Ep. 1339 - Bloodbath In California After Minimum Wage Is Raised To 20 Dollars An Hour
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, California decides to address the economic crisis by making it worse. They raised minimum wage to 20 dollars an hour for fast food workers, and the predictable bloodbath ensued. Also, the media settled on their latest Trump hoax. Plus, a new book explores the ways that children have been rewired by smartphones. And the manager of a new fast food restaurant gets poor reviews from customers. But he knows the real reason for the bad reviews: racism, of course.
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, California decides to address the economic crisis by making it worse.
They raised the minimum wage to $20 an hour for fast food workers, and the predictable bloodbath ensued.
Also, the media settled on their latest Trump hoax.
We'll take a look at it.
Plus, a new book explores the way that children have been rewired by smartphones, and the manager of a new fast food restaurant gets poor reviews from customers.
But he knows the real reason for the bad reviews.
Racism, of course.
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
This episode is brought to you by Preborn.
To donate securely, dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby or go to preborn.com slash Matt.
For several years now, Democrats in the state of California have enjoyed all the perks of one-party rule.
With supermajorities in the state legislature, they don't have to deal with an opposition party.
They certainly don't need to provide any kind of transparency to the public.
They're completely free to enact the Democratic Party's grand vision, just like the leaders of notorious utopias like Baltimore, Selma, Detroit, Oakland.
If states are the laboratories of democracy, then California is the laboratory of the Democratic Party, whatever Democrats want.
They get.
And that's why hundreds of thousands of people flee California every year.
And it's why a lot more are about to leave the state.
Because California, without much discussion or debate, just raised its minimum wage for certain fast food workers to $20 an hour.
That is a 25% hike in wages, up from $16 an hour.
The law applies to chains with 60 or more locations in California, and it includes franchises, many of which are family-owned.
Now, the totally foreseeable and inevitable followed from this new policy, which is that a bunch of fast food chains announced mass layoffs.
Others started raising prices, and at least one restaurant so far has closed down completely because of this.
Watch.
Rising wages.
California's fast food workers started earning more money today, 25% more than they were making yesterday.
The pay raise could mean higher prices at some restaurants, and has reportedly prompted at least one Central Valley business to shutter.
Today, the employees of the Foster's Freeze in Lemoore showed up for work but got their last paycheck instead.
Action News anchor Nick Garcia was in Lemoore tonight and talked to workers about the abrupt closure.
Some of the people who worked at this Foster's Freeze thought it was an April Fool's Day joke until they saw the close sign for themselves and reality sunk in.
I was like, okay, April Fool's, be frill.
Not April Fool's.
I realized that she was not joking.
I drove straight over here and got my last check.
So those employees at Foster's Freeze went from $16 an hour to $0 an hour thanks to the minimum wage hike, which California declares a win for workers.
And they're not alone, those workers.
When this law was signed, two large Pizza Hut franchisees laid off more than 1,200 delivery drivers.
In San Jose, the Wall Street Journal reports that two small Vitality Bowls restaurants have cut their workforces in half.
Restaurants like Jack in the Box are testing fire robots and automated drink dispensers so they can fire more employees soon.
Hours are being cut as well. And of course prices are going up too across the board
The New York Post reported that at one Los Angeles area Burger King prices for a Texas double Whopper went from
$15.09 on March 29th to $16.89 on April 1st once the law went into effect
That's an increase of nearly $2 for the same exact Already horrifically overpriced food in just two days
The Big Fish meal went up by $4 from $7.49 to $11.49.
So that is the precise increase in hourly wage passed directly and immediately to the customers.
Several other menu items went up anywhere from 25 cents to a dollar, the Post found.
You know, from what I've seen, some of the advocates of the minimum wage hike on social media have tried to dismiss the concerns over the price hikes by saying that 25 cents to a dollar isn't a very steep increase.
But what they're ignoring is that, first of all, as a percentage of the overall price of the item, these hikes are already significant.
And second, this law has been in effect for less than two days.
And this is what has happened only in that time frame.
We can assume the prices will continue to go up from there.
One of the many fast food companies raising prices is the fried chicken restaurant Raising Cane's.
The CEO of the company went on CNBC recently to talk about the impact of this legislation on his business.
Now, based on everything I've just said, you might assume that the CNBC anchor conducting the interview would have maybe a dim view from a business perspective.
Of this new legislation.
After all, you'd expect someone at a business-oriented network to understand that higher prices and fewer jobs are generally a bad thing.
But here's how she frames her question.
What about if your workers are making more money, and then others are as well in California, do you anticipate any kind of sales potential benefit from people having more disposable income to buy more chicken fingers?
You know, we have always tried to stay consistent, do one thing better than everyone else, so we focus on what I call everyday value.
Now, the CEO doesn't really answer the question, probably because he's there for a nice PR opportunity.
He doesn't want this to be adversarial, or maybe he wasn't paying attention.
But it's an incredible question to ask in earnest, which she appears to be doing.
If you give minimum wage workers a raise, but in the process you make it more expensive for them to live and eat, you haven't really given them a raise.
You haven't made it easier for them to purchase more chicken fingers.
This is especially the case for the many workers who have already lost their jobs because of this, and the many more who will lose their jobs in the future.
Now the fact that this is apparently difficult to say out loud, even for the CEO of Raising Cane's, tells us a lot about how California got into this position.
Very few people in the state seem to understand basic principles of economics, or at least, they don't want to talk about those principles.
