Ep. 1349 - Dumbing Down Education In The Name Of 'Decolonization'
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, there is a movement underway to "decolonize" academics, especially subjects like math. One professor is spearheading an effort to bring "indigenous math" into the classroom. What does that mean exactly? We'll discuss. Also, more high profile Democrats refuse to condemn the "death to America" chants. A student in North Carolina is suspended for using the term "illegal alien" in class. And Joe Biden is now calling for WNBA players to be paid their fair share. What is a fair share of the zero dollars in profit that the WNBA earns?
Ep.1349
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, there is a movement underway to quote-unquote decolonize academics, especially subjects like math.
One professor is spearheading an effort to bring indigenous math into the classrooms.
What does that mean exactly?
We'll discuss.
Also, more high-profile Democrats refuse to condemn the Death to America chance.
A student in North Carolina is suspended for using the term illegal alien in class.
And Joe Biden is now calling for WNBA players to be paid their fair share.
What is a fair share of the zero dollars in profit that the WNBA earns every year?
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
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It's not every day that a ribbon-cutting ceremony in the Democratic Republic of Congo
attracts international media attention.
Normally, Congo flies under the radar, we might say, even though it's actually one of the biggest countries in the world.
It's bigger than Mexico, believe it or not.
But a couple of years ago, this incredible footage from the capital of Congo was picked up by Western media.
It's from the grand opening of a footbridge that was apparently a big deal for the locals.
And here's how it worked out.
(upbeat music)
(laughing)
Yay!
[inaudible]
I don't know.
Was the ribbon holding up the bridge?
I mean, why did it collapse the second they cut the ribbon?
I don't get it.
But, you know, it's a little like the collapse of that bridge in Baltimore, except in this case, a barge, you know, didn't need to hit anything.
All they had to do was cut the ribbon and stand on the bridge, and the whole thing came crashing down on them.
Now, fortunately, nobody was hurt in that incident.
It got a few laughs on social media.
Everybody moved on.
In retrospect, the collapse of that footbridge in Congo's capital was more than just a meme on the internet.
It was a practical manifestation of something that Western academics now want to import into this country.
There is a concerted effort underway in universities all over the world to, quote, decolonize mathematics, engineering, and science in general.
It's been generations since Congo was under Belgian rule, so presumably that footbridge is a great example of decolonized engineering.
That's what it looks like when it's decolonized.
And now the West wants to emulate that.
I first noticed this trend when I came across a recent article from Australian National University, which according to Wikipedia, is supposedly an impressive institution.
And the gist is that a professor in Australia named Rowena Ball is trying to get the concept of indigenous mathematics off the ground because Aboriginal people struggle with European mathematics, quote-unquote, otherwise known as real mathematics.
The article includes this remarkable line, quote, Numbers and arithmetic and accounting often are of secondary importance in indigenous mathematics.
Now, that seems to make as much sense as saying that words are of secondary importance in linguistics, or that maps are of secondary importance in the science of cartography.
I mean, how can you have mathematics without numbers and arithmetic, exactly?
Well, read on and Professor Ball will tell you.
Quote, Mathematics is primarily the science of patterns and recognizing and classifying those patterns.
One interesting example that we are currently investigating is the use of chiral symmetry to engineer a long-distance smoke signaling technology in real time.
If you light an incense stick, you'll see the twin counter-rotating vortices that emanate.
These are a chiral pair, meaning they are non-superimposable mirror images of each other.
The article goes on to explain, "A memoir by Alice Duncan Kemp, who grew up on a cattle station in the early 1900s,
vividly describes the signaling procedure in which husband and wife expert team Bogie and Marianne
selected and pulsed the smoke waves with a left to right curl to signal white men instead of the more usual right to
left spiral.
To create and understand these signals, you have to be a skilled practical mathematician,"
Professor Ball says.
Well, it's not hard to see what's being conflated here.
Yes, it's possible to argue that the act of lighting the incense stick and producing counter-rotating vortices does, in a way, implicate mathematics and especially geometry, as does literally everything that happens in the physical world.
I mean, it's like saying LeBron James is a skilled mathematician because his three-pointers make nice parabolas.
He's not thinking in his head about the parabolic equation when he's playing.
He doesn't even know what that is, probably.
Now, in the case that Professor Ball is talking about, there's nothing really mathematical in any traditional sense about generating smoke signals.
And frankly, depending on the size of the vocabulary of the signaling system, it's probably something you could train apes to do.
Even though they have no understanding of language, much less math.
I mean, it's like saying that a child successfully flying a kite is doing math.
I mean, it's nonsense.
You might as well say that by walking across the room, you are engaged in mathematics.
Now, these are very simple sort of actions and phenomena we're talking about.
Throwing a basketball, lighting an incense stick.
It's not rocket science.
