Ep. 1390 - Major Polling Firm Changes Its Own Results After Left-Wing Activists Complain
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the term "Orwellian" is overused these days–but, no other word can describe what just happened with a Pew survey finding that a vast majority of black Americans believe in racial conspiracy theories. The findings were so upsetting to activists that Pew went back and changed the report. This is a crazy story that few are talking about. We'll discuss. Also, Donald Trump reportedly floated the idea of abolishing the income tax. That's a great idea that should garner a lot more enthusiasm than it does. And, a democratic congresswoman claims that she miraculously cured cancer. Where are the fact-checkers on this one?
Ep.1390
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, the term Orwellian is overused these days, but no other word can describe what just happened with a Pew survey finding that a vast majority of black Americans believe in racial conspiracy theories.
The findings were so upsetting to activists that Pew went back and changed the report.
It's a crazy story that few people are talking about.
We'll talk about it today, though.
Also, Donald Trump reportedly floated the idea of abolishing the income tax.
That's a great idea that should garner a lot more enthusiasm than it does.
And a Democratic congresswoman claims that she miraculously cured cancer.
Where are the fact-checkers on that one?
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh show.
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One of the criticisms you often hear about polls is that they're agenda-driven and therefore unreliable.
And very often that's true, but it's usually difficult to prove it.
Pollsters understand that if they want to have any credibility whatsoever, they need to project an image of neutrality.
They know that they can't buckle under political or social pressures and retract or modify their own findings, at least not in public.
If they did that, then they'd be exposed as activists instead of pollsters, and nobody would take them seriously ever again.
That's why it's very notable that the other day, the Pew Research Center heavily revised a report that it had released just last week.
Under pressure from left-wing activists, Pew completely changed major sections of their report, including the meaning of their polling results, in some cases.
Now in case you're not familiar with them, Pew is one of a handful of supposedly reputable, major polling organizations.
You've almost certainly seen their data being cited on cable news, social media, many times in the past.
They have a reputation for being a serious non-profit focused on communicating accurate information to the public.
But in this case, Pew caved.
And it's important to understand why they caved, because it shows how a lot of this country's most serious problems, the ones that You know, cost a lot of people their lives every year, are going entirely unaddressed because they're considered impolite to talk about.
So what I'm going to do is read you Pew's original report, and then I'm going to show you the revised report, which Pew issued after activists shouted them down on social media.
Pew's original unedited report found that, quote, most black Americans believe racial conspiracy theories about U.S.
institutions.
That was the headline, originally.
Here was the second paragraph of the original report, quote, Most black adults say that the prison 74%, political 67%, and economic 65% systems in the US, among others, are designed to hold black people back.
The report continues, Quote, about two-thirds, 67% of black Americans say racial conspiracy theories in business in the form of targeted marketing of luxury products to black people in order to bankrupt them are true and happening today.
82% of black adults say that they have heard the following racial conspiracy theory about the prison system.
Black people are more likely than white people to be incarcerated because prison wants to make money on the backs of black people.
Many black adults, 74%, say that this racial conspiracy theory is true and happening in the U.S.
today.
Additionally, the report found that, quote, 76% of black adults say the racial conspiracy theory that black public officials are singled out and discredited in a way that doesn't happen to white public officials is true and happening today.
The report adds that, quote, 55% of black adults say the racial conspiracy theories in the form of secret and non-consensual medical experiments, like the Tuskegee study, are true and happening to black people today.
Now the report goes on, but already these findings are extremely troubling.
If the data is even remotely accurate, it would mean that an overwhelming majority of black Americans are, frankly, paranoid to an almost comical degree.
I mean, the idea that businesses sell luxury products Two black people in order to bankrupt them, as opposed to, oh I don't know, in order to make money, is so incoherent and just insane that you would hope at most 1% of the population would believe something like that.
But Pew found that 67% of black Americans believe that.
These are staggering numbers.
Now sure, You might accurately say that businesses sell luxury products and don't care whether their customers are bankrupted by purchasing them.
That's true, that's business, but the idea that the point of selling the products is to bankrupt a certain relatively small percentage of the customer base is completely asinine.
Meanwhile, 8 in 10 black Americans apparently believe that the prison system is expressly designed for the purpose of incarcerating black people for profit.
The report also finds that 55% of black Americans think the government encourages single motherhood in order to make black men obsolete.