But the fast food workers themselves understand very clearly what's going on here.
They realize that they didn't actually get a raise.
Here's an employee from Jack in the Box explaining a basic economic reality that the governor of her state doesn't seem to comprehend.
I mean, it's good you're getting more money, but at the same time, it's going to increase everything else.
But Silva has concerns about how fast food companies may respond to this.
Cutting employee hours, or in some cases, restaurant hours.
The fast food worker union reps laid it out in a press conference this morning.
When you cut hours, you can sell fewer hamburgers or tacos, so it's not the preferred strategy for most employers.
The raise doesn't fix all problems for Silva.
She wants to buy a house.
So how does a fast food worker understand the economics of the situation better than these CNBC anchors?
That's it, hi, there's no way we can make it neither.
So how does a fast food worker understand the economics of the situation better than
the CNBC anchors?
Why is she raising issues that California's politicians don't seem to understand?
Whatever the answer is, this is getting to be a running theme in California.
A couple of years ago, California sent out millions of inflation relief checks, which accomplished nothing except making inflation even worse.
But there was no opposition party that could block those checks, just like there's no opposition party to block this minimum wage increase.
In fact, in California, the labor unions obtained non-disclosure agreements during the negotiations for the minimum wage bill.
So nobody can talk about how exactly this bill came about.
There's never going to be a full explanation for why, for example, Gavin Newsom's friend and donor at Panera Bread managed to secure an exemption for fast food restaurants that make bread.
Not that we really need an explanation for that.
It's the kind of naked corruption that one-party states are well known for.
But you don't need an insider's look into the legislative process to know how poorly conceived this law is.
That's because after the bill was passed, legislators went back and added a bunch of other exemptions, including fast food locations in airports, stadiums.
That's how you know you're dealing with a very well thought out law.
The legislators just go back and redo it sort of on the fly a few weeks later.
And these are the people manipulating the economy in the most populated state in the country.
They're doing it as haphazardly as you would expect.
Now the truth is that raising the minimum wage by 25%, which is obviously a very sizable hike, in the midst of inflation and a struggling economy is incredibly stupid, and there's really no other word for it.
It attempts an end run around the actual problems that California is facing, except really it's worse than that, because they aren't just avoiding the problems, but actively making everything worse.
They're trying to solve problems by creating more of the problems they're allegedly trying to solve.
And they aren't done.
In fact, some leaders in California think that $20 an hour is still too low.
It's not even half of what they think the minimum wage should be.
Here's Representative Barbara Lee.
Both of our Democratic opponents are calling for a minimum wage between $20 and $25 an hour.
You're calling for a $50 an hour federal minimum wage.
That's seven times the current national minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
Can you explain how that would be economically sustainable for small businesses?
You have 60 seconds.
First, let me say I owned and ran a small business for 11 years.
I created hundreds of jobs.
Benefits, retirement benefits, also health care benefits.
I know what worker productivity means, and that means that you have to make sure that your employees are taken care of and have a living wage.
In the Bay Area, I believe it was the United Way, came out with a report that very recently, $127,000 for a family of four Is just barely enough to get by.
Another survey very recently, 104,000 for a family of one.
Barely enough to get by.
Low income because of the affordability crisis.
And so just do the math.
Just do the math.
Just do the math.
Do the math, says the woman who apparently can't add two plus two.
She wants to mandate six-figure incomes for the people who run the cash register at McDonald's.
And she wants to do that on the federal level, by the way.
She wants this nationwide.
Now you notice that she was asked about the economic sustainability of such a plan and did not pretend to even address that concern.
That's because, of course, it is not sustainable at all.
$20 an hour isn't sustainable.
$20 an hour has already caused a bloodbath of layoffs and price hikes.
$50 an hour would simply be the end of any place that they tried it in California.
It would be the end of commerce in California, which means the end of California itself.
So, on second thought, maybe her plan has some benefits, you might say.
But you notice what Lee said in the clip there.
She said that a family of four needs a six-figure income just to get by.
Now, that's not really true.
You can get by on less.
You know, when I had a family of four, we got by on significantly less than $100,000 a year.
But think about how that applies here.
She's saying that minimum wage workers need a massive mandatory raise because that's what's
necessary for families of four to survive, according to her.
And this obviously implies that there are a lot of single income households of four
where the breadwinner makes minimum wage.
But that's not generally the case.
And this is really perhaps the most important point here.
Minimum wage jobs are not meant to be careers in the first place.
These are supposed to be jobs for teenagers working part-time while they finish high school.
These aren't jobs that grown adults with kids and mortgages are supposed to be doing for years on end.
So if you've been working at a job You know, for five years, ten years, whatever, and you still make minimum wage, there's obviously a serious problem and it's not one that a minimum wage hike can solve.
Now, personally, I want every minimum wage worker to get a hefty raise, but that can be achieved and should be achieved by earning a raise or by getting some work experience under your belt and then going out and finding a better job somewhere else.
Minimum wage is supposed to be a stepping stone, not a foundation to build your life on.
You know, it's a bit like if lawmakers passed a law declaring that all tent manufacturers must make their tents big enough and sturdy enough that, you know, they can be lived in for six months at a time.
But that's not what tents are supposed to be used for.
That's not what a tent is.
A tent is something you stay in for a few days at a time.
Now, lawmakers in California might respond, well, that's not true.
In our state, lots of people live in tents for years.
