Ep. 1301 - The ADL Pushes Law Enforcement To Investigate Me For The Crime Of Having Opinions
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a shocking new report reveals that the ADL, a left wing activist group, has been pressuring law enforcement to open terrorism investigations into me and several other conservative commentators. Also, Greg Abbott holds the line against the Biden administration and refuses to allow them to tear down the border fencing. Are we headed towards a Fort Sumter situation? Plus, major media companies are experiencing mass layoffs and shutting down left and right. And in our Daily Cancellation, I found myself in the middle of another social media controversy for my unorthodox, unapproved opinions about therapy, mental illness, and depression.
Ep.1301
- - -
DailyWire+:
Become a DailyWire+ member to gain access to movies, shows, documentaries, kids entertainment and more: https://utm.io/ueMfc
Shop the NEW Jeremy’s Women’s Collection here: https://bit.ly/3RCphRM
Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj
- - -
Today’s Sponsors:
ExpressVPN - Get 3 Months FREE of ExpressVPN: https://bit.ly/3VeHvZM
PreBorn! - Help save babies from abortion: https://preborn.com/Matt
Windshield WOW - Exclusive Discount for my Listeners! Use promo code WALSH at checkout. http://www.WindshieldWOW.com
- - -
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, a shocking new report reveals that the ADL, a left-wing activist group, has been pressuring law enforcement to open terrorism investigations into me and several other conservative commentators.
Also, Greg Abbott holds the line against the Biden administration, refuses to allow them to tear down the border fencing.
Are we headed towards a Fort Sumter situation?
Major media companies are experiencing mass layoffs and shutting down left and right.
And in our daily cancellation, I found myself in the middle of another social media controversy for my unorthodox, unapproved opinions about therapy, mental illness, and depression.
I'll explain and double down today on The Matt Wall Show.
the internet without ExpressVPN, it's like leaving your keys in your car while you run
into the gas station for a snack.
Most of the time, you're probably fine, but what if you come back to see someone driving off with your car?
Every time you connect to an unencrypted network in cafes, hotels, or airports, any hacker on the same network can gain access to your personal data, such as your password, financial details, and so much more.
It doesn't take much technical knowledge to hack somebody.
All a hacker needs is some cheap hardware.
Hackers can make up to $1,000 per person selling personal information on the dark web.
ExpressVPN creates a secure, encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet so hackers can't steal your sensitive data.
It'd take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption.
I love how easy it is to use ExpressVPN.
All you gotta do is fire up the app, click one button to get protected.
It works on all devices, your phone, laptop, tablets, and more.
Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash Walsh.
That's exprssvpn.com/walsh.
You can get an extra three months free.
Expressvpn.com/walsh.
After 9/11, dozens of state-run, quote unquote, fusion centers
popped up all over the country.
Now there are roughly 79 of them in operation, and they exist in virtually every state.
The point of these centers is supposedly to facilitate cooperation between the federal government and the states in order to gather intelligence and prevent terrorist attacks and other serious threats to the homeland.
But here's the strange thing.
They don't appear to be doing that.
A couple years ago, investigative reporters at The Nation found that the Fusion Center in Central Florida was investigating, quote, criminal and violent extremist use of emojis.
The Fort Worth Fusion Center, meanwhile, was preoccupied with a plot to break the Netflix star Joe Exotic out of prison, while the Capital Region Fusion Center was busy looking into viral TikTok challenges.
The Washington State Fusion Center, for its part, opened an investigation into a report, quote, concerning a homeowner working on cars in his driveway and letting oil run down the street into Mission Creek in Olympia.
Now, in any other context, this would be considered fraud.
These state governments are taking money to fight terrorism, but they're not remotely attempting to do that.
In fact, they don't appear to be doing anything of consequence whatsoever.
Which, in this context, is especially strange.
I mean, normally, when federal and state governments give themselves vast powers of surveillance and lofty new mandates, they don't waste their time chasing down homeowners who are being a little sloppy while they work on their cars.
They usually start using their expanded powers as quickly and as widely as possible.
So, one of two things is happening here.
Either these fusion centers are a massive and long-standing fraud, or there's something else going on here.
Or, a little bit of both.
Now, for a while now, there have been signs that the latter explanation—something else is going on here—is the more plausible one.
In their investigation, The Nation obtained documentation indicating that one area of focus for these fusion centers is, quote, First Amendment-protected events.
But the journalists weren't able to provide much more clarity on that, probably because the government redacted information on their investigations in this area.
So we learned all about the TikTok investigations and the emoji investigations at these fusion centers, but not so much about their crackdown on the First Amendment.
And that's where things have stood for the past several years.
But yesterday, thanks to a report from Mary Margaret Olihan at the Daily Signal, we have indication of the actual mission of these fusion centers and what First Amendment-protected events they might be interested in.
The Daily Signal obtained an email sent in February of 2023 by the Anti-Defamation League, or the ADL, to the Washington State Fusion Center.
And that's the same fusion center that was looking into that homeowner who was working on his car in a sloppy way.
Here's the subject line.
White Supremacist Fight Clubs Anti-LGBTQ Plus Hate.
On the body of the email, the ADL warns about, quote, online amplifiers of LGBTQ plus hate promoting, quote, false narratives escalating harassment of LGBTQ plus individuals.
This alleged hate includes, quote, the vilification of drag shows and, quote, baseless claims of child grooming by LGBTQ plus people.
According to the ADL's email to this Washington State Counterterrorism Center, this vilification, quote, further endangered and isolated an already at-risk community.
According to the Daily Signal, the email then appears to link to an ADL blog post which identifies who the purveyors of this supposedly dangerous hate are, and those people are Libs of TikTok, the account Gays Against Groomers, Blaze Media, Christopher Ruffo and of course that international infamous terrorist who goes by the name Matt Walsh.
Now the post states that quote, the ADL is advocating for government partners to strengthen laws against perpetrators of online hate as well as consulting with law enforcement partners to act on online hate speech that incites violence and or credible threats.
The ADL says that it teamed up with GLAAD as well and they're apparently all working with law enforcement.
In other words, The ADL, just to get you up to speed here, the ADL told a counterterrorism agency to investigate journalists and political commentators because we are saying things they don't like.
They are trying explicitly to use the arm of the law to silence us at gunpoint.
Now, they don't even claim that we violated any law, right?
They're not claiming that, because we haven't.
Instead they're saying that because we oppose the chemical and physical castration of children, and because we believe in biology, and because we don't think that men should be cross-dressing in front of children, therefore we are inciting violence.
So they call on law enforcement to act.
The Daily Signal reached out to the Washington State Patrol about this, and they're one of the state agencies that participate in this fusion center.
They indicated that they take emails from the ADL and various other interest groups under advisement, but they denied opening any investigation on the basis of the ADL's email.
So, according to them, as far as we know, there is not a current criminal investigation against, say, me, for tweeting things that they don't like.
Obviously, we have no idea whether that's true or not.
We also have no reason to believe that it's true.
It would certainly be strange for the ADL to send an email like this to a counterterrorism center if they thought it would just be ignored.
The fact that they're sending it would seem to indicate that there's some kind of relationship here, that there's some sort of precedent.
