dramatic and glaring evidence yet that the standards are being lowered.
I mean, they have lowered the standards so much, they have obliterated the standards to such an extent that they are now excusing plagiarism by university presidents.
They will now accept plagiarism in the name of diversity.
You honestly cannot lower the standards more than that.
And I realize in saying that I might eat my words because they're going to look for a way to do it.
Every time you think the bar can't get lower, I mean, they dig a hole and lower it even more.
But when you consider the job, it's like plagiarism is the worst thing you can do.
It's like, I don't know, hiring a chef for a five-star restaurant Who serves microwaved chicken nuggets.
It's just, you can't lower the bar any lower, given the job.
I mean, there are worse things a person can do in life than plagiarize.
But when it comes to a university president and that job specifically, it's as bad as it gets.
But, I haven't even mentioned the best part of this AP article, and before we move on I have to mention it.
So, let's read this paragraph to you.
Christopher Ruffo, a conservative activist who helped orchestrate the effort against gay, celebrated her departure as a win in his campaign against elite institutions of higher education.
On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote, scalped, as if gay was a trophy of violence.
Invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans.
And actually, so that's the end of the sentence.
He said scalped, which evokes scalping, which was done by white colonists against Native Americans.
And now, anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the history of the New World, of this part of the world, you know that scalping... Yeah, now it is true that white colonists in some cases did take up the practice of scalping, but guess where they learned it from?
In some cases, the white colonists would, yeah, they would collect scalps because they saw the Indians doing it.
And I guess a few of the white colonists said, well, it looks like a good idea, we should try that.
Which certainly is not something that can be justified.
But no, this is actually a Native American practice.
And there's evidence of scalping that goes back hundreds of years before any white man set foot on these shores.
So, The AP, they went apparently, and I'm trying to sort through this, but, because there are two different versions of this article, and so it appears that at some point over the last few hours, they went back and they changed, they edited this sentence, so that now it says, in scalping, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans, and also used by some tribes against their enemies.
They went back and changed that.
They all said, yeah, okay.
Because they were hoping that nobody would notice that.
They could just throw that in.
And then a bunch of people noticed it and said, that's insane.
And so now they went back and, yeah, okay.
A few Native Americans did it too.
And by a few, we mean like every Native American tribe did this.
They just, they cannot stop embarrassing themselves.
It's amazing.
All right.
Well, a couple other things.
As the illegal immigrant crisis continues to unfold and threatens to destroy our country, the mayor of Boston, who was last seen hosting a racially segregated holiday party—remember that, we talked about it—well, she has some thoughts about all of this.
And, you know, whenever she's talking, you expect great insight.
And we get some of it here, for sure.
Every person, every human being has the legal right to come to the United States and seek asylum or shelter and those policies have been in place for a long time, but when the review of that individual's particular situation and the then decision to allow the pathway to stay and/or work authorization that comes
along with that, when that process is so drawn out, people are stuck. They are looking to work, looking to
contribute, looking to be in a safe democracy where they can raise their families and
we at the city level are now dealing with many of the impacts of the processes
having people fall through the cracks at the federal level.
So we're working very closely with the state, this is affecting municipalities across the commonwealth, to be able to triage the situation, create temporary housing so that families can get settled.
Okay, so I mean all the rest of that we didn't really, it's sort of irrelevant.
The key point is the very first thing she said, which is that every person has a right to come here for asylum and shelter.
And the second part of that is important.
Because asylum means, supposedly, there's supposed to be a legal process of coming here and claiming asylum.
But she also throws in shelter, and shelter is just, you know, it's just anything.
So, she's not just saying, and this would also be wrong by the way, but she's not just saying that everyone has a right to come here and follow the legal process of claiming asylum, where supposedly only a very small portion of people are supposed to be granted it, depending on if they fit a bunch of different criteria.
But she's not just talking about that, which again would also be wrong.
She's saying, well, yeah, claim asylum or shelter.
So what she's saying is that everyone has a legal right to come here.
For any reason.
Just to remind you, if you're not keeping track of the tally, there are currently 8 billion people on Earth.
Earth's not overcrowded, despite what they say.
There is, in fact, plenty of room for everybody.
Vast swathes of the globe are still basically uninhabited.
And that includes many thousands of square miles of land that could be inhabited.
So I'm not just talking about Antarctica here.
So the world is not overcrowded, it's not overpopulated.
But certain parts of the world can become overcrowded and overpopulated.