They set them up right on the sidewalk.
Yes, but the problem there is not that the tents are insufficient homes.
The problem is that those people are trying to turn tents into homes.
Okay, the problem is with how the tent is being used.
And minimum wage is like, it's like the tent of salaries.
It's meant to be very temporary.
It's a temporary structure that you're not supposed to stay in very long.
Now, the advantage of working a minimum wage job is that the bar is pretty low.
Because it is an entry-level job, and because you are working with, you know, again, a lot of teenagers, at least 16-year-olds, but get paid minimum wage.
And the advantage is that that sets the bar pretty low.
You show up on time, you look presentable, you put the effort in, you be reliable, be moderately competent, have a moderately good attitude, cover all the basics, and you'll be on the fast track to a better job, either at your current place of work or somewhere else.
You don't need to wait around for the government to force your employer to give you a raise, as I've said plenty of times before.
The best way for a minimum wage worker to make more money is to not be a minimum wage worker anymore.
And that's a basic truth that you won't hear from politicians like Barbara Lee.
Instead, they'll promise you the pie in the sky.
The bad news is they probably won't deliver on that promise.
The worst news is that they might.
And then everyone's problems will get much worse.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
Now I've been extremely clear and I've spoken in my stance that abortion is undoubtedly evil and should be illegal in all circumstances.
I'm also aware of the indoctrination and pro-abortion propaganda pushed by public schools and other liberal institutions.
You all have heard their lies that a baby in the womb is just a clump of cells or that a woman's reproductive rights include termination of pregnancy if the baby's life is an inconvenience to her.
And then there's the quality of life argument that abortion is somehow justified because the mother doesn't have the means to take care of her baby.
I don't think these people actually know what they're saying.
Our society needs a massive overhaul when it comes to helping young women understand the inherent value of life and the duty and joy of motherhood.
That's why an organization like Preborn is so critical.
Preborn covers all the bases for soon-to-be mothers, particularly ones considering abortion.
Preborn meets women with compassion, encouragement, and understanding.
They provide women with the tools they need to choose life for their babies.
Not only do they introduce women to their children through ultrasound, but they also provide education about pregnancy, as well as two years of financial support for women who choose a life.
And they do all this at no cost to the mother.
Help make a difference in the fight against abortion by supporting organizations like Preborn.
Donate $28, the cost of one ultrasound, and help save a life today.
To donate, securely dial pound 250 and say the keyword, baby.
That's pound 250.
Say the keyword, baby.
Or go to preborn.com slash Matt.
That's preborn.com slash Matt.
Before we get to the headlines, or to the lesser headlines, I need to start with the big news of the day, of the week, the month.
Arguably the century.
You know, a couple days ago I posted a picture on Twitter of myself in a judge's robe, sitting at a judge's bench.
And I said that I was finally fulfilling my life's calling to be a judge.
And many people, basically everyone, I mean basically everyone thought that I was joking.
Because we did, it was on April Fool's, you know, in fairness.
But now I can reveal to you, officially, that I was not joking.
This is not a joke.
I am now a judge.
I am now officially, officially, America's preeminent legal authority and expert.
And next week, we will be premiering my new show, my court show, appropriately called Judged.
Take a look.
All rise for the Honorable Judge Walsh.
Please be seated.
Ms.
Goldstein.
Mr. Bentley.
Mr. Outerbridge.
Ms.
Spicer.
Mr. Barney.
Ms.
Singh.
At 30,000 feet, my lips exploded.
Why would I pay rent to somebody who had sex with my sister?
A dog bit my finger.
He's allergic, like the grass.
If he didn't want me to drop the car, he would've took the key I had with him.
Has anyone told you you're the worst negotiator that's ever lived?
I've never been more annoyed than I am in this moment.
[whirring]
[whirring]
Not even close.
That does it.
Please get the hell out of my courtroom.
Now, yes, again, I must emphasize that this is real.
I have my own court show on The Daily Wire.
I'm very excited about it.
We obviously live in a world deprived of justice, deprived of truth.
And I'm here to change that.
And these are real people.
These are actual real cases.
I do have real legal authority to rule over their disputes and to impose monetary damages.
Why would anyone give me that power?
Why would anyone come to me with an actual real dispute, a legal dispute they're having?
Well, that's easy, because they recognize that I am uniquely equipped to handle any of these disputes as a person who is, as you know, always right about everything.
I've never been wrong about a single thing, ever.
You know that if you watch this show.
And I was also right about something else that I wanted to mention.
You know, I've been missing shows If you watch the show, you know I have been missing episodes seemingly at random for the past year, and many in the audience were upset, even accusing me of being lazy and unreliable and saying many other unimaginable things to a man of my stature, to a judge like myself.
And I said that I was working on some major projects and that these absences will be worth it, so here's one of them.
And I say one of them because we're not done yet.
There's more to come.
And what's coming next is, well, you're going to like it.
You're going to like it in the audience.
Some other people won't like it, but that's a topic for another day.
For now, my court show, Judge, is the headline premiering next week, Tuesday, April 9th, 8 p.m.
Eastern.
And you don't want to miss it.
You are, in fact, legally required to not miss it.
I am a judge, after all.
That's the way it works now.
I will have you imprisoned if you do not subscribe to The Daily Wire and watch this show.
That's my marketing pitch.
Okay, we have our latest Trump hoax.
The media's latest Trump hoax, I should say.
