Ep. 1333 - Florida Bans Children From Social Media
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, as the debate over banning TikTok continues to rage, Florida has quietly passed its own bill that might solve the problem. A ban on children using social media. It's a law that should be in place in every state. Also, a major disaster in Maryland as a cargo ship crashed into a bridge sending dozens of cars careening into the river. What happened? And why? Also, a horrifying story shows in disturbing detail why surrogacy should be banned. Plus, the attorney general of Minnesota says that car manufacturers are to blame for tempting young people with cars that are easy to steal.
Ep.1333
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, as the debate over banning TikTok continues to rage, Florida has quietly passed its own bill that might solve the problem, a ban on children using social media at all.
It's a law that should be in place in every state.
We'll talk about it.
Also, a major disaster in Maryland has a cargo ship crashes into a bridge, sending dozens of cars careening into the river.
What happened, and more importantly, why?
Also, a horrifying story shows in disturbing detail why surrogacy should be banned.
Plus, the Attorney General of Minnesota says That car manufacturers are to blame for tempting young people with cars that are easy to steal.
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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Legislation that would ban TikTok in the United States unless its Chinese owner divests from the company is currently making its way through the Senate.
It's still not clear what's going to happen to that bill exactly.
It overwhelmingly passed in the House by hundreds of votes, but it appears to be significantly less popular in the upper chamber.
And that's true in no small part because of the most intense lobbying campaign in recent memory is underway to kill the legislation.
A lot of very powerful and very wealthy interests don't want to see this ban pass.
And that's not to say that there aren't reasonable arguments on both sides of the issue.
On one hand, TikTok is unquestionably toxic for both kids and adults.
Pretty much, you know, everyone who uses TikTok very quickly drops several IQ points and learns how to twerk, at least in the U.S., where the algorithm is fine-tuned for that express purpose.
It's also a spy app under the control of a hostile foreign power that's transmitting all sorts of data we don't know about.
And these are, to say the least, serious problems.
On the other hand, there are obviously legitimate concerns about empowering the US government to remove entire platforms from the Internet, even though the bill, as it's written, only applies to platforms that are controlled by foreign entities.
You do have to wonder how far that limitation can be stretched.
We all just live through You know, several years of hysteria about Russian control of the White House and every other significant new power that the government has been given to combat foreign enemies has eventually been used against the government's domestic political opponents.
We know that.
So it's hard to be reassured that, given this vast new authority to ban the most popular social media app on the planet, that the government wouldn't at least try to ban, say, Twitter.
Which is far more inconvenient for them, even though the language of the legislation would not seem to allow that.
So that's why legislation that was just signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is so significant.
It hasn't gotten much attention, but it should because it addresses the legitimate concerns about apps like TikTok without granting the government any kind of sweeping new, unprecedented powers to regulate the lives of American citizens.
Instead, it regulates the behavior of children in a manner that's consistent with all sorts of other regulations that already apply to minors.
Watch.
His grandpa says Bryson's screen time is limited, and of course, he's entirely too young for social media.
But just how young is too young?
It's done.
There you go.
According to legislation signed into law this morning by Governor Ron DeSantis, the answer is 13.
House Bill 3 would require social media companies to ban accounts belonging to someone under the age of 14 to be on sites like Instagram and TikTok.
Kids older than 14 would need a parent's permission.
The bill is widely expected to face legal challenges from the tech industry.
So, generally speaking, under this bill, children under the age of 14 can't have social media accounts, and 14- to 15-year-olds will need permission from their parents to have a social media account.
The bill is set to take effect at the beginning of next year, although, as you heard, there are undoubtedly going to be legal challenges on First Amendment grounds.
Several months ago, a federal judge blocked a similar law in Arkansas which banned minors from creating social media accounts without parental consent, but the Florida bill Is meaningfully different from the legislation that was struck down in Arkansas.
And it's important to get into the specifics because, as we've learned, the media will misrepresent the substance of every Florida bill they possibly can.
Well, they misrepresent everything all the time, but especially legislation in Florida, as we've seen, that's when they really go to town.
So, here are the details.
The Florida bill is not a blanket ban on any particular app.
Instead, it's focused on banning apps that have particular features which are designed to keep children on the app at all times.
In order to fall under this ban, according to the text of the legislation, the app must have one of the following.
And these are all the addictive features as they call it.
One, infinite scrolling, which the bill defines as continuously loading content or content that loads as the user scrolls down the page without the need to open a separate page.
Two, push notifications or alerts to inform a user about specific activities or events related to the user's account.
Or three, autoplay video or video that begins to play without the user first clicking on the video or on a play button for that video.
Now there are a couple of other features that Are singled out in the bill, but those are the big ones.
Live streaming is also included.
Now, in other words, TikTok can create a version of its app for minors that complies with these restrictions, and it would not be banned for minors in that case.
The point of the law isn't to ban content per se, it's to regulate how much of it children are being exposed to.
And that's a significant distinction because there's a lot of evidence that these addictive features harm children.
In fact, rewire their brains.