Your brain is doing complex equations when you shoot a basketball, sure, or even when you walk across the room.
And because our mathematics is so sophisticated and precise, we can describe the physical phenomenon to a great degree of sophistication and precision.
But that's only because our mathematics can penetrate reality to that degree.
You don't have to wonder how precise African folk math or whatever can get in describing that stuff.
To say nothing of the math and mathematical physics required to build stuff like nuclear reactors and rocket engines and computers and all that.
That stuff absolutely requires not just numbers, but advanced and highly abstract theories that the people that are doing this are, you know, consciously engaged in.
But highly abstract theories are out of style now, and not just in Australia.
Braindead oversimplification is the name of the game.
So here, for example, is a recent TEDx talk delivered by a woman who teaches mathematics in Canada.
She's also a vice principal in the Ottawa School District.
Listen to her communicate her understanding of what mathematics is all about.
Before I begin, I am hoping you will do a little bit of math with me.
If you are willing, raise your hand if you have ever said or heard someone say one of these things.
I am not a math person.
I can't do math, or even I hate math.
Did you know that if you made it on time today, or even made a cup of coffee, chose what to wear, you were doing math, even though you didn't think about it that way?
My talk today is about how mathematics has become, for me, an enriching opportunity to connect with others and the world in ways my high school calculus class never really afforded.
Well, I guess there's some good news here.
I mean, I must be a genius mathematician myself, because I made coffee and I picked out my own clothes this morning.
Now this will come as news to all of my grade school math teachers who graded my math exams in a manner that conveyed a certain lack of faith in my mathematical prowess, but if only they'd known that I already passed the math test just by getting dressed before I came to school.
And if only I'd been as brain damaged as academic elites are today, then maybe I would have thought to make that argument myself, in my own defense.
Anyway, a little over a year ago, there was an in-depth column in The Spectator about this movement to discredit and undermine serious academic disciplines, especially math.
It was written by John Armstrong, who teaches at King's College London and previously taught at Oxford.
He's an actual mathematician with actual credentials, and he summed up the problem with this whole push to decolonize math pretty simply.
He said, quote, The fact is that colonialism is irrelevant to the validity of mathematics.
The Mayan civilization was doing sophisticated mathematics in the Americas long before Christopher Columbus arrived on the continent.
The digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 we use today were first written in India and inspired by Chinese mathematics.
They were popularized by Persian and Arab mathematicians and then made their way to Europe via the Moors' conquest of southern Spain.
Admittedly, the Moors' conquest of Spain was a form of colonialism, but apparently not the type of colonialism we are meant to be interested in.
So, what do these activists mean when they say they want to decolonize math, given that the entire idea of decolonizing math is completely incoherent?
The Arabs were colonizers too.
And why are Australians, of all people, so interested in promoting this idea?
Well, one possibility is that, by some estimates, as the Twitter account IO points out, Aboriginal Australians happen to have, on average, the second lowest IQ out of any demographic group on the planet.
Now that's the sort of thing that's supposed to be unsayable, but it's impossible to talk about certain groups struggling academically without bringing up the intellectual elephant in the room.
I mean, there might be a reason why there aren't many aboriginals working at NASA, let's say.
And it's an important point because it means that decolonization, practically speaking, entails dumbing down these subjects or destroying them altogether.
And mainly we see With this decolonization agenda, the embarrassment that liberal Westerners feel about the fact that their ancestors were far more advanced in just about every way and by every available measure than the native people they conquered.
The liberal Westerner is constantly looking for ways to even out the score.
And we're seeing that more and more in this country as well.
The once respected Nature Magazine, for example, recently published an editorial with no byline that reads, quote, Uh, why we have nothing to fear from the decolonization of mathematics.
And what's amazing is that if you read the whole editorial, you won't actually find a definition of what decolonization means in this context.
You won't find anything close to a definition, actually.
The most you'll discover is that, according to Nature, decolonization, quote, shows that the roots of discovery and invention are shared between many world cultures, which can be particularly empowering to people from historically marginalized groups.
Decolonizing science is the antidote to exceptionalism, the idea that any single culture or civilization possess special abilities in advancing science.
But as we just established, some cultures and civilizations did indeed advance science and mathematics more than others.
I mean, there were some cultures and civilizations that didn't advance it at all because they didn't even have the concepts.
And then there were others that did quite a bit to advance it, and some of those were colonizers, and some of those colonizers were not white.
And regardless, none of this has anything to do with mathematics.
I mean, maybe you can argue that this belongs in some elective history course somewhere, but it has no place affecting courses on the fundamentals of mathematics, which is exactly what's happening in this country.
Pittsburgh Public Schools, for example, recently announced a plan to make mathematics instruction more equitable.
What does that mean?
Watch.
The Pittsburgh Public Schools hiring a consultant to teach a new method of instructing kids.