The Biden campaign's Twitter page posted this clip, and I'll play the clip for you, and then I'll tell you what their caption for the clip is.
And of course, the entire media picked it up and ran with it.
But here's the clip of Trumpwatch.
The Democrats say, please don't call them animals, they're humans.
I said, no, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals.
So there's the short clip.
Now, the caption, which again, the whole media has repeated, the caption that Biden offered is this.
Even the out-of-context clip that they provided, they're still misquoting it.
Because what he really said was, Democrats said, please don't call them animals.
I said, no.
He didn't say immigrants, he said them.
And of course, Biden, he didn't even put immigrants in brackets.
You know, he just pretended that was the actual quote.
That's not what was said.
So who is the them in this context?
Well, let's listen to the full clip to get that context.
Here it is.
Student in Georgia who was barbarically murdered by an illegal alien animal.
Okay, so there you go.
The animals in this context are specifically the illegal immigrants who murder American citizens.
They're not humans, they're animals.
Nancy Pelosi told me that.
She said, please don't use the word animal, sir, when you're talking about these people.
I said, I'll use the word animal 'cause that's what they are.
I'll never forget my vow to her.
Okay, so there you go.
The animals in this context are specifically the illegal immigrants who murder American citizens.
He's saying murderers are animals.
Now, if you're a very sensitive soul, you might still take issue with that.
You might say that all human beings are human and we shouldn't use dehumanizing language about any of them, no matter what terrible things they've done.
Now, I personally don't mind the dehumanizing language.
It is dehumanizing language.
I don't mind it for the simple reason that the language itself Um, isn't what dehumanizes the scumbag killer.
So maybe I should, it's not dehumanizing language, it is dehumanized language.
And the difference is that these criminal scumbags, their own behavior, their own decisions, Their own choice to be scumbag killers is what dehumanizes them.
So they have done the dehumanizing of themselves.
They have dehumanized themselves by behaving in a way that is subhuman.
That is barbaric.
That is beneath the dignity of a human being.
They are behaving like animals.
So the language is just a reflection of their own behavior.
It's a recognition of their choices.
So I don't have an issue with it, but the problem is that You know, the Biden campaign and the media, but I repeat myself, of course, are not being honest, obviously, because they're godforsaken liars and they lie about everything.
So they're not out there arguing that, hey, you know, we should use humane language even when we talk about the worst kinds of people.
I think that that would just be better.
They're not saying that.
Instead, they're arguing that we shouldn't call all immigrants animals, even though nobody is doing that.
Nobody has done that.
Nobody would do that.
Nobody thinks that.
That's in your cartoon version of the world, you know, where Trump and all conservatives are cartoon villains and they go around talking about how all immigrants are animals.
No one thinks that.
No one's saying that.
Criminals, scumbag criminals who murder innocent people, they are animals.
That's why they get locked in cages.
You know, you could argue that putting someone in prison is dehumanizing to a certain extent.
And it is.
But again, because you take anyone else and you throw them in a cage, you can't put them in a cage.
They're not animals.
Well, yeah, if it's an innocent person, it's dehumanizing.
But if you have chosen to act like an animal, then we as a society are forced to treat you like an animal.
Like, we have to put you away in a cage.
We have to put you in a cage.
Because, like we do animals, because that's how you are acting, and we have no choice.
And I think we should be, there's no reason that we can't be honest about that in our language.
Our Daily Wire has this report.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU Stern, said in an interview this week that smartphones and social media have led to numerous problems for Gen Z. Haidt made the remarks while speaking to Firing Line with host Margaret Hoover about his new book, The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness.
He explained that the great rewiring refers to a five-year period between 2010 and 2015 when society fundamentally changed for adolescents with the emergence of smartphones and social media.
He said the very concept of social media, posting things that make you stand out because you're desperately fighting for attention, has been detrimental to adolescents because they're learning these behaviors during puberty.
We have a quick clip of this, I believe.
Let's watch that.
So there's very important older research by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, where they looked at that gigantic health data sets, the Framingham Heart Study.
And they were able to see that, you know, if one person takes up smoking, their friends are more likely to take up smoking.
But actually, so are their friends' friends, and even friends' friends' friends.
So the things we do spread out through social network.
We affect each other.
Now, it turns out, When you're looking at emotions, girls and women, in this
study women, when a woman is depressed, that spreads out to her network, whereas when a man is
depressed, it doesn't.
Women talk about their feelings, they're more connected in that way. Girls are connecting
on social media, where it just turns out in many communities, the more anxious and depressed you
are, the more you get support.
The more extreme your symptoms, the more you get likes and followers.
Of course, it's good to destigmatize mental illness.
We don't want people to be ashamed.
But boy, is it a terrible idea to valorize it, to tell young people, you know what?
The more you have this, the more popular you'll be, the more support you'll get.
And so you get this explosion, not just of anxiety.
Anxiety is in part, I think, spread sociogenically, it's called, from social causes, not from internal causes.
But we get it for dissociative identity disorder, and it seems to be the case for gender dysphoria as well.
And you think that the data demonstrates that it is above and beyond just the phenomenon of coming out and increased awareness?
Yes, because it happens in clusters of girls.
It happens in clusters of girls who had no previous gender dysphoria when they were young.
So it's very different.
So this is obviously not the first time we've heard this, but the more it's talked about, the better.
I mean, we need to be talking about it a lot more than we are.