The journal World Psychiatry recently published an analysis which found that quote,
"The primary hypothesis on how the internet affects our attentional capacities is through
hyperlinks, notifications, and prompts providing a limitless stream of different forms of digital
media thus encouraging us to interact with multiple inputs simultaneously."
Now these are the kind of notifications that are specifically banned and affordable
for kids and there's more research along those lines.
Researchers at UNC, for example, found that, quote, checking social media repeatedly among young teens ages 12 to 13 may be associated with changes in how their brains develop over a three-year period.
In their analysis, which was published in JAMA Pediatrics, the UNC researchers specifically determined that, quote, the brains of adolescents who check social media often, more than 15 times per day, became more sensitive to social feedback.
Now, there's much more research on this point, but intuitively, and you can go look at it, I mean, there's tons of research about how social media harms kids.
But intuitively, we all know this is true.
Like, we all know it.
And the social media companies know it too, which is why they have these kinds of features.
Their goal is to rewire children's brains so that they seek positive social feedback from apps instead of from people in their day-to-day life.
And that is obviously concerning because when their brains are developing, children are especially prone to falling into addictive behaviors that once learned can affect them for the rest of their lives.
We are mentally and emotionally deforming entire generations of children who do not know how to interact with the world or pay attention to it unless it is filtered through a tiny screen.
And this isn't just concerning, this is a crisis.
It is impacting the future of our civilization.
If we could look into a crystal ball and see what the world will look like a hundred years from now...
Because of this?
It would probably terrify us so much that we would call for the ban of every social media company and every smartphone in existence.
I mean, that's how bad it's going to get.
And I'm not saying we should ban all those things.
I'm simply saying that horrors beyond our comprehension await us as we condition billions of people to be totally dependent, physically, mentally, emotionally, on a little screen.
And this is why we need to protect children in particular.
We already protect them from all kinds of other things that we have judged to be toxic or inappropriate for them.
We don't allow children to say, you know, to say gamble or smoke or drink alcohol.
We also already regulate how companies can engage with children on the internet.
There's something called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, for example.
And among other things, that law requires that websites get parental consent before they allow children to post photos, videos, or audio recordings of themselves or any other, you know, identifying personal information.
This law is the reason why major social media platforms, including Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, already prohibit children under the age of 13 from using their platforms.
So what Florida's law does is slightly expand limitations like this to social media platforms that are targeting young children.
Now, in response to the Florida law, one of the most common counter-arguments you'll hear is that children will just circumvent the ban, as they've already circumvented the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
All kids have to do is provide a fake birth date, and they can make an Instagram account.
But all this tells us is that the feds aren't concerned with enforcing that law, or many other laws.
Florida is taking a different approach, and we've already seen that when states actually want to enforce these laws, they can get results.
Many of the laws that we call unenforceable, it's because there's no real attempt to enforce them.
But when there is an attempt, you know, it's amazing how many laws can be enforced if you actually try to enforce them.
And we saw that after various states passed laws requiring pornography websites to verify that their users aren't minors.
You know, some users found a way around the ban by routing their web traffic to other states using a VPN service.
Still, these services cost money on a monthly basis.
They're not the easiest thing for a 13-year-old to sign up for, at least not in most situations.
And that's why traffic to these pornography websites went down significantly, even though it was technically possible to break the law and circumvent the restriction, just like it's possible technically to break any law, which is not an argument against making laws.
The other common counter-argument you'll hear is that parents should be in charge of policing this sort of thing, not the government.
And indeed, that's one of the major arguments that came up in Florida.
It's why DeSantis vetoed another version of legislation which would have prevented 14-year-olds from accessing these apps even with parental consent.
So the final bill was kind of a compromise position which addressed the concerns of the parental rights dissenters.
But the truth is that although parents should be the ones policing their children's social media use, many parents don't.
Or many parents try and they're not able to do it, you know, sufficiently.
Because it's also very, very hard for parents to do that and to police that.
It's also true that parents should stop their kids from drinking alcohol or using tobacco products, but they don't always do that either.
You know, that's why we still have laws against those things, and most people don't think that those laws should be repealed for good reason.
What this means is that Florida, without much fanfare, has found a solution to the TikTok debate that has dominated Congress for the past several weeks.
All we have to do is what we've done before.
It doesn't have to be complicated.
We don't have to open the door to future government bans on Twitter or any other social media platform.
We just need to do something that's fallen out of favor recently, which is to protect children from strangers on the Internet and from the Internet itself, which wants to harm them.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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Okay, well, just mention this at the top because it's the biggest news in the country today.
Begin with this video that I think we were all shocked to see when we woke up in the morning.
A cargo ship slamming into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing the bridge to collapse.
And if you haven't seen it, here's the video of that incident.
I used to drive across that bridge all the time when I lived in Maryland, so it's just crazy to think that it no
longer exists.
And so here's what we know.
About this so far, by the time you listen to this, we may know a lot more, so this may be a moot point.
But right now, it appears that a massive cargo ship from Singapore hit a support beam of that bridge around 1.30 in the morning.
And there were a number of cars on the bridge at the time.
