Ep. 1377 - The Only Solution To The Violent Crime Epidemic
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, an actor in Los Angeles is killed after he catches someone stealing the catalytic converter from his car. Now, a friend of the victim is speaking out, declaring that the solution to these violent crimes is to "come together" and "love each other." But that is not the solution–in fact, that attitude is a big part of the problem. Also, Chelsea Handler speaks out about the Harrison Butker controversy. She always has great insight to offer and this is no exception. And, a new report finds that teens and young adults today have little to no interest in getting their driver's licenses. That makes us all safer on the roads, but is it really a positive trend?
Ep.1377
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, an actor in Los Angeles is killed after he catches someone stealing the catalytic converter from his car.
Now a friend of the victim is speaking out, declaring that the solution to these violent crimes is to come together and love each other, but that is not the solution.
In fact, that attitude is a big part of the problem.
We'll talk about that.
Also, Chelsea Handler speaks out about the Harrison Butker controversy.
She always has great insight to offer, and this is no exception, of course.
And a new report finds that teens and young adults today have little to no interest in getting their driver's licenses.
That makes us all safer on the roads, of course, but is it really a positive trend?
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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You know you're living in a state of total lawlessness when criminals start pulling off
heists that, under normal circumstances, they don't even attempt.
Think of the train robberies in the Wild West with Butch Cassidy where they detach the rail car and dynamite the safe and so on.
Brazen crimes like this only happen when law enforcement isn't doing its job for one reason or another.
Otherwise, the risk of getting caught is just too high, so the thieves don't even try.
Now, post-BLM, there's been a lot of coverage of crime rates increasing as police retreat and criminals become emboldened, but there hasn't been much coverage of the dramatic increase in one specific kind of crime, which used to be relatively rare.
I'm talking about the theft of catalytic converters.
Stealing catalytic converters doesn't take very long, but it's highly conspicuous.
Thieves typically slide under cars and start sawing, or they lift cars for easier access.
In either case, it's a loud and very noticeable process.
It's brazen.
It's definitely not the kind of thing you'd try if you thought there might be any police officers around.
But there aren't many police officers left in major cities in this country, which is why thefts of catalytic converters have skyrocketed.
To give just one prominent example, in the city of Los Angeles from 2018 to 2023, the number of catalytic converter thefts per year has increased by more than 720%.
Put another way, Los Angeles went from having 970 catalytic converters stolen every year to more than 8,000 stolen every year.
And the numbers are similar in many other major cities.
Nationally, catalytic converter thefts jumped by more than 900% from 2019 to 2023.
Thieves want these converters because they have precious metals that they can sell for hundreds of dollars.
And now that they know that police aren't interested in stopping them, they're just lifting cars in the middle of the street and removing the converters.
That's what happened in the early hours of Saturday morning to actor Johnny Wachter, who was a regular in the show General Hospital for two years.
He also appeared in the show Westworld.
Around 3 a.m., Wachter and a co-worker were leaving a rooftop bar in downtown Los Angeles, where Wachter served as a bartender.
That's when Wachter noticed that three individuals had raised his Toyota Prius.
With a floor lift, and he initially suspected that his vehicle was being towed.
And by the way, thieves target Priuses and other hybrids because their catalytic converters have a higher concentration of precious metals than gas cars, makes them more valuable.
But when Wachter confronted the group, according to police, he was shot.
Quote, without provocation, the men fled and Wachter died shortly afterwards.
Watch.
The Brother of Beloved soap opera star Johnny Wachter tells us the 37-year-old was shot to death in downtown LA early Saturday morning.
Killed while trying to stop a catalytic converter theft in progress.
He I guess was seeing them do it in the act and was standing up for what he believed was right and you know protecting his vehicle and his car and he was being brave and it You know, you never anticipate someone would kill someone for that.
Tessa Farrell says Wachter was her friend and former fiancé, that he moved to L.A.
from South Carolina to follow his dreams and accomplish them as a main character named Brando Corbin on General Hospital, where he filmed 164 episodes between 2020 and 2022.
The LAPD says investigators are still searching for three male suspects in connection with the fatal shooting.
And right now, they're not releasing a description of them or how they got away.
But Tessa says Wachter's co-workers at a downtown L.A.
bar were witnesses to the attack.
She says she hopes this killing shines a light on violent crime occurring in L.A.
I will actually always think of him as this spirit that loved to celebrate life and be alive and push the limits of experience.
He was an amazing actor.
He was really funny.
Now the woman you just saw, Tessa Farrell, is Wachter's ex-fiancé.
In a video she posted to TikTok on Monday, Farrell states that she hadn't seen Wachter in a few years prior to his death.
She also indicates that she hasn't been talking to him lately because she's been busy working on a movie.
She then goes into some detail about their relationship, how much she cared about him.
But as the video goes on, Farrell reveals how little she understands about what happened to Wachter and about violent crime in general.
And before I show you the rest of the footage, I want to make it very clear that my intention is not to mock a woman who's grieving, obviously.
