Ep. 1357 - The Dastardly Right Wing Plot To Have Babies And Save Humanity From Extinction
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the media has uncovered the dangerous right-wing conspiracy to have babies and stave off human extinction. We'll talk about this dastardly plot today. Also, an activist at Columbia University gets himself expelled for calling for the death of "Zionists." But what do these activists even mean when they talk about "Zionists"? And Jerry Seinfeld says that comedy is basically dead and the extreme Left killed it. Plus, Kristi Noem gets huge blowback from the Left and the Right after she reveals that she killed one of her dogs on her farm 20 years ago. Is the reaction justified?
Ep.1357
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Today on the Matt Waltz Show, the media has uncovered the dangerous right-wing conspiracy to have babies and stave off human extinction.
We'll talk about this dastardly plot today.
Also, an activist at Columbia University gets himself expelled for calling for the death of Zionists.
But what do these activists even mean when they talk about Zionists?
We'll talk about that.
And Jerry Seinfeld says that comedy is basically dead and the extreme left killed it.
Plus, Kristi Noem gets huge blowback from the left and the right after she reveals that she killed one of her dogs on her farm 20 years ago.
Is the reaction justified?
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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Over the past few years, the biggest knock you've heard against the field of public health is that they completely mismanaged COVID, mainly by exaggerating its impact.
They told us that it was a potentially civilization-ending epidemic, one that justified lockdowns, mandatory shots, etc.
And in the end, they were wrong, of course, and for that reason, nobody will ever trust one of these supposed experts again.
But the really extraordinary thing about the field of public health ...isn't really the epidemics that they fixate on.
It's the ones they ignore.
And in particular, there is one ongoing public health crisis that these experts really don't want to talk about.
Even though, if it continues for much longer, it will quite literally bring about the end of humanity.
I'm talking about collapsing fertility rates all over the world, which is a problem you really have to put in context if you want to understand how dire things are.
So right now, Russia, China, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Ireland, Switzerland, Greece, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Qatar, the UAE, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, the UK, Germany, and of course the United States, and many others, have birth rates that are well below replacement level.
The U.S.
fertility rate in particular, the fertility rate here in the United States, is at its lowest point in nearly a century.
And what that means is that people aren't having enough children to sustain the population.
They are not replacing themselves with children, with a new generation.
But not every country is affected by this crisis.
There are countries where fertility is much higher than replacement level.
And they include such esteemed locations as Niger, one of the poorest countries on the planet, Chad, Somalia, Angola, Tanzania, Afghanistan, Zambia, Cameroon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and of course, best of all, Haiti.
So it doesn't take a genius to see where this is heading.
Third-world hellholes are reproducing while first-world countries, the ones that sustain the global economy, that keep billions of people alive, are not reproducing.
And as this goes on and third-world inhabitants continue to pour into the first world, the distinction between these two parts of the world continues to blur until they have become completely irrelevant, basically.
Eventually, everywhere will be the third world.
There will be no third world because the whole world is the third world.
This is not a new problem, of course, but to the extent political leaders have tried to solve it, by and large, they have failed.
That's the really bad news here.
A decade ago, for example...
China eased its barbaric one-child policy, and they expected millions more births as a result.
But the following year, the country saw only an additional half-million births, and the country's birth rate has remained below replacement level ever since.
Beginning in the 90s, Japan undertook its own effort to raise the birth rate, including offering more parental leave, more childcare services, etc.
The result?
Well, nothing has improved.
It's only gotten worse, in fact.
Last year, Japan's birth rate was the lowest on record.
It's the same story in Hungary.
Starting with Orban's government in 2010, Hungary doubled its spending on families in many of the same ways and other ways.
And yet, last year, Hungary, like Japan, recorded its lowest number of births in history.
So, whatever the problem is here, it's clear that it cannot be resolved solely through spending or government intervention.
Simply providing some ad hoc economic incentives isn't cutting it.
Although those policies are good, I think, they aren't sufficient.
So, what is the solution?
You could say that the broader economy needs to improve, which is obviously part of it.
But the declines I'm talking about have been in progress for decades.
Singapore's birth rate has been dropping since the 1980s, and their GDP per capita grew dramatically in the new millennium.
It's a similar situation in Taiwan.
And birth rates in the U.S.
were declining pre-pandemic for more than a decade beforehand, in fact, even throughout periods in which median household income were setting new records.
So what this means is that figuring out the root cause of this problem is more complicated than looking at economic indicators alone.
It means analyzing culture, and in particular, taking a close look at prevailing attitudes towards children and families, and trying to change those attitudes.
That was the main goal of the NAIDL conference, which took place at the end of last year in Austin, Texas, and speakers from all over the country gathered together to assess what's gone wrong and how to fix it.
One of them was Kevin Dolan, who's an organizer of the event, and he made it clear that whether you personally like the idea of having kids or not, the collapse of fertility rates will have a devastating effect on you and everyone you know one way or another.
Watch.
It doesn't matter if you already have kids, if you don't have kids, if you hate kids.
If you have a 401k or a mortgage or a social security card or a checking account, this question is going to impact your life in a very direct way.
The entire global financial system, the value of your money and almost every asset you might buy with money, is defined by leverage, which means its value is dependent on growth.
Every country in the developed world, and most countries in the developing world, face long-term population decline at a scale that makes that growth impossible to maintain.
Which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles.
But in the aftermath of a collapse like this, the shrinking number of productive workers have to support a growing number of older, sicker people, which in turn accelerates the economic pressures that make it difficult to start families.
This problem isn't self-correcting, at least not within your lifetime.
It gets worse as it gets worse.
Now, whether you agree with him or not, and of course everything he said there is correct, so there's nothing to disagree with, but one of the first things you notice one way or another is that Kevin Dolan is not a demagogue.
He didn't hold this conference to berate anyone for not wanting to have kids.
He's not some kind of cult leader who demands that everybody sign a pledge to create a certain number of children or something.
He's a normal guy, and he's trusting too, which is why he allowed a political reporter to attend the event and write about it.
And how did that turn out?
Well, predictably, Politico published a hit piece a couple days ago that's so bizarre and so totally disconnected from the event that it verges on self-parody.
Here's how Politico wrote about the conference on Twitter.
Here's the tweet quote the far right is so obsessed with making babies. They just held a whole conference about it
Yes, you heard that, right?
Politico has uncovered the sinister right-wing plot to have babies and ensure the survival of the human species.
They caught us, red-handed.
You know, we are anti-extinction.
Much to our shame, apparently.
And then if you click through to the article, you'll find this sinister-sounding headline, quote, the far-right's campaign to explode the population.
Now, it's not hard to see what Politico is getting at.
Basically, they're saying that anybody who wants Western societies to produce children, which is to say, anybody who wants Western societies to continue existing, must be far right.
It's reminiscent of how, you know, the word freedom has become a dirty word in Canada.