We also have no idea how many similar emails the ADL has sent to this particular fusion center or any others.
What we do know is that the ADL has a very long history of not simply advising law enforcement agencies, which they shouldn't even be doing that, but participating directly in law enforcement functions.
This is a quote from a speech that James Comey, who was the FBI director at the time, delivered to the ADL's Leadership Summit back in 2014.
Quote, the FBI works with the ADL to host civil rights and hate crime training for our state and local counterparts through a number of programs.
And the ADL, of course, has even greater reach.
You trained more than 12,000 law enforcement personnel last year alone, and I want to thank you for that.
So this is not a typical political nonprofit we're talking about here.
The ADL is conducting training for law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.
And these partnerships have only accelerated in recent years, post-BLM.
As the ADL states on its website, quote, In 2020 alone, ADL's Center for Extremism provided law enforcement with critical intelligence about extremism over 1,000 times and tracked over 5,000 new incidents of hate on our online interactive heat map.
In other words, the ADL, which supposedly was founded to combat anti-Semitism, is now a de facto intelligence agency for federal and state law enforcement.
This is the organization that's now advising the Washington Fusion Center to investigate me and several other commentators for having offensive opinions.
Now...
If you know anything about the history of the ADL, this actually probably wouldn't surprise you.
The ADL has a long and well-documented history of working with law enforcement, even going so far as to actively participate in law enforcement investigations.
One of the more famous cases took place in the 1960s when an ADL director raised money for the FBI to pay some Klansmen $36,000 in an effort to set up other Klansmen.
Now that incident led to a shootout and the death of one Klan member.
Whatever you make of that operation, journalists noted at the time that it was obviously a little strange for a private tax-exempt organization to be involved in this.
The ACLU at the time called for an investigation.
But in the end, no one seemed to mind.
The ADL adopted a pseudo-law enforcement assistant role, which they've retained ever since.
Now, I've focused on the ADL so far, mainly because they're the group that are trying to have me specifically investigated, but there are many other organizations like the ADL doing the same thing.
Maybe the most notable is the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC.
You might remember that the FBI cited the SPLC in its infamous memo claiming that, quote, radical traditionalist Catholic ideology is a significant terrorist threat in America.
The FBI tried to hide that memo, but a whistleblower came forward and released it.
The SPLC is a completely discredited group.
They've even had to pay out defamation settlements for some of their more egregious hack jobs.
And the Bureau knows that, according to the whistleblower, but the FBI tried to cite them anyway in order to justify the targeted surveillance of Catholics on the basis of their religious beliefs.
We've seen many examples of similar misconduct in recent years in which the government partners with some supposedly independent private entity In order to lend some legitimacy to its obviously illegitimate investigations.
During the Trump campaign, the FBI effectively teamed up with the Washington Post in order to obtain secret surveillance warrants against the Trump team.
The FBI even copy-pasted from a debunked Washington Post editorial in its FISA warrant application against Carter Page.
And more recently, the DOJ has been investigating Dr. Ethan Haim because he blew the whistle on Texas Children's Hospital, which claimed that it had stopped butchering children, but kept on doing it anyway in secret.
And that got the attention of trans activists and their various advocacy groups, which in turn led to the DOJ knocking on Haim's door.
Now, they know they don't have a legal case against him.
They know it's not a violation of patient privacy to disclose the existence of unlawful and unethical procedures without disclosing patient identities.
But they're harassing him anyway.
They want to send him to prison, take away his medical license.
Now, it's not hard to see where all this leads.
As I told The Daily Signal, When they called me about this story to get my comment on it before they published it.
You know, I have no doubt that if Biden wins another term, we will actually see prominent conservative commentators arrested on hate crime and terrorism charges.
That is going to happen.
This is not hyperbole or being dramatic, conspiracy theories.
This is what they want to do, and they're laying the groundwork for it right now.
First, they open investigations.
Then they start surveillance.
And then once that's normalized, they escalate things.
We talked about slippery slopes yesterday on the show in relation to trans ideology.
This is yet another slippery slope that we are on.
The ADL is telling government counterterrorism centers to suppress political dissent.
And the fact is that unless they pay a price for this, unless there is enormous backlash, And unless the law enforcement agencies stop taking marching orders from these compromised far-left-wing activist groups, then they'll continue to make these demands.
And eventually, they'll get what they want.
And at that point, if it gets that far, the only real question will be, which of us do they hit first and try to make an example out of?
of.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
Each January, churches across the country commit themselves to observing the sanctity
of human life and honoring the 65 million babies whose lives have been tragically ended
through abortion.
Sadly, since the overturning of Roe, babies' lives are at an even greater risk.
It's been reported that the abortion pill accounts for over 50% of all abortions, making abortion available 24-7.
I met someone and I got pregnant and I wasn't ready.
When I was at the clinic, after they told me how far along I was and that the baby had a heartbeat, I cried, and they gave me a minute by myself in the room.
I broke down, and I prayed to God.
I asked the Lord to, when I walk out of those doors, to just give me the strength to be able to go through the pregnancy.
I made my decision at that time.
Treasure, I chose because I know that she was a gift from God, and she's just gonna be a treasure.
I'm super grateful that I'm able to go down this journey with my daughter, and I'm just super glad that I didn't have abortion.
Preborn needs our help.
For just $28, the cost of a dinner, you can sponsor an ultrasound to introduce a mother to her baby for the first time.
100% of your donations will go towards saving babies.
To donate now, all you gotta do is dial pound 250 and say the keyword, baby.
That's pound 250, baby, or donate securely at preborn.com slash Matt.
That's preborn.com slash Matt.
Okay, we start with what is without question one of the most significant political events of our lifetime, and may prove to be quite a bit more significant even than that.
But this is the Daily Wire report.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a defiant statement on Wednesday, pushing back against President Joe Biden's attempts to stop Texas from securing its borders against the millions of illegal aliens pouring into the state, thanks to Biden's reckless border policies.
Abbott's statement comes after the U.S.
Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration earlier this week.
Ruling that it could remove or cut through razor wire the state has deployed to stop illegal aliens from crossing the Rio Grande into the state.
Abbott said in a statement, President Biden has violated his oath to faithfully execute immigration laws enacted by Congress.
Instead of prosecuting immigrants for the federal crime of illegal entry, President Biden has sent his lawyers into federal courts to sue Texas for taking action to secure the borders.
President Biden has instructed his agencies to ignore federal statutes that mandate the detention of illegal immigrants.
The effect is to illegally allow their en masse parole into the United States by wasting taxpayer dollars to tear open Texas borders security infrastructure.
President Biden has enticed illegal immigrants away from the 28 legal entry points along this state's southern border and into the dangerous waters of the Rio Grande.
Abbott continued, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and other visionaries who wrote the U.S.
Constitution foresaw that states should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border.
So this is, and I mean the whole statement is actually really well, I'm not going to read the entire thing, but it's very much worth reading.
Uh, the whole statement because it's got, um, you know, it's got some real, it's got some real, uh, declaration of independence type vibes to it.
And, and for good reason.
Um, and you know, it's extremely defiant as it should be.
