Ep. 1348 - Activists Who Shut Down Highways Aren't 'Protesters.' They're Terrorists.
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, yesterday pro-Hamas demonstrators shut down major highways and bridges across the country. This isn't a protest. It's terrorism. Also, Trump's trial in New York is underway, and after just the first day of the proceedings it's extremely clear that he has no shot of anything resembling a fair trial. Plus, controversy erupts at a Christian men's conference after -- somehow, for some reason -- a male stripper was invited on stage to perform shirtless on a pole.
Ep.1348
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, pro-Hamas demonstrators shut down major highways and bridges across the country.
This is not a protest.
It's called terrorism.
Also, Trump's trial in New York is underway, and after just the first day of the proceedings, it's extremely clear that he has no shot of anything resembling a fair trial.
Plus, controversy erupts at a Christian men's conference after somehow, for some reason, a male stripper was invited on stage to perform shirtless on a pole.
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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The first target in any protracted military campaign is pretty much always infrastructure.
When the US invaded Iraq with a shock and awe strategy, we hit the bridges right away.
We did the same thing in Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Korea.
And the reason for that is pretty simple.
If you shut down transportation, you shut down the country.
The purpose of taking out bridges and airports isn't to convince anyone that you're right.
It's not a moral argument.
The point is to disable your enemy as quickly as possible and to make them vulnerable to further attack.
And after what happened yesterday, it's clear that the domestic enemies of the United States, the ones we've imported and that our universities have indoctrinated, Understand the importance of infrastructure very well.
In a series of coordinated attacks, Hamas sympathizers stormed bridges and airports all over the country.
And I'm going to go through several of these attacks, and I'll start with by far the most significant and the longest lasting interruption.
It took place on both the Golden Gate Bridge and Interstate 880 in Oakland.
Watch.
Another protest turned the morning commute into a parking lot, leaving many drivers angry and asking what will stop these from happening.
Outside of a ceasefire in Gaza, what can be done to prevent major traffic arteries from getting shut down for hours?
It has been actions such as these.
That people have been taking across the world that have actually been moving the needle.
Woods-Irvin wasn't involved in today's protest, but was one of the demonstrators who shut down the Bay Bridge in November.
Hospitals say in that case, several organ donations were delayed because of the backup.
78 people were arrested and charged, but all avoided jail time, agreeing to the court's diversion program where they would have to complete five hours of community service each.
So, just a month ago, activists shut down the Bay Bridge, and as you just heard, they delayed several organ donations.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that at least one person had a medical emergency while he was stuck in traffic, but nothing happened to any of the people responsible for that.
They got something like five hours of community service.
So, yesterday, it happened again, and this time on the Golden Gate Bridge in the interstate.
News reports like the one you just saw always say that protesters are shutting down traffic, and that is accurate.
But it only tells part of the story.
The other part is that the political leaders in these cities are also choosing to shut down traffic by allowing the protesters to do this.
Now, it would be exceedingly easy to not only clear these blockades but also dissuade anyone else from ever pulling a stunt like this again.
All you have to do is pull them off the road by force and then hit them with every criminal charge even vaguely applicable, including terrorism charges.
Just throw the whole book, the entire book, at just one of these people.
Or a lot more than one, would be my preference, but just one is all it would take.
One person, one time, and it will never happen again.
Give one of them prison time, real prison time, like 15 years of prison time, and the problem is solved.
Forever, just like that.
Nobody will ever shut down a road in this country ever again.
Instead, the authorities in California are doing the opposite.
They gave these criminals a few hours of community service the last time they did it, and this time they let them shut down one of the longest bridges in the country for five hours before making a single arrest.
I mean, why wait five hours if you're going to make the arrest anyway?
Why not do it in five minutes?
Why not do it in 60 seconds?
All told, 38 people were ultimately arrested between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Oakland Interstate, and they were hit with a variety of charges, from false imprisonment to unlawful assembly.
None of these charges, it's important to point out, carry a potential sentence of over a decade in prison.
Because that kind of penalty in this country is now reserved for pro-life demonstrators who pray outside of abortion clinics and allegedly block access to the abortion facility.
Now, if you do that, as we've seen, you get the pre-dawn SWAT team raid from the DOJ and a very good chance that you spend the next 10 years in prison.
But if you sit on the highway for five hours and prevent thousands of people from getting where they need to go, then it's not a big deal, apparently.
In fact, false imprisonment is the most serious charge that any of these demonstrators face, and the max you can get for that in California is something like four years.
And of course, it's virtually certain that they're not going to serve that time of four years or even go to trial for any of this.
They'll get community service, probably, and then they'll be out doing the same thing again a month from now or two months from now.
And that's odd, even by the Biden administration's own logic, because for all we know, There might have been people on these roads who were headed to get abortions.
Imagine that!
And they were delayed or even blocked from doing so.
Will the DOJ look into the number of Californians who had to reschedule their abortions yesterday because their bridge was illegally shut down?
Think of how many children might still be alive because of these protesters.
Think about how many opportunities to murder babies were squandered.
That's the kind of thing that normally keeps Merrick Garland up at night.
Now, if pro-lifers deserve a decade in prison for mildly inconveniencing people who are trying to access one abortion clinic in Nashville, then that means that these people deserve a century in prison.
But of course, they're on the left, so they can literally do whatever they want all the time.
Logic doesn't really apply.
There will be no DOJ probe into the organizers of this protest.
There will be no RICO case against them.
Yet increasingly, it's clear that there should be.
According to San Francisco's local news station, KRON, a woman named Ellen Caminiti was one of the organizers of the Golden Gate protest yesterday.