The people who want to destroy Western civilization aren't doing a very good job of hiding it anymore, and, well, they're not really trying to hide it, they're being quite open and explicit about it.
But if you go online to the NATO Conference's website, You know, you could find a bunch of speakers explaining very clearly what they think is happening in this country.
They talk about everything from divorce laws to common fears people have about parenting and the impacts these considerations are having on fertility rates.
None of this is a right-wing conspiracy.
I mean, that is the familiar terminology that the left trots out whenever they know something is happening and they want it to keep happening.
So they deny that it's happening because they don't want us to notice because they want it to keep happening.
And indeed, there's a very active antinatalism movement right now.
You spend any time on the darker corners of the internet, and you'll find quite a few people who fully embrace depopulation as a positive good.
And it's pretty grim stuff, as you can imagine.
In fact, mainstream media outlets routinely run stories about young people who don't want to have kids because it will hurt the planet somehow.
Watch.
As the climate crisis gets worse, it's fueling a wave of anxiety in younger generations.
Some say they're rethinking whether they want to start a family or even how they'll do it in a world with a very uncertain climate future.
We're not sure that we're gonna have kids because we don't want to bring our kids into a world like this.
I don't have kids but it has impacted my thoughts.
I definitely want to leave the world in a better place for my kids.
I want to make sure to raise children who are aware of this.
Now, according to a recent poll, almost a quarter of them say climate change is impacting their decision to become a parent.
And people under the age of 35 are more likely to report climate change as a reason not to have children, compared to those born in the decade before them.
Millennials and Gen Z were born into the most rapid time of global warming.
Yes, I want to make the world a better place for human beings, so I'm going to embrace the extinction of humanity in order to bring that about.
You know, that's the, that's the more, but what you saw there is the more socially acceptable form of the depopulation agenda, and it's being promoted by corporate media quite openly.
But the antinatalism movement gets more organized and more explicit the deeper you look.
One of the leaders of this depopulation agenda is a guy named Les Knight, who's the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.
And I want to show you footage of one of his recent conferences.
And as you watch this, compare Knight's presentation with the one you heard earlier at the Natal Conference.
You have the Natal Conference versus the Anti-Natal Conference.
And just compare the two, just in terms of the general sanity of the speaker.
Watch.
But I would like to start with an acknowledgment of the First Peoples of the land we're living on.
Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Clackamas, Chinook, And I also would like to acknowledge the original inhabitants of this land, the grizzly bear, the dire wolves, Harlan's ground sloth, and many others that are now extinct.
I think we need to honor them a little bit.
That red line is the one that is always left out in the articles.
They say, birth rate is down by this much, growth rate is down by this much, it's the lowest it's ever been.
What about the actual numbers?
They don't seem to remember to put that in, because it would give it away.
Like all the headlines for saying, oh, we've hit 8 billion, but the growth rate is falling.
And I saw ones for, we've hit 6 billion, but the growth rate is falling.
Same with 7 billion.
But the funny thing is, it took 12 years to add the two previous Billions, but it only took 11 years to add this one.
So it kind of gives it away.
You won't find that in the mainstream press.
OK, so that's the, by the way, the first land acknowledgement that I've heard anyway that just doesn't just acknowledge some of the tribes or whatever, but also acknowledges some of the wildlife.
And does so inaccurately, by the way, because he says that acknowledging the original inhabitants of grizzly bears and ground sloths Yes, we gotta pay homage to the ground sloths.
But they weren't even the original.
I mean, I guess, really, you should be acknowledging single-cell organisms and bacteria, you know.
They were, I guess, the original inhabitants before them.
So this is as cultish and as creepy as it gets, but you will not see Politico running any articles on this guy and how he's a representative of the far left.
They're not smearing Les Knight.
Instead, quite the opposite.
The New York Times recently published a glowing profile of Knight, quote, For the sake of the planet, last night the founder of the voluntary human extinction movement has spent decades pushing one message.
May we live long and die out.
Now in that clip you just saw, you heard Knight mention that no one ever talks about the fact that the world population is increasing even as birth rates plummet.
But there are a couple of obvious explanations for this.
And one is that, as I mentioned earlier, not all countries are experiencing plummeting birth rates.
The most dysfunctional countries on the planet are actually reproducing at extremely high rates.
And additionally, just from a statistical perspective, it takes time for lagging birth rates to show up in world population figures.
You know, there might be a lot of young couples now having kids in some places, but that doesn't mean that those couples will still be around in 20 years having children.
Birth rates decline first and then population declines after it.
When you get to the point where the population itself is starting to decline, that's when the catastrophe has really hit.
So the goal is to prevent that from happening.
Reversing this decline should not be a right-wing project, yet there are very few prominent people outside of conservative circles who are willing to talk about this at all.
Elon Musk is the only notable exception I can think of, and in fact, it should tell us something that Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men on the planet, somebody who's thinking about big things like going to Mars and all that kind of stuff, he considers depopulation to be the greatest existential threat we face as a species, which again should tell you something.
And this weekend, speaking of Musk, I engaged in a back and forth with Elon Musk on Twitter about the causes of this existential threat.
The conversation started when someone posted this chart on social media.
It shows the number of men under 30 who report having zero sexual partners since turning 18.
And that has increased from 8%.
That number has increased from 8% in 2008 to 27%, according to this chart, in 2018.
Which is obviously a striking increase and it demands an explanation.
And I responded by saying a lot of theories can explain this, but it's very clearly like
98% because of porn. That's what I said. I made that observation because
the iPhone and Pornhub were both born in 2007. And if you look at the chart,
male virginity rates skyrocketed pretty much from that very moment
as birth rates plunged in the opposite direction.
Now, in reply to my tweet, Elon Musk wrote this, quote, it's not porn, which has been readily available from the days of VHS tapes, but rather the general temptation of the online world if you're going to blame it on anything electronic.
Sex is not what matters.
Lots of people are having sex that have no kids.
Population implosion is what will end civilization.
And what Musk is saying about pornography is obviously true.
Pornography clearly predates the year 2007, but it was nothing like the pornography that's been available in the past decade or so.
So here's one small data point, okay, just to put this in perspective.
Playboy, at its peak, at its absolute peak, sold around 7 million copies a month, which is a lot for a magazine, okay?
And that was back in the 1970s, I think.
Pornhub, okay, just one site, gets something like 15 times as many visitors per day.
So, and that's just, again, one site.
So way more people are consuming porn today, way more often, starting at way younger ages.
And on top of that, the porn itself is way more graphic and debased.
And this isn't the whole reason that birth rates are declining, but it is a major plank in the depopulation platform.
I think there's no question about that.
And that's a strong argument for continuing to ban young people from accessing online pornography, which several states have already done.
It's also a good reason for parents to limit or even eliminate their children's access to electronics, and that should just be the beginning of it.
And if all this sounds drastic, it's probably because you haven't been fully informed about the scale of the problem that Western civilization is now facing.