Uh, I should note that a bunch of other red state governors, DeSantis first, several others, including Kemp in Georgia, uh, Kristi Noem, uh, a bunch of others have come out in support of Abbott.
As well they should.
Now, as I say this right now, at this point, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, the guy whose primary issue is supposed to be the border immigration, at this point has said nothing about this at all.
He's posting a lot over last night, quite a bit, about other things that he's personally involved in, but not about this.
But you do have at least the, which by the way is inexcusable, okay?
This is, anyone who's a leader in the Republican Party, and if you're going to be the nominee then that certainly puts you at the top, needs to take a stand on this.
It's not enough to say, well I've talked about immigration before.
No, like this particular thing that's happening. You need to be they'll be easy Trump should be down at the border
right now being getting a hundred percent involved in this issue and
and Being there up at the front taking the lead on everybody,
you know, it's we could go through and look at the list of red state
governors that have that have spoken up like I said many of them have and
Hopefully by the time I finish the show they'll all have said something but any that have not I mean even even
Even the Utah governor Spencer Cox. Okay like that that spineless
You know milquetoast guy even he has come out in support of Greg Abbott
So everyone needs to speak up.
And this is exactly what Greg Abbott needs to be doing.
And if he holds the line here, he may well go down as one of the most significant political figures in modern history.
And one of the great heroes in the history of the Republican Party.
I mean, that's how significant this is, and I say that as someone who has been critical of Abbott over the years, but here he's doing something incredibly important.
Now, and this is to take nothing at all away from him, but it's also true that he is in the very advantageous position where, and this doesn't happen very often, But he's in a position here where the morally right thing to do is also the most politically advisable thing to do.
So he's right morally, and he's right on the politics of this thing.
And as I said, that doesn't always happen.
Those things don't always line up.
In fact, often they don't.
But in this case, they do.
Because he's put Biden in a no-win situation.
Biden is up against it here.
The far left, to include the Democrats in Congress who have spoken out, Beto O'Rourke has spoken out, others in Texas have come out, and the far left, they want Biden to seize control of the Texas National Guard in order to forcibly open the border.
They want him to use force to go in and open the Texas border.
That's what they want.
But that's a political disaster for Biden if he does that.
I mean, that is a catastrophe.
That is poison.
If anything could guarantee a landslide loss for him in November, it's that.
Just the very idea and the image as well of the federal government marching into Texas by force and tearing down its border fencing as hordes of illegals come streaming into the state Nobody who is not a far-left radical lunatic would look favorably on that.
Everybody else would be utterly infuriated and horrified by it.
And I think there's just no denying that.
And you know that's true, by the way.
You know this whole thing is a political landmine for Biden, just based solely on the fact that the corporate media is trying to ignore this whole story.
So here we have the governor of Texas openly defying the federal government, ignoring the Supreme Court, and the story isn't even, it's not even mentioned.
I looked this morning, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, New York Times, Washington Post, like, not mentioned.
They're not even mentioning that any of this is happening.
And that itself is extremely significant because it tells you a lot.
Because if you didn't know any better, Right, you would think that these left-wing outlets would go balls-to-the-wall on this one.
They'd be screaming about how Greg Abbott is a fascist tyrant, persecuting the poor Hispanics, or whatever.
You'd think that's what they would be doing with this, but they aren't even, they're not even trying that on this one.
They'd rather not talk about it.
They want to pretend it isn't happening because they know.
They know that this is a disaster for them and for Biden.
It's a disaster.
Either Biden has to back away like an impotent clown, scurry back under his bed, you know, like a scared puppy with his tail between his legs, or he has to totally usurp the will of the people in Texas and the Texas state government to forcibly tear down border fencing.
The fencing that's there to protect communities from cartels and fentanyl traffickers and everything else, you have to go in and just tear it down.
Which again, it would be perhaps the least popular move any president has made in an election year in like 150 years.
It's hard to think of anything, especially in our lifetimes, that has been, that would More politically disastrous than that for a president in an election year.
Oh, and by the way, he could start a civil war.
So there's also that.
There are some real Fort Sumter vibes to this thing, and that's pretty obvious.
So this is what happens when you hold the line.
When you refuse to back down as a conservative, this is what happens.
It's tremendous.
And by the way, keep in mind, This is not a case where a state government is trying to undermine or overrule a federal law or interfere with the enforcement of a federal law.
OK, we've seen that sort of thing historically in America.
And in those sorts of cases, the feds always win.
But this is different.
This is very different.
Um, this is actually kind of the opposite of that because this is the state enforcing a federal law that the feds refuse to enforce.
And then the feds coming in and saying, no, you're not allowed to enforce that either.
That's just not going to be enforced.
We've decided.
So it's the feds not claiming the right and the authority to enforce a law, but claiming the absolute authority to decide that they're not going to enforce one of the most Crucial laws that not even enforce a lot.
The feds have decided they are not going to fulfill one of their most critical fundamental obligations.
And then claiming that no one else has the right to do it either.
Abdicating their responsibility to enforce his own laws, creating a vacuum that state governments have no choice but to step into.
And then coming back around and saying, no, you're not allowed.
That vacuum just needs to stay.
We want a vacuum there.
That's what we decided.
Um, that's the dynamic here.
And it is, um, so it is very different from most of the kind of historical parallels that people might be reaching for in a situation like this.
It's a very different situation.
And it puts the Biden administration, again, politically in a totally unwinnable spot.
They put themselves in that spot.
Morally, they're completely wrong, obviously.
And legally, too.
Now, I know that the Supreme Court You know, in their last decision came down essentially on the side of the Biden administration and you've got Amy Coney Barrett in there, you've got the women of the Supreme Court who are on this issue are clearly motivated either by far-left politics or by emotion or both.
But even with that in mind, like ultimately, Greg Abbott is on very strong He's on very sturdy legal ground as well.
Okay, I haven't watched this yet, but Ron DeSantis just put out a video addressing this
issue.
Let's watch a little bit of that.
Biden is going after Texas saying that they must remove fortifications from their border.
They put wire, they put things to keep people out.
Biden's saying you got to take that down to let people come in illegally, which is just crazy.
And I remark that if the Constitution was originally understood to mean that a state could not protect itself, against an invasion.
If the federal government could force a state to allow an invasion, the Constitution would have never been ratified in the first place.
Texas would have never joined the Union when it did.
And if you look at Federalist 46, which Daniel Horowitz pointed out, James Madison talks about situations where federal encroachment can be mitigated by state action.
So you have Texas here that's holding its ground.
They have every right to fortify the border vis-a-vis an invasion, and that's Article I,
Section 10 of the Constitution. So they're in the right.
You also have a situation where liberal jurisdictions over many, many years have been
sanctuary jurisdictions against enforcing federal immigration law.
So you'll have somebody who's a criminal alien, they will not be given over to ICE, and they will deliberately act to frustrate the laws on the books, and somehow that's viewed as okay.
You have Texas who's acting to enforce the laws on the books, to ensure that they have
a secure state and that we have a secure country.
So all of this is just nonsense.
What Biden's doing.
Texas has every right to stand its ground.
We've in Florida, we've been sending people to help for many years now because we understand
it's not just a Texas issue.