The point here is not to demean Tessa Farrell in any way, but the fact remains that the ideas she promotes in this video must be addressed because they are a cancer on society that has cost many people their lives, and will continue to cost people their lives unless these ideas are rejected.
So, with that in mind, here's the rest of Tessa Farrell's video.
Watch.
It's not okay.
This can't keep happening.
So many lives are being lost to just us not being smart.
We have to be smarter as a community.
And guys, even if you're watching this, we have to stop being so mean to each other.
Like I saw some of the comments yesterday and it's like, guys, let's love each other.
Let's not steal, you know?
Johnny's up above now looking down and I'm so happy that I think he found happiness before he went because that was his dream in life.
Is to be happy.
But I'm just so proud of the man he's become and it's so sad that crime in LA had to do this and I'm hoping that, um, change some legislation to prevent this from happening.
These criminals can't keep being on the street and they can't keep being sent back and have no repercussions for their actions.
You know?
The person who did this, if you're watching, I'm sorry, but you shot the wrong guy.
You know, you can get a real job.
I know the job market's hard, but we're all in it together.
You don't have to steal.
You know?
Especially take a life over it.
Human life is disregarded.
Too easy, guys.
We gotta make some changes as a community.
We gotta support each other and come together.
Maybe that's what Johnny's gift is for us.
Maybe he's gifting that to all of us.
Because he was full of gifts.
Okay, now, so there's the video.
As I said, the point here is not to You know, criticize this young woman.
I mean, there are aspects of this that are kind of strange.
The line about you shot the wrong guy is a really weird thing to say.
It just is.
I don't know what you mean, shot the wrong guy.
She also, you know, she hasn't, according to her own testimony, hasn't even talked to the guy in years, and yet she's the main one on TV and now doing videos talking about this.
So there are some aspects of it that are kind of strange, but that's not really the point.
We can't see inside her heart to know what her motivations are.
The attitude on display here, though, is deeply sick, yet it's also entirely pervasive.
She implores the criminals who just murdered a loved one, I guess, to stop being so mean and to love each other and not steal.
She acknowledges that the job market is hard, but she says, well, they don't have to steal.
We're all in this together, she says, to the guys who just shot Johnny Wachter.
We need to support each other.
So violent thugs have been allowed to take over our communities precisely because of this just utterly delusional liberal approach to crime.
You know, and if Tessa were just one naive woman crying out in the wilderness, or in her bathtub, as the case may be, again, for whatever reason, then this wouldn't be worth responding to, but she's one of millions of people saying this.
Again, this attitude is why lawlessness has claimed hold of so many communities.
People with this view elect people who have the same view, or at least who express the same view, and those people usher in more chaos and criminality when the cycle repeats over and over again while thousands more fall victim to these crimes.
So we have to address it and be honest about it.
And being honest about it means this, because here's the reality that these people just can't wrap their minds around.
Okay, these criminals cannot be redeemed with a lecture about the value of teamwork.
They're not committing crime because they're poor and desperate.
And I want to say that again.
They are not committing crime because they're poor and desperate.
The job market has nothing to do with it.
At all.
Okay, they steal and kill because they enjoy it.
They want to do it.
So they do.
Mike Cernovich put it succinctly on Twitter yesterday when he tweeted, criminals like crime.
It sounds overly simplified.
It's not.
It really is as simple as that.
They like it.
They do it because they like it.
They act this way because they want to.
Okay.
You take anyone in America right now who's currently stealing a catalytic converter from a car.
I don't care who they are.
Take that person, hand them a million dollars.
And say, your life has changed.
Here's a million dollars.
You don't have to do this anymore.
They'll be back on the street committing petty and not-so-petty crimes by next week.
Probably by tomorrow, okay?
You could give them a high-paying job in a corner office downtown.
They'd never even show up for work.
Not a single day.
They'd rather be on the street stealing pieces from people's cars to sell for drug money.
Now, there are observable reasons for this.
And one of the major ones, though certainly not the only one, One of the major ones is simple.
People with high IQs tend to be more empathetic because they have the intellectual capacity to consider what other people might be thinking or feeling.
We think of empathy as an emotion, but it's also an intellectual exercise.
People with very low IQs often have little or no empathy.
A few years ago, there was a study published in the journal Psychological Science that came up with a finding along these lines.
As the New Haven Register reported at the time, one of the psychologists behind the story remarked, quote, there may be cognitive limits in the ability to take the perspective of others into account.
In other words, the less intelligent you are, the harder it may be for you to put yourself in another's shoes.
So with that in mind, Guess where criminals who steal catalytic converters rank on the IQ spectrum?
We can assume it's not very high.
In fact, we don't have to assume because based on the data we have, chronic adult offenders have an average IQ of around 85, which is a full standard deviation below the population's average.
In other words, the people committing much of the crime in this country are Very stupid.
They're often so stupid they don't feel empathy, at least not to the degree that normal people do.
It's not that they're psychopaths, although that's certainly true in some cases.
