Ep. 1381 - Disney Churns Out Its 'Gayest' Star Wars Show Yet
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Disney has released its "gayest" Star Wars show yet. They have apparently learned nothing from their string of failures over the past several years. Also, a DEI trainer has declared that the American flag itself is a symbol of hate and extremism. And, a remote tribe in the Amazon finally gets an Internet connection. Now, the tribe is addicted to porn and social media. We'll talk about all of that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
Ep.1381
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Today on The Matt Wall Show, Disney has released its gayest Star Wars show yet.
That's a quote.
They have apparently learned nothing from their string of failures over the past several years.
Also, a DEI trainer has declared that the American flag itself is a symbol of hate and extremism.
And a remote tribe in the Amazon finally gets an internet connection.
Now the tribe is addicted to porn and social media.
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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It's no secret that Disney isn't doing well lately.
They just laid off nearly 15% of the workforce at Pixar, their movie studio that used to produce guaranteed hits.
But Pixar's recent films, Elemental and Lightyear, were bombs, and the division hasn't turned a profit in more than two years.
People just didn't go for the strained, interracial, immigrant metaphor in Elemental, or the same-sex kiss in Lightyear, or the kind of rehashed, stale vibe of both projects.
Additionally, Disney's much-touted, fully-immersive Star Wars hotel, called the Galactic Star Cruiser, shut down late last year after operating for less than two years.
Disney had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the project, apparently on the theory that people cared so much about the Star Wars brand that they'd be willing to spend thousands of dollars for the privilege of staying two nights in a windowless, concrete building posing as a spaceship.
That didn't pan out.
Apparently, people aren't excited to stay in a hotel where the experience is seemingly designed to be as aggressively unpleasant as possible.
That same quarter, Disney's streaming service, Disney+, reported a loss of more than a million subscribers.
That's not even getting into Disney's decision to get involved in Florida politics, on the side of activist teachers who want to talk to kindergartners about gender identity and sexual orientation.
Faced with this brand collapse, Disney had two options.
One option was to retool their content to focus on entertainment and family values instead of activism, which is what Disney used to do when it was a universally beloved and much more financially successful company.
They could get back to their roots, in other words.
And not in the sense of churning out more remakes, but in the sense of being a company that makes wholesome family films that capture a real sense of wonder and imagination.
But the other option was to keep doing exactly what they've been doing and continue to shove the same agenda, the equity, representation, LGBTQ approach that they've been pushing for years now.
Well, eight months ago, Disney CEO Bob Iger publicly pledged to pursue the first option.
He declared that Disney would refocus its efforts on entertainment, not political messaging.
That was the plan, or at least the plan that was shared with the public.
But that's not what has happened.
Disney, over the past eight months, has apparently decided to double down on agenda-driven content to the point that they're now openly attacking their own fans.
It's a remarkable turn of events, and it's one that's worth discussing because this development is not unique to Disney.
And it suggests that wokeness As we call it, may not be the best way to describe what we're seeing at Disney and other major corporations like it.
That's part of what we're seeing, but there's something else going on here as well.
It looks a lot like corporate mediocrity run amok, the private sector version of what we see across the public sector bureaucracy.
Unimpressive people with impressive sounding credentials who check the right demographic boxes are taking the helm of businesses and products that they don't understand.
They've insinuated themselves into these companies like a cancer that's evidently impossible to remove.
And even when the company CEO publicly tells them one thing, they're free to do another.
Now, to get a better idea of what I mean, take a look at this interview from the other day, featuring Leslie Hedlund, the creator of the new Disney Star Wars show, The Acolyte.
Now, I don't want to prejudice you in any way, so I'll just play the clip with no further introduction.
This is the showrunner talking about her new show.
Watch.
I want to ask you both because this is, I would say, arguably the gayest Star Wars I think by a considerable margin.
And are you excited about that?
Are you bracing yourself?
It's pretty gay, let's be honest.
Leslie, are you... how do you feel?
Am I gay?
Yes!
Well, no, I know you are gay, but I'm asking, are you excited about putting this... you know, this is gonna be a talking point.
Is it gonna be a talking point?
I'm sure some... Because nerds are gay.
Yeah!
Well, some nerds are very not gay and are very threatened by gay stuff.
Well, that's true, but in my world, nerds are gay.
Okay.
Was this the fun element of it?
No!
I don't think so, and yet people have told me that it's the gayest Star Wars and I frankly
You're offended?
Into it.
I think that Star Wars is so gay already.
Okay.
I mean, have you seen the fits?
We'd be like, look how gay this is, and then send each other a reference photo.
And are you telling me, with a straight face, that C-3PO is straight?
They're a couple.
That's what I think.
But, this is more outward.
I think it's canon that R2-D2 is a lesbian.
So don't worry about the story or the plot or the characters.
Who has time for that?
Instead, just listen to these two women call old Star Wars characters gay and then giggle like schoolgirls.