And that 75% of black Americans think that they need to work harder than other races to get a good job.
There's also the finding that a majority of black adults think the media is engaged in a racist plot to hold them back.
I can go on and on, but you get the point.
Every single finding from Pew suggests, if the findings are accurate, That millions of people in this community think that, essentially, they have very little agency or control over their own lives.
They believe that every institution in the country is deliberately designed to sabotage them.
Not even just that the institutions do end up sabotaging them, but that they were all explicitly designed for that purpose.
The implications of these findings are pretty clear.
All these years after the Civil Rights Movement, paranoia and self-pity have given rise to fantastically false theories about how society works.
Decades after the entire federal government and most of the private sector has deliberately restructured itself to hire and promote more black Americans, often by lowering standards, the result is that millions still think the entire system is stacked deliberately against them.
The people who gave these answers in the poll have fully internalized the left's narrative of racial grievance to a crippling degree.
I mean, you just cannot function, you cannot be a properly functioned person in society if you really walk around every day thinking that every single institution is engaged in a conspiracy against you and was designed for that purpose alone.
Now, if As a country wanting to improve living standards in black communities, we read this report and realize that what we're doing isn't working.
Telling black people that the police are deliberately murdering them, that America is systemically racist, and so on, has led to a feeling of mass helplessness so pronounced that it's turned into full-blown delusion.
This is the kind of thing that you would think so-called disinformation experts would be concerned about.
People who think they have no control over their own lives and that far more powerful forces are out to get them have no incentive to improve themselves or their communities, because, you know, part of that belief is that you can't anyway.
And so then you stagnate, and that's exactly what's happened to black communities all over the country since the Civil Rights era, from Baltimore to Detroit to Selma to Oakland.
And everywhere in between.
Of course, nobody in power actually wants to improve black communities.
Activists certainly don't care.
They thrive on victimhood.
So, predictably, Pew's report was met with outrage on social media.
Pew was called shockingly offensive by random social justice groups like Just Leadership USA.
It was one of the groups.
So within just a couple of days, Pew backed down.
They pulled down their original report entirely.
I was only able to access it using an internet archiving service.
And Pew replaced the report with a new version which, to their great shame, accepts as fact the very beliefs that they correctly described as false and conspiratorial just a few days ago.
So here's Pew's new revised headline and second paragraph.
See if you can spot the difference from what I just read a few minutes ago.
Quote, Most black Americans believe U.S.
institutions were designed to hold black people back.
A new analysis suggests that many black Americans believe the racial bias in U.S.
institutions is not merely a matter of passive negligence, it is the result of intentional design.
Okay, so what's happened here already is that Pew has gone from labeling these beliefs as conspiracies to full-on accepting them as fact.
Right?
That's the way it's phrased.
There is racial bias in U.S.
institutions, Pew declares.
They didn't in their original report, now they're declaring that.
And the only question is whether passive negligence or intentional design is the explanation.
In their revised report, Pew also introduces this brand new paragraph, quote, Black Americans' mistrust of U.S.
institutions is informed by history, from slavery to the implementation of Jim Crow laws in the South to the rise of mass incarceration and more.
So instead of labeling these insane views as conspiratorial and inaccurate, Pew now says they're informed by history.
And they don't stop there.
Remember that paragraph I quoted earlier about how an overwhelming number of black Americans think that luxury brands only sell them goods in order to bankrupt them?
Well, that paragraph changed too.
Here's the new version, quote, 67% of black Americans say businesses today target marketing of luxury products to black people in order to put them into debt.
Now, changes like this are especially striking because they alter the meaning of Pew's original results.
The original report said that black people feared that they were being bankrupted on purpose.
The new report says that they're being put into debt on purpose, which is it?
And that may seem like a small difference, but it really isn't.
It's two different things, and they are going based on the same results, but have changed their conclusion because people were upset about it.
Why should anyone take another word from Pew seriously if they're willing to slap haphazard edits like this together in response to political pressure from activists on social media?
If they do an analysis, if they do a study, a poll, and find certain results, and then some people in the public say, I don't like those results, they're upsetting, and then Pew will go back and change the results and say, oh, never mind, that's not what it said.
Well, once you do that one time, how can, again, how can anyone ever take you seriously ever again?
Ever.
And all of this is to disguise a real problem that Pew's original report had exposed.