It's that, by and large, they're like morons.
There's no reasoning with them because they don't care what you think.
And they don't even, like, the idea that they should think about someone else as another human being and put themselves in their shoes and all, they just...
They don't do that.
They don't care.
And this is not an excuse for them.
It's not remotely an excuse.
I'm just trying to explain that there are deep-seated problems here, and poverty and desperation have not nearly as much to do with it as people think.
And of course, the other major factor, even more significant, is that many of these criminals were raised in homes without any parental guidance, where there was no effort put into their moral formation.
After all, You know, even if you are low IQ, that doesn't mean that you have to become a violent criminal.
Being raised correctly, no matter how smart you are, can guard against that sort of outcome pretty effectively.
But these people were not raised correctly, or raised at all really, and so here we are.
But all these factors together create a very disturbing situation.
The lack of moral guidance, the lack of proper adult supervision growing up, the lack of spiritual formation, the lack of intellect, all together mean that no matter what Tessa Farrell says to these people, it won't matter.
Now, she understands the concept of empathy.
They don't.
She doesn't really understand human nature.
That's one of the problems, and that's why everything she says in that video is pointless.
It's also why every politician's effort to rehabilitate these people is a waste of time.
They quite literally don't even know what rehabilitation means.
And that's why the only thing you can do with them is remove them from society, put them in prison, lock them away.
It's the only thing.
It's the only thing that can be done.
Now, is it possible for these sorts of people to be redeemed?
The type who casually kill another human being after stealing from his car?
The sort of person who would kill somebody over a catalytic converter?
Can that person be redeemed?
Well, as a Christian, I have to believe that they can, as a matter of faith.
But it takes a supernatural intervention to bring that about.
And the simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of violent criminals will never be functional members of society, ever, in their lives.
That's a fact, whether we like it or not.
Which is why our only choice is to lock them away forever and let God be the judge at the end.
That's not for us to do.
But we can make judgments about them in this life.
We have to.
And one of the judgments is, you are a dangerous, dysfunctional person.
We cannot live around you.
Now, even leftist politicians understand this to some extent, which is why they never blame criminals for their own actions.
They find others to blame, sometimes to comical effect.
A year ago, there was a video of a Los Angeles City Councilwoman named Nithya Raman that made the rounds.
And she was announcing her decision to vote against a measure that would have, quote, made it unlawful for any person to possess a detached catalytic converter unless valid documentation or other proof of lawful possession can be produced.
The point of the measure, obviously, is to help prevent the kinds of thefts that led to the death of Johnny Wachter.
Ultimately, the measure passed, but before it did, Rahman explained why she opposed it.
She said that Toyota was responsible for the thefts of catalytic converters, not the thieves, because they made the catalytic converters too easy to steal.
So it's their fault.
Watch.
We have a company, you know, the Prius, whatever, Toyota, who makes the Prius.
Um, that essentially has a device on their cars which is super easy to remove.
It's basically the value of a MacBook, right?
That is put in a place that is incredibly easy to access in your car.
And then the thefts related to this issue have essentially all of the costs of that are given to us to bear instead of them having to manufacture a car that actually is not so easy to be stolen.
So, the government requires car manufacturers to place catalytic converters on cars with the Clean Air Act, and now the government blames car manufacturers for making these converters too easy to steal.
Now, to be fair, it's true that a lot of cars have their catalytic converters in the engine bay now, where they're less accessible to thieves, but the reason these thefts have increased in the last six years has nothing to do with their placement on vehicles.
If it did, the thefts would be declining, not increasing, as more manufacturers place the converters in the engine bay.
The reason these thefts are skyrocketing is that the police have stopped enforcing the law and DAs have stopped prosecuting crime.
Rather than admit that, Los Angeles politicians are blaming car manufacturers.
These are the lengths that leftists in Los Angeles will go in order to absolve criminals of responsibility for their own actions.
They'd rather blame Toyota than hire more police to prevent these crimes, which are brazen in pretty much every case.
And the family and friends of the victim, in turn, are hopelessly confused about why their loved one is dead.
And by the way, whether you think these criminals are responsible for their actions or not, it actually shouldn't even matter.
Like, you could make the argument that if most of these criminals are low IQ, they were raised in dysfunctional, neglectful homes, then to some extent, it isn't their fault they turned out the way they did.
You could say that, hey, if I was in the exact same situation, maybe I'd be out stealing catalytic converters too.
Maybe.
Now, I think the argument only goes so far.
Ultimately, we have free will, we all make choices, and we should be held accountable for them.
But it actually doesn't matter.
It's all academic, because either way, the violent criminals must be removed from society.
And in fact, I would argue that if they are indeed not responsible for their actions, that's all the more reason to remove them, because it means all the more that they probably can't be rehabilitated.
So this is usually how it goes after a senseless murder.
It's exactly what you saw in that video.
We hear from friends and family calling on the community to come together.
Sometimes they advocate on behalf of the murderer, telling us to be understanding and forgiving of the scumbag who murdered their loved one.