They're excited that this new Star Wars show will be the gayest Star Wars show yet, which is in every way the exact opposite of what the audience actually wants.
Nobody Has watched the recent Star Wars films and shows and said to themselves, you know, this would be better if only it was even gayer.
No one has thought that except for apparently the people behind this show.
Now, the only thing you learn from that interview is that Leslie Hedlund is gay and has no respect whatsoever for her audience or her own show.
This is how Disney is promoting the latest entry to franchise they spent $4 billion to buy a decade ago.
And that has a lot of fans wondering how exactly she was chosen for the role of showrunner.
If her role is to push some subversive woke ideology, she's not being very subversive about it.
She's just angering as many fans as she possibly can, and that's, you know, all this is.
And she's not the only CEO, the only one doing this.
The CEO of Lucasfilm, a woman named Kathleen Kennedy, just came out in defense of her showrunner.
Kennedy declared that if you're not a fan of how Leslie Headland is handling herself, then you probably hate women.
Quote, I think Leslie has struggled a little bit with it.
I think a lot of the women who step into Star Wars struggle with this a bit more.
Because of the fan base being so male-dominated, they sometimes get attacked in ways that can be quite personal.
My belief is that storytelling does need to be representative of all people.
That's an easy decision for me.
Yeah, she really said that.
Storytelling does need to be representative of all people, says the CEO of Lucasfilm as she mocks her own fanbase.
These people are so dumb, they don't even understand the words coming out of their own mouths.
Representative of all people?
Really?
Are they going to have 8 billion characters in this show?
One for each person on Earth?
How exactly does that work?
Is storytelling supposed to be representative of all people, whatever that means?
Or is it supposed to be representative of the creative, distinct creative vision of the storyteller?
I was going to show some more clips of these women, but it's honestly too painful to subject you to.
These are people who can't even communicate without descending into Valley Girl nonsense, and they're putting together shows that they expect millions of people to watch.
Kathleen Kennedy was lucky enough to work with Steven Spielberg, and Leslie Hedlund worked on rom-coms with titles like Sleeping with Other People.
So those are their credentials, and they're considered impressive in the industry, I guess.
So they get to continue butchering Star Wars.
By the way, the Acolyte was released this week.
I think it was released yesterday.
As has become a new tradition for Star Wars films and shows, it has a very high critic score at Rotten Tomatoes, like 88%,
but a failing grade of 45% from the audience.
That is the dynamic we always see now with these things.
Joel Berry, who apparently subjected himself to at least some of the show, offered this review, quote,
"The Acolyte is a queer Marxist vandalization of the myth of Star Wars.
In The Acolyte, the Force is a metaphor for cultural hegemonic power.
The Jedi are a metaphor for cisgender white oppressors who hoard the power for themselves.
Yes, it really is that obnoxious and stupid.
The account WallStreetSilver offered this viewer a warning.
Quote, So Disney has decided to right the ship by ramming it directly into another iceberg.
Number one, main character has two mothers.
Number two, main Jedi characters are all black and Asian, no white men.
And number three, only speaking role for white men in first episode is prisoners on a prison ship.
So Disney has decided to right the ship by ramming it directly into another iceberg.
That's not to pick on the acolyte too much, although it obviously deserves it.
Because of the fact that Disney is now pumping out Star Wars shows on an assembly line,
there's another one that I can mock as well.
It's called Tales of the Empire.
This one is apparently geared towards kids, and I guess it features a non-binary Jedi, based on how all the characters use they-them pronouns to refer to this corpse.
Watch this.
I think we've played this once before, but here it is again.
If you can get through it, here it is.
Watch.
They're still alive.
We need to get them to the ship.
We can save them.
Forget it.
Let them die.
It's not worth the trouble.
They were about to surrender.
Irrelevant.
The Jedi are a threat to be eradicated wherever they are found.
Oh yeah, we did play that before because I remember now.
That's the one where the bad guy, I guess it's the bad guy, kills someone But then still respects that person's pronouns after having murdered them.
So that's... that's nice at least.
This is the result of Disney's big plan to focus on entertainment and not messaging.
We have non-binary Jedis and girlbosses making sure we have the gayest Star Wars ever.
And that's not all.
As Bloomberg recently reported, Disney is now banking on the upcoming film Inside Out 2 as the, quote, key to restoring the magic.
They think that this film, a sequel to a movie from 2015, is going to be a smash hit to the point that they're going to give it a 100-day run in theaters.
As Bloomberg reports, "If families show up for Inside Out 2 and the kinds of numbers Pixar used to see,
it will reaffirm the studio's standing.
But if the movie fails, it will fuel concerns about the company's relevance."
And by the way, the whole article is kind of funny because it's all about how Disney,
they've come up with their brilliant strategy to get back on track,
and their brilliant strategy is to do more sequels and remakes.
That's the strategy.
And of course, anyone reads it and is like, isn't that what you've been doing the whole time?
Isn't that the only thing you've done for 20 years now?
Now what is Inside Out 2 going to be about?