And that's by design.
A few months ago, I did a whole monologue on the JAFF memo and the origins of Planned Parenthood's very comprehensive campaign to depopulate the planet.
Very powerful non-profits and political organizations in this country don't want you to reproduce.
That's not conspiratorial, it's just true.
They've put it in writing.
This is an actual agenda they have to make sure the population declines.
They want fewer people on Earth.
And the good news is that this is one of the few problems in our society that pretty much everyone can help solve.
It's maybe the single most solvable crisis in history.
They have to expend all this effort and push all this propaganda to discourage reproduction because it's one of the most natural things a person can do.
But the propaganda is failing now, I think.
Because of conferences like the NATO conferences and efforts like it, as well as Elon Musk and other prominent figures, there's more attention to declining birth rates than there has been at any point in recent history.
And that's why Politico and left-wing activists are melting down about it.
There's nothing they want to see less than more children being born.
I mean, that's the last thing they want to see.
Which is why they mourn.
They mourn when we see children being born.
And that tells you everything you need to know about their ideology.
And it also tells you how to defeat it.
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So you may have seen this video of an activist at Columbia University named Kaimani James.
He's one of the ringleaders of the homeless encampment on university grounds, which has been allowed to continue by the university so that these spoiled wealthy kids can cosplay as revolutionaries, basically.
Anyway, this activist is very publicly called for violence.
Here's probably the main clip that's been circulating.
Maybe you've already seen it, but let's take a look at that.
If we can agree as a society, as a collective, that people, that person, some persons need to die if they have an ideology that results in the deaths of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions.
If there are people like that who exist, shouldn't they die?
Zionists?
They're Nazi.
Zionists, a.k.a.
Nazis.
You know, carnivores, a.k.a.
vegans.
So he says that you need to die if you have an ideology that has resulted in the deaths of millions of people, which, of course, by that logic would mean that every communist needs to die, by his own logic.
If you saw that, if you heard that phrase without any context, you would think, oh, he's calling for the death of communists, given that, you know, communism has killed tens of millions of people.
It is the most destructive and murderous and oppressive ideology in the history of the world, and it's not even close.
Like, there's not even a second, there really is no second place.
It's pretty much, it's pretty much that.
But that's not who he's referring to.
He's referring to Zionists.
And what does he really mean by Zionists?
Well, I've been explaining since all this began that when they talk about Zionists, they really just mean white people.
And that couldn't have been more clear from, you know, Zionists, Nazis, white supremacists.
It's just that...
These are just words, these are labels he's using to describe white people, that's it.
And the fact that the labels are contradictory and make no sense, like how can you be a Zionist Nazi?
That doesn't matter.
Of course this contradictory doesn't make any sense, but even so.
And to see the war in the Middle East, to see the war in Israel right now as one between whiteness and people of color.
That doesn't actually make sense, objectively speaking, but it doesn't matter because that's how they see it.
That's just, that's why they care as much as they do.
To him, white people are just, every white person's a Zionist, just like every white person's a white supremacist, and every white person is a Nazi.
We're all those things together.
It has very little to do with Israel, in fact.
Like, that's not what this is about.
He doesn't actually care about that.
And to make that clear, here he is in 2021 talking about white people and giving his feelings on white people.
Let's listen to that.
Our next speaker is Kaimani James.
Hello everyone, it's Kaimani James.
Um, yeah, I'm hearing a lot about bigotry and whatever the hell I just heard.
Let me start by saying that I cannot believe we even have to have this conversation in 2021.
This is pathetic.
And white people, both politicians and otherwise, should be disgusted with themselves that they even called for these two Latina women to be reprimanded and their character smeared, all because they expressed their feelings towards the racism and hurtful remarks they receive from white people.
Saying I hate white people is not racist, period.
Is it prejudice?
Yes.
Racist?
No.
In order for white people to experience racism, they have to have socialized power structures against them, which they don't.
White people are the creators of those socialized power structures, and they're specifically designed to oppress black people and keep them from making their way into positions of power, let alone create change.
To scream reverse racism is ignorant as hell and only exemplifies how you lack the metacognitive skills and Oh, meta-cognitive skills.
Very impressive.
He looked that up in the nonsense thesaurus and pulled that one out.
So we get the cult definition of racism, the left-wing religious doctrine about racism, which is that racism against whites is impossible.
Because this is what the left does.
This is how they get around logical problems.
And this is how they get around contradictions in their ideology.
They just redefine a word.
The fact that black people can be racist against white people and
that racism is not something that white people own.
You know, you can find racism all over the world.
In fact, you find a lot more of it.
You find a lot more of it in other parts of the world.
If you go to a non-white part of the world, there are a few basic assumptions you can make most of the time.
And one of them is that there's going to be a lot of racism.
And that's generally how it goes.
It's just how it goes.
problem for people like this.
And so what do they do about that problem?
Well, they say, oh, we'll just redefine the word racism.
We'll just, we'll just, we'll come up with a new definition for the term.
And in our definition, automatically whatever a non-white person is doing
or saying it cannot be racist because white people are.
Now, how do you defend that definition?
Why should any of us accept that definition?
Why do you get to just come in and make up a new definition for this term?
Well, they don't have to explain that.
At least they don't feel any particular obligation to explain it.
That's it.
And because they own the institutions, and they own the academic institutions in particular, they can teach this definition and they don't have to explain it.
But you can glean two things from all this.
And the first is that, once again, this guy hates white people.
Zionists, Jews, Israel, these are all proxies for white people and hatred of white people.
That's what this is, that's what it's all about.
And that's also one of the reasons why there are some corners of the right that have basically taken the side of these pro-Palestine protesters And what you should understand is that if you're on their side, especially if you're a white conservative, they hate you.
They hate your guts.
They actually want you dead.
So you're linking arms with them, singing Kumbaya, because for you it really is like you hate Israel.
But you should know that they actually hate you, right?
They actually want you to die.
They would be happy if you died.
So you should know that.
And I don't need to perform any kind of deep psychoanalysis to arrive at that conclusion.
It's just, it's, it's, they're telling you.
You can listen to them.
They'll tell you.
They will tell you.
Yes, I want you dead.
They will tell you that if you ask them.
And the second thing you notice is just how weak and pathetic these left-wing revolutionaries are.
I mean, this guy wants so badly to be militant and radical, but he is the softest, least threatening, least imposing figure you can possibly imagine.
And that's because he's not a revolutionary.
He is a defender of the status quo.
He's a henchman for the establishment, for institutional powers.
He's not challenging powerful people.
He is parroting them.
He's saying what they want him to say.
And this is the problem for left-wing activists in general now, is they want to preserve that spirit.
They want to preserve the spirit, the flavor, the branding, let's say, of revolutionaries.
But their parents and grandparents already won the Cultural Revolution, and they seized power, and now these people are defending that power.
They are defenders of power.
The revolutionaries are the ones that they oppose.