I mean, there is indeed a massive problem with racial conspiracy theories in this country.
And I'm talking about actual conspiracy theories, in the sense of baseless claims about shadowy forces conspiring against certain groups.
So, let's go through some more of them.
It was just a few years ago that the vaunted author of the 1619 Project of the New York Times endorsed a claim that fireworks are a government plot to disrupt black communities.
This theory was first advanced by a different writer on social media who said that fireworks are, quote, part of a coordinated attack on black and brown communities by government forces, an attack meant to disorient and destabilize the Black Lives Matter movement through sleep deprivation and desensitization so that when they start using their real artillery on us, we won't know the difference.
After that thread was posted, Nicole Hannah-Jones, the 1619 Project writer, directed her followers to read it.
Now, again, this is a woman who invents history about racial grievances for the New York Times, telling her followers to learn about how fireworks are a secret anti-black conspiracy.
There was also this episode from just a few weeks ago when Tony Fauci was testifying at Congress.
Maryland Congressman Kweisi Fumey, I think that's how you pronounce it, spread this lie about the Tuskegee experiment.
Watch.
Now, let me just say a couple of things.
I sound a little outraged just because, you know, we sit here and we watch one conspiracy theory after another get debunked.
And if I might, on a point of personal privilege, to the gentlewoman from New York who wanted to argue that We should be worrying about testing of human medicines on animals.
If this committee really wants to do something, let's talk about the most infamous biomedical research study in the United States, the Tuskegee study, where 400 black men in this country were injected deliberately with syphilis and allowed to die slowly over a 40-year period without any attempt to help them at all.
It was condoned by the U.S.
Public Health Service.
And if we want to talk about testing, let's talk about that as well.
Now, other than Michael Schellenberger, I don't think anyone even bothered to correct this.
All of the fact-checkers went silent.
But the truth is that blacks were not deliberately injected with syphilis during the Tuskegee experiment.
Some black people did not receive the proper treatment, and that was horrific.
But the idea that the government injected people with syphilis on purpose has no factual basis whatsoever.
And yet a sitting U.S.
congressman has no problem making that claim out loud, and nobody will correct him on it.
Conspiracy theories like this are common.
These are not one-off instances.
And it's been like this for a long time.
In 2005, a telephone study of black Americans found that, quote, 53% agreed that there is a cure for AIDS, but it is being withheld from the poor.
And this is not some distant conspiracy theory.
A lot of people still believe it.
Just two years ago, the Washington Free Beacon found that U.S.
Congressman Tim Ryan, quote, made a promise to investigate whether the U.S.
government created the HIV-AIDS virus with the intention of murdering the nation's black population.
Now, that sounds a lot like The kind of insanity that Pew unearthed, but Pew had to muzzle itself, and in that respect, Pew isn't alone.
Many scientific journals have done the same.
Nobody ever talks about this, but just a couple of years ago, the journal Neurology, maybe the leading journal in neuroscience in the entire world, published a field report from a physician named William Campbell.
The report was called Lucky and the Root Doctor.
It was about Campbell's time serving mostly black patients in the Deep South who had immigrated here from West Africa.
And these patients, Campbell wrote, often brought superstitions to this country that made it difficult to treat them.
Campbell specifically described one patient, a 60-year-old black man named Reggie, who had a serious medical condition that required long-term care.
A gun that Reggie had been holding blew up in his face many years earlier, and now he had developed a neuromuscular disorder.
But Reggie ultimately refused treatment.
He said that he would instead go see a root doctor.
Here's how Reggie explained the concept.
Root doctors do spells, man.
They're not witches, but they're like witches.
If you get in for somebody and if you got the money, you can get roots put on them and bad things, real bad things, will start happening.
I knew a woman once.
She had roots put on her husband.
Next day, man, the next day he stepped out in front of a truck.
I saw a man one time vomit frogs from having roots put on him.
Hundreds and hundreds of tiny frogs.
He just kept on vomiting and kept on vomiting.
It was terrible.
I've been sick so long and you ain't been able to make me well, so I figure someone had put roots on me.
Only way I can get better is to get them roots off."
Campbell never saw Reggie again after that.
He documented this first-hand account in order to educate other physicians in the Deep South about challenges they might face when treating black patients, especially ones that had come from West Africa.
But it's relevant information, right?
It's like stuff you need to know if you're in the medical community.