I've read 20 to 30 cars, maybe.
There were also construction workers on the bridge.
And many are still missing, as you can imagine.
The latest that I read said the ship lost propulsion.
It lost power shortly before it collided with the support beam.
And the crew apparently notified the Maryland Department of Transportation that they had lost control of the ship.
Now, of course, when you watch the video, and there are several videos out there of the actual crash, And it looks like the ship veers right into the support beam.
And so naturally, anyone who sees that, the first thing you think is, was it intentional?
We're being told at this point that it was not, that it was not terrorism.
I don't know.
Within hours, they said.
I don't know how they could know that so quickly, but that's what we're being told.
I do find that denial, the denial that this was intentional or terrorism, I find it slightly more believable just given the time when this happened.
Yes, it's devastating any time of day, obviously, but 1.30 in the morning is the least devastating time for this to happen.
If this had happened at 6 p.m.
or something, I mean, my God, that's rush hour, beltway rush hour, and you're talking about many, many hundreds of lives lost.
So, it doesn't seem like you'd plan a terrorist attack for 1.30am.
At the same time though, you know, this is a bizarre accident to say the least, if that's what it really was.
The ship hit the perfect spot, I guess, to take the whole bridge down, or take a large portion of it down.
So, you know, what actually happened?
How did the ship lose power?
Why did it veer?
We don't know right now.
What we do know is the devastation will go beyond the immediate carnage of the crash.
I mean, this is going to be a disaster for the entire city.
That bridge had like 30,000 cars go across it every day.
So the ripple effects here are enormous for commerce in the city and for everything else.
Meanwhile, again, we still don't know what happened or why.
We'll find out.
Or they'll find out.
Hopefully we find out after that.
You never know.
In the meantime, it's hard not to notice that this is yet another transportation-related disaster.
And you add this to the train derailments.
You know, you add this to the supply chain crisis.
You remember the ships clogged, you know, at a standstill in the ports.
Airplanes falling apart in the sky.
Now ships crashing into bridges.
Again, I'm not assigning any blame for this latest incident, because we don't have enough information for that at this moment, as far as I know.
But the overall picture is pretty bleak.
And we'll find out more.
And when we look at all these things together, And by the way, I said this on Twitter this morning, and of course I had all kinds of people that were responding and say, oh, come on, you're exaggerating.
There have always been train derailments.
There have always been airplane accidents.
There have always been, someone told me, there have always been ships running into bridges.
Yes, I get, of course, this isn't the first time that's happened, but it's not, to say it always happens, I think is a bit of an exaggeration.
I've never seen anything like this before.
A bridge that enormous being taken down by a ship?
I can't remember the last time we've seen that.
But yes, all these individual sorts of things, bridges falling apart, accidents at sea, accidents in the air, train derailments, supply chain issues, congestion at ports, like all these things individually have happened.
None of that is unprecedented.
But I also don't think you're crazy if you notice all of these things happening a lot And in close succession.
And I think there are many different avenues we can explore to explain that, but one of them is certainly the competency crisis.
We are becoming a rapidly less competent, not just less competent country, but less competent world.
Does that factor in to what happened this morning?
We'll find out, but that's at least the context in which this has occurred.
Okay, here's another horrific story for you.
It's the kind of story that tempts me to say things that could get me banned on every platform, so we'll see how it goes.
Here's CBS News.
A Chicago-area veterinarian who has judged national dog shows was arrested Friday on child pornography charges and accused of chatting about planning to sexually assault his newborn son, according to federal prosecutors.
Adam Stafford King, a veterinary ophthalmologist from Elburn, is charged with one count of knowingly distributing child pornography as a staff ophthalmologist at MedVet Chicago Veterinary Clinic.
King is also a Havanese dog breeder and dog show judge.
According to charges against him, the FBI began investigating King in October as part of a child pornography investigation in New York.
Agents learned a subject in the New York case had been chatting with King using the dating app Scruff and the messaging app Telegram, and King had sent that person several videos of child pornography.
After the person was arrested, FBI agents posed as him online and continued to chat with him.
During those chats, King used the handle He also talked about how he has drugged and sexually abused his nieces and nephews.
He says he uses Benadryl to do that, to drug them.
and girl though prefer boy according to the charges. He also talked about how he
has drugged and sexually abused his nieces and nephews. He says he uses
Benadryl to do that, to drug them. And here's an important part that we wanted
to get to. King also allegedly claimed that he and his husband were expecting
the birth of a child by a surrogate on March 29th and that he planned to
to sexually assault the child after it's born.
He also allegedly sent the person in New York an ultrasound image of the unborn child and a photo of a baby, rather of a baby outfit, that he and his husband got for Christmas.
King allegedly wrote in a message, quote, I do love the idea of inviting a buddy over for when I have my boy.
Just has to be someone I can trust, obviously.
Um, okay, so needless to say this man should be tried and convicted lawfully in a court of law and then executed.
Um, I actually think, okay, now we're gonna get right, we're just gonna get right into the stuff that gets me in trouble.
But I'll just say that I, I honestly believe that we should legally bring back medieval style torture methods for certain criminals like this one.