They are fighting against cultural insurgence, and they're doing that to protect their own cultural power.
That's what's happening.
And which is why the only way that somebody like this will suffer any consequence whatsoever, no matter what they say or do, is if they say or do something to cause embarrassment for the powers that be.
That's the only time that they'll suffer consequence.
They can say and do whatever they want to the other side, to conservatives, whatever, it doesn't matter.
But if they do or say something that causes political inconvenience or embarrassment for the people that are facilitating all this and funding it, well that's when it becomes a problem.
Which is what happened with this guy.
You know, he went a little too far, he said a little bit too much, said the quiet part out loud, a little bit too loudly and publicly.
And that's what brings us to this update.
Here's from the Daily Wire.
So that's the update, is that he's supposedly been expelled, I guess.
One of the most vocal students in the anti-Semitic protests at Columbia University in recent
days has been thrown out of school after the Daily Wire unearthed video of him stating
that Zionists don't deserve to live.
So that's the update, is that he's supposedly been expelled, I guess.
And again, it's not because of what he said.
It's not because he said he doesn't like white people.
The bit about I hate white people, he said that three years ago.
So you can say that.
It's just saying it loudly enough and getting enough attention where it becomes an embarrassment, where it becomes a political problem for the powers that be.
That's the only time you suffer a consequence if you're in his shoes, and that's why he's suffering it.
All right, next, Jerry Seinfeld is in the news.
He's out promoting a new film.
It's a comedy, the film is, about, I think, the invention of the Pop-Tart.
And as I understand it, it's kind of a fictionalized retelling of the competition between the two top cereal brands to come up with a breakfast pastry.
And, you know, which actually sounds like a funny concept for a film.
It's a little bizarre, but that's what makes it funny.
I have no idea if it's going to be any good or not.
But, you know, it's a clever concept.
Anyway, people are talking about this clip from an interview he did with the New Yorker Radio Hour where he talks about, which is something he's talked about frequently, the death of comedy and why don't we see very many funny movies or shows these days.
Let's listen to that.
Nothing really affects comedy.
People always need it, they need it so badly, and they don't get it.
It used to be you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, oh, Cheers is on, oh, MASH is on, oh, Mary Tyler Moore is on, All in the Family's on.
You just expected there'll be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight.
Well, guess what?
Where is it?
This is the result of the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people.
When you write a script and it goes into four or five different hands, committees, groups, here's our thought about this joke.
Well, that's the end of your comedy.
They move the gates like in skiing culture.
The gates are moving.
Your job is to be agile and clever enough That wherever they put the gates, I'm going to make the gate.
So he's totally correct, obviously, but we have to understand that the, and of course we've heard this analysis many times, it's correct, but the PC crap, as he calls it, and the wokeness and all that, that hasn't just made it, I think when we talk about it, we make it sound like the problem is that people are afraid to produce a funny comedy because they don't want to offend people.
Like there's this barrier.
Wokeness is a barrier.
And there are thousands of funny movies and shows being held back by the barrier of wokeness.
And if only we could tear down that barrier, then all the funny stuff will come flooding through.
And I think that's not the case.
I think it's worse than that.
Because the fact is that if wokeness went away tomorrow, there still wouldn't be very many good comedies coming out this year, or next year, or in five years from now.
Or in ten years.
And that's because Our culture has created a generation of people, multiple generations of people, who aren't capable of making good comedy, even if they wanted to.
Even if there were no rules stopping them, even if there were no social pressure, rather, stopping them, they still wouldn't be able to do it because it's about the conditioning.
People have been conditioned this way, and breaking conditioning is much more difficult than breaking through a barrier.
And that's where we are now.
And also, by the way, it's not just wokeness.
I think there's a perfect storm of factors getting in the way at the moment.
A big part of it is the left and the conditioning and all that.
But there are other problems, too, like the glut of content in general.
There's just so much.
People are inundated with so much stuff all the time that it's hard for anything.
To be seen and to make an impact.
People's attention spans have dwindled.
The audience is overstimulated.
These are all factors conspiring against any one piece of content, not just comedy.
But it is part of the picture.
There's just so much stuff.
Way too much.
Seinfeld mentioned Cheers and MASH and Mary Tyler Moore in those shows.
Well, back then, Or even in the 90s, when shows like Seinfeld were on air.
Back then, on a Thursday night or whatever, I don't remember what day Seinfeld aired.
I think maybe it was Thursday.
But on a Thursday night, let's say, everybody was watching Seinfeld, because that's just what was on.
Like, that's what you did.
And Seinfeld was competing with a few other shows on a few other channels.
Even when cable came along, it was still, you know, there weren't that many options at that time slot.
So that was the night that everybody went home and watched Seinfeld, because that's what was on.
Or Cheers or Mash before Seinfeld.
And those shows were a shared cultural reference point.
Everybody understood the humor.
They got the joke.
It was all understood in context.
And there's just so much stuff all the time now that there are no shared cultural reference points anymore.
We don't share anything.
We don't have any shared, you know, culture at all anymore.
Especially, you know, we don't have it, like, everything's so fractured.
You break it down by generation.
You break it down by ideology.
How do you break it down?
It's like everybody has their own, they all live in their own world, especially when it comes to entertainment and culture, and that's the stuff that they're consuming.
There's not a lot of cross-pollination, which also means, the point is that if somebody says something supposedly offensive, you know, as a joke in a podcast or in a tweet or on a show or in whatever context, most of the people getting upset about it have no idea about the context.
They don't even know who the person is.
They don't speak the same language.
They don't understand the tone and the context of the humor.
So back in the 90s, yeah, people would get offended by Seinfeld on occasion.
There'd be an episode here or there that caused a little bit of a dust-up.
But for the most part, if there was a joke or a plot point on Seinfeld that today would upset people, well, back then, you saw that, and you said, oh, yeah, that's Seinfeld.
That's their humor.
We get it.
We understand the joke.
We understand, in the context, we all understand what this is.
And we just don't have that anymore.
It's like when that dumb controversy happened with Shane Gillis a few years ago, and he got fired from SNL before he even started because of, I think it was some jokes on a podcast.
And I don't remember the jokes.
Jokes about Asian people, I think were a few in there, and other things too.
Now, everybody that knew Shane Gillis at the time, they were saying, guys, it's Shane Gillis.
This is his type of humor.
Really?
Are you serious?
He doesn't actually hate Asian people, okay?
This is his humor.
You don't understand, you don't listen to him.
But most of the people in the outrage mob never even heard of the guy before that.
And that's something I think we don't quite grasp, really, or we don't quite appreciate, that that also is such a new dynamic that didn't really exist prior to the Internet.
Like, you would never have national outrage at somebody that the majority of the nation had never heard of before the outrage.
Right, so people being upset because someone said something.
I can't believe you said this.
And then if you ask them, who is that?
I don't know, but I can't believe you said that.
Before the internet, that would never happen.