We see this kind of thing all the time.
Well, you know, as important as forgiveness is, just once I'd like to see someone in that situation calling for justice and punishment.
Like showing real righteous anger?
I'd like to hear something like this.
This criminal killed somebody I love.
I hope that he's brought to justice and that justice is swift and severe.
I want him punished severely.
I want him removed from society.
That's what I want.
That's a much healthier response, and it would actually solve the problem, too, because a very small percentage of the population is responsible for an overwhelming amount of violent crime.
But we rarely hear anyone talking about that anymore.
The people committing these crimes don't understand much, but they understand exactly what's happening right now in cities like Los Angeles.
And at the expense of innocent men like Johnny Wachter, they're taking full advantage of the opportunity.
Let's get to our five headlines.
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We'll start with this from Daily Wire.
Trans-identifying women, biological women who identify as men, are suffering menopausal symptoms after taking testosterone.
A new study shows symptoms like incontinence, sexual dysfunction, and even bedwetting were found among women in their 20s who tried to medically transition with cross-sex hormones, according to a study published last month.
In the International Urogynecology Journal, and led by researchers at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, the researchers looked at 68 transidentifying women who were taking testosterone.
The women were as young as 18 but had an average age of 28.
The study found that more than 94% of the transidentifying women experienced some type of pelvic floor dysfunction.
About 87% experienced urinary symptoms such as incontinence, frequent bathroom visits, including during the night, and bedwetting.
Women taking testosterone are about three times more likely to suffer from urinary incontinence or urine accidentally leaking than women not on the drug.
About 25% of trans-identifying women had this symptom compared to 8% of other women, the study found.
About 74% of the women had bowel issues such as constipation or being unable to hold in stool or flatulence.
Other symptoms included burning sensations and difficulty urinating and defecating.
Elaine Miller, a pelvic health physiotherapist who has worked with around 20 detransitioners, noted that bladder issues are embarrassing, a profound impact on the lives of these young people, of course.
She says, quote, it's really sad when we hear people say, nobody ever told me this, and they should have been informed of the risks in the gender clinics.
Okay, so yet another study showing the horrible effects of these drugs.
And I say effects and not side effects for a reason, because I actually disagree with
the last thing that I read there.
Miller says they should have been informed of the risks in gender clinics.
Now, it's a little bit of semantics here, I suppose, because the overall message is
correct, obviously.
I agree with her overall message, but it is worth noting that this stuff, it's not a risk,
It's not a side effect.
It's not what might happen if things go wrong when you start the transition process.
It is the point.
The point is to harm your body.
It's to cause dysfunction.
That is literally the point.
You are a female and your body is functioning as female bodies are meant to.
And the point of the drugs is to interfere with that, to stop it, to suppress it.
If you're going for gender transition, it's not because there's anything wrong with your body.
It's not because your body's doing things that it's not supposed to do.
That's what medicine is really meant for.
It's to heal or treat some sort of dysfunction with the body.
But there's no dysfunction.
So, in fact, you are causing it.
You're causing the dysfunction.
So, it's like if somebody said that a side effect of diving headfirst into an empty pool is that you might end up paralyzed.
They said, well, that's a side effect.
That's a risk.
Yeah, I mean, in a certain sense, it's a risk, but it's not how you phrase it.
It's not a side effect.
The paralysis, in that case, is a perfectly natural consequence of the thing that you are doing.
It is a direct, natural consequence of the thing, and the thing is diving headfirst into an empty pool.
It would actually be much more of a side effect or an unintended consequence if you dove headfirst and were not injured.
That would be the anomaly.
You know, that's like what should be in the fine print.
It's like, you dive headfirst into the pool, here's all the stuff that's almost certainly going to happen because it's an inherently dangerous act and an inherently self-destructive act to do that.
And then, like, in the fine print, it's like, oh yeah, I mean, I guess there's a chance that you'll be okay.
It's possible.
I mean, it's possible you could dive headfirst and not be injured.
It's possible you could dive headfirst into an empty pool and even somehow have a positive experience.
I'm certainly not encouraging it, but it's not logically impossible.
It is possible.
It's possible in the same way that pigs could actually fly.
It is possible, logically speaking.
And so it is possible to do something harmful and yet somehow not be harmed, but being harmed by the harmful thing That is what should be expected.
That's not any sort of anomalous, strange, unexpected result.
And it's the same thing...
With this, although I think I'm even kind of underselling it by comparing these gender transition drugs to diving headfirst into an empty pool.
Because like I said, if you dive headfirst into an empty pool, there is a possibility that you could actually walk away totally unscathed.
Not at all likely, but there's a possibility.
And when you start taking the drugs, it's actually basically impossible that you will walk away.
It is going to have an effect on your body, and that effect is going to be harmful.
No matter what, it's just how harmful is it going to be?
That's the only question.
It's a matter of degrees.
And for a lot of people, it's going to be deeply harmful.
And the only question, really, this is the only question.