It's intended to be anti-racist and what some find curious is that the subject involved is math.
KDK lead investigator Andy Sheehan talked with the district leader who recommended it.
According to Assistant Superintendent Dr. Sean McNeil, this means addressing historic inequities in educating students by exposing them to black professionals in STEM fields to tell students of the African American legacy in mathematics, emphasizing its practical applications in a hands-on, welcoming way.
And McNeil says the emphasis is on concepts and reasoning rather than putting importance on getting the answer right.
Is this not sort of dumbing down the curriculum, the math curriculum to say, hey, you know, you didn't get the right answer, but, you know, close enough.
At times there is a right or wrong answer, but we don't just emphasize the right or wrong answer, we emphasize the journey.
At times, at least he was willing to concede, at times in mathematics, at times there's a right or wrong answer.
No, every time in mathematics, every single time, there's a right or wrong answer.
But, you know, he says it's not about getting the right answer anymore in Pittsburgh's math classes, it's about the journey.
And the next time your bridge collapses, remember that.
You know, your death is not what's important.
What matters is that the incompetent engineer who built the bridge had high self-esteem.
So yes, you might be lying on the ground, mangled and dying with a giant metal beam, like, spearing you through the stomach.
But as you lay there expiring, just think about the journey that those bridge engineers were on.
And that should give you comfort.
It's the same thing that the Canadian teacher said in her TEDx talk.
The goal is for everyone to feel like a mathematician, regardless of ability.
None of this has anything to do with actually teaching math, of course, which is the point.
Students can fail math courses, and they've been doing a lot of that in Pittsburgh, but it's harder to fail a course that begins with the assumption that every student is gifted in mathematics, no matter what their test scores or actual mathematical aptitude might say about it.
The other underlying factor that drives all this superficial decolonization rhetoric and activism is a deep insecurity about actual knowledge on the part of those circulating this garbage.
And it's a very well-founded insecurity for them, actually, especially when it comes to ignorance regarding history.
Everything is a cartoon with these people.
Cartoon history, cartoon philosophy.
It's barely high school debate talking point stuff.
It's more elementary school level thinking, which does make it easier to incorporate into lower education, incidentally.
But to be clear, this isn't just happening in Pittsburgh.
It's easy to pick on Pittsburgh for a lot of reasons.
As I said before, the city is falling apart.
But this effort to decolonize math has serious financial backers, and schools everywhere are adopting similar approaches.
In 2018, Bill Gates' foundation created something called the Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, intended for use in grades 6 through 8.
And the Pathway trains teachers that, quote, in order to embody anti-racist math education, teachers must engage in critical proxies that interrogate the ways in which they perpetuate white supremacy culture in their own classrooms.
And develop a plan towards anti-racist math education to address issues of equity for black, latinx, and multilingual students.
Now, why would Bill Gates want to promote nonsense like that?
It's hard to say.
No one appears to have asked him.
But we do know that in the years since 2018, math literacy in this country has plummeted.
In 2018, something called the Program for International Student Assessment measured the average 15-year-old's math aptitude in this country at a score of 478.
By 2022, that score had already dropped to 465, still trending in the wrong direction.
Meanwhile, data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that U.S.
math and reading scores are at their lowest level in decades, right now.
Now, you can blame that on COVID and lockdowns and wonky gain-of-function research, if you want, which Bill Gates also funded through WHO, by the way.
But there's not a serious person alive who thinks that any of this decolonization propaganda is actually helping these scores move in the right direction.
It's doing the opposite by design.
And this is every bit as serious an attack on this country as the airport and bridge raids that I covered yesterday.
Because this is an attack on our ability to build airports and bridges in the first place.
And unless we want our bridges to function like Congo's in the near future, it needs to end.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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Delia Wire reports numerous House Democrats in the nation's capital refused to condemn burning the American flag and chanting death to America when confronted by a reporter this week.
The questions from the reporter came in response to far-left protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City this week holding a pro-Palestinian demonstration that disrupted traffic.
And we also saw the American flag was burned.
They were chanting death to America.
We've seen that in protests all across the country, in fact.
Here's the video.
Anti-Israel protesters blocking the Brooklyn Bridge were burning the American flag and chanting death to America.
Do you support that type of protest?
Do you support burning the American flag and chanting death to America?
Does it sound like this is pro-Palestinian or anti-American if they're burning American flags and chanting Death to America?
I'm not privy to... I haven't seen these reports.
I'd have to check for them myself.
Anti-Israel protesters blocking the Brooklyn Bridge burned the American flag and chanted Death to America.
Do you condemn this type of rhetoric?
We've got to get her onto her next event.
Are you okay with people burning the American flag?
If you'd like to follow up with us.
Are you okay with people chanting death to America?
Sorry, we've got to head into... Congresswoman Porter, are you okay with people chanting death to America?
Is it okay?