And I'm not advocating for extrajudicial punishments.
I'm not advocating for vigilanteism.
I'm saying legally, a law should be passed allowing it.
Maybe Florida can be the first to step up to the plate on this.
They're the first on a lot of things.
Maybe they can be the first on this.
It'll be a constitutional challenge, of course.
It'll be called cruel and unusual punishment.
But look, for thousands of years, I mean, it's actually not unusual, certainly not.
I don't think it's cruel, as long as you're, if you're, if the person that is Sustaining this punishment is someone like this.
It's not cruel, and it's certainly not unusual.
It's like the most usual kind of punishment, you know, arguably.
And for thousands of years of human history, in every society on Earth, they used physical punishments for certain crimes.
Whipping, amputation, all sorts of innovative techniques, stockades, etc.
And there are some crimes that warrant that, in my opinion.
Some crimes that warrant the deliberate infliction of severe physical pain.
And, you know, what I'm trying to communicate is that it's only very recently that such an idea is shocking to people.
Totally shocking.
For most of human history, if I were to argue this to you, you would be shocked only that I feel the need to state the obvious.
You know, if I said that, okay, we need a legal punishment to inflict severe physical pain on a man who wants to rape babies, If I had said that to you, you know, almost any other time in human history, you would look at me like, of course, why are you even saying that?
As if this is a, what is there to argue about?
Of course, obviously.
How else are you going to punish somebody like that?
And even now, I don't think that anyone even really disagrees.
I mean, does anyone disagree with the idea that this man deserves to experience severe physical pain lawfully as a lawful punishment?
Does anyone really disagree with that?
I don't think anyone really does.
People pretend to disagree because we've been conditioned into this idea that torture is always wrong no matter what.
Maybe the problem is the word torture.
Like, so let me amend my statement.
Actually, I'll amend it.
I don't think this man should be tortured.
I don't.
I think that we should legally inflict severe physical pain on him, and in his case, it would not be torture.
Okay, it would be if we did the same thing to somebody who was arrested for, say, unpaid parking tickets.
In that case, it'd be torture, cruel and unusual punishment.
In his case, I wouldn't, although it's methods that we may, previously may have been described that way, in this case, I wouldn't call it that for him.
I would call it corporal punishment, is what it is.
And that's what I would advocate.
Alright now, beyond that, we were very notably told that this guy, Adam King, this beast, this goblin, was on the verge of having a child via surrogacy along with his gay lover.
By having a child, of course, we really mean buying a child.
He was going to buy a child, who he then planned to systematically rape.
That was the plan.
And he had already bought the child, it seems, and the surrogate, whose body he had rented, was going to give birth in the next few days.
And keep in mind, it's apparently only by accident that they found out about this comeback.
That's how close he was to actually getting his hands on this baby.
It seems that authorities were investigating some other pedophile scumbag and in the process they found out about Adam King because this other scumbag was talking to Adam King and that's how they found out about him.
And this leads us to an extremely horrifying question, which I'm sure has an even more horrifying answer.
And the question is, how many pedophiles have already purchased children successfully?
How many children have been bought, birthed by surrogates whose wombs were rented, and then delivered into the hands of sex criminal monsters?
Like, total.
I mean, this guy's a monster.
Words do not suffice.
There's no word, at least no word that I can say here publicly that would Be quite enough to describe this person.
So let's just say monster.
How many children have already been birthed and delivered into the hands of monsters?
How many?
I mean, we know the answer isn't zero.
We know that.
Beyond that, we don't know.
And that's what's so terrifying.
And it's also one of the many, many reasons Why surrogacy should be banned.
It's not because every person who has a child through surrogacy is a sex predator, obviously.
Nobody's saying that.
But the point is that it is inherently dehumanizing.
Purchasing a child and then purchasing a woman's body to incubate the child is the commodification of the human person.
And it's We might even say it's the most direct form of commodification of the human person since slavery.
You are literally treating human beings like commodities.
You are buying and renting people.
So I don't know what else to call that.
And you're doing this And doing this and allowing this creates far more problems and opens up far more moral and ethical quandaries than it solves.
That's because it doesn't solve anything.
There's no moral problem being solved by this.
This isn't like some sort of balancing act where we have to say, well, you know, we've got two moral claims and we've got to figure out who wins out here or how do we thread this needle.
There's no needle to thread.
You know, because, and here's the reason.
I know you might say that, well, the problem is that some people can't have kids.
And that's the problem, and that's what surrogacy solves for them.
But no, because if the only way that you can have a child semi-biologically is through surrogacy, well then, you just aren't meant to have a child in that way.
Not everyone is.
Now, some of the people who would otherwise choose surrogacy can and should adopt And I say some, because only married male-female couples, husbands and wives, should be allowed to adopt.
So if you are happy, married, stable marriage, man-woman, husband-wife, and you're thinking about surrogacy, my opinion, my very strong opinion, is that what you should be looking at is adoption.
And there are many children need to be adopt and children have a right to a mother and father.