The only question is, yes, you're going to be harmed by this, but
for how long will you be able to convince yourself that you like the way you've been harmed?
So, what story about that harm that you're doing to your body will you tell yourself?
And all of the people who go through this process and claim at the end of it That they feel good about it and it turned out great.
A lot of them are just straight up lying, directly, explicitly lying.
But all of them are lying, at least to themselves.
So if they're reporting positive outcomes, then it's only because they have told themselves a story.
They've come up with a story about what they've done to themselves.
And to some extent, they believe their own story.
But it's only a question of for how long will they believe it?
How long will they believe this story they're telling themselves?
And when they stop believing that story, they're going to look at themselves and their bodies and say, oh my God, what have I done?
And that will happen to almost all of them.
I just want to, we've mentioned this a few times, but I feel the need to mention it again because May 27th, well, here's the website Vancouver City News put out this article, and this was on May 27th, a couple of days ago.
May 27th marks a grim anniversary.
Three years ago, on Monday, hundreds of suspected unmarked graves were discovered at a residential school site in Kamloops.
The graves of 215 children, some as young as three years old, were found on the site of what was once Canada's largest Indigenous residential school.
And I don't even need to read the entire article.
The point is that this article exists, that it was published on May 27th of this year.
I'm not reading something from last year or two years ago.
I'm not going to go into great detail again about the fact that this is all completely false.
We've talked about that, including very recently, last week even.
But it is completely false.
It's all a lie.
The Masquerade story is a hoax.
It's not true.
And we know that now.
What's interesting to me here is the fact that even, like, a few days after another round of articles, Saying, again, that this is debunked, it's a hoax, it didn't happen, there's no evidence of it.
A few days later, you got a media outlet putting out another story, as if none of that happened.
Just pretend it doesn't exist.
They chug right along with the lie, as if it hasn't already been debunked ten times over, and this is what it means to live in a post-truth society.
Which, when I say a post-truth society, I'm not saying that we live in a society, we live in a period after truth, as if truth doesn't exist.
Truth still exists, but rather we live in a society where the dominant ideology believes that truth is whatever they say it is.
So this is the consequence of that.
This is the consequence of living in a, you know, all the my-truth stuff.
This is a consequence of that point of view.
So, really the only question is when you hear, when these media outlets continue, whether it's this false narrative or we talked last week about Michael Brown, I mean, George Floyd.
We've had, in fact, May, the end of May is quite a time for anniversaries of left-wing hoaxes, and we've had quite a few of them.
Recently, but when they continue to spread these these falsehoods the only interesting question It's not interesting to ask whether or not it's true.
We know that it's not true The only interesting question is the people that's spreading it to what extent do they believe what they're saying?
Are they are they just Fully consciously lying I Think certainly there's plenty of that going on as well But we also have to remember that when you hear stuff like, this is my truth, that isn't just some corny, cliche slogan that you hear online all the time.
We're dealing with a society where millions of people really believe that.
That's how they look at the world.
They really do think that the truth is just, that's what the truth is.
It's whatever you happen to want the truth to be, whatever you happen to feel, that is truth.
Because it's what you want.
And so the point is that I think there are actually a lot of people who truly struggle to see the distinction between what is true and what I want to be true.
To them, those two things are inextricable.
They're the same.
They struggled.
If you try to separate those two concepts, what you want to be true from what is true, their brain breaks.
They don't understand how those two things can be separate.
And it is, to say the least, a very troubling thing to live in a society where you've got plenty of adults, you have millions of adults really, who think this way.
But that's the situation we're in.
It's the kind of thinking that used to be relegated only to very young children.
Okay, like my four-year-old daughter is She's already at the age of four, at an age where she's well into the age where she can start to understand the distinction between those two things.
A two- or three-year-old can't.
Like, for a two- or three-year-old, they want something to be true, and so therefore it is, and they really don't... The idea that, well, okay, I can want this to be true, but it isn't, even though I really want it to be, They don't, two or three years old, they just don't, they can't grasp that.
They don't have that level of discernment.
They don't have that level, that very basic level of insight into just kind of like the nature of reality.
And that's fine at 2 or 3 years old.
Once you get to 4 years old, you're starting to understand that, okay, like, there can be things about the world that I wish weren't true but actually are, and that's really unfortunate.
And then you get to 5 and 6, and once a kid is 5, 6, 7 years old, they should fully grasp this.
They should be able to fully grasp it.
They might have trouble dealing with it emotionally.
That's why you might still get kids who have meltdowns and that sort of thing because they have trouble dealing with the frustration of living in a world where they don't get to determine what the truth is, but they should at least understand it intellectually.
The problem is that, I mean, at seven years old you should understand that, but we have 37-year-olds walking around.
We have 57-year-olds walking around who don't get it.
They don't understand this.
And that's one of the ways that these false narratives continues to spread.
All right, Chelsea Handler has some thoughts on the Harrison Butker situation.
We can always turn to her for speaking of insight, for a great insight and great discernment.
Let's listen to this.