Do you not have a problem with it?
I'm happy to reach out here.
Okay, so that's Ayanna Pressley, AOC, and Katie Porter, all unwilling to condemn the Death to America chants.
Last week it was Rashida Tlaib we saw, also unwilling.
And so these are not just random politicians either.
These are some of the most prominent Democratic elected officials in the entire country.
And they just can't bring themselves to say, no, I don't think people should chant Death to America.
I am opposed to that.
I do not want America to die.
They can't say that.
And it should be a layup.
This is like the easiest shot to make.
They could even pivot.
They could answer the question and pivot.
They could say something like, well, I condemn death to America because I love my country, unlike Republicans who are trying to destroy our democracy and yada, yada, yada, whatever.
I mean, that's easy to do.
Or it should be.
And I think this is something that maybe younger people listening might not fully appreciate, because you see a video like that and you say, well, Of course those people won't condemn death to America.
Obviously they won't.
And you're right, it is obvious.
Of course they won't.
But what you should understand is that this is a pretty new development.
We get jaded and we get very accustomed to things very quickly.
But this is pretty new.
Because 10 years ago, 15 years ago, Democrats would have happily condemned that.
Eagerly, in fact.
Not because they were great patriots back then, but because the political incentives would have been very high for them to go on the record and say, hey, I'm not with those people.
I love America.
You know, God bless the USA.
Fifteen years ago, that would have been the incentive, and that's not the case anymore.
These Democrats don't condemn the chant because, for one thing, they agree with it.
They're all anti-American traitors.
But more importantly, politically, they're held hostage by the most radical far-left elements on their side.
So they won't even pretend to be patriotic because patriotism, shows of patriotism, are a betrayal to their side.
And this is a side whose agenda is dictated, it's dictated by people like this.
Here's an activist named Nardine Kiswani, who was on Piers Morgan's show last night, and she was asked the same question about Death to America chance, and does she condemn it?
And here's how she dealt with that issue.
You know, phrases and actions that I've been taking at the post haven't actually been violent.
They haven't harmed anyone and I don't think we should focus... What do you think about people chanting death to America as they did in one video clip?
I think that that's just a phrase maybe said by an individual.
Well no, the whole crowd began joining in.
I didn't see that.
Yeah, yeah.
So this guy said it and then the whole crowd began chanting it.
Would you condemn that?
I'm here to talk about the entire Israeli government.
You're here to answer my questions, actually.
Would you condemn what they were chanting, death to America?
I think we should condemn Palestinians actually being killed.
OK.
That's not the question I'm asking you.
So I will ask you about Gaza.
But on the question I asked you, would you condemn people in America chanting death to America?
What do you say?
I don't condemn how people choose to express their rage verbally.
I don't condemn that because at the end of the day, the reason they're saying that is because the US is sending the tax dollars and the weapons that are actually creating death to Gaza.
So do you support them chanting death to America?
I don't chant that myself, so I don't know why you're trying to trap me in this type of argument.
I'm asking you to condemn it, you don't want to.
So I'm asking, do you therefore, should I assume you support them chanting?
Those aren't the chants that I would personally do myself.
I just want an opinion on this.
You must surely either condemn it or support it.
No, you don't need to.
It's not a binary thing.
How would anyone do, do you think, if they went to Gaza and chanted death to Palestine with Hamas terrorists nearby?
I would like to see her answer to that.
I'm sure she didn't really have an answer.
No, obviously that woman should be deported and I don't care if she's lived here her whole life.
Get the hell out of the country, you don't belong here.
If you legitimize death to America, chance you don't belong here.
And she legitimizes it by saying that these people are, well, they're expressing their rage.
This is how they feel.
But these are the kinds of people that Democrats are catering to.
So where does it lead?
I mean, what happens when one of the two major political parties no longer has the political incentive to even pretend that they love their own country?
Again, this is something that, if you're a little bit younger, may come as a surprise.
But we used to complain about politicians being fake and phony and showy in their displays of patriotism.
We used to complain about that sort of thing.
But now we've seen what happens when they no longer feel the need to engage in even phony displays.
It turns out that the phoniness was vastly preferable to this.
I'd much rather that they all go out of their way to talk about how much they love America and how patriotic they are, even when it's not true, and we know it's not true, but at least when they feel the need to do that.
Because if AOC had responded, or Rashida Tlaib or Katie Porter had said, I condemn it, I'm opposed to it, I don't think anyone should say that, none of us would believe what she's saying.
So we know that if she did condemn it, it wouldn't be sincere.
It's still good to be in a country where politicians at least feel the need to pretend that they care about the country and that they love it and that they prioritize it above other nations.
Or at the very least that they don't have a seething contempt for the country that they're supposed to be representing and caring for.
So, like, best case scenario is you have leaders who express love of their country and really mean it, like actual patriots.