She was apparently off-site, serving as a representative.
And I looked her up, and it turns out that she's the communications director at a non-profit called the National Center for Lesbian Rights, or NCLR.
So this is an organization that gets tax breaks to advance lesbian rights, and at 9 a.m.
on Monday, their communications director was organizing a criminal blockade of one of the most important bridges in the country.
Now, one of my producers reached out to Ellen Cameniti about this, and she said, "NCLR had no role in it.
That is just my day job, which is completely separate from this."
Now, what's confusing about that, again, is that she says it was her day job,
Well, this blockade took place first thing Monday morning, which counts, you would think, as during the day.
So it sounds like Ellen Kavanaugh's day job is shutting down infrastructure in San Francisco in the name of Palestinian solidarity.
We followed up with NCLR to ask them about this, and we wanted to know if they had any reaction whatsoever to their employee assisting in a criminal blockade during the workday.
They didn't respond to that question, not surprisingly.
All they said is that they had nothing to do with the blockade.
Now, you'd think that if NCLR disagreed with what their employee did during work hours, they would fire her immediately.
At the very least, they would condemn what she did, especially given that she did it on behalf of Hamas, which is a group that would happily toss everyone in their organization off of a rooftop.
But no such luck.
That's because NCLR, like many so-called left-wing public interest non-profits, isn't really working in the public interest at all, of course.
It's a tax shelter that employs unhinged activists who want to destroy this country.
They should lose their tax-exempt non-profit status immediately.
Non-profits aren't supposed to have anything remotely to do with criminal activity, and it definitely sounds like, at a minimum, they're tacitly endorsing exactly that.
But of course, you know, there's not going to be any DOJ investigation, at least not under the Biden administration, because the Biden administration wants these kinds of blockades to occur.
That's why they took place all day yesterday, all over the country.
In Seattle, demonstrators blocked access to the airport, forcing travelers to walk to the terminal.
In New York, they stormed the Brooklyn Bridge.
In Chicago, they blocked the highway leading to O'Hare Airport.
In Dearborn, Michigan, a caravan of Hamas sympathizers backed up traffic.
In Fremont, California, they attacked a Tesla production facility, apparently because of Elon Musk's tweets that they were upset about, forcing the plant to declare an emergency and close.
Now, in all of these cases, except for the situation in Fremont, There wasn't much of a police response, at least not initially.
In Seattle, officers eventually arrested the people blockading the roadway.
Julio Rosas reports that on the Brooklyn Bridge, the NYPD made an effort to stop the demonstrators and succeeded in stopping about half of them, but traffic was still disrupted.
As far as I could tell, the only decisive reaction to these riots took place, not surprisingly, in Florida, in Miami, Florida specifically, where police hauled away the demonstrators the moment they broke the law.
Watch.
[train horn]
take a look!
Haha, what's up!
Well, look at that.
The police just dragged them away.
That's it.
It's not hard.
Takes a few minutes, and that's it.
Problem solved, and the whole city isn't held hostage by a handful of terrorists.
Just throw them in jail and make an example of them.
Governor Ron DeSantis' communications director uploaded the footage you just saw, along with this message, quote, in Florida, we drag these people out of the road and arrest them.
Which is obviously the right response, as rare as it may be.
And when police don't do this immediately, then citizens have every right to do it themselves.
I mean, every moral right to do it themselves.
As Senator Tom Cotton put it, quote, I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic, take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way.
It's time to put an end to this nonsense.
Now, of course, morally, to stipulate morally, you have every right To do that, the problem with what Tom Cotton said, and the problem with him encouraging people to do that, is that if somebody does take matters into their own hands, even though they are totally morally justified in doing so, if they do, there's a very good chance we all know they'll spend the rest of their life in prison.
Okay, we've seen people that clearly, I mean, look at, you know, the Daniel Penney situation.
We've seen people clearly acting in self-defense, in defense of the community, against individuals who are violent and erratic.
And they either go to prison or the court tries to put them in prison.
So imagine something like this in this situation.
Well, the Biden DOJ will destroy whoever tries to do that.
They'll do nothing to protect innocent people from these terrorists.
But the moment someone tries to take action, even if it's morally justified, then the feds will hunt them down.
It's almost like that's what the Biden administration wants to happen at this point.
It's almost like that's exactly why they aren't enforcing the law here, why they are allowing these terrorists to do this.
It appears to be what they want in New York.
Yesterday, police officers didn't have much of a reaction when a Hamas sympathizer lit an American flag on fire and shouted, Death to America, right in front of about five cops.
He just did that and walked away casually.
Watch.
Oh shit!
Yeah shit!
Death to America!
Oh shit!
Don't look yellow, somebody arrested us!
Oh shit!
Oh shit!
Who did that?
Ryan did the fly.
No.
Who did that?
Anyone have that on video?
Anyone have that on video?
[BLANK_AUDIO]
Now, this is something of an aside, but if you call yourself America first,
and of course a lot of people do now.
It goes without saying that you should be stridently opposed to people who shout
death to America, burn American flags, and go out of their way to cause problems for American citizens.
For regular American citizens who are just trying to get to work on a Monday morning.
If your America First principle somehow find common cause with people who wish death on America and its people, then that's a good indication that you are, at best, very confused.
But that confusion needs to end at this point.
Because this is well past the realm of online trolling.
There are now coordinated attacks occurring all over the country, targeting our infrastructure.
You know, you hear a lot of people say, when we see things like this, they say, well, Why would people do this?
They're not going to convince anyone to support their cause by blocking traffic or shutting down the airport.
Well, yeah.