As you may have heard, there's a man by the name of Harrison Butker who's talking more than I typically like for a male.
He's a kicker for the Kansas City Chiefs, and I learned that kickers rarely get tackled.
So based on his misogynistic rant during a recent commencement address, I'm guessing this Bible thumper thumped himself a little too hard with his Bible and gave himself CTE.
Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world, and embrace one of the most important titles of all, homemaker.
First of all, Harrison, you're a kicker, so you have one important part of your body and it's not your f***ing brain.
I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabel, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.
Isabel's dream of having a career might not have come true, but if you asked her today if she has any regrets on her decision, she would laugh out loud, without hesitation, and say, heck no.
Isabel, please blink twice if you need us to call for help.
But the real kicker is that Harrison Butker's mother is a renowned physicist who has a degree in chemistry and a master's in medical physics.
So, who paid for all those youth athletic team fees and uniform fees and equipment fees when Harrison was a kid so he could grow up to have a career making millions of dollars for kicking things?
My guess is a working woman.
Harrison, this is the first time I've heard about you and hopefully the last.
And after this, I'm gonna go ahead and do what your fellow teammate does and just pretend like you don't exist.
I don't talk to Harrison all year long, man.
I just let him do his thing.
We sit right beside each other in team meetings and I don't say one word to him.
Okay, so Harrison Butker's mom is a physicist.
Oh wow, well that completely debunks what Harrison said, apparently.
Doesn't it?
Yes, it refutes it in so many ways.
Ways like, well, oh, that's right.
Yeah, that's complete nonsense.
It doesn't refute it at all.
Because Harrison never said that women can't be physicists.
He never said that women shouldn't get jobs.
He only said that many women in that audience at that Catholic school are most excited to become wives and mothers.
He said that Homemaker is one of the most important titles.
All of that happens to be true.
And it doesn't present any kind of mutually exclusive choice.
A woman could go out and get a job while also being most excited about becoming a wife and a mother.
Both of those things can be true at once.
And you know, the funny thing about all this and what makes this never-ending controversy so especially absurd is that Harrison, while he gave a great speech, and it was a very good speech, he didn't go Nearly as far, or as trad, quote-unquote, as he could have.
That's maybe the saddest thing about this, is that, like, it was a pretty, you know, again, good speech, pretty safe, pretty kind of, you know, down, I'm not gonna say down the middle, but it was, it was conservative, but it's, you know, pretty mainstream, all things considered, especially on this particular topic.
And yet, even that can get this kind of reaction.
He's being accused of saying a lot of things that he could have said, and would have been justified in saying, but he didn't actually happen to say those things.
He could have said, for example, that society needs mothers much more than it needs female CEOs.
He could have said that, and it would have been true.
But he didn't say that.
He didn't say it.
He could have offered an explicit defense of gender roles.
Like, he could have got up there and said, gender roles are actually good.
And the more that we get away from those in society, the more that society breaks down.
There actually is no functional option outside of some notion of gender roles.
We've discovered that.
He could have said that, but he didn't.
He didn't, that's just not what he said.
He's being, he's being condemned as though he had said that, but he didn't say that.
He could have said that in fact, he could have said that all women, all women are called to a maternal role, just as all men are called to a paternal role.
And for most men and women, that will take a biological form.
In some cases, there are some women and some men who will fulfill that vocation of motherhood or fatherhood in a different way.
But any man or woman who just flat out rejects that vocation entirely, and instead pursues a life of self-service, That that person will have failed at life and also will be destined and doomed to be miserable.
He could have said that, but he didn't even say any of that.
And, you know, I'm not criticizing his speech, by the way.
I'm only pointing out that he really gave the most mainstream sort of moderate version of this message, and he tailored the message in such a way that it's Really impossible for any intelligent person to honestly disagree with, in particular, that part that Chelsea Handler played there.
And that was a smart strategy, by the way.
Given the occasion, given the audience, given who he is, he is an NFL player.
Like, given all of that, I think the way that he framed it and the way that he approached it was very smart.
It was a smart way to do it.
But people are still reacting to it as if he'd said, All the stuff that I would have said, for instance, which just goes to show that there's no way of approaching this message that will not end with you being condemned as an extremist by the left.
And this is a situation that they have created.
Where on the left, they're not willing to listen to any, like, you cannot venture outside of their framework even a single inch.
And if you do, it's not just that, like, if you go an inch outside of their framework, they'll be a little bit peeved.
It's that anything that's an inch outside of their framework is automatically the most extreme right-wing position in the world.
Everything is.
And so they've created a situation where there's really no incentive at all to try to compromise with them.
Not that I'm saying that Harrison was taking a compromise position, but my point is just more broadly now that It's like, well, why would I even try to appeal to you at all?
Why would I?
No matter what I say, unless I'm totally agreeing with you on everything, no matter what I say, I'm a right-wing extremist by your telling.
So, like, why would I?
Okay, I'll just be a right-wing extremist then.
Why not?