I'm sure people would get upset if someone said something sometimes.
But everyone at least knew who the guy was.
They understood the context.
It's this very strange dynamic where because everything lives in these little buckets, right, everything is so fractured.
It's like the only thing, one of the only things that can break you outside of that bucket and make you sort of known to people that are paying attention to other buckets is if you say something supposedly offensive.
And now everybody else from their other buckets are going to chime in even though they have no idea what's going on over here in this bucket.
You know, similar things have happened to me all the time, where people get upset or offended by some dumb joke, something that I say, and then people who are an audience of the show, they're doing the same thing where they're saying, are you guys serious?
Like, he's clearly kidding.
He jokes about this stuff all the time.
But the problem is that most of the people that are pretending to be offended have no idea.
And they don't care.
Right?
Because we don't have that cultural reference point.
All right, here's something fun.
The NFL draft happened over the weekend, starting on Thursday.
My Baltimore Ravens had a solid draft, I thought, by the way.
Filled some big positional needs.
Would have liked to see them grab a wide receiver earlier.
They didn't grab one until, I think, the fourth or fifth round.
Overall, I thought they did well.
That's neither here nor there, but if you're one of the five people wondering how I felt about that, now you know.
Anyway, there was destined to be at least one draft-related hot take to go viral, and we got it from a guy named Boyce Watkins, who apparently is an author or something.
I don't know exactly what he does for a living, but I do know that he has a PhD, and I know that because he's the kind of guy who puts PhD in both his Twitter handle and in his bio.
So, he just wants you to know he has a PhD.
He works it into everything.
I assume he works it into every conversation.
If he's at Applebee's ordering his meal, he'll probably work it in there.
Yeah, can I get the whole lot of bacon burger?
And also, by the way, I have a PhD.
I want you to know.
Just so you know.
Do you have any specials?
Any specials for somebody with a PhD?
Any PhD specials?
Did I mention I have a PhD?
I got a PhD.
Did you know that?
Did you know that?
So he wants you to know he has a Ph.D., and his Ph.D.
is indeed proof of something.
It's proof that Ph.D.s mean nothing at all these days.
Because here was the hot take that Boyce Watkins' Ph.D.
offered up.
He said this, Well, there you go.
It's a lot like a slave auction, except the slaves aren't working for free.
Well, there you go.
It's a lot like a slave auction, except the slaves aren't working for free.
In a similar way, you might say that the ocean is a lot like a box of cereal, except you
don't eat it for breakfast, and it doesn't come in a box.
A doorknob is a lot like an elephant, except it's not a large land mammal.
Yeah, non-sequiturs are a lot of fun.
And Boyce Watkins, PhD, is saying that the draft is just like a slave auction, except for the one single thing that makes a slave auction a slave auction.
So if you take out the one defining feature of slavery, which is that people are being forced to work for free, if you take that out, then suddenly, like, Everything is like slavery.
Even an event where teams hire athletes and pay them millions of dollars to play a game.
Athletes who, they don't, not only do they volunteer to be there, but actually they've been working their whole lives to be there.
Even that event is like slavery.
An event that is, in many ways, actually the opposite of- if you were to ask me to show you something that is the opposite of a slave auction, just so I get an idea, what is the opposite of that?
Well, the NFL Draft is the opposite of a slave auction.
And the thing is, as stupid as this hot take is, you realize that Boyce Watkins, PhD, is not alone.
Infamously, Colin Kaepernick has made the same comparison, and you kind of hear this every year.
And I'm perfectly happy to see the race hustlers continue to go back to this well.
I think it's great that they do.
Because it's the kind of thing that not only does it make them look so stupid, but it makes people just kind of throw up their hands and stop listening to these frauds.
Because if we're at the point where black men are being victimized, even when they're paid tens of millions of dollars to play a game they love, even when they're given the kind of life that most people would kill to have, if even that is a form of oppression, well then, I guess there's nothing we can do about it.
There's no way to solve it, apparently.
I mean, we don't even need to argue about the premise anymore.
We could just say, okay, fine, that's oppressive, too.
Okay, well, we can't, then I guess they're just gonna be oppressed.
I don't know, I guess black people will just be oppressed forever.
If even that, if we can't solve this by giving them millions of dollars, even that, and you can do, you can have a great life, and you can have a job that .01% of people on Earth can have, but 99% of people would love to have, If that's oppressive too, then I think rather than us saying it's not oppressive, we should just say, okay, well...
All right.
I mean, sorry about your luck then.
I don't know.
We can't do anything about it.
It's just the way it's going to be.
We might as well move on.
You have told us it is a totally unsolvable problem.
Not one single thing can make it better.
And so let's just stop trying to make it better then.
We just have to move on.
And I guess, thank God, the rest of us can thank God that we're not black people who have been oppressed with millions of dollars playing a game.
And that's it.
No reason to worry about it.
If you can't change it, if it's something that cannot be changed, no matter what, then, in a lot of ways, those are the problems that you should worry about the least, because there's nothing you can do about them.
So, that's the silver lining, I guess.
Let's get to the comment section.
If you're a man, it's required that you grow a beard.
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First comment says, when my teens talked about getting tattoos, I said, picture a shirt with a picture on it that you wore 10 years ago.
Now imagine wearing that same image on your skin for the rest of your life.
They got my point and thus avoided the visual mess we saw in the video.
Yeah, that's a good analogy.
You know, I like to think of it, I think of tattoos more like bumper stickers.
They're kind of human bumper stickers that you're putting on your skin.
And it is possible, like, and I feel the same way about tattoos at this point, again, even though I have two of them myself.
I feel the same way about tattoos that I do about bumper stickers.
It is possible to put a bumper sticker on your car that isn't embarrassing and that isn't too terribly tacky.
You can put a little Jesus fish on your car or whatever and that's fine.
It's fine.
It doesn't add much.
It doesn't achieve much.
No one's going to be evangelized by your bumper sticker.
But it's fine.
It's not a problem.
It's not going to cause any issues.
Again, it's not embarrassing to you.
That's kind of how I look at tattoos, even my own.
You can have a tattoo that's just fine.
It's okay.
Now, is it worth putting something on your skin forever when the best you can hope for is that it'll just be fine and that you won't be embarrassed about it in the future?
Probably not worth it, but that's I think the strategy that works.
The problem, going back to the bumper sticker analogy, Is when you're peppering your car with dozens of bumper stickers, and you're putting bumper stickers on that are ugly and tacky, and it's like, make no sense.
And you know, sometimes you see the bumper stickers somebody has on their car and you think, really?
What made you think I need to put this permanently on my car?
Why that?
What about that made you think, I want everyone who's behind me in traffic, for as long as I have this car, I want everyone to see it.
Because when you have a bumper sticker on your car, what you're saying to everybody behind you in traffic is, hey guys, look at this.
Look at this thing.
Look at this statement that I've put here.
And many times you see bumper stickers where you think, like, why do you want?