That's because the objective of Hamas sympathizers living in this country, it's not to convince you of anything.
They're not trying to persuade you.
Disrupting infrastructure, as always, is just the first phase in a much larger campaign that they have planned.
And unless more states follow Florida's lead and shut this down immediately, then very soon we'll find out what the next phase is.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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The Daily Wire reports the Supreme Court ruled Monday to allow an Idaho law protecting children from life-altering transgender procedures to go into effect, while the law is challenged in lower courts.
The law, passed last year, bans procedures like double mastectomies on girls who identify as boys and giving children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, which has been linked to bone development issues and heart problems.
The law also stipulates that doctors who perform transgender procedures on kids could go to prison for 10 years.
The decision means the law will go into effect for the state except for two families who say their children identify as transgender and who sued with the help of the ACLU claiming the law was discriminatory.
Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett all sided with Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador who appealed to the court to turn back a sweeping injunction placed on the law by a federal judge who completely blocked the law.
Kintaji Brown-Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan all dissented as you would expect.
So, just to clarify, so this was not, as you heard, it was not the Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Idaho law itself, which bans child mutilation.
So they're not ruling on the merits of the case.
Instead, they're overturning the injunction placed on the law by a federal judge who shut down the entire law from being implemented after two families They sued because they said that they needed to castrate their kids, and the law prevented them from doing that.
And this has become a trend, by the way, in recent years, where federal judges will just come in and issue sweeping injunctions, suspending entire laws for everybody because one person has filed a lawsuit over it.
So it's basically an end around.
It's a way for the judge to at least temporarily shut down a law that he doesn't like.
Very easy to do.
You don't even need to let the lawsuit go through.
If there is a lawsuit, shut down the whole law.
And so, again, the Supreme Court has not ruled on the merits of the case, but rather on the merits of the injunction, which they found to be far too broad, and of course it was.
And the upshot, though, is that the Idaho law can now go into effect, but the lawsuit will continue.
And I think, you know, eventually the Supreme Court is going to have to rule on the actual case itself.
Whether this case or another one, but eventually they're going to have to make a ruling on whether states have the legal right to ban these procedures.
And obviously they absolutely do have the legal right to do so.
And not just the right, in fact, but the duty, the obligation.
I mean, I, if I'm on the Supreme Court, if Judge Walsh is on the Supreme Court, then I'm ruling that, that it's, in fact, it's a, it's a violation of a child's human rights to do this to them.
So not only do states have the right to ban it, but in fact, no state has the right to, to allow it in the first place.
You don't, as a, as a, you know, a doctor does not have the right to do that to a child.
Because it is a violation of the child's human rights.
That's what the ruling should be.
Now, I don't think that's going to happen, but I do think that if we get to a point that the Supreme Court is actually ruling on the merits of one of these laws, at least with the Supreme Court in its current makeup, then it's a slam-dunk case.
Like, obviously.
Of course.
Of course states have the right.
to ban this. And again, not only do they have the right, but the moral obligation.
Daily Wire has an update on the first day of Trump's trial in New York. At least 50 prospective
jurors were dismissed by Judge Juan Merchant on Monday for admitting that they would struggle
to remain fair during the trial, with white women making up many of those who were dismissed.
The trial, where the former president stands accused of falsifying business records to cover up an alleged affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels, began on Monday, marking the first proceedings in a criminal trial against a former U.S.
president.
In addition to the 50 prospective jurors who were dismissed for their partiality, at least nine more people raised their hand when the judge asked if they could not serve on the jury for any other reasons that remain undisclosed.
Of the 96 prospective jurors who entered the courtroom, only 34 remained after the dismissals.
So that was one issue that they talked about. The other was, it says here, at the end of the day,
Trump's team requested that the former president be excused from the trial next Thursday so we
can hear arguments at the US Supreme Court.
Supreme Court on his immunity claim stemming from his Washington, D.C., election interference case.
So, on that last point, the judge is not going—it looks like the judge is not going to let Trump go to the Supreme Court for that case, and he's not going to let Trump attend his son's high school graduation, which is coming up soon.
And here is Trump afterwards talking about that.
Thank you very much.
We had some amazing things happen today.
As you know, my son has graduated from high school, and it looks like the judge will not let me go through the graduation of my son, who's worked very, very hard.
He's a great student.
I'm very proud of the fact that he did so well.
And I was looking forward for years to have graduation with his mother and father there.
And it looks like the judge isn't going to allow me to escape this scam.
It's a scam trial.
If you read all of the legal pundits, all of the legal scholars today, there's not one that I see that said this is a case that should be brought or tried.
It's a scam.
It's a political witch hunt.
It continues.
It continues forever.
And we're not going to be given a fair trial.
It's a very, very sad thing.
In addition, as you know, next Thursday, we're before the United States Supreme Court on a very big hearing on immunity.
And this is something that we've been waiting for a long time.
And the judge, of course, is not going to allow us.
He's a very conflicted judge.
And he's not going to allow us to go to that.
He won't allow me to leave here for a half a day, go to D.C.
and go before the United States Supreme Court.
Because he thinks he's superior, I guess, to the Supreme Court.
And we got a real problem with this judge.
We have a real problem with a lot of things having to do with this trial, including the DA.
Because you go right outside, the people are being muffed and killed all day long, and he's sitting here all day with about 10 or 12 prosecutors.
So everything you said there is, of course, true.
Well, everything except for the bit about how legal scholars all agree that it's a scam trial.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of legal scholars and so-called experts who are totally politically compromised and so have not agreed on that point.
But aside from that, Trump is right.
The case is ridiculous.
It never should have been brought.