But if you can't have that, then the next best scenario is to be in a country where you have leaders who don't care about the country, but at least feel like they need to pretend they do.
Worst scenario is when you have, the worst of all scenarios, is when you have leaders who don't care about the country and don't even feel incentivized to pretend that they do.
And that's where we are now.
Daily Wire report, attorneys representing Nashville, Tennessee argued Tuesday in court that police were still investigating aspects of the shooting committed at the Covenant School last March when a transgender-identifying shooter murdered six people, and therefore, the city is unable to release documents related to the case, such as the shooter's writings.
The argument came during a hearing over whether to release the killer's writings, which have thus far been sealed from the public.
The hearing overseen by Judge Lashia L. Miles comes just over a year after three young children and three school staff members were killed during the shooting at Covenant.
During the hearing, Laura Fox, an attorney for the city of Nashville, indicated the city's police were still investigating the shooting, including probing whether the transgender-identifying killer had any accomplices.
The shooter was shot dead by authorities on the scene.
There has thus far been no indication that anybody else was involved.
Fox stated the National Police expected to wrap up their investigation by July 1st.
So that's what they're saying now.
Now this really frustrates me as I think it does many people in the community here in Nashville and across the country as well.
Because the idea that, well first of all, the idea that a year after the shooting you can't release the writings because of an investigation is just asinine.
Like, I don't buy that for a second.
I'm sorry.
I don't buy that for a second.
I don't think anybody does.
The shooter is dead.
She's been dead since the shooting.
And if she did have any accomplices, something that hasn't, as far as I know, has not been mentioned as a... No one has hinted at that until this moment, as far as I know.
And if there were accomplices, why would it take over a year to make that arrest?
Okay, if she had an accomplice, What are you waiting for?
Does it take a year?
Over a year to establish that connection?
And by the way, if there is an Accomplice, what is the Accomplice doing right now?
What have they been doing for a year?
Are you telling us that there might be somebody out there who helped coordinate the mass murder of innocent people and they're still walking free at this moment?
In the community?
Is that what you're saying?
Where's your urgency?
But all that is nonsense, of course.
It's nonsense, and we know it.
It is just inconceivable that the content of these journals could somehow hinder an investigation into a crime committed a year ago by a dead person.
Doesn't make any sense.
What could there be in the journals that would somehow get in the way of this investigation a year after the fact, Of a crime committed by someone who's dead.
And even if it were true, even if there was, let's say there's something in the journal that somehow would hinder the investigation, well, it seems like by now you would have easily identified which portions of the manifesto might cause this, you know, unspecified hindrance, and then you can redact those portions.
But they haven't released any, they have not officially, intentionally released anything from the manifesto.
So are you really telling us the whole thing, the whole entire thing might somehow hinder this investigation into a crime that has, as far as we know, no living suspects?
That doesn't make any sense.
It just doesn't make any sense.
So I would rather, you know, there have been reports that some of the families Of survivors and victims of the shooting don't want the manifesto to be released, you know, that's been reported.
And not because they're involved in some kind of cover-up, but just because, from their perspective, it's quite understandable that they just don't... Well, I would assume that their reasoning is that they don't want to have to relive this terrible thing that happened.
They don't want to have the insane ramblings of this mass killer who killed their loved ones circulating out there, which is totally understandable.
Now, I think, although it is understandable, The public still has a right to know why this, why this terrible crime was committed.
And so the writings still have to be released.
But my point is that, like, I would rather that the city just use that, make that argument.
Instead of, instead of this absurd insulting to our intelligence claim.
That it gets in the way of some kind of investigation, and then even throwing out the possibility a year later that, oh, by the way, we haven't ruled out the idea that there might be accomplices to this crime.
It's totally absurd.
The Carolina Journal has this.
A 16-year-old student at Central Davidson High School in Lexington, North Carolina, was suspended for three days last week after using the term illegal alien during a vocabulary assignment in his English class.
Leah McGee's son is a teacher who assigned vocabulary words during class last Tuesday, including the word alien.
McGee says that her son made an effort to understand the assignment and responded to his teacher asking, like space aliens or illegal aliens without green cards?
That was his question.
He's just trying to clarify, and it's a fair question.
These days, especially, you have to specify.
We've got a lot of different kinds of aliens on the planet right now, and so we need to know which kinds of aliens we're talking about.
According to an email describing the incident sent to local officials and shared with Carolina Journal, a young man in class took offense to his question and reportedly threatened to fight him because of it.
Prompted the teacher to call in the assistant principal.
Ultimately, his words were deemed by administrative staff to be offensive and disrespectful to classmates who are Hispanic.
The student, in response to a suspension, said, quote, I didn't make a statement directed towards anyone.
I asked a question.
I wasn't speaking of Hispanics because everyone from other countries needs green cards.