It's ultimately an American.
So he's right about all that and that's a thoughtful response on this.
And it's just when this first happened, when Greg Abbott announced his decision, I knew
we could count on DeSantis to speak up and be on his side and have his back on this.
So that was not a surprise.
A couple other governors he felt pretty confident in.
You know, we're at kind of a critical mass now, especially once you've got guys like Spencer Cox and Kristi Noem and Kemp and George.
Like, once they start coming out, it's like, if you're a Republican governor, you have no choice now.
You can't.
You cannot be seen.
You can't be left out of the party.
So, I think, you know, there's no telling where this goes.
It could go to a bunch of different places.
It could go to some pretty ugly places.
I think it's going to be ugliest for the current regime, the Biden regime.
Okay.
Speaking of the, well, we weren't really speaking of this, but going to the media now, there have been, there's been a whole slate of layoffs at major media companies in recent weeks.
And rather than tell you about it or read something about it, I will let Taylor Lorenz, who's the Washington Post propagandist, one of their many propagandists they have on the payroll, she recorded a video very distraught and upset about the state of the media now and how they're all losing their jobs, and let's listen to her.
The entire journalism industry is basically in a freefall.
Today, the Los Angeles Times laid off 115 employees.
They wiped out their entire D.C.
bureau in an election year.
They laid off pretty much all of their sports teams.
They killed their entire tech and business section.
They laid off breaking news writers, social media editors.
The list goes on.
But what's really dark is this is just the latest in months and months and months of layoffs in the media industry.
In fact, tens of thousands of journalists have been laid off in the past year.
Major media companies like BuzzFeed News have completely shuttered their news operations.
Time Magazine also just laid off a ton of people and, oh, Sports Illustrated basically shut down last week.
Pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem that myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out.
And it's not just digital media sites.
Local news has been obliterated.
The newspaper industry is cratering.
Radio is essentially dead, aside from NPR, which has been gutted.
Meanwhile, hundreds of workers at Condé Nast, the parent company of pretty much every major magazine from GQ to Vogue to The New Yorker to Vanity Fair, are on strike because they're also facing impending layoffs.
Even mainstream national media outlets owned by billionaires like the Washington Post where I work and the Atlantic
where I used to work Have done layoffs if you're a young journalist say there's
almost no on-ramp to traditional journalism Even if you do get a job journalists salaries have been
stagnant and even declined and by the way We don't make that much to begin with I don't think people
understand how bad the world would be without journalists The great thing about this is that she
She's saying all this like it's a bad thing and she wants us to be upset, but everyone is receiving it as as glorious
news So this is like, she's basically telling us that it's Christmas morning, but she wants us to be sad about it.
And so something's being lost in translation there.
Because unfortunately, like pretty much everybody else, I can't weep for the poor journalists.
I can't feel sorry for them.
Feeling sorry for a journalist It's like feeling sorry for a tick that you just pulled off of your dog's ear.
Like, it's not... I couldn't even experience that emotion if I wanted to.
I just have no sympathy to give here.
So, why is corporate media falling apart?
Well, there are two reasons.
It's not just the reason that conservatives will immediately point to, although there is that too.
I mean, that is the first reason, the fact that the journalism profession has completely discredited itself.
It has unabashedly become a form of left-wing advocacy.
And on the right, we've been saying this forever, to the point that it just becomes background noise, but this is what we were talking about.
There are many consequences of that.
And the culture has experienced the consequences of the journalism profession becoming nothing but pretty much left-wing activism.
A lot of consequences.
But downstream, far less severe, downstream of all that is like eventually the journalism profession itself starts to reap those consequences.
And so for years and years and years, when those of us on the right were saying the media is hopeless, like to call it biased doesn't capture the problem at this point.
So far beyond bias, this is just straight up left-wing advocacy, with no pretension of being anything else.
And we've been saying that, and we've been saying that, and the people in the media like Taylor Lawrence have been ignoring us and laughing at us and all that.
Well, here you go.
This is what happens.
Now you're all losing your jobs.
Now you're all broke and you're losing your jobs, and these entire once prestigious, storied companies and outlets and publications are going under.
And this is a big reason why.
Why?
And also, one of the reasons why we feel so okay with gloating about it, because usually when people lose their jobs, you know, generally speaking, people lose their jobs.
I'm not going to gloat about it.
I'm not happy about it.
I don't like to see people lose their jobs.
But there are some exceptions.
Okay?
Like, if I hear that an abortion clinic shut down and everybody lost their job, I'm very happy.
And if you worked at an abortion clinic and you lost your job, and now you are personally bankrupt, I'm happy about that.
You deserve it.
That's justice.
I'm very happy about it.
You worked at an abortion clinic, you lost your job, and now you're out on the street homeless.
I am happy.
You deserve that.
That's justice.
The suffering you are feeling, you deserve it as justice.
Now, the journalism industry is not quite as bad as that, but It is still, many of these people are just, they have no integrity, they're very bad people.
And on top of that, you know, they have, in the media, destroyed the lives of anyone they deem an enemy.
Even just normal people, like civilians, who for whatever reason find themselves in the left's crosshairs, and they get destroyed.
It's a lot, when we talk about cancel culture, it's a lot of what we're talking about.
And usually the more high-profile sort of victims of cancel culture are the ones who get the attention.
There's a lot of other people.
We're talking about cancel culture.
We're talking about a lot of times just normal people who, for whatever reason, end up trending on social media or whatever it is.
The media jumps in and tries to ruin them.
And then the very people who do that They lose their jobs and what, we're supposed to not gloat about it?
You deserve to lose your job.
You're a very bad person.
You have no integrity.
You have delighted in your cruelty towards other people.
And now you lost your job.
So why are these companies dying?
Nobody trusts them.
Nobody likes them.
Nobody wants to hear from them.
And you are a business that runs on trust.
Trust is your product, really.
It's what you're selling.
And if you don't have it, if nobody trusts you, then it's over.
And, you know, I guess you could say that that's basically true of every industry.
Every industry, fundamentally, is really selling trust.
You have to trust whatever it is they're selling.
Whatever it is they're actually selling.
It's like, they're all based on trust.
People have to trust.
If you're an architect who makes bridges, and next thing you know, bridges are falling apart all over the country.
Uh, nobody trusts the bridge makers anymore and then your business is going to die.
The only difference is that we need bridges, whereas we do not need what Taylor Lorenz provides.
And that kind of goes to the other big problem for the media, which is oversaturation.
Extreme oversaturation.
This is a problem we all deal with.
Everybody in media deals with it.
I'm in media too.
I do think it's funny when people in conservative media talk about media like they aren't in the media themselves.
There is a distinction.
Here, there's the left-wing corporate press, which we are not.
But yeah, we are in the media business. And so while we are not left-wing propagandists who
delight in destroying normal people who did nothing wrong, we're still in the media, so we—
So we do deal with the second problem, which is the oversaturation problem.
There's so much media.
All of our lives are dominated by media all the time.
People are ingesting media basically every waking second of the day, which means that the media business has never been wider.
Right?
But it's also never been more shallow.
And what I mean by that is that there's never been more people in the media business.