But for someone in that boat, someone who's a man, woman, couple, married couple,
and you aren't able to conceive a child, then you can rightly say, well, we should be able to have
We should be able to.
But this is something that by our nature we should be able to do.
Except that something has gone wrong physically and that prevents us from having kids.
And in that case, again, adoption is a very noble thing.
Obviously, very necessary.
We need stable, loving couples to adopt.
And that's what you should do if you feel so called.
And certainly you should do that instead of renting another woman's body.
But, if you're a single person, if you're in a same-sex relationship, then you cannot say, I should be able to have kids.
Right?
Your inability to have kids is not a problem that has to be solved.
It's just, it's just, it's a fact of nature.
It is design.
It's the opposite of a problem.
It is how things are designed.
A man and woman are designed to be able to have kids.
But sometimes things go wrong, and either the man or woman's body, or both, or something is wrong, and they're not able to, and so you look for other methods.
Again, as I said, adoption is one of them.
But when you've got two men who say, well, we're not able to have kids, That's not... Nothing has gone wrong.
There's no problem here.
There's not... You shouldn't be looking around shocked and say, well, what's going on?
Why can't we... But you can't because that's just... It is precluded.
It is precluded by nature.
You are in the type of romantic relationship that by its nature can never conceive, by its nature can never produce offspring, that nature itself has precluded from parenthood absolutely.
And so you are not supposed to have kids.
That's not how things are set up.
You are not supposed to have kids.
That shouldn't be a controversial statement.
I understand that it is in our very silly culture, but it shouldn't be.
Like, you are not two men.
I want to have kids.
Well, you're not supposed to have kids.
Who are you to say that?
I'm not even saying that.
God is saying that, but if you would like to say nature is saying that, which God has designed, either one of those statements is correct.
And that's it.
And since we're talking about what's supposed to be, well, all children are supposed to have a mother and a father.
And we can draw that conclusion based on the fact that only men and women can have babies together.
And so, what does that mean?
It means that every child has a mother and father, biologically speaking.
And what does that mean?
It means that every child is supposed to have a mother and father, right?
So, when a single person or same-sex couple has a child, quote-unquote, has, they are depriving the child of something that he needs, which is either a mother or a father.
One of those two is going to be missing.
And a child is supposed to have that, has a right to it.
So you notice here, when I'm talking about this, that I'm putting the emphasis on what the child needs.
Because that's what we should be doing.
That should be the emphasis.
And when it's no longer the emphasis, then all kinds of horrors follow from there, as we saw in this story.
But the emphasis on what does a child need.
The fact that two men are together and they want to have a kid, that's not really relevant.
And that certainly should not take precedence over what a child needs.
A child needs a mother and father, and then you've got two men over here who would like to have a baby.
That might be what you like, what you want, but that is going to be in direct conflict And once again, we're in the territory where I'm explaining things that I shouldn't need to explain.
Child's needs are more important than what you want.
And once we start ignoring that, it never leads anywhere good, as we've seen.
The Daily Wire's this story.
The mission statement of West Point will no longer include the words, Duty, Honor, Country, as the over 220-year-old military academy chose to adopt a new mission statement based on Army values.
The Military Academy announced the proposed change on Monday, saying that the edits to the decades-old mission statement have already been approved by the Secretary of the Army and the Army Chief of Staff.
West Point will still retain duty on our country as the Academy's motto, saying that the changes to the mission statement came after a year-and-a-half-long assessment.
West Point's new mission statement will be, to build, educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadet to be commissioned leaders of character committed to Army values and ready for a lifetime of service to the Army and nation.
Academy explained the change by saying that it is part of a routine examination of the mission of the institution.
Quote, our responsibility to produce leaders to fight and win our nation's wars requires us to assess ourselves regularly.
Thus, over the past year and a half, working with leaders from across West Point and external stakeholders, we review our mission, vision, and strategy to serve this purpose.
Uh, blah blah blah, et cetera and so forth.
So, You know, this is the kind of story, it's actually from a week or so ago, and I've had it here and I wanted to finally get around to it.
It's the kind of story that sounds like it's tailor-made for a boomer, for like the boomer outrage cycle.
They're changing the motto for West Point!
It's an outrage!
But actually it is.
Or perhaps it's less of an outrage and more of a very troubling sign of the times.
And yes, it's easy to point out that this motto, or this part of the mission statement, rather, is what they're changing.
It's easy to point out that this was added in 1998, so it's not like it's a 200-year-old thing.
And that's the kind of excuse they give for everything, like when they tear down a statue, right?
They'll always say, well, hey, the statue was only put up in the 40s, right?
It's not that old.
It's not like we're tearing down a 200-year-old statue.
Now, meanwhile, they would happily tear down a 200-year-old statue, you know, obviously.
That's not the point.
The truth is, it doesn't matter when they came up with this language.
The question is, why would you feel you needed to change it?
Because you would think, you would hope, you would want to believe that duty, honor, country are three perfect words to sum up the mission of an institution like West Point.
And now it's going to say, build, educate, train, and inspire.