It's hard to say because it's not out yet, but after some googling I came across this headline from an outlet called
pride.com And here's their assessment based on the trailer quote the
long-awaited sequel to Disney and Pixar's Inside Out isn't hitting theaters until the summer
But the official trailer dropped this week, and it's looking a little gay fans think Inside Out 2 is going to be
gay as F
Now how brave is that?
Are they also going to, I guess, gayify Inside Out?
Or maybe they will.
Which was kind of a middling Pixar entry in the first place.
Is that the direction they're going with it?
Who knows?
But based on the fact that they can't make anything that isn't gay anymore, we can assume that the answer to that question is probably yes.
And all of this is very woke.
That's true.
It's also incredibly lame and stale and unimaginative.
And that would also be an apt descriptor for what Disney is doing with its theme parks.
As the writer Peachy Keenan documented on Twitter yesterday, Disney is currently re-theming their famous Splash Mountain ride because the ride was racist.
For some reason.
And they're creating a politically correct version of the new ride, so they're doing this even with the rides now.
Kenan watched all the Disney's promotional materials and she put together a comparison of the old ride with the new one.
Basically, the new ride won't have Princess Tiana in a nice dress with a handsome prince or even a storyline of any kind, I guess because that's too, you know, archaic and patriarchal.
She wrote, quote, That's the direction they're going with their theme parks.
Sounds thrilling.
I was trying to figure out why all this is happening at Disney.
Why they're sabotaging their own brand, despite what the CEO said they do.
pants, no makeup, no nonsense hair, zero glamour, it's girl boss Tiana and she's
dressed like a jungle cruise. That's the direction they're going with their theme
parks. Sounds thrilling. I was trying to figure out why all this is happening at
Disney, why they're sabotaging their own brand despite what the CEO said they do
and it's clear that whatever's going on here it's not unique to Disney.
Consider what just happened at Cracker Barrel.
Their CEO is a woman named Julie Fels Massino.
She took the job last year.
Previously, she worked at Taco Bell, Mattel, Sprinkles Cupcakes, Starbucks, and Macy's.
Of course, the clientele of every single one of those companies is different from the typical Cracker Barrel clientele, which skews older.
But in general, Her old jobs were mostly in the food industry, just like the Acolyte showrunner's jobs were mostly in the entertainment industry.
And that's good enough, so Julie Messino got the job.
Unfortunately, it's not working out too well.
Messino just announced on a call with investors that the company is, quote, just not as relevant as we once were.
Because, you know, when you think of Cracker Barrel, you think of something that you want, you think of relevant.
That's why Cracker Barrel's customers go there, is because it's so relevant.
But now it's not as relevant, so they need to make it relevant
again, she said.
And to ignite growth, she said, it's necessary to revitalize
the brand.
She then outlined a bunch of generic initiatives like rewards
programs that every other restaurant offers.
And her announcement, because people know what that really
means, when you have one of these corporate, one of these mediocre
corporate people saying that we're going to revitalize the brand and
make it relevant again.
and make it relevant again.
Everyone knows what that means.
Everyone knows where that goes.
And because of that, The stock went down 11% immediately, putting it down nearly 50% in the past year.
And why wouldn't the stock drop?
The new CEO clearly views Cracker Barrel as completely indistinguishable from every other place that she's ever worked.
If anything, she probably hates the brand.
And we can assume she hates the brand's primarily blue-collar Christian clientele.
We saw something similar with that Bud Light Vice President, Alissa Heinerscheid, when she dismissed her own customers as fratty and said Bud Light needed to rebrand, and that's when they brought on Dylan Mulvaney, and we all know how that turned out.
So, Alyssa Heinerscheid, like Julie Messina, had great credentials.
She went to Harvard and Wharton, had worked at big companies like Wisterine and General Mills, but she didn't understand Bud Light or care about the customers.
In fact, she hated the customers and was very open about that, and so she destroyed the brand.
Now the same thing is probably unfolding at Cracker Barrel.
It's a very slow-motion, preventable collapse.
On social media, someone using the handle Pinebearen summed up the problem better than I've seen elsewhere.
Here's what he wrote, describing an alternative to Cracker Barrel's current CEO.
He said, quote, imagine a CEO who actually loved Midwestern and Southern culture.
What about pop-up concerts and endorsements by Zach Bryan and Morgan Wallen?
Why not lean into its heritage as an after-church spot and create programs for church groups, including discounts and shuttle bus services?
Grassroots evangelical support has made huge hits of movies like The Sound of Freedom and restaurant chains like Chick-fil-A.
Imagine a public company with a leadership that didn't hate the blue-collar evangelical population.
There are so many obvious partnership opportunities with brands like NASCAR or country music stars.
I don't think this is wokeness or girl bossery per se, but rather typical corporate mediocrity.
They hired a generic MBA type who built a career on the massive brand equity of Yum!
Brands and Starbucks.
Just a cog in the corporate machine.
I hope we'll see titans of industry again, but this is not how we'll get them.