There have probably never been more companies, you know, media companies and people.
But at the same time, the value of the content has also never been more diminished.
So that even if you don't have the massive trust issue that the left-wing press has, the other problem is that For so many people in media, whatever you're doing can be found a million other places.
People blame Sports Illustrated's collapse on its wokeness, and that's fair.
That definitely had a lot to do with it.
But also, who needs Sports Illustrated anyway?
What do they do that isn't being done?
Just as well in so many other places.
Ten years ago or so, I was a pretty avid reader of the Sports Illustrated website.
I would go there all the time.
But I bailed out long before they started putting trans and morbidly obese people in their swimsuit edition or whatever.
I stopped reading it long before that because, you know, if I want to get people's sports takes, I can go to Twitter.
Or I can go to YouTube.
Or any of a hundred sports blogs.
Everything gets drowned.
Everything is being drowned by everything else.
What's the solution?
Well, I think, I hope the solution is to create meaningful, high-quality content and offer unique, interesting analysis and perspective that you can't get a million other places.
The fact is that 95% of media content is interchangeable and indistinguishable.
Most of it can be replaced by AI, and that's already happening.
A lot of it already has been.
You just don't know it when you read the articles.
Even most of the commentary That you hear from corporate media outlets or whatever.
Most of the commentary could be replicated by a mildly advanced chatbot.
Which means that if you're in the business, if you're in my business, you need to be in that 5% to have any job security at all.
I like to think we're in the 5%.
That's my goal anyway.
Finally, New York Post headline Amazing headline, actually.
This might be the biggest story, really, of all time.
New York Post, "Trans man who had mastectomy "discovered to be five months pregnant,
"making rare seahorse dad."
It says, "A transgender man who underwent a mastectomy "while transitioning in Italy
"was found to be five months pregnant, "joining a rare group of so-called seahorse dads."
The parent-to-be, referred to only as Marco in Italian media, already had a breast removal operation and was preparing to get rid of the uterus when the pregnancy was discovered at a hospital in Rome.
Having discovered the pregnancy, the first thing to do is to suspend hormone therapy immediately.
And so then, because, you know, you're taking, like, you're poisoning yourself with these chemicals and so hopefully it's not too late to save the baby.
But anyway, incredible news.
I mean, I can't even continue reading the article because I'm so, I'm so stunned by it.
I can't even wrap my mind around this.
I am blown away that apparently a woman is going to give birth to a child.
Amazing.
Think about this.
This has only happened like 115 billion other times in history.
That's it.
It's unprecedented.
Aside from 115 billion times, it's never happened.
It's unprecedented.
If it wasn't for the fact that this was the most normal thing in the world, it would be unheard of.
And, you know, of course it's easy to make fun of stories like this.
The media trying to get us to treat it as a medical marvel that a woman has become pregnant.
And we should make fun of it.
Really, that's all we should do.
There isn't much else to be said in response, I suppose.
Except, I guess, just to emphasize how desperate of a move this is by the media.
They know that the fact that the woman is pregnant That fact alone is a definitive, absolute repudiation of the whole idea that she's a man.
So the real story here is, woman claims she's a man is debunked by own pregnancy.
That's the actual headline.
But instead, so rather than making that the headline, which really wouldn't be...
Shocking news either, but instead they're massively overcompensating.
So this becomes the most, it's kind of like the most bizarre, extreme form of a figure skater planting on her face in the middle of a routine and trying to play it off like her fall was some sort of brilliant move that she was trying to do.
So instead of saying, well, I guess this person isn't a man given the whole pregnancy thing, never mind.
Instead of that, they say, oh my God, look at this, how could this be?
The laws of science have been suspended.
Everything we know about the world has been turned on its head.
This man is pregnant.
It's a seahorse.
So they try to go that way and hope that nobody notices.
But the good thing is that if the comments and the reaction on social media to these sorts of stories is any indication, they are not fooling anyone.
I mean, it's perhaps not surprisingly, they are not fooling anyone.
That will not stop them from trying, though.
Which is why they're all losing their jobs.
Let's get to Wes Walsh.
Keeping your windshields clean is always a pain, especially in the winter.
Dirt and salt pile up and washer fluid just can't get the job done.
That's where my friends at Windshield WOW come in to save the day.
Windshield WOW is an innovative windshield cleaning device that uses two magnetic cleaning paddles, one on one side and one on the inside of your car, to clean both sides of your windshield, all from the outside.
All you do is push around the outside paddle and the inside follows automatically, leaving your windshield squeaky clean I personally own a Windshield WOW.
This is one of the best products from my car, Windshield.
Being able to clean both the front and the inside window at the same time is an absolute game changer.
Wish I had one of these years ago.
The Windshield WOW applies firm cleaning pressure and is super thin to get into those tight dashboard areas.
So what are you waiting for?
Go to windshieldwow.com.
Use code WALSH at checkout for a special discount.
That's windshieldwow.com and use code WALSH.
Matt, whether you or other Christians like our orientation or not, we can still celebrate our unions.
Nobody I know is forcing acceptance on you and your associates.
Leave us be and there's no problem.
Another comment says, why should businesses be allowed to discriminate and deny business, Matt?
Do you just really want to see the Jim Crow segregation laws come back?
Another one says, it's still bigotry the venue went out of their way to toe the legal line while effectively telling the couple that they don't like them.
Seems unnecessary and rude.
I will allow you to rent my property, but just know that I don't like, pick one, gay, black, Mormon people.
Another comment, man who makes a living complaining about perceived slights bestowed upon him makes video complaining about woman addressing real slights bestowed upon them.
Okay.
So, a few things.
First of all, the wedding venue we talked about yesterday was willing to host the wedding of this lesbian couple.
So, they were not discriminating, quote-unquote discriminating.
That's the first thing.
Second, why did they decide to be honest about their feelings about it?
Why did... I don't know.
Because honesty is the best policy?
Because they wanted to be honest?
Because that's their right?
Free speech?
I don't know.
And by the way, if I was in a similar situation, I would want that level of honesty.
So, let's say that, um, let's say I was, I was, uh, we'll take something that's not like that far-fetched.
Let's say I was renting an Airbnb or something and with my family for vacation and the person who owns the house knows who I am and hates me.
Like I said, this is not far-fetched.
And then they said, well, listen, I'm going to rent you the house.
You're welcome to stay here.
Airbnb policy, I can't deny you.
But I want you to know that I strongly disagree with you, and I think you're terrible.
I would appreciate that, actually.
I wouldn't stay up all night crying about it, okay?
I wouldn't even go on social media and attack the person.
I wouldn't do it, because I would appreciate the honesty.
Like, I can't blame—okay, you don't like me?
I mean, I don't know why anybody wouldn't like me.
I think I'm a great guy, but there are people who don't.
I can't really blame you for that.
And you were honest.
Okay, now if you come at it in a really over-the-top, combative, insulting kind of way, then that could be a different story.
But if you approach it, I'm saying, if you approach it the way that this wedding venue did with the lesbian couple, and if I was in that situation, I would like to have that information.
Because I don't really want to stay at a place where the host hates my guts.
I just prefer not to.