And the term illegal alien is an actual term that I hear on the news and can find in the dictionary.
Yes, very, very intelligent point from the young man that, you know, Not only is this a legitimate term, but this, it could apply to, like, why, you're the one assuming, anyone who takes offense to this says, well, that's, that applies to Hispanics.
Well, then apparently you think that only a Hispanic person can be an illegal alien.
That's not the case.
Anyone from any country that's not America could be an illegal alien.
Meanwhile, State Senator Steve Jarvis said that he contacted the school's district superintendent to make him aware of the situation.
Jarvis told the Carolina Journal that while he informed top officials of the issue and urged officials to look for the best outcome, he did not take a stance on what they should do because he wasn't there to understand all sides of the story.
Very, very courageous position from Steve Jarvis.
So, this is a classic Republican move right there.
And you find it from Republicans at the national level, but also the state level as well.
Yeah, I mean, he's getting involved.
Okay, that part is good.
He's talking to the superintendent about it.
That part is good.
But all he says to the superintendent is, well, let's seek the best outcome.
What is the best outcome?
I have no opinion.
I can't say for sure.
Why are you even saying anything?
Why get involved if you're not going to take a position on it?
And what other sides to the story do you need to hear?
I don't think anyone disputes the basic facts of the case here.
The kid used the term illegal alien, and they suspended him for that term.
I don't think anyone disputes that.
And not only that, but another kid threatened physical violence against this student for using a term, and yet the student who was threatened ends up suspended for it.
That's the public school system for you.
And by the way, again, the term he used, illegal alien, is, as he says, a legal term.
It's used by the federal government right now.
You could go to the DOJ's website and search under the term illegal alien and you'll get a bunch of hits because this is a term used by the government right now.
The same government that runs the public school system uses itself the term illegal alien.
And even if it wasn't a legal term, I mean, the fact that the federal government still uses that term is like an oversight on their part probably, so I would expect that they're going to switch it all over eventually to the politically correct undocumented migrant or whatever.
But even if it wasn't a legal term, it still wouldn't be cause for suspension, obviously.
And so I can only hope that this kid's family is preparing to sue, because that's the only way to deal with stuff like this.
The only way to deal with it is you have to take it to court.
We need to start getting a lot more litigious about these kinds of things.
This is discrimination against The child, it's a totally unjustified punishment that will
affect his life potentially in serious ways.
And you can't let it stand.
You have to take it to court. It's the only way to deal with it.
And then in the meantime, I know this part I don't even need to say because you've
heard my spiel many, many times.
But in the meantime, for everybody else, this is another very good reason, among so many other reasons, to get your child out of the public school system.
Kids in public school are totally at the mercy of a system that is hostile not just to conservative values, And that's an important point to establish.
Because this is another case, and anytime we hear stories of this kind of insanity in the public school system, usually you'll hear from conservatives that this is, well, it's discrimination, ideological, political discrimination, this is ideological indoctrination, and yet it is all of that.
It's a war on conservative values, and sure, that's happening, but more importantly, The public school system is hostile not just to conservative values, but to the truth and to common sense.
And when your child is in this system, your child is completely vulnerable to it.
Totally subject to this system that punishes your kid for exercising common sense and for saying things that are true.
It's just, it's not fair to put your kid in that situation.
I couldn't do that with my own kids.
I couldn't put them in a situation where they will be aggressively punished just for being normal and having common sense and saying things that are true.
Now, sure, when you get out into the wild world out there as an adult, you're going to encounter many situations.
Where you'll be punished for speaking the truth, and we want to prepare our kids for that, we want to equip them to deal with that, but the public school system is not the way to equip them to do it.
Because here's the thing, you have to equip them first, and then you send them out into situations where they will be punished for speaking the truth.
But the child is not equipped yet, as a child.
And especially to, because in the adult world, You might run into situations like this at your job, you know, in various different contexts.
But as an adult, you still, even at your job, you have more control over it.
Your kid is in that environment every single day for 13 years, six or seven hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for 12 or 13 years, with really no power, no rights, nothing.
And expecting them to withstand that, I think, is just expecting far too much.
All right, finally, some controversy in the entertainment world.
Always important.
Daily Wire reports singer Courtney Love had some criticism for some fellow recording artists, which she candidly shared during a recently published interview with UK-based outlet The Standard.
The 59-year-old took aim at Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Madonna, and Beyonce specifically.
Love told the outlet about the global pop star, she said, Taylor is not important.
She might be a safe space for girls, and she's probably the Madonna of now, but she's not interesting as an artist.
The alt rocker said that she and the material girl don't get along either.
And at another point in the interview, the former Hole band member said that she's also not a fan of Beyonce's new album, Cowboy Carter.
She said, quote, I mean, I like the idea of Beyonce doing a country record because it's about black women going into spaces where previously only white women have been allowed.