And on top of all that, We're not on top of it, but this is, you know, of course, an important facet of it is that it's, it is impossible for Trump to get a fair trial.
It's just not, it can't happen.
It's not even, it's not implausible.
It's not unlikely that he gets a fair trial.
It's impossible.
It cannot, I don't see any conceivable way.
And a lot of people are focused on the fact that this is happening in New York.
And so even more so in New York, you're not gonna get a fair trial.
True.
But I don't think, where could he go on the planet and get a fair trial?
It's just impossible.
He's the most famous man in the world.
He's running for president.
So he's the most famous man in the world.
He's currently running for president right now, as you may be aware.
The election is a year away.
All of these things, anyone in the country who would be in a jury pool will be aware of.
Even the most ignorant, here you're looking for the most ignorant possible people who have as little information about this as it's possible for a person to have.
But even someone in that group, they're at least going to know who he is, they're going to have an opinion about him, and they're going to know that it's a presidential election and that the election's coming up in November.
Everybody at least knows that.
So how do you get a fair trial?
You would need Jurors who have no preconceived notions about Trump are impartial.
I mean, really, what you want would be jurors who don't even know who he is, but that's not going to happen.
Again, you could do this trial somewhere in some island somewhere in the Pacific, and You're not going to find jurors who don't know who Trump is.
So everyone knows who he is.
Everyone in the world knows who he is.
So that's not going to happen.
But at a minimum, you would need jurors who are impartial, who don't really care about Trump one way or another, have no political affiliations, no opinions ahead of time about what they'd like to see happen in the case.
And no opinions about whether they want to see Trump win in November or not.
And it's not going to happen.
We all know that.
Everybody knows that.
The judge knows it.
The DA knows it.
In fact, they're counting on it.
It's not like an obstacle that they...
Mistakenly believe that they can get over it's that is what that that is a that is a feature not a bug for them So the whole thing is a just an absolute miscarriage of justice obviously Katie Couric was on Bill Maher's podcast for some reason and I'm not even sure she's still on TV doing something I have no idea, but she's well She's on TV now anyway on Bill Maher's podcast at least on YouTube and she got some attention when she said this watch And I feel like, to your point, Bill, that socioeconomic disparities are a lot, and class resentment is a lot, and anti-intellectualism and elitism is what is driving many of these
Right.
these anti-establishment, which are Trump voters, are anti-establishment voters.
So I think that is a huge problem that we have to address.
I mean, globalization and the transition from an industrial to a technological society.
I mean, and I don't know if you've ever been jealous of what someone else has or resentful.
It is such a corroding and bitter, almost bile feeling.
almost bile feeling.
Right.
Okay, so Corrick says that Trump voters are resentful, bitter people who are anti-intellectual.
And, in fact, just to make sure that I understand her argument here, she says that Trump voters are anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, and elitist.
Did you catch that?
So she lumps elitism and anti-intellectualism and being anti-establishment all together in the same pile, as if it's possible for someone to be all of those things at the same time.
How does that work exactly?
How can you be elitist and anti-establishment at the same time?
It's like accusing somebody of being a promiscuous prude.
It just doesn't make a lot of sense.
A prudish whore.
It's an oxymoron.
But that's basically what she's going with.
She can't choose which of the two opposite extreme labels she wants to hang around the necks of her political opponents, so she goes with both.
Why choose when you can just have both?
Which shows how meaningless these labels are, by the way.
But she is partially right.
She can't be fully right because her full point is incoherent and self-contradictory, but she is partially right.
The MAGA movement is anti-establishment because the establishment has proven itself to be hopelessly corrupt.
They prove it every day.
They're proving it right now in this sham trial in New York.
The establishment is corrupt, it's incompetent, feckless, oppressive.
Totally unconcerned with the welfare and well-being of American citizens?
That's why MAGA is anti-establishment?
Is it anti-intellectual?
Because I think most people, anyone who considers themselves part of the MAGA movement, anyone who's a Trump supporter, and they hear they're accused of being anti-establishment, they have no problem saying, well, yeah, of course I'm anti-establishment.
But I think anti-intellectual You tend to take as an insult.
And of course, it's intended as an insult, so you're not wrong for taking it that way.
But it's also true that, in a sense, I would say MAGA is anti-intellectual, in that it's anti the intellectual class.
The people who pass as intellectual.
The people who call themselves that, or who are called that.
Those people.
Academics and so on.
But the feelings of animosity towards the intellectuals, it's not because they are intellectuals, but because they aren't.
The problem with the intellectuals in our culture today is that they're not intellectual.
They're frauds.
I mean, the intellectuals are the ones who will tell us that men can get pregnant.
And it's not merely that they believe these crazy things or pretend to believe them.
But that these insane ideas originate with them.
They're the ones who come up with the dumbest, craziest things anyone's ever said, and it filters down from them into the broader culture.
That's what the intellectual class is now.
We have people graduating, as we talked about last week, we have people graduating from Yale, and then going on to have prominent careers in politics, in national politics, and yet, As we saw last week, they don't know what the moon is.
Sheila Jackson Lee thinks that the moon is a gaseous planet.
And she graduated from Yale.
So, the intellectual class is mediocre and stupid and morally corrupt and intellectually bankrupt.
That's the problem with them, and that's why they are hated for good reason.
What about elitist?
Well, I mean, of course, that's just nonsense.
The people go to Trump rallies are about as far from elitist as you can get.
Now, if you listen to the way she phrases it, she says anti-intellectual, she says anti-intellectualism and elitism.
So it's possible that she's accusing them of being anti-intellectual and anti-elite.