But within days, Neurology pulled the article entirely.
You can't find it anywhere on the internet anymore.
It's gone.
Instead, you'll find this note from the Journal, quote, The Journal retracts the article, Lucky and the Root Doctor.
We sincerely apologize for our error.
This story, a recollection by a doctor of a former patient, contains racist characterizations.
This has prompted a re-evaluation of our peer review process for Humanities articles, and we are redoubling our efforts to make sure such material is never published again.
We deeply regret this error and offer our sincerest apologies to those who have been offended.
We promise to do better in the future.
In other words, you're not allowed to discuss conspiracies and superstitions in black communities for any reason.
You just can't talk about it.
Even in the context of a niche medical journal, which is read only by doctors and where the only purpose is saving lives, informing them about stuff they need to know, it's still not allowed.
And it's certainly not allowed in a polling outfit like Pew.
You're just not supposed to talk about the fact that a majority of black Americans, according to their own findings, think variations of the Tuskegee experiments are still happening today or that luxury businesses exist for the purpose of bankrupting them.
Meanwhile, black communities can continue to self-destruct in a bottomless pit of self-pity.
That's the idea.
It's what the left wants to happen.
It's why they conceal stuff like this.
Like, this is the actual conspiracy.
Well, another one, in fact.
Another conspiracy to cover up the fact of all the conspiracy theories.
But we shouldn't accept it.
These are not only conspiracy theories in the purest sense of the term, they're also the most pervasive, most damaging, and most absurdly false of all conspiracy theories.
Which means that for once, conspiracy theory is used in an accurate way, like the way that Pew used it.
The term conspiracy theory is used all the time in ways that are not true, like all kinds of things that are actually true are labeled conspiracy theories in a pejorative way in order to, you know, shame people for believing them or talking about them.
That happens all the time.
But in this case, things were correctly labeled a conspiracy theory, because that's what they are.
But in this case, immediately we see a correction and an apology for being honest and truthful.
So what just happened at Pew, even though nobody is talking about it, is one of the more Orwellian episodes we've seen in recent months.
But it's also just the latest in a long line of efforts to convince approved victim groups in this country that they have no agency whatsoever.
At the same time, you know that these efforts are fragile and tenuous precisely because you can't talk about them.
If we actually want black communities to move forward and take ownership of the problems they're facing and solve the problems, all of that needs to change.
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Now let's get to our five headlines.
Well, it's not important at all, but I mentioned it anyway.
I just want to acknowledge that I may have gone too far.
Maybe.
Maybe a tad too far, if you can believe it.
Like, a little bit.
A little bit too far with my anti-birthday stance.
I may have overdone it.
I didn't think I was overdoing it.
Maybe I did.
And I'm realizing that, I'm having this realization moment because yesterday was my birthday.
Just a normal work day for me.
No party or anything at work, no kind of like, and that's, which is good.
It's like, that's what I wanted and it was fine.
But then also, I was noticing throughout the day, like people seemed afraid to even wish me a happy birthday.
Like, multiple people throughout the day came by and, like, prefaced with an apology.
They'd say, sorry, I know I'm not supposed to say this, but happy birthday.
And this happened, like, multiple times.
So it seems that Which of course makes me come off like an insane person.
It makes me look totally insane that you feel like, if someone else witnessed that interaction and they didn't have any context, they would go, well, you're crazy that people feel like they have to apologize.
So it seems something was lost in translation.
All I said, all I, I just passed a long word that I don't need any kind of like cake or anything.
That's all, I'm low maintenance.
I'm a simple man.
I'm just a normal, you know, that's it.
I don't, you know, I don't need anything special.
That's it.
I don't need like a special thing.
But somehow this was translated as, Matt will be angry if you so much as mention that it's his birthday, which is not true.
I mean, Jeremy came by my office and said, I was told not to acknowledge your birthday, so this is me not acknowledging it, and then walked away.
Which I appreciated, but also, you can't acknowledge it.
And this is what I, it gets worse, because what I realized, much to my horror, is that people have interpreted my anti-birthday stance Which I've been very vocal about.
The way it's interpreted is that I must be embarrassed about my age or something.
Because I also had multiple people say to me, like, oh, I hate birthdays too.
I wish I could stay 25 forever, right?
No, that's not the point.
I'm not embarrassed about getting older.
I think it's embarrassing to be embarrassed about getting older.