Not that I like it much.
As a concept, I love it.
I just don't like her music.
OK, well, she's wrong about I love how they're trying to make Beyonce out to be the Jackie Robinson of country music.
No black person's been allowed in country music up until now.
What do you mean not allowed?
You think there's some sort of law stipulating?
And there have been plenty of black artists that have made country music or, you know, have experimented with the genre or whatever.
But the rest of it, Courtney Love is absolutely right about.
And her comments have, as you would expect, very much upset the Swifties.
But she's right.
You know, Taylor Swift knows how to churn out hit songs.
She knows how to do that.
And her music is generally inoffensive and, you know, and fine as far as pop music goes.
I think there's a lot of pop music that's far more objectionable.
And I made this point several times back during that weird two-month stretch when some people on the right were trying to make Taylor Swift out to be, like, the arch-nemesis of conservatism.
And I guess we've hopped off of that bandwagon now.
Nobody talks about it anymore.
But for about two months, it was the biggest deal in the world.
But as far as pop music goes, you know, She's fine, she's unobjectionable, she obviously has talent, but it's also true, she doesn't make interesting music, and she doesn't make important music.
She hasn't made a single song that would qualify as a classic, even as a classic of its own era, where the bar's pretty low, but she hasn't made anything like that.
Now, Courtney Love, back in the 90s, had a few songs that would qualify as classics of her era.
Celebrity Skin is a big one.
It's a grunge classic.
She had several others.
And, you know, say what you want about the 90s grunge scene, but it was raw.
It was real.
It had feeling.
Everybody was strung out on heroin, singing about how much they hated themselves.
I mean, it's not the most edifying music, probably.
And it probably wasn't great to have a whole generation of kids, you know, sitting in their rooms, listening to stuff like that.
But, yeah, at least there was some real human emotion behind it.
Taylor Swift music, by contrast, all sounds like it was assembled out of plastic in a factory.
It sounds algorithmic.
And that's a lot of popular music today.
The worst thing about it is it sounds like it was made by an algorithm.
Like it exists for no other reason than simply to be a hit.
Now that's more the case for somebody like Beyonce, who has absolutely no musical talent whatsoever, and doesn't even write her own stuff.
But the whole scene, all these artists are just churning out basically the musical equivalent of clickbait.
It's content that exists to be consumed, not to express anything real.
And I think that's what Courtney Love was saying there, so this is probably the first time on the show I've ever defended anything Courtney Love has said, but first time for everything.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
[MUSIC]
The WNBA draft happened this past week and according to the latest numbers I
read, the event usually averages about 14 total viewers.
But this year, the WNBA Draft won record ratings and nearly doubled its normal viewership.
And that added audiences largely thanks to Kaitlin Clark, who went number one overall to something called the Indiana Fever.
Which sounds like a disease you might contract from a hooker in Fort Wayne, but it's apparently the name of a women's basketball team.
And Clark, for her part, is easily the most famous women's basketball star of all time.
She's so famous that I know her name, though I don't really know anything else about her.
If you are in the very small fraternity of people who qualify as WNBA fans, This sudden increased interest in the league, even if it still amounts to basically no interest, should be cause for celebration and gratitude.
But we don't do celebration very well in this culture, and we don't do gratitude at all, really.
So instead, people found reasons to whine, and that whining led to what is surely the dumbest discourse of the year 2024 so far.
I don't expect it to retain that title until January, but for now, it lays claim to it easily.
Because over the past couple of days since the draft, the left has been complaining bitterly that WNBA salaries are too low.
It started on social media with posts like this one from somebody named Alyssa Leader, who identifies herself as a public defender.
She also has, needless to say, pronouns in her bio.
She tweeted this, quote, Decided to Google WNBA salaries before the draft, and I actually want to die.
What the hell?
Now, the salaries that have apparently zapped her will to live are $76,000 a year for the top four picks in the draft, and $70,000 for the rest of the Round 1 selections.
In subsequent tweets, Alyssa tells us that the average starting salary for first-round NBA draft picks is $10 million a year by comparison.
She says that this contrast is, quote, honestly devastating.
And there were many other tweets like this from similarly outraged, devastated, and apparently suicidal feminists.
And soon the media jumped on the bandwagon.
NBC News had this headline, "The gap between Caitlin Clark's WNBA salary and her male counterparts
draws outrage." Today.com added this, "Caitlin Clark went number one in the WNBA draft. Some
fans are outraged at her salary." The outrage made its way all the way up to the White House,
where Joe Biden tweeted at 5 p.m. on on Tuesday, right before bed, that, quote,
"Women in sports continue to push new boundaries and inspire us all, but right now,
we're seeing that even if you're the best, women are not paid their fair share.
It's time that we give our daughters the same opportunities as our sons
and ensure that women are paid what they deserve."