It's one thing if you're going to Home Depot to buy a garden hose or something and the cashier doesn't like you.
They don't need to tell you that.
You don't need that information because we're only interacting for five seconds.
You're just ringing me up for the garden hose and I'll be on my way.
But if you're hosting me, if I'm going to be in your house or at your venue and you're hosting, especially you take a wedding venue, it's a celebratory occasion, that's totally different.
And if the people who own the house or own the venue have very conflicted feelings about it, negative feelings, why shouldn't they be honest?
And why wouldn't you want them to be honest with you?
Wouldn't you prefer the honesty?
Well, I prefer the honesty.
But we know for the LGBT group, the last thing that they want is honesty.
They don't want anyone to be honest with them, or with themselves, or with the world.
What they want is compliance.
They don't care about honesty.
And finally, why should the venue have the right to discriminate?
Well, again, they didn't discriminate.
But yeah, I think that they should have the right to.
You know, I think everybody should have the right to.
Unapologetically, I've always said this.
I think that's the easiest way to deal with these kinds of issues.
That is the solution to all of these sorts of problems, is that everybody has the right to discriminate.
In fact, I would say that the right to discriminate is one of the most fundamental human rights we have, and it should be protected and preserved by the government.
Yes, because what does discriminate mean?
It means, literally, definitionally, To distinguish between one thing and another.
That's what discriminate means.
Okay?
And that's why if you have a vocabulary maybe larger than the average person these days, you might refer to someone and say, someone's a very discriminating person.
They have discriminating tastes.
And again, if your vocabulary is a little bit larger than average, you know that you're not saying the person's a bigot.
What you're saying is that they have a discernment.
Like, this is a very thoughtful, discerning person.
And so that's, from a literal sense, that's what discrimination means.
It means discernment, it means distinguishing.
And so yes, that's a basic, that's human nature.
That's part of being conscious, sentient beings, is that we're able to do that.
And you take that over into this realm that we're talking about.
Yes, I believe you have a right to distinguish Between groups of people to distinguish people that you want to be associated with and do business with from people you don't.
I think you have that right.
It's just a long wordy way of saying freedom of association, really.
I actually believe in freedom of association.
And nobody should be forced by law to provide a service to anybody.
Okay, except in, you know, there are exceptions to every rule.
You know, if we're talking about a life-saving service, if we're talking about an EMT or something, and someone needs life-saving measures, you can't decide you're not going to do it because you don't like them.
Outside of situations like that, and then over into like the private sector and businesses, because this also would not apply to government.
But private sector business, non-life-saving situations, I think that, yes, you should have the right to discriminate.
And you do business with whoever you want.
And if you want to have a business that caters only to a certain group of people, why shouldn't you have the right to do that?
Why shouldn't you have the right to do that?
And then if you do that, depending on who you are, what your favored group is and who
you're excluding, there's a pretty good chance your business is going to be destroyed.
If this was the policy, and we let businesses just decide, if we actually allowed people to reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, which I think should be the policy, and then you had some, I don't know, diner somewhere in Ohio that just said, That leapt at that opportunity and said, okay, we're not going to allow black people in the store anymore then.
Thank God, it's what we've always wanted to do.
Well, if they did that, like, their business is going to be bankrupt by tomorrow, you know.
You wouldn't be able to maintain a business with a policy like that.
But you should have the right.
And I think it's, again, that's the simplest Fairest way to go about this, and it makes the most sense.
And it's what the policy should be, which is why it's not the policy.
When Dr. Jordan B. Peterson made the decision to join DailyWirePlus, it was a major win for those who champion free speech and intellectual debate.
DailyWirePlus now has a vast array of exclusive Jordan Peterson content, offering hundreds of hours of captivating content you won't find anywhere else.
Jordan has created thought-provoking works that reshape your perspective on life, which includes Vision and Destiny, Marriage, and Dragons, Monsters, and Men.
Additionally, you can immerse yourself in discussions that nurture your spiritual side, like logos and literacy.
And Jordan's groundbreaking series on the Book of Exodus.
And that's only the beginning.
I haven't even mentioned his Beyond Order lecture series or his extensive archive of lectures and podcasts.
This is the absolute compendium of all things Jordan.
Plus, there's even more new exclusive content on the horizon.
By becoming a Daily Wire Plus member, you'll embark on an unforgettable experience that will fuel your thirst for knowledge and inspire personal growth like never before.
Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe to become a member today.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
[MUSIC]
Towards the end of last week, I found myself in the middle of a social media
firestorm, if you can believe it.
Now, I'm not usually the sort of guy who makes people on the internet mad.
In fact, I think this might be the first time in my life that such a thing has ever happened, but here we are.
On this occasion, I was trending on Twitter for a few days because of some comments I made about therapy, mental health, and depression.
Now, to be clear, I was trending because all the people talking about it were basically talking about how wrong I was and what a terrible person I am, so I don't think I've ever trended because everybody's agreeing that I'm a nice guy.
I'm not sure that it's possible to trend for that reason.
It's pretty much guaranteed that if a lot of people are talking about you on the internet, they are mostly saying horrible things, which tells you something about the internet and about people in general.
That's beside the point.
In this case, it all began when a guy named Matt Van Swoll tweeted what he called a super hot take on therapy, which is basically that therapy is overrated, overused, and not nearly as effective as people seem to assume.
This does qualify as a hot take on social media, but that's only because it's obviously true.
And I agreed with it, you know, as it is a point that I have made myself in great detail on this show several times over the past many months.
I'm not going to get hung up on the therapy point here because I've made my case recently and also I should be talking about it again with Jordan Peterson very soon.
So looking forward to that.
I will just mention this one response from a child therapist on TikTok who was offended by my therapy skepticism and decided to strike back by doing a little skit imagining what it would be like if I was a therapist.
So let's just watch that.
Hi, it's nice to meet me.
I'm Matt Walsh.
What's wrong with you?
Uh, yeah.
I saw your Psychology Today profile.
Is it true you can help me in only five minutes?
Yes.
That's all the time I need to fix you.
Uh, okay.
You take insurance, right?
Of course, but only if they're owned by private equity.
The government can't take away my right to choose your health care.
Great.
Is it okay if I let you know what's going on?
Yeah.
I've already started the meter, so you better make it quick.
Oh, oh, okay.
Um, I'm lonely, I don't know how to make friends, everyone keeps making fun of me, and I don't know how to talk to females.
Okay, okay, stop whining.
I know what you need to do.
You're gonna want to write this down.
Alright, great.
What is it?
Stop it!
Um, I think it's a little bit more complicated than that.
Just stop it!
Stop looking like an idiot and make some friends!
Okay, so I should just stop it?
Stop being a weirdo!
I mean, I gotta say, the acting and writing could use a little bit of work, but other than that, pretty spot on.
I mean, that is unironically not far from how my therapy practice would work if I had one.
I don't know why he had his eyes closed the whole time, as the idea that I was falling asleep, which I probably would.
I mean, honestly, if I was a therapist, I'd probably be fine.
I'd be so bored listening to people come in and just whining, oh, sir, I broke up with my girlfriend.
I would, you know, I wouldn't make it through a day.
I would not make it through a day as a therapist.