Now, we need to do more than talking.
But it starts with talking, with acknowledgement of the problem.
And the problem is, as the title of Haidt's book says, that generations of children are being fundamentally rewired.
The epidemic of gender dysphoria, the dramatic historic rise in depression, anxiety, and everything else, all of those things are symptoms.
They're very bad, very troubling symptoms of the underlying issue.
And the underlying issue is that we have completely changed What childhood is, and who children are, by giving them these little screens to orient their entire lives and identities around.
You know, I talk about the orientation, when it comes to children, the orientation.
How do they orient themselves?
Like, where are they looking?
Who are they looking to?
How are they orienting themselves in the world?
And where are they picking up their cues and getting directions?
Sort of like, what's their compass that they're looking at?
Uh, not only to navigate the world but also to develop a sense of their own identity, a sense of themselves, of their place, you know, in reality.
And for most of human history, Children look to adults, the adults in their lives.
They look to the elders, whether it's their parents, grandparents, village elders, you know.
That's most of human history.
That's the way that it worked.
That's how children discovered the world, discovered themselves, who they are, what it means to be a person, all these things.
They would look up, you know, they were literally looking up to the people that were bigger and wiser than them, and that's how they were learning.
And then the advent of modern public school came along.
And the kids instead started looking to each other, to their peers.
And this was a negative development.
This was harmful.
And this is where you started to see things like extended adolescence, where you've got, you know, 27-year-olds who are still acting like they're 13 and these sorts of things.
And that began with kids in public school who spend most of their time around each other, like a giant Lord of the Flies experiment.
And they're basically raising each other, and they're learning about the world by looking at each other, but none of them know what the hell's going on, so they're just chasing each other, they're going around in circles, right?
And that was bad enough.
But now it's gotten so much worse, because now they look to each other, to their peers, through their phones.
They are orienting themselves to the world based on their peers, as they were before, but they are accessing their peers through the filter of their phone screens.
And even this, even this aspect of the problem is just an aspect of the problem.
The problem itself, again, the fact that kids are spending every waking moment of their lives on these things, the problem itself is so vast, it is so all-encompassing, that it's almost impossible to talk about it without breaking it down into smaller pieces.
And the fact is that we are completely changing Who our kids are, how they act, how they interact with the world, you know, everything with phones.
And maybe it's hard to appreciate this entirely until you see the contrast.
Now, you can think back to your own childhood and say, well, you know, geez, when I was a kid, this isn't what childhood was like.
But that kind of contrast, you know, you're looking back with rose tinted glasses, right?
And you have nostalgia.
And so it's hard to draw that comparison.
But you can notice the contrast, you know, in the present day.
And this is something my wife and I notice all the time, because as you know, none of our kids have phones.
They have spent zero minutes of their lives on social media.
They don't even know what social media is.
You know about all this because I rant about it all the time.
But the point is that when my kids are around their friends whose parents have the same policy and who, you know, they don't They don't do the phones, they don't do any of that.
Then, in those cases, everything seems normal, as it should be.
And, you know, they're out running around in the woods, they're just being kids, like we were when we were kids.
And it's great.
It's exactly what childhood should be.
But when my kids are around other kids their age, whose parents do not have this no-phone policy, kids who have smartphones and all that, And many, even though my oldest kids are about to turn 11, many kids their age have not only have smartphones, but have had them for like four or five years or longer.
And when you see that, that's when, I mean, the difference is so stark.
It is, it's shocking, the difference.
The smartphone kids are generally not interested in doing things like running around outside and, you know, being a kid.
They tend to be much more jaded and cynical, even at such a young age.
They cannot pay attention to anything.
They don't want to do anything that doesn't involve a screen.
They just have no interest in anything that is not screen-related.
Even the way they speak is different.
You know, I can listen to a kid speak for 20 seconds and I can tell you immediately whether his parents let him have a smartphone or not.
Because the language, the way that they speak is different.
And this is a self-perpetuating problem because the non-smartphone parents notice this difference, just as we have with our own kids, and they also notice how this difference is very isolating to their non-smartphone kids.
Their kids have trouble relating to these other kids.
They literally don't speak their language.
And that's a challenge.
Feeling isolated as a child, that's no small thing.
I mean, we as adults can say, as I've given the speech to my own kids many times, you know, it's okay to stand out, it's good to stand out, you don't have to go with the crowd and all that kind of, you know, that whole speech.
But when you are a kid and you feel isolated and you feel like, There's this whole world that other kids are living in that you don't even have access to.
Again, it's a very isolating feeling, but the trade-off is worth it.
Because to be perfectly frank with you, when I see those other kids that have been on the smartphones forever, and I see how they act, and I see how they speak, I hear how they speak, and there's just a certain lack of vitality and childhood innocence.
It's so...
Obvious.
And I see that, I think, I don't want my kids to be that way.
It is so much better for them to not be like that.
And the trade-offs are significant.
But they are definitely worth it.
All right.
Here's someone that you should meet.
This is Ayesha Siddiqui.
She's a UN climate advisor.
As Lives of TikTok pointed out yesterday, posted this video, this woman works at the UN.
And yet is not only a radical climate change alarmist, but is also rabidly anti-white.
Maybe the word yet is not necessary there, as if there's some sort of conflict between, you know, working at the UN and having this attitude everyone at the UN does.
But anyway, take a listen.
I say this because the climate crisis is not a policy.