So it goes from something strong, masculine, militaristic, to a mission statement that sounds like it could easily be the mission statement for any college, any school, any corporation.
It could be a mission statement hanging on the wall in the break room at Best Buy, okay?
And it wouldn't look out of place at all there.
A mission statement at the Best Buy break room that says, Duty, Honor, Country, would be awesome.
I mean, I would be a big fan of Best Buy if they would put that in the break room.
But that would seem like maybe slightly strange, or at least a little more intense than you would expect for Best Buy.
But educate, train, inspire?
Sure.
I mean, any HR presentation will probably include that phrase somewhere.
And so, that's what they got.
They go from something strong, militaristic, something that has real heft to it, something meaningful, to just, like, sanitized HR language.
And that's what we find happening all across the country.
Now, will this change affect anything?
Will you notice any difference in your day-to-day life because West Point changed the language on its mission statement?
No, obviously not.
The point, again, is what it represents.
What it's a symptom of.
And that is the flight away from duty, honor, and patriotism.
The rejection of those values.
Duty, in particular.
Now, patriotism... Obviously, we live in a society deficient in patriotism.
We live in a country deficient in patriotism.
We know a lot of people who live in this country hate this country.
And that's a major problem.
But I think most people, in theory, would claim that they are patriotic.
Right?
Even now.
And many of them aren't.
Many of them are the opposite of patriotic, but if you were to ask most people, I think, and you were to say, are you a patriotic?
They would probably say yes.
So patriotism lives on in name, which doesn't mean much, obviously.
And honor is another one.
People don't talk about honor, but if you ask them about it and, you know, and you said, is it important to act honorably?
They would probably say yes.
Even if they then proceed to act dishonorably, they would still say yes.
So those two values are on life support, if not already dead.
But they aren't rejected outright, I would argue, in the same way that duty is.
And many in our culture are conditioned to reject the very idea of duty, to deny that they have any duty to anyone or anything.
And so that's what this is really symptomatic of, is that these are just, it's actually upsetting to people when you talk about duty.
They don't want to hear about it.
They don't want to hear about responsibility.
The idea that they have a responsibility to anything that they have, you know, duty, obligation, responsibility, any of these, these are obviously all synonyms.
And for a lot of people, The idea that they have an obligation at all.
Especially that they inherently have certain obligations.
They reject that.
And even in a context where you would think that everyone would agree, well of course you have obligations there.
Like, you're going to join the military?
Obviously there are obligations.
You go get a job at any company.
If you work at Best Buy, there are obligations.
But even in those contexts, if you talk to people about obligations, they get, they say, well, don't, don't tell me what I can do.
I can do it.
I want to express myself.
I want to be free to be me.
And the problem, the problem, which is not really a problem, but why people see obligation as a problem is that, well, a lot of people are lazy, pretty simple.
They don't want to have to do things, but also it requires you to subordinate in some ways your, your, um, Your personal expression, you know, you cannot do and say everything that you want all the time, especially in the face of obligations, because the obligation comes along and says, OK, well, you might want to do this thing over here.
You might want to express this.
You might want to be this way.
But here's the responsibility we need you to fulfill.
And you just got to get it done.
And if it's not possible for you to do that while still expressing yourself and being yourself and being an individual, then too bad, you still need to do it.
And that's the part that makes obligation, duty, responsibility anathema in our culture.
Which is all the more reason why you would want an institution like West Point to emphasize it.
Right?
They should be making new mission statements that emphasize these points even more, if anything.
But of course, they're going the other way.
Let's get to the... What are we getting to?
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A couple of comments here.
We talked yesterday about birth control and some women are awakening to the dangers of birth control and deciding not to use it anymore.
This is a big crisis.
Big, big, big crisis for the media and for the left.
Because as we know, the birth control pill, as I said yesterday, you know, these forces have been for decades waging a war on the family.
The birth control pill was essentially their nuclear bomb in that war against the family.
Here's a comment that says, well, I hope the men are smart enough to use protection and or get a vasectomy so these women can't trap them.
So sad.
I feel bad for the men that will be told their spouse is on birth control and they aren't.
Here's a, just want to say one quick thing about this, that if you are worried about being trapped, quote unquote, with the natural consequences of a particular act, Then don't engage in that act.
If one of the natural consequences of an act, in fact, consequences that have been borne out billions of times in human history, if you are worried about those results, consequence even has a negative connotation I don't like, but results, okay?
If you're worried about the natural results of a particular act, so worried about it that you would call those results a trap, then don't engage in the act.
So, if a woman can trap you with a baby, trap you, then that's a woman that you should not be having sex with.
And if you do, you're not trapped.
It's not a trap.
What, were you actually, did she, like, lay out, like, a booby trap somewhere?
Pardon the pun.
And, you know, maybe set, like, dig a hole somewhere, and you wandered in, and you fell in the hole, she trapped you, and then, is that what happened?
No, I think it was a deliberate act that you engaged in.
And so, if you don't want to be trapped in that way, it's a really easy way to avoid it.
And, you know, the easiest way to avoid it is to only have sex with a woman who you would want to have a baby with.