What is it about that that you want everyone forever to see it?
I don't get it.
Or the worst is when it's a bumper sticker That you know one of those sassy bumper stickers that kind of insults the people playfully insults the people behind you in traffic and that one too it's it's it's like do you want
I get it's a joke and it's a bumper sticker, but do you really want to say that to everybody behind you without even knowing who they are?
Is that a smart move?
So bumper stickers become tacky kind of in the same way that tattoos do.
You put too many on and they're just kind of weird and they don't make sense and it's like Maybe you see a bumper sticker that, in the moment, is kind of funny to you, but, and you put it on your car, is that still gonna be hilarious to you two years from now?
When it's on your car and you can't take it off?
Same thing with tattoos.
Alright, next time it says, your tattoos are bad, but mine's okay because it's in a different place.
Matt Walsh.
Okay, that's supposed to be a quote of me.
That's not exactly what I said.
Love you, Matt, but hypocrisy much?
I'm a devoted Catholic and I have a great job, thank goodness, and you know what?
I've got over 80 tattoos, including my whole bald head and neck.
Yeah, I guess, you know, I am saying that mine's okay and yours aren't.
Like, that is what I'm saying.
I think it's fine, my tattoos are fine, and yours are, like, not totally fine.
I mean, it's not.
I'm not saying it should be illegal, like, you have them.
I'm not saying you shouldn't go out in public, you should hide your head in shame, but I wouldn't recommend anyone ever doing that to themselves.
Never!
I think it's ill-advised to do that.
I think in all cases it's ill-advised.
It will not add to your life in any way to cover your entire neck and head in these images.
I'm glad that it hasn't gotten in the way of you getting a job, and I'm glad that you apparently are still happy with them, but I would 100% advise anyone against doing that.
And your argument seems to be that If I think one or two tattoos in a not very visible location are okay, then I must automatically be in favor of dozens of tattoos all over your body or else I'm a hypocrite?
Is that your argument?
Isn't that like saying that I can't judge your diet of fast food if I also have a diet of some kind?
You're a hypocrite!
You judge what I eat, yet you also eat food!
Curious?
Look at that, I gotcha now.
But yeah, because the point is not simply the fact of eating food in general, it's what you eat and how often you eat.
And I think with tattoos, now tattoos are not necessary to continue living like food is, but it's a similar kind of thing.
It's not necessarily so much the fact of getting one, it's where you get it, how many you get, all that kind of stuff.
Finally, I was like that kid in the 80s about video games.
It causes me some old pain to hear the slight disrespect for video games and kids playing them in your comments.
Today, I'm a well-known concept artist in the video game industry, and I have worked on many famous games.
Okay.
Look guys, I really need you to stop being so sensitive.
I just need you to try to not be so sensitive.
It's at the point where I can't say anything that relates to video games at all without people getting their feelings hurt.
You think I'm exaggerating?
If I just simply say the term video games and then move on and say nothing else about them, I will get angry comments just for saying it.
I'm not kidding.
And if you think that I'm kidding, keep in mind that a few weeks ago there was a whole massive outrage cycle against me and YouTube videos and everything.
People did, there were gamers doing like two hour long shows about something I said about video games.
When all I, I did a monologue, maybe you remember this, where I was talking about wokeness in video games.
Just like I've talked about wokeness in movies and TV shows and music, like I've talked about it in every area of culture.
And I talked about it in video games.
And I was taking a position that conservative gamers agree with.
And yet, I still had gamers vehemently criticizing me for daring to talk about the subject at all.
In fact, I was really told that.
Multiple times, I was told that I shouldn't talk about it at all.
I am not allowed to talk about it because I've been critical in the past, so I'm not allowed to talk about it.
Which is just, like, imagine someone taking that position with TV shows or movies.
Like, someone telling you, well, you can't, you can't talk about movies at all.
You've been critical of some movies, and so you, no, you don't, you can't talk about, never mention the movies ever again.
It's like, look, in this case, you know, you say in your comment that video games can be a passion in some cases that lead to a career.
Okay, I said exactly that in the segment that you're responding to.
I made exactly that stipulation.
I said that.
So I don't know, did you tune out for that part or what?
I'm not sure.
But my whole point Was that, talking about parenting, and especially parenting of boys, that you should help your son find his passions.
And we were using the video of the kid at the tractor convention, and he's really into farming, and he knows everything about farming.
Just a great, like, you could tell just from a 90-second video.
It's a great kid.
Any parent would be proud to have a kid like that.
And so how do you end up with a kid like that?
I mean, everybody would like to have a son.
It doesn't mean that every son has to be into farming.
It's just a boy that is really passionate about something, very knowledgeable, able to converse about it in an intelligent way, very positive.
And how do you end up with that?
How do you help your son be like that?
And the answer is, one of the big answers, as I said, is helping them find what they're passionate about.
And every boy has something, and it might change over time, but there's something there that if you were to sort of, and sometimes they'll find it on their own, and sometimes they need some help finding it.
And they find it, it's the thing that lights their soul on fire, just the thing that makes them, it just clicks.
You want to find that for them.
And I said that in most cases, right, if you don't help your son find his passion, he's going to substitute entertainment.
And that's what a lot of kids do.
The screen becomes not really a passion.
You can't call it a passion because for most kids, when they're looking at the screen, it's a very hypnotic, very sort of depressive state where they're sitting sort of slack-jawed, staring at it.
It's not a passionate activity.
But if you don't help a kid find a passion, that's what it becomes.
That becomes the substitute.
And I said that in most cases, entertainment is not going to be the lifelong passion that will lead to a career and a lifestyle and a, you know, make him a good, well-rounded person.
It doesn't mean that they can never engage in entertainment or that they can never watch TVs and movies and play video games.
It just means that that can't be the focal point of your child's life.
Because it will not be the focal point of a Of a productive, happy adulthood, right?
You want to help them focus on the things that will later in life lead them to having good lives and being good people.
But, as I said, sometimes it will.
Like, there will be cases where entertainment, let's say video games, actually are a real passion.
And that, like in your case, in the case of the person leaving this comment, They'll go on to be a concept artist in the video game industry.
Fantastic!
Wonderful.
And you probably look back at your childhood spent playing video games, and it's not a waste to you, because it led to something that it became your art.
Great.
I think that's great.
My point is that most of the time it won't work that way.
And just like, same thing with movies and TV.
I get accused of singling video games out.
I don't.
I don't single them out.
I get singled out whenever I bring them up.
I just lump them in.
It's just like movies and television.
It's the same thing.
Movies, TV, streaming, video games, all the same kind of thing.
It's digital, screen-based entertainment.
I'm not against it.
Across the board?
Of course not.
But most of the time it should be consumed in moderation.
And same thing with movies and TV.
There are a lot of kids that if you let them, they'll sit around watching TV, and watching movies, and binging, you know, streaming and stuff.