But if I was a therapist, it'd be pretty similar to that.
Although, I'd probably model it more after this scene from an obscure HBO show nobody watched 10 years ago.
But I like this one scene anyway, because this is what therapy would be like if I was doing it.
Here it is.
So, I'm not the kind of therapist that puts efforts around.
I like to dig in fast and I give feedback.
Stop fidgeting.
What are you doing with your arm?
Nothing.
I'm just nervous.
Put your hands in your lap.
Focus.
Sit up.
Good posture sends positive messages to the brain.
We're here to work.
So, what are your issues?
Give them to me.
Well, I am sad about this breakup I just went through.
She left you.
Yes.
And now you feel rejected and unlovable and you can't understand why she no longer loves you.
Yes.
You do know that she's not the only source of love for you in the world.
But I want her love.
We don't get everything we want in life.
You don't get to have her love.
That's it.
End of story.
Next issue.
Yeah, pretty much that.
Again, unironically, that would be good therapy.
One of the big problems with therapy is that in its least effective forms, and the least effective form seems to be the most common form, it gives people a forum to whine and talk about themselves in a way that feeds the meter for the therapist and gives the client an excuse to be narcissistic and self-indulgent, but does not lead to action or change.
In fact, the therapist is incentivized to not spark any lasting change because that would interrupt the cash flow.
The fact is that for most people in therapy, the source of their problems is not some complex, deeply hidden trauma they need to, you know, have years of discussion to identify and unpack.
They don't need a licensed expert to help them find it.
If you're like the average therapy patient, any random dude on the street could listen to you complain for five minutes and tell you exactly what your problem is.
But if therapists give simple answers, again, they'd be out of a job.
They need to keep you there and talking, that's the whole business model.
But what a lot of people really need is to be told exactly what you heard in that clip, which is, this is the way things are, this is life, you can't always get what you want, deal with it, stop complaining, move on.
I mean, that is the answer to like 99% of the emotional complaints that you have.
If your life is all screwed up, it's probably because you're making bad choices.
Not definitely, but probably.
The answer is to stop making those choices.
And if you don't stop making them, your problems will continue.
And someone could tell you, like, stop doing that.
That's what's causing the problems.
But I don't want to stop doing it.
Okay, well then your problems are going to continue.
You could stop doing it or you could keep doing it.
It's up to you.
No one can force you.
And that's all that there really is to be said about it most of the time.
And if your life is screwed up for reasons you truly can't control, then in most of those cases, all you can do is accept what has been done, accept the reality for what it is, and keep moving.
Now, I will admit there probably is a gender difference here that often gets lost in the shuffle when we discuss this issue.
What I'm saying applies to people in general, but probably more to men in particular.
Because the reason is that a source of a woman's emotional struggle is often that she doesn't feel understood.
Right?
And talking to a therapist who understands you, or is paid to pretend that they understand you anyway, might have some utility in some circumstances.
But the source of a man's struggle, most of the time, is that he feels like he has no control.
He feels like he's lost his power, his vigor, his vitality, or like he never had any to begin with.
And the last thing that he needs, if that's his issue, and I think it is for most men, The last thing he needs is to sit around talking and complaining and harping on the fact that his dad didn't come to his t-ball game when he was five or whatever.
For him, the best thing he can do is take action, do something, get moving.
But...
As I said, we can continue that conversation another day.
This led, after a couple of steps, into a discussion about depression.
And somebody insisted that I can only have this opinion about therapy because I've never experienced depression.
And I explained that, well, literally every human on Earth has experienced depression to one extent or another.
I was then told that, well, there's a, quote, monumental difference between being sad and depression.
And I asked for someone to offer a definition of being sad that is monumentally different from depression.
And then from there, we were off to the races.
This request on my part was apparently deeply offensive.
Some people did attempt to actually answer the question, which I appreciate, but many others responded with rage and histrionics and various accusations and insults and all the other things you might expect.
I'm a terrible person.
The Daily Wire should fire me.
I shouldn't be speaking about this subject unless I have a degree in the relevant field.
My opinions are dangerous.
People are going to die because I tweeted about depression.
I'm ignorant and cruel and callous and etc.
and so forth.
That was the general message from the outraged masses.
Let me make a few points that will hopefully tie all these things together.
And first, to answer my own question, there is a difference between sadness and depression, but it is one of degree, not of kind.
Depression is a deep, persistent sadness.
It's like the difference between being hungry because you skipped lunch and being hungry because you haven't eaten in two days.
They're both forms of hunger, but one is more severe and more debilitating than the other.
But it would not be accurate to say that there's a monumental difference between starving and being hungry.
Starving is being hungry.
If somebody dies of starvation, it would not be inaccurate to say they died from hunger.
In fact, people do say that.
So it's just a matter of degree.
And the same is true of sadness and depression.
Depression is sadness to a much greater degree.
Now, it seems like there's no reason why this point should make people so angry that they call for me to be deplatformed and fired from my job, but that's what happened.
The reason that it gets this reaction is because most people are programmed to lash out at anyone who says anything that appears to fall outside of the orthodoxies and teachings of the psychiatric industry.
Even people who otherwise pretend to be skeptical of the expert class, people who, in any other context, would not throw around the trust the expert line, okay?
People who, when it comes to vaccines or anything else, they'd be the first to say, I don't care what the experts say.
Okay, the experts are wrong.
But when it comes to issues like mental illness and depression and ADHD and anxiety and so on, many of those same people completely change their tune.
The skepticism vanishes and is replaced by a blind trust in the people who have declared themselves the sole authorities on all issues having to do with human thought and emotion.
So don't trust the experts.
Except for the experts who claim to be the expert on the human condition itself.
Those we can trust absolutely and follow with total obedience.
That appears to be the idea.
I think the public also wants to believe that depression is inherently fundamentally different from sadness, as opposed to being different by degree and severity.
Because sadness is obviously not a disease.
Yet those experts say that depression is a disease, and millions of people are very invested in seeing it that way.
They want depression to be a disease.
It seems kind of odd to say that, like it's odd that people would want to have a disease, but they do.
Most of the people that would say they're depressed, if you tell them it's not a disease, they react.
It's not just that they disagree.
They react with pure rage at the thought.
Because they want to have a disease.
They do.
And if you suggest that it may be something other than a disease, they become, again, very upset.
They'll even say that if you deny that depression is a disease, then you are denying that depression is real.
In fact, if you go to Twitter right now and you were to go search for this, you're going to find a whole bunch of tweets from various people saying, Matt Walsh thinks depression isn't real.
Matt Walsh, sometimes I'll put it in quotes.
Matt Walsh, depression is fake.
Like, I never said that, this is just making up quotes, but that's what people do.
Because for some reason this distinction is like really hard for people to grasp.
Okay?
Depression is not a disease, but it is real.
That's, that's the little nuance here.
In my opinion, thanks to the psychiatric industry, what we're dealing with is a giant category error.
And at this point, they have taken nearly every negative emotion, experience, behavior, and categorized it as a disease.
And in many of these cases, the categorization makes no sense.
But that doesn't mean that the emotion or the experience or the behavior isn't real or doesn't exist.