So, like, if you tried to fit everyone on Earth into the United States of America, well, yes, now you've got a real crowding overpopulation problem because you've crammed everybody in.
So, 8 billion people on Earth is not an issue, it's not a problem until you open up the borders Of our individual country and say everyone on earth has a right to come here.
Which is not true.
You know, anytime we talk about rights, and we know that on the left, and they're doing this more and more if you listen to the language that they use.
More and more on this issue and on many issues, you know, they're not, they don't frame it around, well, they still talk about compassion and diversity and all these things, but they have learned to, as much as possible, frame things around the idea of rights, because that's a fundamental American value, and they know that most Americans, they hear rights, and they just, they have a positive association, and so they try to frame everything around that.
And so you have a lot of sort of competing rights claims that are made and it becomes very confusing.
Everyone's claiming they have a right to everything.
So how do we know what's an actual right and what isn't?
Well, one of the ways that you know something is not a right is if, just imagine what would happen if everybody claimed this right.
And if everyone claiming the right would result in the destruction of civilization, or a particular civilization, then we probably know, then it's a good indication that that's not an innate human right.
So if everyone has the right to come to the United States, what happens if everybody calls in that right and says, alright, I have a right to it, I'm deciding to do it.
What if everyone doesn't?
We literally can't fit everybody.
So, pretty good indication that's not an actual human right.
It's also not a legal right.
It's not anything.
I'll tell you what is a right, though.
The people who live here and who are citizens of this country, we have innate human rights, just like any human being does on Earth.
And we also have specific legal rights.
That we specifically are entitled to because we are citizens of this country.
And one of the both human rights and legal rights that we have is to national sovereignty.
Put another way, we have a right to our nation.
To our national identity.
We have a right to that.
We are entitled to it.
Which means that the people who are in power in this country are obligated to defend our national sovereignty.
That's who has a right.
All right.
OK, another quick thing, and this just kind of annoys me, so I'm going to mention the band Green Day.
And yes, they still exist, and they're still making music apparently.
Well, they made waves somehow when they performed on New Year's Eve, and they threw in a line into one of their songs during this New Year's Eve... I don't remember what network they were performing on, but ABC or NBC or one of those.
And they threw a line into one of their songs attacking Trump supporters, something about the MAGA agenda.
Doesn't matter.
Anyway, this has been grabbing headlines among right-leaning outlets for days now.
I mean, for days, there's been headlines about Green Day attacking Trump supporters.
And they did a segment on it on Fox News.
Let's watch that.
I think that it's imperative that we start to define what they mean when they say MAGA agenda.
What does that actually mean?
What does that look like?
Does that mean lower crime?
Does that mean actually secure borders?
Does that mean a better economy?
Because why would you- maybe he is raging against the machine if that's what he's actually asking for.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, that song, the original song, was actually a post 9-11 song because the band at the time was upset about what was happening overseas and the Iraq War and all that.
But, you know, they're probably their biggest hit, right?
But now, to change it, to just continue to make it political, you know, you're just alienating people.
Okay.
Green Day has been a A lame, liberal, faux-punk band for 35 years.
They've been around for almost as long as I've been alive.
Green Day has.
And they've been doing this for 35 years.
This exact thing.
Attacking conservatives, attacking the right.
They've been doing this the entire time.
And trying to grab headlines that way and get attention that way, because their music is terrible.
I mean, it really is awful.
And it always has been.
Like, even in the 90s, back when they were popular.
And I'm not going to say that my music taste in the 90s was impeccable, but even then I recognized, like, this is pretty lame.
And yet, still, 35 years later, you've got Fox News doing segments.
What is Green Day becoming political all of a sudden?
Hey kids, you hear about this Green Day band?
You know this musical band, Green Day?
You hear about them?
They're getting all political!
Can you believe it?
I want Green Day to get back to what they were doing before, which apparently was not political at all.
I mean, look, I know that I'm one to talk, you know, when it comes to complaining about people taking the bait, okay?
So I know that I am notorious for taking the bait.
But we've got to get a little better about it sometimes.
And if you're still doing Fox News segments on Green Day and complaining about their left-wing agenda, then I think it might be time to stop taking the bait.
One other clip I want to play.
This is sort of a long one, but this is from Dave Chappelle's latest special, and it's going massively viral.
And it's a long setup to a joke, and you need the whole thing, or it doesn't make sense.
So we'll play it for you, and then we'll talk about why this clip is getting all the attention that it is.
Let's go ahead and play it.
And the only thing that got me out of that space was a comedian friend of mine, the late, great Norm MacDonald.