So maybe she's accusing them not of being elite, but of being opposed to elitism, and she sees that as a bad thing, and that would actually be true, but no matter how you look at it, it's confused.
All right.
Speaking of confused, the Daily Star has... Here's the headline, anyway.
Most people want to have sex with robots.
New robo-sexuality study reveals.
Okay.
The article says, new research has revealed who would most likely be interested in having sex with robots.
Technology has moved on in leaps and bounds from the days of blow-up dolls to realistic sex robots, which have been built to satisfy, quote-unquote.
While a few have made their way onto the market, development continues to improve on what's available.
Along with the vast shift towards looking realistic, investing in new sex aids has never been easier.
For the shy folk who didn't relish the idea of strolling into a store and pulling one down off the shelf, internet shopping has put pay to that awkward encounter.
Put pay?
Has put pay to that awkward encounter?
But who's most likely to invest?
Is it a perv-only pursuit or would easily embarrassed others take the plunge now that they can hide behind a keyboard?
Luckily, a couple of boffins in Canada—this is the most British article I've ever read—a couple of boffins in Canada sought to find out the answers by probing a number of undergraduates at their disposal.
I'm not going to read this anymore.
Anyway, the point is that they did this study to find out who would be likely to take advantage of sex dolls, and they found some characteristics.
The problem is that The headline says that most people want sex robots.
I don't see where the actual text of the article lays that out, that most people want that.
I'm not sure where they get the most people from.
But I have no doubt that a lot of people right now Would take advantage of this option if it was made available to them.
And I also have no doubt, whether there's any study that bears this out right now or not, I have no doubt personally that eventually most people would be quote-unquote robosexuals, which is apparently a term now.
Because the stage has been set for this.
Now, first of all, we normalized alternative quote-unquote sexualities.
That's already been done.
Second, we have millions of people who are already hooked on virtual sex in the form of internet porn.
Third, we have a loneliness epidemic of people feeling isolated and alone and desperate for human connection.
And we've removed shame and stigma.
Develop technology to actually have sex have sex robots you make them cheap enough for people to buy and You remove all the stigma around it If that happens then yeah, I think you're gonna see probably billions of people who are sexually active exclusively with robots I Think that is the future we're heading into It's kind of the final stage.
It's the conclusion that we have been setting up for and then when that happens like Well, then you have the extinction of the human race, basically.
That's it.
That's the end.
That's what does it.
And it's not just that people won't reproduce anymore.
Birth rates are already plummeting.
Young people are already foregoing marriage and family life.
And then you give people robots as a sexual outlet, and you've just kind of put the final nail in the birth rates coffin.
But it's not just that.
I mean, that's the big thing.
That's the main thing.
I think the other thing though is that we're taking away everything that drives and motivates people, especially men.
We're taking away all the reasons people have, or rather have had in the past, to like leave their homes.
And more than leave their homes, actually go out and achieve great things.
And like I said, this is not a problem that begins with the proliferation of sex robots.
That will be the culmination.
But it's already happening.
I've been reading a book right now by Hampton Sides called The Wide, Wide Sea.
And I'm a huge fan of the author Hampton Sides, strongly recommend the book.
As you know, I love books about old explorers, and this one is about the final voyage of Captain James Cook.
This was a guy in the 1700s who traveled all over the globe, tens of thousands of miles all around the globe, east to west, north to south, discovering new land, you know, reshaping the map, changing the world as it was at the time.
And what I love about these stories, and the thing that draws me to them, Is that these are stories of men who are driven to do extraordinary things and endure just incredible hardship and deprivation.
Because back in the 18th century, and for centuries before that, and for at least a century after that, going on a voyage across the ocean, that was, you know, it was a death sentence for a huge number of the men that were on the ship.
They knew before they set sail that probably half of them would die and would never see their homes again.
And when they die, they die horribly.
Like, die of scurvy and dysentery and hypothermia and starvation.
Like, the worst possible ways.
And if you got on one of these ships, it's like, there's a 50% chance that's going to happen to you.
Or they might die in more horrifying ways than that.
They might get kidnapped and eaten by cannibals on an island somewhere, and that could happen too.
And even if they survive, they're still going to be stuck on a ship for years and years and years at a time with rats and roaches and the stench of human waste.
It's either too cold or too hot, and it's wet all the time, and you're eating stale, moldy bread and salty, spoiled meat.
Just an absolutely torturous experience.
And yet these guys would willingly sign up for that experience.
They would sign up to do it.
They were eager to do it.
Why is that?
I'm just fascinated by the why.
Why did they do it?
Especially because it's so different from the way people are wired today.
The idea of anyone willingly putting themselves into a position like that Forgoing comfort to that extent.
It's just unthinkable.
People will not do it.
But back then they did.
As to the why, there isn't one answer.
You know, they were motivated by the desire to explore, the desire to find out what the world looked like.
Just pure curiosity was something.
The desire to spread the gospel, in many cases.
There was also a profit motive.
You know, they dreamed of riches and resources and everything.
And they did it for honor, for respect, for increasing their station in life.
And all of these powerful human desires drove them to do incredible, courageous things.
Now, what does it have to do with sex robots?
Well, the point is that the more that people are satiated, the more that their base desires are met, and met on demand, in their homes.
Like, just snap of the finger, and that's it.
No effort required.
The more that happens, the less they're motivated to go out and pursue anything.
Their base desires are met all the time, always, at a moment's notice.
And after a while, they don't even develop any other higher sort of desires, any loftier desires.
All they have are the base ones.
And even the base desires, they don't feel those with any great passion or intensity, because the satiation of that desire is always within arm's reach.