So, for example, one of the many clinical mental diseases that psychiatrists have come up with to explain misbehaving children is something called oppositional defiant disorder, which is a disorder characterized by a child acting oppositional and defiant.
Now it's definitely true that some children, many children even, all children to some extent, do behave in oppositional and defiant ways.
That is very real.
No one is denying the existence of opposition and defiance.
And sometimes that kind of behavior can be severe and have extremely bad consequences.
But it's not a disease.
Diabetes is a disease.
Liver cancer is a disease.
Parkinson's is a disease.
These are illnesses that can be detected structurally in the human body.
You can find them in the actual cells of the human body.
You can find them without even talking to the patient at all, okay?
So this is not, you know, doing a survey and they tell you things and then you go looking for certain chemical things in the brain.
No.
They could not even talk to you and run tests and find the disease without you saying a word to them.
But a child's defiant behavior is not a structural illness of the human body.
Guess what?
They could run a test on every single child in the world, and they will not find anything that they could call, oh, there it is.
There's oppositional defiant disorder.
They've got it.
Cannot happen.
Why is that?
Because it's not a disease.
They've made it up.
They've invented this disease.
That's why they don't do blood tests to diagnose it.
It's an unwanted behavior.
Unwanted behavior is not a disease.
Now, one of the newer inventions of the psychiatric industry is something called Prolonged Grief Disorder.
This is a disease, quote-unquote, that can be diagnosed if a person is very sad after losing a loved one and those feelings of sadness persist for more than a year.
Now, I would say with great confidence that this is a fake disease.
Is grief fake?
Is Matt Walsh denying that grief exists?
Am I claiming that if you lost your spouse that you're not really grieving them?
No.
What I'm saying is that you don't have a disease.
Is grief very serious?
Is it something that deeply impacts a person's life?
Can it lead even to self-destructive behavior and suicide in extreme cases?
Yes, on all counts.
But it's not a disease.
The psychiatric industry has once again taken a normal human experience and medicalized it.
Turned it into a thing that you can prescribe drugs for.
And in order to do so, they have come up with completely arbitrary guidelines and parameters.
Who says that grief is only supposed to last 12 months?
Who decided that?
Who the hell put psychiatrists in charge of deciding how long you should be sad after your wife dies?
Who the hell is this person to sit there with their little notepad and say, well, it's been 13 months.
It's too long.
You have a disease.
What?
And most people just accept that.
And not only do they accept it, but it's like they don't understand why some of us criticize it.
It blows my mind.
The whole idea is absurd.
I mean, it's outrageous.
It's insulting.
But this is what these people have done.
They've done it with, again, the entire human condition.
Every difficult human emotion or experience has been arbitrarily and entirely subjectively recategorized as a clinical problem.
And if you think I'm making that up, you can go, you can find the DSM, you can find it online, you can go through it, and I guarantee you, literally every negative emotion has multiple diseases for it.
Try me, if you don't believe me.
And this is what has happened with depression, in my view.
Depression is real.
It is serious.
I do not believe that it is a disease, however.
Depression is despair, which itself is, again, essentially a much more persistent, deeper, more encompassing sadness.
I prefer the word despair.
So, despair, I submit.
is not a disease because it is a completely natural, even fundamental aspect of the human experience.
One of the parameters that is supposed to separate clinical despair from non-clinical is that we are told clinical despair, depression, often has no discernible cause or reason.
And I heard this from a lot of the people that, you know, when I asked that question and people were freaking out and were angry.
Of the people who are not freaking out and we're trying to give a reasonable answer, which I appreciate, many of them said this.
They said something like this, that, you know, well, when you're sad, there's like a reason something happens, but when you're depressed, there's no reason.
You just, you just, you, you, you, it's just there.
It's like this cloud that follows you.
If somebody's very sad because they lost their job or a family member died or something, that's not clinical depression, I'm told.
Though, as we've seen, the psychiatrists still have a clinical disease and a bottle of pills even for that.
But it's not depression.
Depression has no immediate external cause.
So if everything seems to be fine in your life and yet you feel this deep persistent despair, you are clinically depressed.
And you should probably be on drugs.
That's the idea.
But here's my point.
And this is like, this is, after 50 minutes of rambling, this is my point.
This is what I'm trying to say on this subject.
There is no such thing As despair, depression, felt for no reason.
That is a misnomer.
So if somebody says, I feel depressed for no reason, no they don't.
There is a reason.
And I would argue that simply being a human, having a mind, living as a conscious being on this planet full of death and suffering, the very fact of being sentient, of being aware of yourself and your place in the world, is reason enough to feel despair.
There's nothing necessarily irrational or surprising, certainly nothing clinically diseased, About struggling to see meaning or purpose in life, or having no motivation, or feeling empty.
These are all rational and understandable responses to our condition as conscious, self-aware beings.
That doesn't mean people should feel that way.
Or that we should abandon people to those feelings and not try to help them.
It doesn't mean that you shouldn't seek help.
It doesn't mean that you should be content with your despair.
It doesn't mean any of that.
My only point is that the despair is rooted in something deep.
The deepest thing of all.
It is a product of being human.
Which means that, though it is real, and though it is painful, and though it is very serious and very hard, it is not the same sort of thing as malaria or typhoid fever.
It is not a disease.
Yes, getting malaria and typhoid fever are also things that can happen to people.
But they are not a product of the human condition itself.
They are an aberration.
That's what makes them a disease.
They don't come from your very humanity, like despair does.
Now, philosophers and theologians and thinkers through the ages have had a lot to say about the problem of despair and how we should cope with it as human beings.
Only in very recent time did we decide that we should put it into the same category as physical illness and treat it the exact same way.
And I would argue that this strategy, along with being rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of depression and of the human condition itself, has been an abject failure.
We have been treating depression as a disease for decades, and you tell me.
Generally speaking, has it worked?
Have people become less depressed?
Have people become more able to function?
Has suicide rates gone down?
No.
No and no are the answers to those questions.
In fact, as we disease-ify and medicalize all of these difficult human emotions, what we find is that year over year, the problems get worse.
Suicide becomes more common.
People become less able to cope with the challenges of life.
The strategy isn't working.
And it isn't working because it's based on a lie.
And it's a lie that makes people feel powerless.
That it, in fact, trains people to take comfort and seek respite in their powerlessness.
If your feelings are a disease, then you can't do anything about them.
You can't conquer them on your own.
You are helpless against them.
That's been the message for decades.
And for decades, we have paid an unimaginable price because of it.
So I am suggesting that it may be time to stop, just for a moment, analyze some of these basic presuppositions of the modern psychiatric field.
Realize how totally at odds they are with the insights of virtually everyone who lived on Earth up until the existence of modern psychiatry.
Um, realize that this is a field that has been extremely, disastrously wrong about a lot of things.
And I believe that this is one of those things.
It's perhaps the main thing it is wrong about.
And that's all I'm trying to say.
And I will keep saying it, no matter how angry people are about it.
I believe you're directing your anger in the wrong place.
I'm not the one who has been tasked with solving a problem that I have only made progressively worse for the last 60 years.
That's the psychiatric industry.
And it's why that industry is today, once again, finally, cancelled.