They'll do that all day every day, if you let them.
For a small fraction of those kids, a small fraction, like 0.001% of those kids, will actually, it will be a passion of theirs, and they'll go on to become film directors, and they'll work behind the camera, and they'll be actors, and they'll actually work in the entertainment industry.
In which case, great.
For those kids, that was not wasted time.
But most of the kids won't.
They're not going to go on to have a career in the business.
They're not going to go on to do anything with it.
It just will be a distraction.
It'll just be an amusement, and nothing more than that.
Nothing wrong with an amusement.
But an amusement should not be the focal point of your child's life.
So, I await the angry comments finding something wrong with what I just said, no matter how reasonable it might be.
Sunday, May 12th, we here at The Daily Wire are setting out on a new journey with our first ever animated series, Mr. Bircham.
And we're rolling out the red carpet for all of you with a free series premiere exclusively on Daily Wire+.
Mr. Bircham is the brainchild of the brilliant Adam Carolla.
Bircham is a junior high woodshop teacher who's standing his ground in the wave of modern day lunacy.
He's tough as nails, and he's not about to let some overzealous social justice warrior dictate the terms of his classroom or his life.
And it doesn't stop there.
Our friend Adam Carolla has rallied an unparalleled lineup of talent for the series, including Megyn Kelly, Roseanne Barr, Sage Steele, Danny Trejo, Kyle Dunnigan, Patrick Warburton, Tyler Fisher, our very own Brett Cooper, and a whole lot more.
Take a look at the official Mr. Bertram trailer right now.
Roll what you need.
Jumping in the first one?
Rolling.
Speed.
Action.
Sawbuck's looking a little chubby-wubby.
So I bought him some new food.
It's organic and vegan.
Dogs are supposed to eat meat.
They're descendants of wolves.
You ever see a vegan wolf on the Nature Channel?
I'm a vegan.
Coffee is for closers, ladies.
Listen up!
Hey, don't make this a prison hug.
I'm a heteronormative, cisgendered, white male.
For which I apologize.
I'm black and that used to be enough, but I'm also bilingual and I'm non-binary.
We're the army!
We drink more before 9am than you Navy pukes do all day.
He rubbed all the fur off his emotional support ferret.
The damn thing look like a four-legged penis!
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Ah.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Charity and work.
Two words that should never go together.
Like women and opinions.
I want a burly man.
They're salty and make me dizzy.
Sorry, I just need to find a thingy to fix my gaming chair.
When I was on the construction site, my chair was a five-gallon bucket.
It was also my toilet.
Hey, I'm done.
I'm going back to bed.
Thanks a lot.
Prepare for the razor-sharp comedy that only Adam Carolla and The Daily Wire can deliver.
Don't miss out on the series premiere streaming free exclusively on Daily Wire Plus on Sunday, May 12th.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
[MUSIC]
Christy Dohm, the governor of South Dakota and potential Trump running mate for 2024, though not anymore,
I guess, has found herself in the middle of what meteorologists
would call a massive, And it all begins with a revelation offered up freely by Noem herself in her forthcoming book about how she killed her dog.
The Guardian had the report, quote, Cricket was a wire-hair pointer about 14 months old, the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an aggressive personality and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.
By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave.
Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds, and having the time of her life.
Noem describes Cricket then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control.
Nothing worked.
And then on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem's truck and attacked the family's chickens, grabbing one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.
Cricket, the untrainable dog, Gnome writes, behaved like a trained assassin.
When Gnome finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog whipped around to bite me.
Then, as the chicken's owner wept, Gnome repeatedly apologized and wrote the shocked family a check for the price they asked and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime.
Through it all, Gnome says, Cricket was the picture of pure joy.
I hated that dog, Gnome writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself untrainable, dangerous to anybody she came in contact with, and less than worthless as a hunting dog.
Okay, now, Nome then tells us about how she decided that she had no choice but to put the dog down.
So she led the dog down to a gravel pit and she shot it.
And this again, I remind you, is a story that Kristi Nome chose to tell in her own book.
Nobody would know about the tragic demise of poor Cricket if not for Nome writing about it in her book.
Why did she tell this story?
Well, in subsequent public statements, she has explained that this was meant to be a story about how she's a tough woman who isn't afraid to make difficult decisions.
Here's what she tweeted on Saturday, or rather on Sunday.
I can understand why some people are upset about a 20-year-old story of Cricket, one of our working dogs at our ranch, in my forthcoming book, No Going Back.
The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons learned.
What I learned from my years of public service, especially leading South Dakota through COVID, is people are looking for leaders who are authentic, willing to learn from the past, and don't shy away from tough challenges.
My hope is anyone reading this book will have an understanding that I always work to make the best decisions I can for the people in my life.
The fact is, South Dakota law states that dogs who attack and kill livestock can be put down.
Given that Cricket had shown aggressive behavior toward people by biting them, I decided what I did.
Whether running the ranch or in politics, I have never passed on my responsibilities to anyone else to handle.
Even if it's hard and painful, I followed the law and was being a responsible parent, dog owner, and neighbor.
As I explain in the book, it wasn't easy, but often the easy way isn't the right way.
Okay.
Now, this defense, as you might imagine, has not been persuasive to the vast majority of the public.
And over the past few days, after this excerpt from the book was made public, Noam has faced immense backlash from all corners of the political world.
Left and right have blasted her relentlessly and ruthlessly.
Just to give you some idea, The tweet that I just read to you, with her defending herself, has, as of last night, it had 22,000 comments underneath it, and basically all of them, including many from prominent conservatives, and of course a great many leftists, are condemning her in no uncertain terms.
I scrolled through the first 100 comments, just for reference, and not a single one of them, not one, was sympathetic to her.
It's a 100 to 0 against her right now, is the verdict.
And she's been trending now for days, and she's been discussed on every major news show, and all of the commentary has agreed that not only is she a dog-murdering psychopath, but she's also killed her political career just as surely as she killed poor old Cricket.
And we can honestly say, without the slightest hint of exaggeration, that no politician in modern American history has ever been this widely condemned for anything.
I mean, ever.
Think of an example of any politician ever being this roundly.
Maybe Anthony Weiner is the other example I can think of.
And so Anthony Weiner and Christie Noem.
What do we make of that?
Well, for one thing, we can say for certain that Kristi Noem has the political intelligence and political instincts of a cantaloupe.
Anybody with a passing familiarity with modern American culture can tell you that the very last thing any politician with national ambition should ever do is admit to killing a dog.
You would be better off confessing to anything else, I mean anything, including killing a person.
And we'll get back to that in a moment.
She could confess in that book that 20 years ago she got really mad at her neighbor and walked over and shot her neighbor in the face.
And I promise you there would be less outrage over that than the dog.
I promise you.
But from a purely political perspective, this is the most egregious unforced error we have ever seen in our lifetimes.
And all for the sake of proving that she can make tough decisions.