And so again, we're already, this is the world we already live in, where people just don't, there's no reason to leave your house.
Everything, why even leave?
And the idea, like even if you do leave your house, okay, you leave and you come back.
But the idea of leaving to do something great and embrace hardship knowingly, well that I think to most people is unthinkable.
They would never do it.
And that's the trend and there's no signs of it slowing down, unfortunately.
Let's get to Was Walsh Wrong?
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Just a couple of quick comments.
We talked yesterday about Bill Maher kind of breaking the vow of silence among pro-abortion people by actually saying out loud what they all really believe, which is that they realize that abortion obviously kills a human life, that it is murder, but He said he's okay with that because there are too many people on the planet already, and so he's not going to miss these babies that are killed.
First comment says, the difference between killing Maher, and I made the point that that logic could just as easily apply to Bill Maher himself, if we can justify murder based on the fact that there's some sort of surplus of people, because people are commodities, that's how Bill Maher looks at them, well then why can't we kill Bill Maher?
This comment has an answer to that.
The difference between killing Bill Maher and an embryo slash fetus is that by killing Maher, you hurt those to whom he's a loved one, whereas the embryo slash fetus is a loved one to no one.
Well, that's pretty dark, I have to say.
That's pretty dark.
Because what you're arguing is that a person's moral worth is dependent on how other people feel about that person.
That's what you're saying.
That if you are loved by others, then you have worth and you shouldn't be killed.
But if you're not, then we can kill you?
I mean, that's the argument.
And it... Like, let's extend that logic out.
It also means that someone who is loved by a lot of people is worth more than someone who is loved by fewer.
So, for example, Taylor Swift Is, by your logic, is worth way more than you are, or I am.
Because if she's killed, that would be a great tragedy to, like, millions of people.
As that wouldn't be the case for you, and it wouldn't be the case for me.
In fact, I'm in a worse spot, because if I'm killed, then, in fact, it's a cause of celebration for a lot of people.
And so, you know, I don't know, it's like, that puts me in the negative, I don't know.
I'm in a bad spot.
I don't think that you want to go down that road when you're assessing who has worth and who doesn't.
This is the point.
If you try to do anything but just accept that everybody has moral worth, that it comes by the nature of the fact that we are human beings created by God, which does not mean that we have the right to keep living no matter what, no matter what we do.
Okay, if we commit a horrendous crime, if we try to kill someone else, they have to kill us in self-defense.
In that case, but we still have, by the nature of being human, we have moral worth and other people don't have more worth than we do.
If you try to come up with any other way of looking at it, then this is what you end up with.
I mean, you end up with very dark scenarios like this.
I mean, what about, just hypothetically here, you know, you're walking through the woods and you stumble across some hermit living in a cabin in the woods, and no family, nobody even knows that he's alive, right?
He's been living off the grid, you know, living the life, a very enviable life, in fact, for, you know, for decades.
So can you just kill him?
Like, no one's gonna know he's dead.
No one even knows.
So the old, if a tree falls in a forest thing, but if you kill a hermit in the forest and no one knows that it happened, it doesn't matter.
According to you, it really doesn't.
Finally, if Matt cared about all lives, he would care about the innocent Ukrainians getting slaughtered.
Instead, Matt said he doesn't care about them.
How can Matt choose not to care about some lives being lost that don't affect him, but not understand when Marr makes the same argument?
Well, I don't know what you mean by care.
What do you mean I don't care?
Yes, I care in a general abstract sense about people suffering around the globe.
Sure, I care like that.
I care in that sense.
But billions of people are suffering in billions of different ways every second of the day.
So what do you mean care?
Am I supposed to walk around overwhelmed by grief about all of that all the time?
Do you?
And why do you make special mention of Ukraine when there are people suffering in equal if not greater measure right now in Ethiopia and Indonesia and everywhere else?
What about them?
Why don't you mention the Ethiopians?
Why do you only talk about the Ukrainians?
Do you not care about the Ethiopians?
My point is that we can and must prioritize the people who are closest to us, our own family, our own friends, our own communities, our own country.
We care more about them.
I care more about my own children than I do about your children.
If my child and your child were in a burning building and I could only save one, there's nothing to think about.
I'm saving my own kid.
I don't even have to think about it.
I care so much more about my own kid than I do about your kids.
Or you.
But that's because I'm a human being.
That's because this is how we're wired.
This is the only way we can be.
If I didn't care more about my own, if I cared about my own kids the same way that I care about everybody else in the world, that would make me a horrible person.
I would be like a sociopath.
I'd be a neglectful, terrible father in that case.
So, this is how we're wired, this is how it's meant to be, but all of that is beside the point.
Because relating this back to abortion, my whole point is that the worth of a human being is not dependent on how other people feel about them.
So yes, if my child is in a burning building, I'm going to save my child over any other human being.
You know, it doesn't matter who it is.
Does that mean that I believe that my child objectively has more moral worth than any other person on the planet?
No, I don't think that.
But my responsibility, my relationship with, my emotional attachment to, that's...
Responsibility is a big one.
I already said that.
But that's what makes me prioritize my own child.
Yet that is, again, that's not how we assess the actual objective moral worth of human beings.
Well, as you should know, we premiered my new show, Judged, by Matt Walsh last week, and we put out episode one and two, and what we can tell you, episode three of my new series, Judged, by Matt Walsh premieres tonight at 8 p.m.
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You can use code JUDGED at checkout for 35% off your membership at dailywireplus.com, and remember, If you don't enjoy the show, that means there's something wrong with you.
Need to get that fixed.