That's right.
Shout out to Norm.
And what Norm did, which I'll never forget, is he knew that I was the biggest Jim Carrey fan in the world.
Now, I'm not going to go all into it, but Jim Carrey is talented in a way that you can't practice or rehearse.
What a God-given talent.
I was fascinated with him.
And Norm knew that.
And he called me up and he goes, Dave, um, he says, I'm doing a movie with Jim Carrey.
Do you want to meet him?
And I said, Yes, I do.
And it was the first time I could remember since my father died being excited.
And the movie was called Man on the Moon.
I didn't know any of this.
And in this movie, Jim Carrey was playing another comedian I admired, the late, great Andy Kaufman.
Yes, and Jim Carrey was so immersed in that role that from the moment he woke up to the time he went to bed at night, he would live his life as Andy Kaufman.
I didn't know that.
When they said cut, it was still Andy Kaufman.
So much so that everybody on the crew called him Andy.
I didn't know any of that.
I just went there to meet him, and when he walked into the room where we were supposed to meet, I screamed, Jim Carrey!
And everyone said, "No!"
(audience laughing)
"Call him Andy."
(audience laughing)
And I didn't understand.
And then he came over and he was acting weird.
I didn't know he was acting like Andy Kaufman.
Just like, hey, how you doing?
And I was like, hello?
Andy?
Now, in hindsight, how lucky am I that I got to see one of the greatest artists of my time immersed in one of his most challenging processes ever?
Very lucky to have seen that.
But as it was happening, I was very disappointed.
Because I wanted to meet Jim Carrey.
And I had to pretend his d*** was Andy Kaufman.
All afternoon.
And he was clearly Jim Carrey.
I could look at him and I could see he was Jim Carrey.
Anyway, I say all that to say, that's how trans people make me feel.
[APPLAUSE]
All right, so we got a little bit about Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman, and
then we get to the joke there at the end.
Um, and.
And that is apparently, I haven't watched the Dave Chappelle special, but that is apparently how he opens the special.
He comes right out with another trans joke.
And we know all the heat that Chappelle has been taking for making jokes about trans people, and he comes out right away with a long, drawn-out joke about trans people, which is fantastic.
Give him a lot of credit for that.
You know, Dave Chappelle is not on our side.
When I say our, I mean as a conservative.
He's not a conservative.
On really any issue.
And I know there are some conservatives that every time Dave Chappelle has another trans joke, there are some conservatives that say, well, we shouldn't be applauding him, he's still a left-wing guy on most... Yeah, understood.
But... And I would even say, like, if Dave Chappelle was coming along now, And for the first time, he had found the courage to make a joke about the trans phenomenon.
Then I would say, I don't give him any credit for that at all.
Really.
But he's been doing this all along.
And so I put him in the same category as someone like J.K.
Rowling, who is not a political ally and has made it clear that she doesn't like me personally.
And yet still, I give her a lot of credit.
For not just being truthful about this issue, but for being truthful pretty much all along about it.
And it does make a difference in the culture.
To have people like J.K.
Rowling and Dave Chappelle treating this stuff as the farce that it is, it really matters a lot.
When I talk about how I think culturally on the trans, in the fight against the trans agenda, culturally I believe that we are winning.
Which isn't to say that we've won, which isn't to say that the battle will be over anytime soon, or really ever over completely, but we are winning.
And it's not because of people like J.K.
Rowling and Dave Chappelle, but that has been a crucial aspect In us winning the war culturally.
And that's why everyone appreciates this show.
Here's the other thing.
And I would say this about most of the jokes I've heard Dave Chappelle say or tell on the trans issue.
Like, most of the jokes are not that funny.
They're not hilarious.
And a lot of times they're kind of like punchlines that you've already seen on Twitter a million times.
I mean, that particular joke, I didn't laugh out loud at that joke.
In fairness, I don't laugh a lot at anything, but I don't think in general to laugh out loud joke necessarily.
But people, it's funny, but people appreciate it because this is the kind of thing that comedians are supposed to be making fun of.
And I do think that, again, people like Dave Chappelle have been You know, you could say that, and you would be right in pointing out that people like Dave Chappelle and J.K.
Rowling shouldn't necessarily have all the cultural influence that they do, but they do.
And it's impossible to overstate how important it's been to have people like them telling truth, even if they won't tell the truth about anything else, at least telling the truth on this.
And in Dave Chappelle's case specifically, it's not just telling the truth about it, but it's treating it like a joke, making a mockery of it, because that's what it is.