That does a fairly good job of putting into perspective everything we've been seeing over the past few years at Disney, Bud Light, so many other major corporations.
And I think it's a more apt explanation than simply chalking all this decline up to wokeness.
This trend of hiring interchangeable CEOs with resumes and trendy demographics has been an unmitigated disaster because it overlooks What the leader of every company should have at a bare minimum, which is an understanding of their product and a genuine respect for their customers.
Without that, you get shows like The Acolyte.
You get Dylan Mulvaney and Angry Customers, and your stock collapses along with your brand.
All the combined efforts of feminism and diversity and equity and wokeness have brought us to this point.
All of those things together.
But it's bureaucracy and inertia that keeps it alive, long after everyone's tired of it.
And that inertia is the reason why, whether you're going to a restaurant or a movie theater, you're now guaranteed a product that's as mediocre as the people who created it.
Now, let's get to our five headlines.
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So the creepiest elected official in the country, Scott Wiener in California, had some thoughts to share at San Francisco's Pride kickoff event.
I don't even know why they have a Pride kickoff, like every day is Pride day.
Every month is Pride month in San Francisco, but they had some big event, Scott Wiener was there, and here's what he had to say, listen.
We are always there for these kids.
These are our kids and we need to make sure that we are lifting them up and giving them a path to success.
So we are working very hard to make that happen.
And we know that we have school boards in particular in some very conservative areas that are demonizing and attacking our LGBTQ youth in ways that are so, so dangerous.
And so about a week ago, our caucus, the 12 of us, we said, not on our watch and we introduced legislation to ban these
forced outing policies that some school boards are starting to adopt.
Because we know that for all of us, a lot of experience in this room in terms of coming
out, in terms of when, if, how someone comes out to their parents.
That is our decision and no one else's damn business.
And we're going to make that clear in the law of the state of California.
[applause]
But as we fight all the nasty people out there who are trying to harm us,
and we're going to beat them, and we're going to win, let's celebrate.
Let's have just a festive and uplifting month.
I am so excited about it.
Happy Pride, everyone.
Okay, so there's Wiener.
So many red flags in what he just said.
You know, the guy's a walking red flag, of course.
But to begin with, he says, these are our kids.
That's the way he looks at it.
Of course, they aren't.
You don't have any kids, Weiner.
These are not your kids.
These kids do not belong to you or the government.
And we see again here the basic question.
This is the thing that lies at the center of all these debates.
It's the fundamental question, which is, whose kids are they?
Who has primary authority over a child?
Who is primarily responsible?
Who's the first line of defense?
Who does the buck stop with?
And there are basically two possible answers.
Well, there are three possible answers.
There's the right answer.
You could say that the answer is God, and you'd be right about that.
So, you know, maybe we need to be more specific.
Who's the primary earthly authority over a child?
Who on earth is first and most responsible for a child?
And once we've narrowed it down that way, then we're left with only two possibilities, and it's either going to be the parent or the state.
And the Scott Wieners of the world say that it's the state.
And that explains why, later in the clip, he describes the forced outing of kids.
Well, what does that mean?
What do you mean by forced outing?
Because if you didn't know any better, and you heard something like that, you would think that, okay, well, kids who are supposedly gay or trans, allegedly, that these kids are being compelled by the state to declare themselves as such?
That's what forced outing sounds like.
Is there some kind of mind-reading technology being used to identify kids who have these kinds of feelings and self-perception, supposedly?
And then it's declared, like, is that what that means?
No, it doesn't mean any of that.
It simply means, what Scott Wiener refers to as forced outing, it simply means that kids Who have already declared themselves as supposedly LGBT in school, kids who have made this fact about themselves known to not only their peers, but also to teachers and school administrators, that in those cases, the parents should also know.
So it's not a question of quote-unquote outing.
It's a question of whether or not the school should actively keep secrets from the parents.
Should the parents be in the loop about their own kid or not?
That's the question.
Should the schools have knowledge about a child's mental state that they don't share with the parents?
Should the schools know more about a child than the parents do?
That's what we're talking about.
And any sane person will say no to that.
And you say no because that's a, again, a complete inversion of sort of the chain of custody of a child.
And the way that it's supposed to work is the parent is responsible for the child, entrusts a limited, supposed to be a limited amount of authority to the schools for a limited period of time while they're in school, but the parent is still the one who's responsible.
What they want to do is flip that on its head.
And anytime this comes up, I do, and I've made this point, I think in fact cannot make this point enough, that when it comes to this question specifically, Should the schools tell parents everything about a child?
And specifically, if the child is identifying, allegedly, as LGBT in some way, should the schools tell?
Well, always remember that the same people who answer no to that question, people who say, no, the schools shouldn't, because that's forced outing, and it's up to the kids to decide what they share with the parents.
Those people, Scott Weiner, They would be the first to tell us that LGBT kids are a high-risk group.
That they are a much higher risk for suicide and for suicide attempts.
They'll tell us that.