Now let's get to our Daily Cancellation.
[MUSIC]
Well, if you run a Christian church and you decide to hold a Christian conference,
let's say a conference for men, it's probably a bad sign if anything at the conference makes headlines or trends on
Twitter.
And if something does make headlines and it does trend, you certainly don't want those headlines to be shocking and sort of hilarious in a morbid and cringey and depressing way.
You don't want it to be the kind of thing that people see and they raise their eyebrows and say, wait, what?
That's generally not the type of reaction you hope for.
And yet, that is the reaction that I had, and I think everyone else had, this week when video from the Stronger Men's Conference in Missouri started circulating on social media.
The first tweet I saw was from Colin Rugg, and here's what he posted.
Quote, Pastor Mark Driscoll gets kicked off stage at a men's conference after he calls out Pastor John Lindell for allowing a demonstration from a male stripper.
Now, you read that and you think that there must be more to the story.
Indeed, there is.
It's just that the full context doesn't make it much better than it sounds.
Here's USA Today with more, quote, The Stronger Men's Conference, an annual event hosted by the James River Church, exists to inspire and equip men to live out God's vision for manhood, to be the husbands, fathers, and leaders God has called them to be, according to a news release.
It was held at the Great Southern Bank Arena on April 12th and 13th.
Driscoll's remarks came following a performance from Alex Magala, a sword salt swallower who took off his shirt, climbed up a pole, and swallowed a sword live at the conference.
Now before we listen to Driscoll's rebuke, let's see a clip of the act in question.
Keep in mind that this is a Christian conference for men, men specifically who are looking for guidance and inspiration to become better husbands and fathers.
That's how they sell this thing.
That's what they're there for.
And this is how they apparently kick things off.
off watch.
[MUSIC]
(dramatic music)
Wait, wait, wait.
So he swallows the sword and then he goes back up the pole.
Uh, yeah, I mean, pretty gay, let's be honest.
And you notice, like, the older guys in the front row in ball caps and t-shirts, the kinds of guys who, you know, they look like they enjoy nothing so much as cutting the lawn on a Saturday morning, and for good reason, just regular guys.
And here is this Vegas sword swallower dramatically ripping off his shirt and climbing a stripper pole.
And yes, this performer, Alex Magala, is apparently a former male stripper.
Now, perhaps we can be generous enough to James River Church to assume that they didn't know that.
And, you know, and yeah, I think they probably didn't, although it would mean that they aren't even Googling the people they pay to perform at their conferences.
Let's assume that his full career resume was not known.
Let's assume that they failed to do even five minutes of due diligence.
Fine.
Even so, why would you think that a bunch of 55-year-old men at a Christian men's conference would want to see that?
And the point still stands, even if you argue, as some have, that there was nothing sexual about the performance.
Now, I think that interpretation stretches the bounds of credulity a bit too far.
I mean, this is an actual former male stripper ripping his shirt off and performing on a pole.
So he did strip and then perform on a pole.
It's not difficult to connect the dots here.
In fact, I say he's a former male stripper, but I'm not even sure that the former qualification is true or not.
I don't know.
But a Daily Mail article from 2016, when he was on Britain's Got Talent, Says this, quote, When he's not performing on the family-friendly talent show, the 26-year-old Soviet-born performer leads a more X-rated lifestyle, wooing all female audiences and gay nightclubbers.
Astonishing photos show Magala, a college dropout, on stage as a pole-dancing striptease artiste in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
Among his regular hangouts is the Abbey Gay Club in Hollywood, dubbed the best gay bar in the world.
So, as of 2016, he was frequenting gay bars in Hollywood.
Not just frequenting, but performing at them.
And now he's doing gigs for Christian men's conferences.
Still on a pole, and still shirtless.
Whether he also still has his stripper side hustle going, I don't know, and it's irrelevant.
Because, like, it's, again, connect the dots.
When there's smoke, there's fire.
And when there's a stripper taking his shirt off and performing on a pole, there's, well, there's something that doesn't belong at a Christian conference, at least.
But even putting the stripper stuff entirely to the side, the question still remains.
Why would you think that a bunch of middle-aged men at a men's conference would want to see that?
What about that performance is supposed to speak to men, much less inspire them in their walk with Christ?
Even if this was just normal acrobatics, right?
Let's just pretend that it was.
I've never met a middle-aged man who has any real interest in acrobats.
And I certainly haven't met a man who goes to a Christian conference in hopes of witnessing an acrobat, especially not one of the shirtless and male variety.
And that's apparently how Mark Driscoll felt about it, and he said so once he got on stage.
Only to then be thrown off stage and suffer his own rebuke by Pastor John Lindell.
Let's watch this altercation unfold.
Let me do this.
I've been up since one o'clock in the morning.
The reason I'm hoarse is I have been praying for you and my heart is very
burdened for you.
And I want to be very careful with this, and it's not what I want to say,
but the Jezebel spirit has already been here.
(typing)
(whispering)
The Jezebel Spirit opened our event.
This is a rebuke and a correction of no one.
This is an observation.
Before the Word of God was opened, there was a platform.
It was a high place.
On it was a pole.
An astronaut.
The same thing that's used in the strip club for women who have the Jezebel spirit to seduce men.
In front of that was a man who ripped his shirt off like a woman does in front of a pole at a strip club.
That man then ascended.
See, our God is not arrogant.
He doesn't us and our God is humble.
He's decent.
And then he swallowed a sword and Jesus cried, OK, Pastor John, I'll receive that.
Thank you.
Let me just say this.
If Mark wanted to say that, he should have said it to me first.
He didn't.
Matthew 18.