The climate crisis is not a result of natural disasters, it's actually man-made.
It's a result... I'll say it again because I think they missed this.
The climate crisis is man-made.
And it's not just man-made, it's white man-made.
It is a result of capitalism.
There's a colonialism.
There's a racial oppression.
And so, if you want to get involved, The way that we save our planet is when we protect the most vulnerable communities among us.
And this includes black trans women.
This includes indigenous peoples.
And this is why it includes children and young folk.
Because when we protect them, then we can protect everybody else.
Okay, so, you know what really gets me about this?
Well, first of all, it's just not true.
It's not true on several different levels, but on the racial end of it, most of the air and water pollution in the world comes from Asia.
So she says that climate change is not only a man-made problem, but a white man-made problem.
Well, most of the air and water pollution on Earth comes from Asia.
In fact, we talked about it recently that one Asian country has 83 of the top 100 polluting cities, the cities that have the most pollution.
One Asian country has 83 of those top 100 cities, and that's the country of India.
So, you know, that's Asia.
And then Africa is the second worst offender when it comes to water pollution, specifically.
Which means that the people that are destroying the planet, the worst offenders at destroying the planet, are non-white.
So that's the first thing.
But the second is, and I was thinking about this today, which is that if there could possibly be one advantage, if there could possibly be one positive, one little glimmer of a bright side to climate alarmism, which there is no advantage, okay, but if there could be one, It would be that climate alarmism, you would think and hope, would have at least, even though it's totally false and everything else, it would at least have a sort of unifying effect.
You know, because if the planet is really doomed, if the climate apocalypse is on the horizon, then we're all screwed, right?
We're all in the same sinking boat.
It's like if there was an asteroid headed towards Earth, you know, an asteroid the size of Australia or something, headed towards Earth, we're all going to be vaporized.
And that's what these people think climate change is anyway, basically.
Well then, when it hits, we're all going to be equally dead, so maybe we can find some measure of unity in our shared sense of being totally screwed.
Like I said, it's a very small silver lining, but you would hope that would be there.
But we can't even get that from the climate alarmists.
And the reason is that the climate alarmists, they filter their climate alarmism through the victim-oppressor narrative.
So even this, Even a planet-wide catastrophe, which they falsely believe is on the horizon, even that somehow becomes an us-versus-them thing.
Everyone's gonna die, and it's still like some people are more affected than others by this.
And we know that's because this is all, of course, a left-wing phenomenon, and this is leftism.
Seeing the world based on this calculation of victim versus oppressor.
Which, by the way, there was another round of discussion, there's been another round of discussion on social media this week about defining the word woke.
And I think this time, I think Libs at TikTok, Chaya Raychik, she was giving a speech and she was asked for a definition of woke.
And she didn't immediately offer one that is totally cohesive.
And so that becomes, at least in the clip that's circulating, I'm sure it's largely out of context.
But, and that became another round of like, see those conservatives, they can't even define the word woke.
Well, part of the reason why it can be hard to define because we're talking about it's an ideology, you know, an ideology.
These are ideas, okay?
This is not like being unable to define the word woman.
Woman is a biological category.
It's a physical thing, okay, with the physical definitions.
Ideas are Not that.
Ideas change.
And with something like wokeness, it's a whole bunch of really confused ideas.
And the ideas themselves also change.
That's one of the hallmarks of a woke person, is that they can say something one minute, and then five minutes later say completely the opposite, and seem to believe both of those things at the same time.
And so when people look at that, And we can see this pattern, and we see there's this category of people who have this confused idea of the world.
But trying to define what that confusion is, is a little difficult sometimes.
But it is perfectly possible to define.
It has many defining elements.
And if someone presses you for a definition, a one-sentence definition, you could do worse than this.
Which is seeing the entire world through this lens of victim versus oppressor.
All of reality, all of reality, every aspect of reality itself is defined by the victim versus oppressor dynamic.
Alright, let's get to Was Walsh Wrong.
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Now on Monday, I went into great detail explaining why Beyonce's new cover or reinterpretation of the classic Dolly Parton hit, Jolene, is an abomination.
And there have been some comments disagreeing with me on that point, even though, as I've already explained, all disagreement is now unconstitutional because I am a judge.
But this is from Autumn.
She says, Beyonce and mediocre don't belong in the same sentence.
Well, I would agree if you're talking about her looks or her dance moves.
She's a good-looking woman, no question.
She's a great dancer.
But the truth is, and you know this, you know it deep down, you know it deep down, Autumn, that if she was not an attractive woman, she would have no career as a singer.
And that's not a statement that's true of every female singer.
There are plenty of female singers who have had great careers, legendary careers, despite not being necessarily beautiful.
And the reason that they had those careers is because their music was that incredible.
But they were great artists.
But Beyonce, take out the looks, and she's, you know, she's a passably okay singer who doesn't play any instruments, doesn't write her own music.
So on talent alone, on merit alone, she's mediocre.
Sorry to say.
It's just, it's the truth.
Another comment says, This is my favorite kind of comment.
And I love it because you could use it against anyone, no matter what they're saying or what they're talking about.
Now, for one thing, I'm not outraged at Beyonce's song.
Sure, it is upsetting when somebody massacres a classic song.
I don't like it.
But I do take exception to that.
On principle.
But I'm not emotional about it.
I just think it's bad.
And as for me talking about this while kids are dying, I'm not sure which kids you're referring to, but I just wonder if you go around shouting that at anyone who says anything that doesn't relate to this nonspecific tragedy that you're talking about.