They will eagerly tell us that.
And that's true.
That is absolutely true.
We don't deny that.
So what they're saying is, if a school knows that a child is in a high-risk group for suicide, that the school should not share that information with the parents.
The school should actively conceal from the parents that their child is in a high-risk suicide group.
And if the schools do hide that information and then that child goes on to tragically take his own life?
Are the schools held responsible for that?
You knew this child was in a high-risk group, you didn't tell the parents?
And then one tragic day that the child is at home and does something drastic?
Whose fault is that?
Well, the schools carry a significant amount of the blame.
This is something that Rational people understand, but rational people, as Wiener says, are nasty.
Those are, he says at the end, those are the nasty people.
We're the nasty, you know, the nasty kinds of parents who dare to insist that we are the parents of our children and we want to know what's going on with them and if you have information about their mental state and about what they're going through, we need to know that because they're our kids and we care, we love them.
We love them, you don't.
You're the school, you're the state, Scott Wiener.
We care for our children, you don't.
Okay, I have to say, you know, I'm used to being proven right, but it doesn't usually happen this quickly.
So last week we talked about the left's decision to declare suddenly that the Appeal to Heaven flag, which has existed since the nation's founding, since before the nation's founding in fact, declared that it's controversial and
right wing after, and racist and everything, after Justice Alito flew
that flag outside of his vacation home.
And the reason why it's a controversial flag, they say now,
is because supposedly there were also some people on January 6th who
had that same flag.
And the San Francisco City Hall then even removed the flag from its
building where it had been flying for 50 years.
Because all of a sudden now, it's a problem.
It's a controversial flag.
Yet another patriotic American symbol is now verboten.
And I said last week that we are rapidly approaching the point where the American flag itself will be deemed Racist.
And I don't just mean like a few left-wing wackos saying that.
It'll be a mainstream thing.
Our institutions will push to change the American flag in order to rid it of its racist and controversial past.
That's going to happen.
Where the American flag will be deemed a hate symbol, basically.
Well, here's the Fox News headline dated June 4th.
Headline.
School district DEI trainer says American flag becoming hate symbol.
Employees resisting CRT should be fired.
Reading the article, a diversity, equity, and inclusion trainer spreading critical race theory in the public education system said that resistant employees who disagree with the concepts should be fired, according to her published work.
Epoch Education CEO Dr. Nancy Dohm called employees who don't accept notions included in CRT, such as the existence of white privilege, a poison to culture and climate, and criticized equality in favor of equity.
The DEI firm's YouTube videos, meanwhile, espouse CRT's tenets and indicate that colorblindness isn't sufficient.
Epoch calls itself a national leader in DEI and indicates that at least five public school districts, ranging from nearly 40,000 students to over 70,000 each, have hired the firm to bring in an equity agenda.
In a video posted on Epoch's Vimeo account, Dohm said that she believed the American flag was becoming a symbol of hate and extremism.
The video became publicly unavailable after Fox News sent a request for comment.
Okay, so they deleted the video after Fox asked about it.
Apparently, so I guess Fox, uh, Asked about this video before they didn't save it.
They did not save the video or pull it and save it before asking this organization about it.
So the organization didn't respond with any comment, but they just took the video down.
But we know the gist, which is that the American flag is a symbol of hate and extremism and racism, and it was inevitable that they would come to this conclusion.
And we know that this is what the left wants to do. They want to purge this country of its own history,
sever any tie that we have to our own past, to our history, to our tradition.
Now, why do they want to do that? Well, because history and tradition are,
you know, are anchor points. These are These are sources of identity.
These are lessons and guidance.
Our history, our tradition, it tells us who we are.
But the DEI, CRT, communist types like Dohm, they see all that as their own job.
Like, it's her job to tell us what our identity is and who we are, to anchor us, to guide us.
That's what she's supposed to do.
That's what DEI is supposed to do.
So we have to be emptied of any previous sense of identity that we had, removed from any sources of attachment, separated from any points of orientation, so that we can be remade and reoriented.
And this is how cults operate.
I know the term cult is thrown around a lot and probably overused quite a bit, so it's lost a lot of its meaning, a lot of its sting.
But in this case, DEI is a cult.
Leftism in general is a giant cult.
At least it operates like one.
At least it has borrowed many of the methods of cults.
And this is the first thing that the cult does.
It severs you from your family.
This is, you know, isolate, get rid of any attachment that you have and isolate you.
That's the first thing that's part of the cult brainwashing 101.
That is step one.
We just heard about that in the first headline.
But we don't want to out the kids.
What does that really mean?
We want to isolate them from their parents.
We know something about the child that the parent doesn't know.
And so that allows us to form an attachment to the child and isolate the child away from the parents.
Okay?
This is also grooming.
I mean, it's all the same.
It's all the same kind of process.
So they do that.
Strip you of your sense of identity.
Render you helpless, confused, bewildered, isolated, feeling vulnerable.
And then they come in and they say, well, come this way.
You're scared now.