That's crazy.
There's nothing embarrassing about the fact that I'm 38.
I turned 38.
I thought I was turning 39.
I checked with my wife.
She said, actually, I'm turning 38.
I have to check with her about how old I am.
I don't want to be 25.
25-year-olds are stupid.
Why would I want to be that?
I'm quite happy to not be 25.
It's just a very strange thing.
Am I a diva now because I'm not demanding a birthday celebration?
Now I feel, am I so low-maintenance that it's become high-maintenance?
Is that what's happened?
I don't know.
I didn't think it was that strange.
I'm an Irish Catholic man who comes from a long line of Irish Catholic men.
It's part of our culture, I think, that we don't want you to make a big deal out of us, ever.
Like, under any circumstance.
I could go and be the first person to land on Mars, and when I come home, I would not want any kind of welcome home reception, nothing.
You could say, oh, congrats, and that's it.
That's all I want.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm the weird one.
Maybe the problem is me.
No, that can't be it.
It's everyone else.
Anyway, so I've generally avoided talking about tax policy on the show, not because it's unimportant, but because it's nearly impossible to discuss the topic without boring 99.9% of the audience to death.
So hopefully we can do the impossible here, because Trump has floated two tax proposals over the past several days.
And one idea, in my opinion, is bad, and yet has gained lots of traction on the right.
And the other idea, in my opinion, is great, and yet has gained, from what I can tell, basically no traction at all.
So, and that's the way these things go, of course.
The bad idea is to get rid of federal taxes on tips.
The Daily Wire reports, quote, A pair of House Republicans introduced legislation on Tuesday that would slash federal taxes on tips after former President Donald Trump promoted the idea earlier this month.
The bill, spearheaded by Representatives Thomas, Massey, and Matt Gaetz, would amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide that tips shall not be subject to income or employment taxes.
It takes its inspiration and its name, the Tax-Free Tips Act, from a legislative push by Ron Paul, a former congressman candidate for president, to Nick's federal taxation on tips.
And Trump had said, I think it was at a campaign stop in Las Vegas recently, last few days, that he thinks that we should exempt tips from taxes.
I'm not naive, obviously I know why he's suggesting this a few months before an election.
But taken on the merits, the idea makes no sense to me.
If we have a federal income tax, and tips are income for people in service jobs, why should they be granted some kind of special exemption?
I know it's an unpopular view here, I get it, but if tips, and here's the thing, if tips are not income, Right, the argument for this is that, well, they're not really income.
Okay, but, well, then the whole logic for tipping goes out the window.
Because Americans have been guilted into tipping for decades on the basis that service workers rely on tips as their income.
Right, this is what we're always told.
Well, they're not even really paid, they hardly get any hourly wage at all, so this is their wage.
This is what we're told.
We're told it's our responsibility to pay these, no, apparently it's not the employer's responsibility to pay the workers, it's our responsibility to provide them with their paycheck, essentially.
And, okay, well, if that's the case, then, yeah, if there's an income tax, you should pay it.
Like, why, if it's their income, and we have an income tax, they should be taxed the same as anyone else.
If it's just kind of a bonus or a gift, right?
We call it a gratuity, and this is the argument I've heard.
Well, it's a gift.
That's what it is.
It's a gift.
You don't tax someone.
You get a gift.
If somebody walks up to you and, you know, if somebody hands you a birthday card with $10 inside of it, you shouldn't have to pay a tax on that.
Well, fine.
But again, if it's just a gift, then why are we pressured into tipping as, like, a matter of course?
What, so we have to give a gift?
That's what you're telling me?
Every time we go out to eat, we have to give a gift to the waiter?
Either way, it seems like we're setting up people in the service industry as special in a way that no one else is.
Like, do I have to give a gift to anybody else that I encounter?
I gotta give a gift to the person who's... So, is it a gift or is it just income?
It can't really be both.
And you see where we are.
But this is one of the worst things about the federal income tax.
That it gives the federal government an extraordinary power to arbitrarily select winners and losers.
That's part of the problem here.
That's what this plan would do.
And they already do this with the federal income tax.
There are lots of people who already don't pay any federal income tax at all.
There are other people who pay exorbitant amounts of taxes, crushing, crushing amounts.
There are people who I know quite well, in fact, the one who is in this room right now, who pay so much in taxes that it's a demoralizing amount.