Matthew 18.
If Lark wanted to say that, he should have said it to me first.
Matthew 18.
Matthew 18.
If your brother offends you, go to him privately.
I'm coming in.
I talked to Mark for a half hour!
There was not one word of that!
He's out of line!
So, so John Lindell throws Matthew 18 at Driscoll saying that he should have spoken to him privately.
And in many circumstances, I would agree.
I mean, I believe strongly in addressing things privately rather than publicly whenever possible.
But in this case, when you're speaking at a public event and you strongly object to something that was done or said at that same event before you get on stage, it becomes necessary to address it publicly.
If you don't want to be called out publicly at a Christian conference, don't invite male strippers to perform.
It's like a pretty simple equation.
And if I had been invited to speak at that event, and I found out that my opening act was the dude dancing on a pole, I would have done exactly as Mark Driscoll did.
Because if I did anything else, if I didn't say anything, it would seem like I was a willing party to this spectacle.
Now it's clear that Driscoll is in the right, Lindell is, you know, desperately in the wrong, and everyone involved in hiring the former male stripper, or perhaps not so former, I don't know, should be fired or should resign.
I mean, that much is obvious to any thinking person.
But what might be less obvious is the why here.
Why would they do this?
Like, how is this mistake made?
Assuming, again, that it was a mistake.
Assuming that they didn't actually intend to hire a stripper, which I still think is a safe assumption, though perhaps I'm giving too much grace to them with my interpretation.
Yet, assuming it was a mistake, how was that mistake made?
How did James River Church end up in this situation?
Well, it's not really hard to see how.
Because you go back to that video of Driscoll and Lindell.
You notice the decor in the background of the arena.
The backdrop for the stage is a giant picture of a motorcycle.
Why is there a 50-foot motorcycle picture up on the stage?
What does that have to do with inspiring Christian men to be better fathers and husbands?
Now, there's obviously nothing morally objectionable about a picture of a motorcycle, but it does seem sort of random and ridiculous.
Speaking of which, consider this video from last year's Stronger Men's Conference, because they've been doing this for, I don't know how many years, several years.
And at last year's event, there were no strippers as far as I know, but they did have this.
Let's watch.
Driven by none other than Chuck Norris!
Yeah!
Wow!
Yeah!
Yeah!
Wow!
That's right!
Okay, just to review what we watched or describe it for the audio listeners deprived of that,
deprived of the visuals there.
That was a guy in a tank shooting fake guns in the air while riding over a bunch of cars as fire shot out of the ground and an 80s hair metal band played a song from the Top Gun soundtrack.
The only thing they were missing was Chuck Norris chugging light beer while barbecuing steaks over a gas grill.
And they would have crammed all of the corniest male cliches into one performance.
That was like, it was a parody of the modern church's outreach to men.
If Luke Wilson's character at Idiocracy had visited a megachurch in that movie, The scene would have looked exactly like that.
You could take that in its entirety and drop it right into that movie, and you wouldn't need to change anything.
It's so lame and cringy that it's funny, and then it dives deeper into the lameness and cringiness, and it stops being funny.
But then it goes deeper still, and it's funny again, just not in any way that the church would have intended.
Now, don't get me wrong, okay?
I think tanks are cool.
You know, tanks are cool.
I like fire as much as the next guy.
I like to watch really big vehicles drive over smaller vehicles.
I don't like 80s rock all that much, but I understand the appeal.
There's nothing inherently wrong with any of that stuff individually or even altogether, but when a church is spending many, many, many thousands of dollars to put on a display like that, And they're doing it, they claim, to inspire men to be better Christian leaders in their families and communities.
We must ask how exactly this helps in that goal.
Like, what is this supposed to achieve?
Is it conceivable that any man will leave that conference and say to himself, wow, you know, I was feeling kind of spiritually dull and like I was failing as a man and a father, and then I saw that guy drive that tank over those cars while the Top Gun soundtrack played, and now I see everything clearly again.
My faith is restored.
I was blind, but now I see.
I'm ready to be a leader.
It's very hard to imagine such a scenario.
At the very least, it would have to be a very specific and very strange crisis of faith if it can be cured by tanks and pyrotechnics.
But the vast majority of men will gain nothing from that whatsoever.
And some will go home feeling sort of embarrassed and condescended to.
There's nothing spiritually invigorating about this.
There's nothing actually inspiring.
There's nothing to help a man gain wisdom or strength.
It's just frivolous and ridiculous and, like, corny.
And that's the case even before the male stripper takes the stage.
Now, here's one thing that I can assure the organizers of the Stronger Men's Conference and any future Christian men's events, and there are many of these kinds of events that happen all the time, and they're very, very common.
Men in this culture are not in need of more mindless, dumb distraction.
We don't need loud noises and flashing lights and, you know, sounds and random crap happening for no apparent reason.
That's the culture we live in every day of our lives.
This is every day.
It's just that.
It's just nonsense and noise and everything.
Things are happening and people are shouting and that's all the time.
We can get that anywhere.
And if we do want to see a demolition derby with a tank, and I'm not saying that we don't want to see that on occasion, but we can find it on YouTube whenever we want, I assume.
So if you want to give men inspiration, if you want to help them, if you want to deliver spiritual enrichment and edification, Give them something distinct from what they're surrounded by every day in this loud, dumb, obnoxious, demoralizing culture.
Give them beauty.
Give them wisdom.
Give them something solemn and mystical and dignified and real and true.
That's what the church should be there to provide.
Not pyrotechnics and tanks.
And certainly not mail strippers.
And that is why the Stronger Men's Conference is today cancelled.