And in a context where having a baby would not, from your perspective, destroy your life.
So, you know, this is just back to me being super old-fashioned and saying, You find a woman, get married, and then you don't have to worry about being trapped with a baby, or at least you shouldn't be.
Moving on to cauliflower ice cream.
Someone says, before I dismiss it, I gotta see the nutritional contents on that veggie cold ice cream.
Might be a good actual ice cream replacement for someone trying to cut back on their sugar intake.
Someone else says, but cashew ice cream is even better than regular.
No, this is all just, I've never had cashew ice cream.
I have been, I'm not going to say fooled, but I have tested these claims many times for various people, including my own wife.
Has insisted that, oh, here's a substitute version of this dairy product that it tastes, you wouldn't even tell the difference.
You couldn't tell the difference.
I've been, so many times I've been told this and I said, really, I can't tell the difference?
Okay, try it.
And every single time it's the worst experience of my life.
My wife just, just, this is bringing back recent trauma for me.
My wife just last week came home with not just one box, but multiple boxes of plant butter.
And I said, what?
Why?
Did you look in every store in the greater Nashville area and they didn't have butter?
Is that what happened?
Because even if that happened, then as tragic as it is, I guess we're just not going to have butter.
Why would you bring this substance into our home?
And she didn't have a good explanation.
I don't know.
But she did.
And so now every time we're eating anything that involves butter, I always have to ask, like, this is real butter, right?
I have to be very careful now.
I have to walk around on eggshells to make sure I don't accidentally consume plant butter.
It's a real problem.
I love you, Matt.
Matt, do you really think the dairy industry would hold if they were transparent about
their product's source?
What sounds better, food derived from an animal that lives in its own s***, depressed all
the time, pumped with hormones and forced to be pregnant, or a food derived from a plant
that looks funny?
I love you, Matt, and I can tell you're sprinkling a bit of satire in, but you're wrong on this
one.
What sounds better in that scenario?
The former.
Yeah, I'll take the depressed animal living in its own sh** over the plant.
Absolutely.
I don't know what to tell you.
And also, I don't know if the cows are depressed.
I think you're just assuming that.
We don't know if the cows are depressed.
How do you know that the cows are depressed on a dairy farm?
We don't know that.
You can assume it, but you've never talked to a cow to hear that.
Maybe they feel like they're living out their purpose.
I mean, I would argue that the greatest purpose for a cow, the greatest purpose for a cow is to provide milk to human beings and then ultimately to become a hamburger.
That's the great, that's the great, I mean, they could be thrilled with that.
This could be something, they are fulfilling, it's their highest calling.
So that could be the way they see it.
We don't really know.
But what I will say is that Whether cows are depressed or not, I don't want them to be depressed.
If the cows are depressed, it's unfortunate.
I don't think it affects the taste of the dairy product, though.
Like, if I were to give you ice cream that was produced from milk from a depressed cow, and then I were to give you ice cream that comes from a cow that was very optimistic and hopeful about the future, I don't think you'd be able to tell the difference.
In fact, I guarantee you, you couldn't.
So, it's all delicious, either way.
Depressed, happy, whatever it is.
It's all delicious to me.
And, you know, that's the silver lining here.
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Shea butter.
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Forget it.
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Why would you even put that in there?
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And you put that in the copy.
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We care about what goes on in your body.
That's why, uh, this sounds creepy.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
[MUSIC]
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison was interviewed on Al Sharpton's MSNBC
show on Sunday.
And it may come as shocking news that Al Sharpton still has an MSNBC show than he
He is, after all, the least talented broadcaster in the history of American broadcasting.
He makes Don Lemon look like a broadcasting legend by comparison, yet he has had a show on the network for years.
DEI in action yet again.
In any case, there's one portion of this Keith Ellison interview that has gotten some attention today.
Let's watch it.
Well, I am a prosecutor, as you know, and if you are a victim of a crime, then the crime rate is intolerable, and I understand that.
We have a duty and an obligation to protect everyone and make sure justice is done.
But statistically, it is true that crime is dramatically down, and some of the right-wing prescriptions for how to deal with crime are just wrong and are going to bring us back to the bad old days.
OK, let's pause it there for a moment.
We haven't even gotten to the really crazy part yet, but let's deal with this first claim first, which is Ellison saying that the crime rate is actually down and that Republican prescriptions to deal with crime are just wrong and will bring us back to the bad old days.
And by bad old days, he means the days when we put, you know, when we did radical things like put criminals in jail.
He doesn't want to see that happen again.
But what about this idea that crime is down?
Well, Ellison is not the only one saying this.
It's a major Democrat talking point, which means, by extension, that it is a major media talking point.
No surprise there.
It's an election year, and they want to desperately convince voters that things are going swimmingly well.
Yet, even as Ellison and Democrat Party and the media assure us that crime rates are dropping, many Americans look around their communities and they see something that does not comport with the rosy picture that these propagandists are painting.
They tell us that crime is going down, crime is under control, but we can see with our own eyes the rampant shoplifting, drug use, property crime, violent assaults, zombified drug addicts wandering around in the street and so on.