I'll show you the way.
And there's always the underlying threat, too, of course, which is why we hear in this case that employees who resist the DEI indoctrination have to be fired.
But you should talk to them first.
You should be kind and generous and try to explain everything to them.
But if they resist, then, you know, just get rid of them.
That's the carrot and stick approach.
The cult says, well, you're part of the family.
We love you.
We're your real family now.
But then it's made clear that if you try to leave the family, if you don't get with the program, you'll be destroyed, which is how DEI works.
And it's easy to lose sight of just how bizarre all of this is.
And I don't just mean because DEI is crazy.
I don't just mean that the ideas that they're promoting are crazy, though they are of course.
I mean the idea that adopting a set of beliefs that have nothing to do with the work you're doing at a company or an organization should be a requirement for your continued employment at that company or with that organization.
Like, it was never like this before.
In the past, you were required to do your job and have a good attitude about your job and at least act as though you value the job and the company that you work for.
And now the whole idea with DEI is that you need to accept an entire belief system that, on top of being insane, also has nothing at all to do with the job you're getting paid to do.
But this is the other facet of how cults operate.
You know, in a cult, everything has to do with the cult.
There is nothing The idea that there could be anything in life that is not related is anathema.
That doesn't exist.
Everything is related to it.
And that's obviously how they see it here.
Wall Street Journal with a report here that's getting a lot of attention in political circles for some reason.
Here's the headline.
Behind closed doors, Biden shows signs of slipping.
Participants in meetings said the 81-year-old president performed poorly at times.
The White House said Biden is sharp and his critics are playing partisan politics.
There's a lengthy article all about how Joe Biden, I don't know if you heard this or not, I don't know if you noticed or not, but Joe Biden supposedly is, they're claiming that Joe Biden is losing a step or two.
That's what they're saying in the article.
Reading a couple of the examples, it begins, when President Biden met with congressional leaders in the West Wing in January to negotiate a Ukraine funding deal, he spoke so softly at times that some participants struggled to hear him, according to five people familiar with the meeting.
He read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods, and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out or really fallen asleep, is what it would have looked like.
In a February one-on-one chat in the Oval Office with House Speaker Mike Johnson, the president said a recent policy change by his administration that jeopardizes some big energy products was just a study, according to six people told at the time about what Johnson said had happened.
Johnson worried the president's memory had slipped about the details of his own policy.
Last year, when Biden was negotiating with House Republicans to lift the debt ceiling, his demeanor and command of the details seemed to shift from one day to the next, according to then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and two others familiar with the talks.
On some days he had loose and spontaneous exchanges with Republicans, and on others he mumbled and appeared to rely on notes.
McCarthy said in an interview, I used to meet with him when he was vice president.
I'd go to his house.
He's not the same person.
White House officials, though, dismissed many of the accounts from those who have met with the president or been briefed by those meetings as motivated by partisan politics.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said, "Congressional Republicans, foreign leaders,
and nonpartisan national security experts have made clear in their own words that President
Biden is a savvy and effective leader who has a deep record of legislative accomplishment.
Now, in 2024, House Republicans are making false claims as a political tactic that flatly
contradict previous statements made by themselves and their colleagues."
I mean, in fairness to the White House spokespeople, there is no credible denial you can issue here because we
can all see it, but that is the least credible denial that you could have
possibly come up with.
with.
What they're saying is that, well, a lot of these Republicans, they've said in the past that Joe Biden was sharp and really with it, and look at all of his accomplishments.
Well, yeah, they said that in the past.
That's the point.
They're not saying it now, because in the past, that might have been the case.
But now it's not anymore.
If someone is saying, oh, that guy is senile, it doesn't make any sense for you to object and say, oh yeah, well, 15 years ago you didn't say he was senile.
Yeah, that's how senility works.
When you're 81, you're senile.
When you were 65, you probably weren't.
So that is legitimately their excuse.
That you have no credibility if you called Joe Biden senile now, if two decades ago you were praising his mental acuity.
So this is the breaking news.
Joe Biden is old and senile.
Which of course we know.
This piece actually undersells it.
First of all, by claiming that Biden is only slipping behind closed doors.
No, it's happening very much in front of the doors.
I mean, he's literally slipping in front of all of us, and then slipping every other sense of the word, too, in front of everybody's eyes.
If he gets another term, he'll be a full-on vegetable, or dead by the end of it, and everybody knows that.
There's no question about it.
It's like 100% understood by everybody.
And of course it is.
He's 81 years old.
And he's a human being.
He is a mortal creature living on Earth.
So mortality is real.
It exists.
It's a reality we all must contend with.
And I've been saying this ever since Biden first ran for president.
And at the time, it may be easy to forget this now, but you go back like five years ago, And I was making the same point about this guy's just like, he's way too old.
On top of everything, there are many other reasons to not vote for him, obviously.
And if he was 60 years old and a young whippersnapper by comparison anyway, I still wouldn't vote for him, and I still wouldn't support him.