Like, I am no matter what, so I might as well take.
You've created no incentive.
To listen to anything that you say or to try to compromise or whatever.
Now, even if they created incentives to compromise, I would still be against compromising with them.
But my only point is that this is what they've, like everything, there's a wide array of views on all of these topics that have now all been put in the box of right-wing extremism.
To the extent that even if you simply say that most women at a Catholic school are most excited about getting married, that's all you said.
You didn't even say anything else outside of that.
Everything else is a conclusion people are drawing.
Even that is treated this way.
And as for Chelsea Handler, of course, she continues to be, I think, a cautionary tale for women everywhere.
That this is what bitterness turns you into.
She's just such a bitter, unappealing person.
In every way, that's what she is.
And the funny thing is that Harrison Butker in his speech gave a vision of what he considers rightly to be the good life.
And he says that most women become mothers and wives, and it's one of the most important roles that they'll fulfill, and you'll find purpose and meaning in family.
Same for men.
Men and women both.
Not that men will also become mothers and wives, but men also will find purpose and meaning in family life, playing their own role.
And that is one basic vision for the human person.
Chelsea Handler, Displays like the other vision really she's she's kind of this.
This is the diametric opposite This is the other path you could take And Who could look at that?
I mean who can look at Chelsea Handler and say oh, yeah, I want to be like that By the time I'm 50.
I want to be Chelsea Handler.
I want to have her life.
I Want to be the way that she is Who could say that nobody can say that?
And I think that's all, in a way, that's all that needs to be said, I suppose.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
(upbeat music)
I still vividly remember when I got my driver's license.
I jumped in the driver's seat of my parent's green Ford Escort, popped in a CD with a mix of songs I downloaded from Napster for this very occasion, sped off down the road feeling like the freest person on earth.
Of course, I didn't really have anywhere to go, so I ended up driving around aimlessly for a little while, and then I eventually stopped at CVS.
And bought some Red Bull and gum, and then headed back home.
So it wasn't much of an adventure, but I pulled back into my driveway feeling like I'd returned from some sort of expedition.
I'd only gone to the pharmacy and purchased $3.50 worth of items, but the important thing is that I went there.
I went there myself, alone, independently.
It was just me, the open road, and my illegally downloaded early 2000s alt-rock playlist.
Every adult my age or older has a similar experience and remembers it well.
It's one of the iconic moments of your teenage years.
Your first time driving on your own.
The first time being, or at least feeling, fully independent.
Of course, a lot of people also remember their high school proms and graduations and stuff like that.
I remember those only vaguely and as overall sort of lame and overrated experiences.
But this...
Driving.
This lived up to all the hype.
It is the real modern American rite of passage.
Or at least it was.
Because all of this seems to be changing, and like so many other changes these days, not for the better.
According to a new study, Gen Z seems to be the first generation of young people to have little to no interest in driving.
The New York Post reports, quote, Zoomers are seemingly rewriting the teenage rite of passage script, opting for tech over tires as they steer a cultural shift away from the traditional rush to the open road.
New research from MarketWatch Guides found that the youngest group of drivers, ages 19 and under, make up only 1 in 25, or approximately 3.6% of licensed drivers in the U.S.
Taking all drivers under age 25 into account brings the combined percentage to 11% of the driving force.
In the past, getting a license at 16 was an integral milestone in the journey toward adulthood, but 2021 data from the Federal Highway Administration indicated the percentage of 16-year-olds who had a license had dropped to 25% from 46% in the 80s.
Now, I fully understand that you as an adult, an adult driver on the road, might be thinking to yourself, okay, fewer dumb kids driving.
What's the problem?
And I certainly understand that attitude, but it is actually a problem, and I'll explain why.
But first, it's important to understand that this is a real observable trend, not just a matter of anecdotes.
In a report a few months ago, Newsweek also noted that Gen Z is choosing not to drive.
You don't have to go all the way back to the 1980s to see how stark this decline has been.
Reading from the article, quote, Gen Z, the generation born after 1997, appears to be less enamored by the prospect of driving than previous generations, according to consulting firm McKinsey, with potential implications for the future of the car industry.
This group of Americans is less likely to have a license than its older counterparts at the same age.
McKinsey points out that in 1997, 43% of 16-year-olds and 62% of 17-year-olds held a license.
But those numbers have dropped substantially, and by 2020, only 25% of 16-year-olds and 45% of 17-year-olds have a driver's license, consulting firms said, citing data from the U.S.
Federal Highway Administration.
And the question, of course, is why the Zoomers have given up on driving.
Some of the reporting on the trend seems to want to position this as a bold, revolutionary new approach to life, but there's nothing bold about it, and very much the opposite, in fact.
What's fueling this trend is the same thing fueling every other aspect of life for the younger generations.
They're lazy, they're scared, and they're addicted to their phones.
Gen Z isn't driving because it takes effort to learn, and they don't want to make the effort.
There's risk involved, and they don't want to take the risk.
And it's something that requires you to look up from your phone, and they certainly don't want to do that.