I would imagine that you yourself, on a daily basis, talk about like a thousand different things that have nothing to do with kids dying.
And I wonder, would you have said this if I had done 10 minutes on why the song is good?
What if I had praised the song for 10 minutes?
Then would I be permitted to discuss this?
Even though, quote-unquote, kids are dying?
Let's see, another one says, Russell says, Matt, this is a bad take.
I'm not watching this.
The music industry has always done covers or remixes.
Most popular songs have three or more versions over the decades.
Another one of my favorite types of comments.
This is a bad take.
I'm not watching this.
Well then, how do you know it's a bad take?
I disagree with what you said, and also I have no idea what you said.
Another classic.
Dr. Flurkin says, Matt, I see your point, but Beyonce didn't destroy the classic song.
She transformed the defeatist attitude that Dolly portrayed and changed the victim into a character that is willing to fight for her livelihood.
I appreciate the transformation into a proactive opponent rather than a defenseless victim.
Okay, well look, I agree that the attitude Beyonce has in her version is generally a better attitude than what you find in Dali's version.
But the point of music is not to demonstrate a good attitude.
Okay?
The point of music is to connect with the human experience.
So, Dali's song is defeatist in a certain way, if that's how you want to put it, but that's real.
People feel that way sometimes.
People feel defeated.
And many pieces of great art in all different mediums have been created.
How do I have that feeling of defeat?
Because it's real.
Again, people have worries, they have fears, they have anxieties.
Art expresses that.
It doesn't mean that all art has to wallow in pain and misery, but sometimes it does.
Because sometimes people do.
And so we create art that reflects that.
And it's just ridiculous to correct a piece of art by giving it a more positive outlook.
Okay?
It's insane.
I mean, it's like...
Imagine if somebody did a reinterpretation of the song Man of Constant Sorrows, and instead the new version is called Man of Optimistic Outlook.
Like, it wouldn't make any sense if somebody made that song, that remake.
It wouldn't make any sense for you to say, well, yeah, but it's better to have an optimistic outlook than to be a man of constant sorrows who wants to be sorrowful all the time.
That's not how you want to be.
Come on, cheer up.
Well, yeah, I mean, it is better to be optimistic, but that's not what the song is about.
That's not what the song is meant to express.
You've just completely emptied that song of what that song is supposed to mean.
If you want to make a song about being optimistic, then go ahead and do it, but just go make that song, make a different song.
But why take this song that's about sorrow and try to rip out everything that makes it what it is?
Or imagine if, because like I said, you apply this to any other medium, it just looks even more ridiculous.
Imagine if somebody made a remake of...
Of Schindler's List, but in their remake there's no Holocaust, everybody's happy, and Schindler's List is really just his list of people that he's inviting to his birthday party at Dave & Buster's, okay?
Now, it would be incoherent to justify that butchery by saying, well, but a birthday party at Dave & Buster's is way better than the Holocaust.
This is a much more positive and happy story.
Well, sure it is, but that's not what the original piece of art was trying to express.
You cannot correct something just by making it happier.
That's not how art works.
That's not art.
That really is appropriation.
We hear the word appropriation all the time, and most of the time it is wildly misused.
But in this case, that's actually what that is.
You're appropriating someone else's piece of art.
And trying to turn it in to give it the message that you think it should have had.
Crazy.
Crazy.
It's crazy.
All right.
Let's get to the daily cancellation.
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For whatever reason, former NFL star Randy Moss recently opened a fried chicken restaurant in Huntington, West Virginia.
Now, sadly, it would seem, the restaurant was not well-received by the community.
Customers left bad reviews online, complaining, from what I can tell, I read some of the reviews, that the food is too bland, the prices are too high, the service is too slow, and strangely enough, the place doesn't seem to carry ketchup, according to a lot of the reviews.
Now, as an avowed ketchup skeptic myself, I don't find this last point to be a problem, but the other points certainly are.
And to sum it up in the words of one customer named Connor who left a Google review, the chicken was nothing to ride home about.
And yes, that is ride as in R-I-D-E.
Connor is saying that, you know, he wouldn't ride all the way home on his bicycle to tell his family and friends about this chicken.
Chicken's okay.
It's not something to ride home about.
Now, overall, the restaurant got at least one, possibly two, thumbs down from many of its patrons.
So, How would the manager of this establishment respond to this criticism?
Would he take the feedback to heart?
Would he come up with a better chicken recipe?
Would he work with his employees to improve their service?
Would he lower prices?
Would he start stocking ketchup?
Would he ensure that it's the kind of place Conor would want to ride home about?
No, of course not.
Instead, he accused his customers of racism.
Here's the local news report.
Well, it was supposed to be a positive development in the heart of Huntington has turned into controversy after accusations of racism and discrimination went viral on social media.
We're talking about Crispy's Chicken.
It's a restaurant owned by NFL Hall of Famer Randy Moss.
But as 13 News reporter Jordan Mead tells us, the manager of the restaurant says the community isn't supporting the business and he claims it has nothing to do with the food.
The original video that sparked it all.
That's the manager of Crispy's Chicken, a fast food restaurant in Huntington.
money that sparked it all.
But since we've been here for the past few months, it has been nothing but negativity from the community,
the community not supporting.
That's the manager of Crispy's Chicken, a fast food restaurant in Huntington.