But you really don't even need to get to any of that other stuff, because he's senile.
So the rest of it even matters.
How is this not the most relevant fact about him?
And I can remember five years, even though now, like, everyone agrees on this point, five years ago that was not the case, and even many conservatives, I can remember having this argument with even some conservatives who were not going to vote for him, but said that, oh, I'm not going to vote for him, but age is not the reason.
Age isn't a factor.
Age is just a number.
Right?
Well, I have a grandmother who's 92 years old and she's still sharp as a tack.
Why are you being ageist?
I heard that a million times.
We all heard that, right?
But age is not just a number.
It is a real physical reality.
Everybody declines mentally and physically as they get older.
And once you hit 80, that decline speeds up exponentially for everyone.
I mean everyone.
Like everyone ever who's ever lived.
Even if you go on to live until you're 120.
The decline still, I mean, you're declining for decades even before that, physically certainly, but then once 80 is kind of a, that's when dementia rates skyrocket and your chance of dementia goes up by multiple percentage points every year once you hit 80 and every year after that.
Your chance of living to 90, first of all living to 90, but also living to 90 and still having use of your mind, It's very, very, very small.
Some people do it, very small.
And that's just, so of course.
That's one of the things that makes all this so frustrating is that it was always going to end this way.
And it might not even end.
This guy might get another term in office when he's 81 years old.
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Many decades ago, as the legend goes, a shaman in the remote 2000 member Maribou tribe in
the Amazon rainforest had a vision.
He foretold that someday there would be a mysterious device that people could hold in the palm of their hands and use to interact with the rest of the world in an instant.
And supposedly, according to the prophecy, this device would initially appear to be a net positive for society, but eventually it would lead to chaos and ultimately war.
Now, this dark prophecy was recounted this week in a lengthy article in the New York Times.
And even though it sounds a bit like the shaman just got high and described a Palm Pilot that he saw in a magazine somewhere, his warning has presented this story as a really haunting prediction.
And that's because last September, For the first time in their history, the Marobo people were finally connected to the internet.
And while there's no war yet, things are not going according to plan.
The process of getting this village online began two years ago when the government of Brazil approved the use of the Starlink service in the country.
Starlink is a subsidiary of Elon Musk's company SpaceX, and it provides broadband quality internet via satellite.
Shortly after the approval, one of the leaders of the Marabou tribe started soliciting donations to acquire Starlink equipment after the villagers had expressed interest.
And eventually, with the help of an American entrepreneur named Allison Renaud, the technology was installed.
Here's what that installation looked like.
Watch.
We have the pleasure of showing you this story full of challenges and hope.
We carried out the largest connectivity action in the Amazon in September 2023,
connecting 20 Marubu villages in one of the most remote areas in the Amazon.
And if you're listening to the audio podcast, I'm sure you can understand everything that was just said there.
As you can see, the Maribou people aren't anywhere near as primitive as some of the totally uncontacted tribes that still exist in South America.
They have clothes and tables and glasses and all that.
In fact, some of them already had phones, but still pretty primitive.
But until September, they haven't had access to the internet.
They didn't have the tiny glowing device to connect to a limitless supply of content, and now they do, for better or worse.
And mostly, as it turns out, worse.
There have been thousands of articles and academic papers written about the effects of the internet on people's brains and behaviors.
I've talked about some of the findings before.
For example, the fact that depression spiked as soon as a majority of kids in the country began owning smartphones all the way back in 2012.
But a lot of the analysis so far has relied on correlation.
People who support giving smartphones to children can always respond by pointing to a million other variables that might be affecting the mental state of children.
They can say, you know, the economy got worse, they can point to other cultural shifts, etc.
and so on.
But none of those alternative explanations apply to this remote Amazon village.
The arrival of Starlink and Marabou allows us to pinpoint precisely how a society might be affected by the Internet because, in this tribe, they're pretty much controlling for every other variable at the moment.
So, what changes can we observe?
It's a very interesting anthropological sort of study that can be done here.
Well, here's the New York Post headline to give you some idea.
Quote, Remote Amazon tribe finally connects to the internet, only to wind up hooked on porn and social media.
As one villager told the Times, quote, when it arrived, everybody was happy, but now things have gotten worse.
Young people have gotten lazy because of the internet.
They're learning the ways of the white people.
Then the villager added, with impeccable comedic timing by the way, but please don't take our internet away.
That's how you know they're fully bought in.
You know, it's how you know this tribe is now living in the internet age officially.
For one thing, there's the jab at white people, so they've already picked up on that.
But then also there's this attitude that the internet is terrible and it's destroying us and we hate it, but don't take it away, we need it.
The Times reports that in the village, common sites now include, quote, teenagers glued to phones, group chats full of gossip, addictive social networks, online strangers, violent video games, scams, misinformation, and minors watching pornography.
Here's what the Times reporter saw when he arrived.
I've been reporting on the arrival of high-speed Starlink internet in remote Indigenous villages in the Amazon rainforest.