Back to the New York Post quote.
Social media access and texting have eliminated some of the need to meet up with friends to socialize as teens and young adults might have in the past.
Even the workforce has changed, with a larger percentage going hybrid or completely virtual since the COVID pandemic.
Mental health could also be to blame, with the anxious generation tag getting slapped onto Gen Z increasingly often.
On some level, fear of car accidents could also be the blame for the driver drop-off.
Quote, the reality is tens of thousands of people die every year in car accidents, David Straughan, a senior automotive journalist and researcher at MarketWatch Guides said.
That was much more an accepted risk, perhaps, for previous generations, and I think that it's very logical to be scared of driving a car.
The most dangerous thing most people do is driving to work in the morning and driving home in the evening.
Well, we all learned from that quote that David Straughan probably should not be on the roads either.
Because it is, in fact, not logical to be scared of driving.
It's rather the result of crippling and unreasonable anxiety.
Today's show recently interviewed a 23-year-old woman who is representative of this unreasonable driving fear and anxiety.
Watch.
Nationwide, driving schools report teens are foregoing licenses not just in cities where public transport's easier, but in less populated areas, too.
23-year-old Madison Morgan grew up in rural Washington state and still doesn't have a license.
Driving is honestly just very anxiety-inducing.
When I would practice with my parents, A lot of times it would end in tears.
Now working in Seattle, she takes the bus to work, but says her parents still beg her to learn how to drive so she can have more options career-wise.
They want me to get a license so that if I ever wanted to move, I wouldn't be as limited.
But why would I want to have my own car when I can just, like, go on a nap and someone else in their car can just drive me around?
Yes, why would you want to have any semblance of independence or self-sufficiency when you can just be entirely dependent on other people to do everything for you?
What exactly is the problem with young people not driving?
Well, there are a lot of problems, but let's focus on the two big ones first.
This is another basic life skill that a huge number of adults will now lack.
And this decline in life skills has been happening for decades now, of course, but it's now reached a troubling threshold.
Many adults in my generation, for example, Don't know how to change a tire.
A survey back in 2016 measured this and found that even eight years ago, 60% of drivers were not confident in their ability to change a tire.
And now we're entering a world where millions of adults don't know how to change a tire on the car and also don't know how to drive the car.
Now, it's not as much of a problem for people to lose the ability to operate a piece of technology if that technology itself Is antiquated.
Almost everybody in Gen Z would be clueless about how to make a phone call with a rotary phone, but they'll never have to deal with a rotary phone, so that's alright.
Who cares?
The problem is that Gen Z is just as dependent on cars as people have been for the past many decades.
It's just that they don't know how to operate the cars.
They need other people to do it for them.
Which means that people are increasingly becoming more dependent, more vulnerable, more helpless with each successive generation.
There really is no silver lining to a trend like that, at least not one that overrides the downside.
Second, older generations have always complained about the younger generation.
That's true.
This is a time-honored tradition going back to the time of Socrates and long before that, but the nature of the complaints has changed in a disturbing way.
You know, old fogies like myself used to complain that the young whippersnappers are too wild, too reckless, too sure of themselves, too prone to taking unreasonable risks, too rebellious, and so on.
Well, now that's been flipped entirely on its head.
The younger generations now are too scared, too anxious, too risk-averse, too shy, too complacent.
These are deeply troubling characteristics because they're so unnatural for young people.
For millennia, since the dawn of human civilization, to be young was to be adventurous to a fault, taking unnecessary risks, being a bit foolhardy and arrogant, trying to conquer the world and thinking it could be done all in a day.
Now that spirit of adventure has been almost completely extinguished.
And the good news, I guess, is that many young people aren't taking foolish risks anymore.
So, and that is good news.
Like, you don't want to take foolish risks.
But that's because they refuse to take any risks at all.
Rather than lacking fear, which has historically been the folly of youth, they have far too much fear.
About everything.
Driving is a microcosm of the larger problem.
When I was a teenager, Um, my parents got very upset with me because I drove too fast and too far and I stayed out too late with the car.
You know, I was, I was very much, too much enjoying the independence of having a car.
But now parents are upset for the opposite reason.
They're upset because their kids won't drive at all or go anywhere or do anything.
Now, yes, this means that they'll be physically safer in a certain sense for now, at least until obesity kills them down the line.
The downside of youthful risk-taking and adventurousness is that, yeah, injuries, accidents, even death can occur.
And all of that is very bad, obviously.
A youth culture dominated by laziness and complacency and anxiety and fear will help you avoid those tragic outcomes, but it will also keep you from living a real human life, developing basic and necessary skills, achieving anything great or anything period.
The energy of youth is supposed to be the thing that propels you into adulthood and sets you on a path to success.
What happens when the youth have no energy?
When they're content to just sit around and remain dependent and powerless and feeble forever?
Well, I guess we're going to find out the answer to that question, and my guess is that we won't like the answer very much.
And that is why the driving-averse Zoomers Are today canceled.