Let's get to Was Walsh Wrong.
So yesterday we had the story in the Daily Cancellation about the gay activists in Seattle who had rallied together to put a stop, put a kibosh on a playground that was supposed to be built and a playground that was going to be funded by a private donation from an anonymous donor, half a million dollars.
This person was donating to build a playground in a part of the city where there apparently is, there aren't any other playgrounds that are in close walking distance.
So they want to build a playground for families and children in that part of the city.
But the gay activists saw this as an anti-gay conspiracy, as another example of gay erasure,
because the playground was close to a beach where these gay activists like to hang out
naked.
And because of the, even though the laws are extremely permissive in Seattle and in the
state of Washington, they still are not allowed to be naked around children.
So you put the playground there, then it would shut down the nude beach.
And so they rally, they say, don't build the playground, it's more important that we can be naked at this beach.
And of course, the city relented and said, yeah, you're right, never mind.
Who cares about the kids?
What matters are these adults who want to get naked in public?
As you can imagine, I was opposed to that decision by the city, but there are some people who disagree with me over some of those comments.
Is Matt under the impression that there are thousands of nude beaches in Washington?
There aren't.
Even in Seattle, nude beaches are thin on the ground.
Without agreeing with the gay lifestyle, I'm on their side on this.
They were there first.
Okay, first of all, I've never been to a nude beach, but I don't think that thin is ever
the right description for the people who tend to go to places like that.
Second, as I said yesterday, you can be naked in public all over the city and the state.
Public nudity is unfortunately legal.
And so there's thousands of other places you can go.
But third, that doesn't matter anyway.
Because this is a matter of priorities.
And you claim that you don't agree.
I find that hard to believe.
You don't agree with the gay lifestyle, but you think it was the right decision for the city to prioritize a gay nude beach over a playground for children in the community.
And you don't agree with the lifestyle.
There's something there that's not quite adding up.
This is a matter of priorities.
Yeah, you have two things that are in conflict.
Like we just talked about a few minutes ago.
You have competing rights claims, sort of.
And you get this a lot.
You have two different groups that are laying claim to something.
And this is why we need our public officials to come in and have the right set of priorities and figure out whose claim should prevail.
In this case, you had gay activists saying, we really want to get naked here and take off our pants.
The other hand, you had families saying, this is a great, this would be a good place we could bring our kids.
Well, if you have your priorities straight, then obviously the latter will win out.
But in Seattle, they don't have the priorities straight.
Another comment says, I don't know, Matt, it's pretty obvious that the anonymous donor was trying to put a playground there to shut down the nude beach.
Why else would you build a playground next to a nude beach?
I find it hard to believe that somebody was donating half a million dollars to build a playground, all as some sort of, you know, conspiracy to shut down a nude beach.
But it doesn't matter.
The motivations don't matter.
What matters, again, is priorities.
Who should take precedent?
In general, from a cultural perspective, who should take precedent?
Kids or gay nudist activists?
And not just in Washington, but culturally, we've decided that we've taken the wrong side.
And finally, Matt cannot hide his contempt for LGBT people.
He openly calls them weird and degenerate.
Shameful.
Well, I did use those words to talk about these people, but if you remember, I was quoting them directly.
It was actually the gay activists themselves who described themselves that way.
And if the shoe fits, wear it, I guess.
Even if you're not wearing anything else.
Start 2024 off right.
The fight to reshape our culture has never been more crucial.
And at The Daily Wire, we are leading the charge.
We've got some incredible things lined up for you this year, with new series like the hilarious Mr. Bircham coming early 2024.
It's The Daily Wire's first ever animated series featuring an all-star cast, including Adam Carolla, Roseanne Barr, Megyn Kelly, and more.
Plus, brace yourselves for The Daily Wire's highly anticipated series, The Pendragon Cycle.
Breathing new life into the authorian legend, inspired by the works of acclaimed Christian novelist Stephen R. Lawhead.
Filming just wrapped, and right now you can catch a sneak peek of what's to come with our incredible Pendragon Cycle production diaries at dailywire.com.
And the 2024 election will be one of the most pivotal in our country's history.
The Election Wire is your source of truth, bringing you everything from the campaign trail to the debates and election day.
And for our younger audiences, DailyWirePlus members can now unlock our brand new kids app, BentKey, at no additional cost.
This is where you can find shows that kids love and parents can trust.
And of course, you'll be the first to see Snow White and the Evil Queen, featuring our very own Brett Cooper exclusively on BentKey.