Myself and our photographer Victor Moriyama, we ended up hiking in total about 50 miles in order to reach villages of the Marubo people, which are an Indigenous tribe that has lived for hundreds of years, if not longer, in one of the most isolated stretches of the Amazon rainforest.
One of the striking things for me was to see this contrast between this old traditional way of life that the Marugos have had for many, many, many years and this very new way of life that looks far more familiar to me, frankly.
And that meant, you know, seeing people hunched over on their phones, typing away, sending voice notes, watching, you know, video clips.
The internet was a huge hit and people were on it all the time.
So much that it became a problem for the hunting and the farming that are necessary for their way of life.
And so what the Marubo leaders did is nowadays, in almost all of the villages, the internet is only on for several hours in the morning and several hours in the evening and then all day Sunday.
So it's pretty striking imagery.
You have people in the middle of nowhere who have never had internet access before and in just a few months the village now looks like an airport terminal.
Everyone's just staring at a screen.
So they're desperately trying to limit the number of hours people can access this because it's getting to be a problem.
One village leader named Alfredo Marubo reported that quote, everyone is so connected that sometimes they don't even talk to their own family.
He added that young men are becoming more, quote, sexually aggressive, which is notable because the tribe's pre-internet culture was chaste and didn't permit kissing in public, which would be quite uncommon for these tribal cultures, by the way.
Many of them are not chaste at all, but apparently this one was.
That's all changed now.
They've had access to pornography for less than a year and already it's changing how boys and girls are interacting.
Alfredo says that kids are sharing pornography in group chats and that he's worried that they're going to start mimicking what they see online.
Meanwhile, another villager named Tamase Marubo, no relation to Alfredo, this village just hasn't invented last names yet, has complained that many young people now just want to spend the whole afternoon on their phones.
No, they're just like us.
On the more positive side of things, someone named Inoke Marubo reports that technology has already saved lives, particularly because it now is much easier for villagers to request medical attention when they get bitten by snakes and that sort of thing.
At the same time, Inuko pointed out that productivity in the village has plummeted, quote,
"It changed the routine so much that it was detrimental. In the village, if you don't hunt,
fish and plant, you don't eat." Now, maybe why some young people in the village now have ambitions
of leaving as quickly as they can.
For example, the Times states that one 15-year-old girl wants to travel the world and visit places she can see online.
Another teenager says that she wants to become a dentist now.
You can't blame them for wanting to leave the mud huts.
I certainly would if I was them.
But the internet has ushered in this sudden cataclysmic collapse of their culture and their way of life as the tribe becomes assimilated into the digital age.
Of course, the village elders don't approve of any of this because if enough young people leave, and if they're not hunting and doing the things they need to do, then the village will die out.
So there's a lot of tension right now in the village about Starlink and how it will be used going forward.
If nothing else, this is a real live experiment that proves a few things that I've been saying for a very long time, many people have been saying.
First of all, it's clear evidence as if we needed it.
That the internet does indeed drastically change human behavior, and it has a particularly significant effect on young people.
Second, the arrival of Starlink in this village proves that the change happens very quickly.
It doesn't take long for people to become dependent on the internet to the point of neglecting their responsibilities and relationships.
It just takes a few weeks.
In fact, you can observe this on a much smaller scale in your own families.
Many parents have observed it.
Like, when you finally decide to give the phone or whatever, the device, let your children have a device of that kind, whether it's an iPad or a phone, every parent has observed that within like 30 seconds the kids are addicted to it.
And immediately it changes their behavior and everything.
That's why I said earlier this year, as I said earlier this year, that the best way to prevent your child from being harmed by a smartphone is to keep smartphones away from them.
Because at the most fundamental level, this puts kind of the Catch-22 on display.
That the internet will connect you to the world, it'll open up opportunities, it'll give you a chance to see things you would never see otherwise.
But this does not come free.
And I'm not talking about the cost that you pay to your internet service provider or whatever.
The real cost is much deeper.
The internet will give you those things, which are good things, no doubt, but it demands something in return.
Namely, it demands the reordering and restructuring of your community and culture and your life.
There is no society that I'm aware of that has managed to simply have the Internet as a useful tool and communication device.
Every society with the Internet, which is almost all of them at this point, and will soon be literally all of them, every society with the Internet in that way has become a society centered around the Internet, changed by it, defined by it.
It becomes the focal point of life and the primary lens through which people encounter the world and each other.
Life with the Internet is life on the Internet.
There's no way to... There's no distinction.
And that ultimately is a diminished life.
It's a less authentic, less beautiful, less real, less vibrant life.
The Internet is a net negative for mankind.
I'm certainly convinced of that at this point.
And I understand the irony of me saying that on the internet as a guy who makes his living here.
I'm fully aware of the contradiction, but my own paradoxical situation aside, this new evidence from a remote tribe in the Amazon makes the profound and life-altering effects of the internet very clear.
That's why anyone who has doubted those effects is today cancelled.