It's almost like, what's the point of working if I have to give the government this much?
It's crazy.
So, already, that's already the way the system is set up, that they use the income tax to select winners and losers, and the government says, well, you guys are special, and so you don't have to contribute, but you guys do, and we don't have to morally justify that, it's just the way it's going to be.
That's why I much prefer Trump's other proposal.
Which is to abolish taxes on tips, along with taxes on all other forms of income.
That I can get on board with.
CNBC reports, quote, Donald Trump on Thursday brought up the idea of imposing an all-tariff policy that would ultimately enable the U.S.
to get rid of the income tax.
Sources in a private meeting with a Republican presidential candidate told CNBC.
Trump at the meeting with GOP lawmakers also talked about using tariffs to leverage negotiating power over bad actors.
And the idea is to replace the income tax with tariffs.
So, according to the report, Trump wants to eliminate the income tax and replace the income tax with tariffs.
Now, I say this is a good idea.
I guess I really mean that it's half of a good idea.
I love the first half, which is to abolish the income tax.
The second half, replace it with tariffs, is less exciting.
I mean, it's better than an income tax because any form of tax, pretty much, is better than an income tax.
But I do reject the idea that the income tax needs to be replaced with anything.
You know, there have been many schemes floated for replacing the income tax.
All of them would be better systems than what we currently have, but I'd really like to see the income tax eliminated and replaced with nothing.
Which doesn't mean that the government would not receive any tax revenue at all.
In fact, without the income tax, they'd still receive hundreds of billions every year through other forms of taxes.
But it would be a massive chunk they're not receiving anymore, which I think would be a good thing.
But whatever it takes to eliminate the income tax, we should do.
And probably like it's never really going to happen, right?
It's just it's too good of an idea.
It's too obviously good of an idea to really happen.
But if there was any chance of it happening, the only way it would happen is if you had some sort of plan for replacing that revenue with something else.
And so, you know, that's what I'm fine with working with that being the proposal.
Again, anything that gets rid of the income tax, because the income tax as a concept, It's an abomination before God.
I mean, it's evil.
There's just no question that we now live under a system of taxes far, far, far more tyrannical and onerous and overreaching than the one that our founding fathers fought a war to free themselves from.
That's just, there's no question about that.
The income tax and its enforcement mechanisms gives the federal government extreme, basically limitless power over our lives.
And the very idea that we owe the government a portion of our salaries, even before we spend it, Is indefensibly ridiculous.
We only accept it because it's been the system that's been in place since all of us were born.
And so we, it's just, it's been part of our reality for as long as any of us have been alive.
It's the Truman Show line.
People accept the reality of the world that's presented to them.
And this is the reality of the world that's been presented to us.
And so most people just kind of accept it.
I mean, nobody likes paying income tax, and everyone hates the IRS sort of in theory, but most people just accept it.
Which is why it somehow Getting rid of the income tax is not a major issue that voters care about, which is crazy to me.
I get why the government doesn't want to do it.
I get why the politicians don't want to do it.
Because again, it gives them extraordinary power over our lives.
Of course they don't want to relinquish that power.
The only way we could ever see this happen is if there was an overwhelming outcry from the public saying we've got to get rid of this income tax system.
And if that went on for long enough, maybe eventually there's a chance of it, but somehow it's not even, like, most people don't even act like they want that to happen, which is nuts.
I mean, it would improve all of our lives so much, and it would give us so much more freedom and agency over our lives if we got rid of this system.
I mean, we all live under this crushing, tyrannical system with an IRS that, again, has basically, I know the Constitution technically exists, but it essentially doesn't as far as the IRS is concerned.
They can essentially do whatever they want.
And we just accept it.
Thomas Jefferson would line us all up and bitch slap us one by one for putting up with a system this insanely unjust.
And we would deserve it.
We would all deserve it.
If we are not going to abolish the income tax for everyone, then we should abolish it for no one.
Either we all pay it, or no one does.
The latter system, no one pays it, is by far the best option.
That's what I would like to see.
The former is bad, where everybody pays it, but it's at least fairer and more sensible than randomly exempting certain groups, not to mention changing the percentage that you have to pay based on how much you earn.
Okay, now, You could say, well, earning more means that you should pay more.
I think most people would agree with that, if we have to have an income tax, that that's the way that it should go.