In 2024, your DailyWirePlus membership will give you more of myself, Ben Shapiro, Candice Owens, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavid, Jordan Peterson, PragerU, But that's just the beginning.
This will be The Daily Wire's biggest year ever, but we can't do it without your support.
Join the fight to reshape our culture and take back our culture at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
It was a 12-month period so dull and unimpressive that Taylor Swift won Person of the Year by default.
But as we tracked and discussed throughout the year, for a company like Disney, 2023 was something beyond merely unimpressive.
It was downright catastrophic.
In fact, Disney's self-immolation was, for the rest of us, one of the year's only major bright spots.
If nothing else, at least we all got to watch Disney lose a bunch of money.
And so the year was not a total waste in hindsight.
The New York Post details this week just how bad things got for the once great movie studio, reading, quote, 2023 marked Disney's 100th anniversary of making movie magic.
It also marked a disastrous year at the box office.
Out of eight major theatrical releases from Disney this year, seven of them significantly underperformed with audiences not just in the U.S., but overseas as well.
The first was in February with Ant-Man and the Wasp, Quantamania, Despite an all-star cast, including Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Bill Murray, the $200 million priced film earned only $250 million domestically and $476 million worldwide, far short of the $600 million it needed to break even on its theatrical run.
$250 million domestically and 476 million dollars worldwide far short of these 600
million dollars it needed to break even on its theatrical run
now presumably 600 million dollars represents its production and marketing
budget Because Disney spent well over half a billion dollars
Making and promoting a film about a man in an ant costume who runs around
punching bad guys and as I understand it communicating with ants
From what I'm told, that's one of the superpowers of this superhero, is that he can communicate with ants.
How does that even help you when you're fighting bad guys?
It's like a very specific kind of bad guy that that would help you with.
I mean, like a bad guy who's the size of an ant.
And in that case, why do you need communicator?
You just step on him.
So I don't know.
In fact, this film actually was a sequel.
So, in total, Disney has spent over a billion dollars on the guy in the ant costume franchise.
They could have provided food for like 50 African villages for a thousand years, but instead they spent the money on Ant-Man.
Now, I'm not one to complain about inequities, okay, but this is a bit much.
And that was only the first of their flops.
As The Post highlights, another superhero movie, The Marvels, had a $274 million budget.
It still hasn't cracked $100 million at the box office.
And the flops continued from there.
Moviegoers showed signs of being tired of recycled material from Hollywood.
Disney had a lot riding on its live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, starring Halle Bailey, released in May.
It earned a respectable $297 million domestically, but greatly fell below expectations internationally, earning just $267 million overseas.
The film had a $250 million budget.
The next month, Disney released Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, starring 81-year-old Harrison Ford.
It grossed just $174 million domestically, less than $400 million worldwide, making it impossible for the studio to recoup its budget of nearly $300 million, which does not include marketing costs.
Disney closed out the summer with its reboot of Haunted Mansion.
Making a dismal $68 million domestically and $117 million worldwide, the $150 million budgeted remake starring Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Tiffany Haddish, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jared Leto.
Disney's 2003 predecessor starring Eddie Murphy, which was also considered a major disappointment, still grossed $182 million worldwide with a $90 million budget.
So in case you missed that, just to review, They spent $150 million remaking a movie from 2003 that was a flop the first time around.
No one wanted to see it the first time, and then they did it again.
And no one wanted to see it the second time.
So of course we have to try a third time.
I mean, if Haunted Mansion didn't work out, and the remake of Haunted Mansion didn't work out, well then I've got an idea.
The remake of the remake of The Haunted Mansion, that's what's gonna get butts in the seats.
So they're just layering flops on top of flops, dud after dud.
And then they remake the dud, and that's a dud too.
And it's not hard to see why Disney is failing so consistently.
You don't need to consult any marketing analysts or PR gurus.
Just ask any average moviegoer, and they will tell you.
I mean, literally walk up to anybody on the street.
And to ask them how they feel about Disney right now, and when they tell you that they don't like Disney, ask them why.
And there'll be two reasons.
They'll give you two reasons why people aren't watching Disney movies.
The first is that the films are almost always rehashed, stale, overdone, played out.
They aren't producing anything original or interesting.
I mean, Disney films are so unoriginal and derivative that you would think the scripts are being written by Claudine Gay.
Which, in fact, they sort of are.
Or by people like her.
Which brings us to the second reason that audiences, of course, are tired of the left-wing propaganda in these films.