Now, we'll get back to the fair share idea in a moment, but first, let's go to the ABC News controversy,
the report on this controversy, which inadvertently revealed the fundamental confusion
Watch.
Caitlin Clark, we gotta start with her, no question, goes number one last night.
But for her rookie season, she's only making $76,000.
I say only, but that's just in comparison to other NBA players and WNBA players.
What does that say about the pay gap in women's sports?
Stephanie, it says that the nation is now going to wake up to the inequality in terms of pay, and it will change.
The media rights deal for the WNBA is up.
There will be negotiations, and Caitlin and Clark will change that as well.
But really, this is all about capitalism.
I mean, for a generation, people have ignored the WNBA.
They haven't bought tickets.
They haven't watched.
They haven't bought the products they're seeing on the commercials.
And everything changes.
I think the eyeballs on this number, $76,000.
Now, again, she's making much more than that.
Her endorsements are into the millions.
There's also a chance of having $250,000 contract or addition for marketing the WNBA.
I'm sure she'll get that as well.
So she's going to be a multimillionaire.
But it's shining a light on something that we should be looking at.
Title IX is, of course, applying to high schools and colleges.
This is about capitalism.
This is about Americans spending their money in a certain way.
And that's going to change because of the eyeballs, because of the TV ratings.
Caitlyn Clark will be the Caitlyn Clark effect.
Stephanie will be impacting that as well.
And it's about time because these women obviously have been underpaid now for several decades.
Okay, the talking head there can't seem to make up her mind, because on one hand, she says that it's capitalism.
People aren't watching or supporting the games, so the women don't get paid much.
On the other hand, she says that the women are underpaid.
Well, which is it?
Well, if this needs to be explained, I will explain it.
It's very much the former.
In fact, WNBA players are not underpaid at all.
They are, if anything, vastly overpaid.
By all rights, as a simple economic matter, WNBA players should not be getting paid anything.
If they're getting paid anything above zero, they are overpaid.
So here are some basic facts to flesh this out.
First of all, the WNBA has existed for nearly 30 years.
It has never once turned a profit.
According to WSN.com, a sports betting site, the WNBA generates about $60 million in revenue.
For the record, an article in Vox claims that the revenue is in the $100-$200 million range, which I find dubious.
But either way, The NBA, by contrast, brings in $10 billion of revenue with something like $3 billion in profits.
So that means that the NBA generates more than 150 times the revenue of the WNBA.
And if you're going with the, I think, quite generous $100 million estimate for the WNBA, then the NBA makes only, only 100 times that amount.
So do the math here, by the way, and you'll see that pound for pound, WNBA rookies actually make about the same as NBA rookies.
70,000 times 150 is 10.5 million.
But even then, they're still overpaid, because although the WNBA generates 60 million in revenue, or even if it's 100 million, let's say, it makes no profit.
These women are getting paid salaries to play for a league that, economically speaking, shouldn't exist.
You don't have to be a financial whiz to understand that losing money for 30 years is usually a recipe for bankruptcy.
The only reason the Women's League stays open is that the NBA subsidizes it.
Every year, the Men's League hands millions of dollars to the women.
The men keep the Women's League afloat.
And why do they do that?
Well, so that everyone can feel good about the fact that a Women's League exists.
You're probably familiar with those charities where you can metaphorically adopt somebody from the third world by sending money to a charity that supposedly then goes to that family.
Well, that's basically what the NBA is to the WNBA.
They have adopted it, like a third world child.
Now, what does this mean?
It means that, again, Nobody watches the WNBA.
The leftists on Twitter and in the media complaining about WNBA salaries have never watched a game in their lives.
They've never sat down to watch a women's game on TV, much less have they purchased tickets to watch it at the arena.
They'll support the league by whining on its behalf on social media, but they won't support it by actually supporting it.
Last year the WNBA had its most watched regular season in 20 years.
So this was a record audience.
And during that record season, the average audience for each game was 500,000 viewers.
Now, to put that into perspective, 500,000 is about the viewership of CNN's weekly 10 p.m.
show with Charles Barkley and Gayle King.
And that show was just canceled after six months because the audience was so low that it wasn't sustainable.
$500,000 for a professional sports league that airs on network television is an even more catastrophic embarrassment and would be even less sustainable if not for the fact that the WNBA doesn't have to sustain itself.
Which is fortunate for the league because it would be out of business in a month if it did have to sustain itself.
Now, Joe Biden wants these women to get their fair share.
Well, I ask you this, what is a fair share of $0 in profit?
That's a math problem so easy that even our vegetable of a president should be able to do it.
The fair share, the actual fair share, is nothing.
Zero.
That's what you deserve to get paid when you put a product on the airways that nobody cares to watch.
That's the simple reality here.
And it's why the unequal pay discourse around the WNBA and everybody pushing it Are all today cancelled.