In the video posted just last week, he lashes out at the community, saying their criticism goes
beyond the food and service.
The entire community is filled with negativity.
Being an African American company, this is what we deal with on a regular basis.
Unfortunate, you know, we're not the other color, which is unfortunate to you guys, because if we were the other color, I'm sure you'd get a lot more respect.
After the backlash from his post, the manager, who would only tell us his first name, called out a local host of a podcast to do an interview.
We tried to be positive and have a positive effect on the community, but it just wasn't happening.
But from that interview came more controversy.
What did our community do?
They tore us down, like they always do.
The African American community, we are known to tear each other down.
The Chinese is not known for it.
The Europeans, nobody else is known for it.
That's something that Talk Huntington host David Williams, who goes by the on-air name of Alligator Jackson, says he tried to de-escalate while addressing complaints.
13 News spoke to Kurt today.
He doubled down on his statements.
Anybody that misunderstood what I said on that video, You have to think, it was clear as day what I said.
It was clear.
It was clear that that's what African-Americans have been going through for centuries.
Okay, I forgot to mention, he's also the marketing director.
It said on the, it said that this is the marketing campaign.
I mean, that's one way to market your product, to yell at your customers and tell them to stop being mean to you.
Anyway, now this is not even the end of the news report, but there's so much to cover that we had to stop it there.
First, most importantly, there is a local podcast host in Huntington, West Virginia who goes by the name Alligator Jackson.
Now that, to me, is the real headline here.
The reporter breezes by it as if it's just a random bit of trivia, but I want to hear more about, you know, Alligator Jackson's podcast.
I did investigate the situation on my own.
I found Alligator Jackson's YouTube channel.
It's called Talk Huntington.
It has 20 subscribers, 3 videos so far.
It looks like it's just getting started, a real bootstrap operation.
I encourage you to go and subscribe to the channel if you want to stay up to date on news out of Huntington, or even if you don't.
And second, almost as important, what is going on with the Crispy Chicken mascot?
Let's put that up on the screen again because I just stared at this thing trying to figure out what's happening.
It appears to be, from what I can tell, like a penguin in the shape of a bomb.
It's a penguin with a fuse on it as the mascot for a fast food chicken place.
That's your problem right there.
That's why you aren't getting the business you want.
People look at that mascot.
They're so confused that they just stand there staring at it until the place is closed.
To make matters worse, it doesn't even say chicken anywhere on the signage outside.
All we see is the penguin bomb and the word crispy, spelled as weirdly as possible, by the way, and no mention of chicken.
People are confused.
That's the issue.
And then they go inside.
There's no ketchup.
Now they're really befuddled.
They can't ride home about it.
I mean, they don't even know which way is home at this point.
And third, finally, Kurt, the manager, says that he is the victim of racism.
He says, of course, in fact, that this is what black Americans have been going through for centuries.
Specifically, they've been going through the trauma of people leaving negative Google reviews for centuries.
Who can forget Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, decrying the racist abuses of the Google review system.
But let's really think about Kurt's theory of the case here.
I do not intend to engage in any form of stereotyping.
I am the last person to ever say anything racially insensitive, as you all know.
But with that said, are you really trying to tell us, Kurt, that customers are less likely to support a fried chicken place if it's run by a black guy?
I mean, that seems a bit like a gay Broadway star claiming that the audience hates his latest production because they're homophobic.
I mean, the simple act of purchasing a ticket to a Broadway show already demonstrates a certain tolerance of the gay community, I would think, and a similar logic applies to Kurt and his chicken restaurant.
Still, the racism defense is reflexive for some people.
I mean, why else would this man's restaurant get such a poor reception?
Why else would anyone say anything bad about him or about anything associated with him, if not for racism?
I think the good thing about this story, aside from the fact that it introduced the world to Alligator Jackson, is that it so plainly reveals the deeper, more personal motivations for many of these race hustlers.
For a guy like Kurt, You know, shouting racism is a rationalization.
It's a coping mechanism.
Now, to be clear, I don't say this to justify the erroneous racism claims, of course.
I don't mean that you should view Kurt in a better light because of this.
I just mean to point out that people these days cry racism constantly because blaming things on racism shields them from the harsher realities of life.
It's their way of explaining their failures to the world and, more importantly, to themselves.
You know, it can be difficult to accept that you're suffering a setback as a result of your own poor performance.
It's hard to face the fact that people are responding poorly to you because they disapprove of your behavior, or they don't like what you've done, or because they just don't like you personally.
It's tough to listen to criticism of your work or your character.
Nobody wants to believe that their lack of success in life is a result of their own inadequacies.
Nobody wants to accept that they've come up short.
Or fail to gain all the success they desire, or any of the success they desire, simply because they're not good enough.
These are hard realities to face.
It's much easier, mentally and emotionally, to tell yourself that it's all because of racism.
And in that lies, for many people, the attraction to the racism narrative.
Now, there are a lot of reasons why false racism claims are so common in our culture.
The Kurts of the world have various motivations, some of them more political and ideological, but at the core of this issue is this.
Lots of people whose lives are not working out the way they want, telling themselves this story of their own martyrdom.
And in Kurt's case, I'm a victim of a racist conspiracy is a fantasy that he prefers over the true story, which is that his restaurant sucks and nobody likes it.
After all, it's better to be a martyr than to be mediocre.
And that is why Kurt from Crispy Chicken is sadly today cancelled.