I mean, does she not have any other anecdotes that could make that point?
Like, is that really, that's what you go with?
It's like if you went to a job interview and the interviewer asked, like, what are your greatest strengths?
And you said, well, you know, I'm really good at setting stuff on fire.
Now, even if you meant that in a positive way, like even if you only ever set things on fire for good reasons, it's just a bizarre fact to offer into evidence in that context.
Choose something else.
Don't choose that.
It's too much baggage with that, right?
Why choose that of all things?
And the context in this case is a book that exists purely to lend her gnome that is some legitimacy on the national stage and earn some easy publicity.
Every politician writes a book like this if they're running for national office or if they expect that they might be nominated for vice president.
Nobody ever actually reads these books.
They'll sell 12,000 copies in the first month and then they're forgotten and not a single additional copy is sold and nobody remembers that it was written.
You're not supposed to actually make news with these books.
You're not supposed to say anything legitimately noteworthy.
And by all accounts, Noam's book is dutifully boring and pointless, full of Republican cliches and boilerplate, with this one story about killing a dog.
And another about killing a goat, apparently, randomly dropped into the middle of it.
This is the only interesting thing that has ever been written in a politician's memoir.
So, I mean, I guess you could say that much in her defense.
Like, at least, there have been many books like this, and it's the only time that any politician has ever read anything that made you go, oh, really?
Only time.
But now we see why they usually avoid writing interesting things in their memoirs, because it doesn't go well for them.
But even if it was politically suicidal for Noam to reveal herself as the anti-John Wick, was she actually wrong for what she did?
That's the question.
Like, was it actually wrong to pull an old yeller on cricket?
Well, I'm not much of an animal rights activist myself, you know that.
I don't expect that my PETA membership card will be arriving in the mail anytime soon, but even so, you know, I would say that yes, Noam was wrong to kill her dog in that situation.
You know, and look, if you've lost me on a topic like this, you're in trouble.
If I'm not on your side, that's rough.
You're in rough shape.
Now granted, life on a farm is not like life in the suburbs.
Animals are kept for utility.
They have to pull their weight.
And anyone who is not a vegetarian eats food every day that was once a defenseless animal put down, much like cricket was, and then butchered and consumed.
Okay, which presumably Cricket wasn't, although, you know, she doesn't say.
And you might be squeamish about it, but that's the way it works, and that's where your food comes from, and you should be an adult about it when it comes to how things go on farms, because, again, that's—this is where you—this is—the world would starve to death if we didn't eat animals, and so, in general, we need to understand that about farm life.
But that does not let Gnome off the hook in this case, because it sounds like Cricket was poorly trained.
At 14 months old, it doesn't sound like enough time was devoted to properly training her to be a useful animal on the farm.
You can't just kill a dog because you're annoyed with it.
I mean, if I killed every animal that annoyed me, I would be like the Genghis Khan of Christy Gnomes.
But I haven't killed any animals, for the record, because taking a life, even an animal life, requires greater moral justification than that.
These are God's creatures, after all.
So, Kristi Noem was wrong for killing the dog, even if plenty of other animals were killed on her farm for perfectly justifiable reasons, which they probably were because it's a farm.
This one does not seem to be justified, in my opinion.
And if I could go back and rescue Cricket from her cruel fate, I would.
Although, if I did, she'd still be dead at this point because this happened, like, 20 years ago.
Still, I am opposed to the killing.
I think it was wrong.
And so, I agree with The thrust of the criticism of Kristi Noem.
Yet the reaction is still absurdly overblown.
I mean, this amount of outrage over a dog killed on a farm two decades ago is a bit excessive, especially when you contrast it with politicians who have publicly confessed to killing people, not just people, but their own children.
Consider the fact that several prominent national politicians have, in recent years, admitted to getting abortions.
One example is Representative Pramila Jayapal, who wrote about her abortion story in the Washington Post in 2019.
And according to Jayapal, her first child, who now supposedly identifies as non-binary and who Jayapal refers to as they throughout the article, had a difficult birth and wound up in the NICU for a few months.
Eventually, Jayapal divorced the father of her child and met somebody else, and then she conceived another child with the new man, but decided that she was going to kill the child because she didn't want to potentially go through another difficult birth.
And you might find some similarities here in the reasoning.
Kristi Noem killed her dog because it was difficult.
Jayapal killed her child because she thought the child might be difficult.
And you probably don't remember this story about Jayapal because there wasn't much outrage in response to it.
She didn't trend for days on end.
She wasn't condemned by both sides of the political aisle, or even one side, really.
There was nothing like the anger and vitriol being directed at Christy Noem.
The public, to include conservatives, have proven to be far, far, far, far less accepting of politicians killing dogs than of politicians killing their own human offspring.
In fact, Jayapal was celebrated by many of the people now screaming at Christy Noem.
So it's not just that people are less upset by the murder of children than by the murder of dogs.
It's that many people are actively in favor of the former.
And those not in favor still can't muster the kind of disgust and visceral revulsion in the face of it that they can for a dead dog.
This is a sign of a truly sick society, one that will not and cannot survive so long as it prioritizes, you know, dogs over people.
There has never been a human society that valued dogs over its own children.
We are the first.
This is a form of moral dementia that we are pioneering.
Now, whenever we have conversations like this, I'll be accused of hating animals.
But the truth is, I don't hate animals.
How could I?
Animals are not moral creatures, first of all.
They aren't capable of committing acts of evil, so there's nothing to hate.
But just as they're not capable of committing evil, so too are they incapable of performing acts of virtue.
It is because human beings can be evil that they can also be virtuous.
And it is virtuous to treat animals with kindness and love.
It is good to love animals.
But we are called to love and protect human children even more.
This is the kind of thing that shouldn't need explaining.
It should come instinctively to every person.
And for nearly all people who have ever lived on Earth, it has come instinctively.
Only in our culture do we systematically murder hundreds of thousands of human children every year while elevating dogs to the status of children.
Indeed, many of the very same people who kill their children are also elevating dogs in this way.
They are actually, quite literally, replacing their kids with dogs.
So, look, if you are pro-life, and you fight against the murder of the unborn, and you have the appropriate emotional reaction to stories of mothers killing their own children, and you love and protect human children above all, and you also happen to love dogs, and you cherish them because they're God's creatures too, then that's great.
You have your priorities exactly in order, you should be commended, I have no issue with you whatsoever, you're exactly right when it comes to this.
Fantastic.
But we all know that you, sadly, are not representative of the majority.
The majority of Americans are either in favor of or indifferent to the mass slaughter of human children.
And either implicitly or explicitly value dogs and other four-legged creatures above humans, including children, including even, in some cases, their own children.
And that, to me, is the real scandal.
I feel bad for poor cricket.
I feel worse about the approximately 20 million human children murdered in this country since Cricket's demise.
And that's why those who are outraged far more by the death of one dog than the 20 million human deaths since then are today cancelled.