And they tell us that crime is going down, but we can see that companies like Walgreens that can survive anywhere, that could probably find a way to survive in Antarctica or on the moon, yet are being driven out of major cities because of crime.
So how do we explain that?
The short answer is that Keith Ellison and company are a bunch of low-down, no-good, dirty, filthy liars.
The longer answer is that, yes, according to statistics, many types of crime are trending down, but that's only happening on paper, not out in reality.
It's happening in the books, but the books have been cooked.
It's not hard to see how this has been done.
Many cities have simply stopped prosecuting many sorts of crimes, especially property crimes.
That's how they perform this magic trick.
You know, if you don't prosecute crime, then there will be less crime, at least on paper.
It's kind of like how you might manufacture a dramatic dip in heart disease in a given year by simply refusing to diagnose many cases of heart disease.
If heart disease isn't being diagnosed as much this year as it was last year, even if there's actually more of it this year than last year, then just like that, heart disease has gone down statistically, like magic.
Now, supposedly they do still prosecute violent crime, and yet there has been a supposed drop in those sorts of crimes as well.
And that may be true, but keep in mind that 2020 was the worst year for violent crime in decades.
If there's been a drop, it's dropping from those highs.
That doesn't mean that the violent crime rate is low or that it isn't still a major problem.
Also, the fact is that many of these woke Soros DAs are not exactly zealous about prosecuting violent crime either.
So, even those statistics probably aren't reliable.
These are all things to remember as you listen to propagandists like Keith Ellison.
And now that we've done that, we've gotten that out of the way, let's get to the really crazy part.
Or the crazier part.
Anyway, here it is.
My thought is that we need to continue to be aggressive about, you know, protecting people, no doubt, prosecuting crime, murder happens, rape happens, criminal sexual assault and human trafficking.
These things happen.
We will continue to do our job, but we've also got to go upstream.
We've got to make sure that the automobiles are not so easy to steal so that they're a tempting, attractive nuisance for young people.
And, you know, right now we are investigating two major automakers because their cars are dramatically too easy to steal for young people.
Dramatically too easy to steal.
And I'm not one to unironically accuse anybody of victim blaming, but if victim blaming is anything, it's what you just heard there.
That was the car theft version of, you shouldn't have worn that short skirt if you didn't want that to happen.
Like, it's exactly the same kind of logic.
Now, if you didn't know any better when you heard him say, we need to go upstream, you may have expected him to talk about things that are actually upstream of the crime problem.
Things like the collapse of the family, fatherless homes, unwed pregnancy, divorce.
He's right.
You know, we do need to go upstream.
That's what you find upstream, if you go upstream.
Instead, he didn't go upstream, though.
Instead, he actually went downstream, way downstream, and then veered off into some small, irrelevant tributary.
He claims that cars are getting stolen because they're too easy to steal, which creates a temptation for young people.
And here are a few problems with that.
First of all, Blaming the car manufacturers for the fact that people are stealing the cars is like if you got mugged on the street corner and then you turned around and sued the company that manufactured your wallet.
It's totally outlandish.
Second, car theft might be a crime of opportunity, but it's not one that someone is tempted into in the moment most times.
Like, you aren't going to have some otherwise good kid, some straight-A student who works a part-time job at Chick-fil-A, some well-behaved, well-raised young man who, you know, happens to see a very stealable car parked along the street as he's walking by, and then feels overcome with the urge to abscond with it.
I myself wasn't even a straight-A student, or particularly well-behaved, but I never felt the temptation to steal a car.
It's not like when you're trying to follow a strict diet and then somebody brings cupcakes into work.
That's the sort of thing that you could be tempted into.
But if you're stealing a car, it's because either you were out looking for cars to steal, or you're the kind of person who will steal a car if the opportunity arises.
Either way, no young person is falling into a life of crime simply because certain cars are so easy to steal that the temptation is just too great.
By the way, most low-level crimes are easy to commit.
Anybody can steal a car.
Anybody can shoplift.
Anybody can burglarize a home.
Getting away with it may take some skill, except in a lot of cities where they won't prosecute you, but aside from that, getting away with it may take some skill.
But crimes of that sort are easy to commit, at least, and there's no way to make it really difficult.
This is not like kidnapping the president or something.
Although that might be a bad example.
You could probably just leave a trail of hard candies and he would follow it right into your van.
Not that I'm advocating that.
The point is, cars are relatively easy to steal no matter what you do.
And that's why you don't solve the problem by addressing the how.
Now it's a good idea on an individual basis to make it harder by comparison for a criminal to steal your car.
That way he'll go steal somebody else's instead and it's not your problem.
But on a societal level, The solution isn't found in the how, it's found in the why.
Why are kids out stealing cars?
Why are they tempted by the seductive sight of a car with insufficient theft prevention?
Well, that takes us back upstream.
Back to what's really important.
Family.
Marriage.
Parenting.
All of the things that Keith Ellison doesn't want to talk about.
Because he's too stupid to understand any of these issues, and also because he's too corrupt and too dishonest to discuss them, even if he did understand them.