Disney movies, just like the movies from any other big studio, are preachy and derivative.
And that's it.
That's the problem.
That's what almost any moviegoer, no matter how they identify politically, will tell you.
And that means that the solution for Disney, as we mentioned at the top, is pretty simple.
Just make movies that are original, or at least somewhat original, and also not political.
Another way of putting it, focus on telling stories again.
Disney for so many years was a storytelling company.
They told stories.
And get back to that.
That's all you have to do.
But that does not appear to be in the plans for Disney in 2024.
Instead, they're going to double down on everything that audiences hate.
And that's why the company announced a few days ago that they will be producing a new Star Wars movie this year.
So, you know, we're rehashing again, we're going back to the Star Wars.
And it will be directed by a feminist journalist.
So they're giving the Star Wars franchise, not just to a feminist, but to a feminist journalist.
The Independent reports Sharmeen Obeid Chinoy, who is set to become the first woman and the first person of color to direct a Star Wars feature film, has said it's about time.
The 45-year-old Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker made her name as an Oscar-winning documentarian before going on to direct two episodes of the Marvel series Ms.
Marvel.
Her Star Wars movie, which has been written by Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight and is rumored to be titled either Star Wars A New Beginning or Star Wars New Jedi Order, is set to begin filming this year.
Quote, I'm very thrilled about the project because I feel what we're about to create is something very special, obeyed Chinoy told CNN during their coverage of New Year's celebrations around the world.
We're in 2024 now, and it's about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.
Yes, it's about time.
It's about time that a woman shapes a Star Wars story.
Now, of course, Every Star Wars film and TV show for the last decade has already been shaped by a woman.
Kathleen Kennedy is the president of Lucasfilm.
And the last Star Wars trilogy was about a woman.
It was about a female superhuman Jedi person.
But even so, this is an historic moment because they're adding yet another woman.
And this woman is the most feminist of them all.
And just to show you that, here she is a few years ago.
Before she was selected to be in the Star Wars franchise, here she is explaining what her goal is when she makes a film.
And you might, if you don't know any better, you might think, oh, her goal when she makes a film, it must be to tell a great story that people want to see.
Oh, no, it's not that.
Here it is, watch.
What is the balance of activating a force for change, but also trying to permeate that patriarchy, that power structure, and is that a part of the calculation of your art as well, and what's been the reaction to that?
Oh, absolutely.
I like to make men uncomfortable.
I enjoy making men uncomfortable.
Not you.
Point taken.
Point taken.
But, you know, it is important to be able to look into the eyes of a man and say, I am here, and recognize that.
And recognize that I am working to bring something that makes you uncomfortable, and it should make you uncomfortable, because you need to change your attitude.
And it's only when you're uncomfortable, when you're shifty, when you have to have difficult conversations that you will perhaps look at
yourself in the mirror and not like the reflection and then say maybe there is
something wrong with the way I think or maybe there is something wrong with the way
I am addressing this issue. There's your next Star Wars director. Now I mean
needless to say if a man ever openly confessed that he enjoyed making women
uncomfortable he would be fired from whatever job he has probably like sent
to jail.
He certainly wouldn't be hired to make the next Star Wars film, nor should he, because by the way, enjoying making people uncomfortable, that's not a normal thing for a human being.
That's not healthy.
You should not enjoy... Now, there are times when it's necessary to cause discomfort in other people, but you should not enjoy other people's discomfort.
That's the definition of being a sadist.
That's the definition of sadistic.
Now, all that to say, we're not uncomfortable Okay, nothing that you can say is making... When you talk about the patriarchy and men here, we're not... Oh, man, this is uncomfortable.
This is really... I feel like she's... We're not uncomfortable.
We're bored.
That's the effect that you have on men.
You can make us bored and, like, irritated, and we find you tedious and dull, And we don't want to be around you, but discomfort is not really the word I would use.
Whatever word you use, though, this is the kind of contempt that Disney has for its audience.
That even after a year of failure brought on by politicized and unoriginal films, they are now gearing up to make what is sure to be their most politicized and also most unoriginal film to date.
It's become kind of a war of attrition with the audience.
And they assume that you'll eventually come back and you'll start giving them your money again.
Especially if it's Star Wars, because it's Star Wars and you'll just sort of dutifully show- Even if you know the movie's gonna suck, you'll show up anyway and give me your money because it's Star Wars and this is what I do.
That's what they're assuming.
But now you need to prove them wrong.
And make this the year that Disney is, once and for all, finally, cancelled.