But pay a higher percentage of your overall income, based on how much, it doesn't, it really doesn't make any, it's obviously not fair, and it doesn't make any sense.
There's no reason why it should be that way, it just is.
So, the income tax system is bad and unfair, no matter how you set it up.
We've just happened to set it up in a way, like we've taken this really bad system and we have one of the worst possible versions of this terrible system.
And again, people just accept it.
Now one other note, lots of people have insisted to me that This proposed policy of exempting tips from income taxes is an incremental approach to abolishing the income tax.
This is incrementalism.
We exempt tips, and then next thing you know, we're exempting other things, and what do you know?
Look at that.
Presto change-o.
There's no income tax anymore.
And if that's what was happening, I'd be on board with it.
I am in favor of incrementalism.
It's really the only way, practically speaking, to actually get anything done.
So I don't take an all-or-nothing approach to most things.
Because it's better to get 5% of what you want than 0% of what you want, of course.
The problem is that I simply don't believe that this kind of proposal is an incremental step towards abolishing the income tax.
As I said, the federal government has been using the income tax to choose winners and losers ever since the system was first established.
That's part of the point of it.
It's part of why it exists, to give them that power.
So there is zero reason to believe that this is anything but more of the same.
All right, and it's not going to happen anyway, but still.
Here's something from the post-millennial This is an interesting report.
A new poll out from Rasmussen asks Americans what they really think of those who were bullied as kids now that they're all grown up.
The answer was surprising.
45% of Americans believing that once they became adults, those once-bullied children spend the rest of their lives trying to get revenge by bossing other people around.
College-educated adults are less likely to agree with that statement, Rasmussen reports.
They also said at 59% that getting bullied in school is a traumatic experience for children, compared to only 31% who think getting bullied in school is just a normal part of growing up.
10% of those surveyed are not sure.
Well, the answer here is that it's both.
Bullying is a normal part of growing up.
It's also, these days, a traumatic experience for kids.
And this is the problem with the way that we talk about bullying.
We're sort of talking past each other, like we do on so many other issues.
Because you've got one side saying that bullying is an epidemic, it's having a devastating effect on children, and the other side saying, no, bullying is a normal thing that kids have always dealt with, we went through it as kids, our parents went through it, our grandparents did, and so on.
But these are actually not mutually exclusive options.
These are not two opposing theories, right?
They can both be true, and they are.
So it's true that many kids these days become basically emotionally crippled by bullying.
It's overwhelming to many kids when they experience bullying in school.
Like, they can't deal with it.
It actually does traumatize them, and I do not use that term lightly, as you know.
But the fact that we have suicide, for example, among very young children is clearly evidence of that.
On the other hand, it's also true that kids have always been bullied, and kids have always bullied each other.
You could even make the argument that 50 years ago, the bullying that kids inflicted on each other was probably in many ways worse than it is now.
I mean, just ask your dad or your grandfather sometime about the ways that kids would torment each other back in the old days, and it becomes very clear, you know, that it was pretty rough back then.
At the very least, bullying is not a new problem.
So it's, you know, in substance, it's sort of the same as it's always been, but our kids are less capable of coping with it than they used to be, and that's the nuance here.
That's the issue.
That's the middle ground, I suppose.
Bullying is a normal part of growing up, and our kids are traumatized by it in ways that kids in the past never were, because kids are less able to deal with this normal part of growing up.
Why is that?
Well, we've talked about parts of the answer in the past.
You know, the big thing, the fundamental underlying thing is what we've discussed with the phenomenon of peer orientation.
Kids are more emotionally and psychologically dependent on their peers for affirmation and approval than they were in the past.
Which makes bullying far more devastating than it used to be.
Kids rely on each other entirely for approval.
They orient themselves to the world based on what their peers are doing.
And they do all this to an extreme degree.
The internet, social media, public school all combine to create this inescapable peer culture that breeds this kind of dependence.
And when the kids are dependent on, emotionally dependent on each other for, you know, to To have their very existence sort of affirmed all the time, and then when that affirmation is rescinded by the group, it becomes like it's the end of—they don't know what to do.
It's like their world has collapsed.
So that's a really big part of it.
It's not just that, because there's more going on.
Another big factor is that—and this is something I think is discussed even less—is that we don't have any concept anymore.
Of how to restore honor, okay?
And this probably applies more to boys than it does to girls, but at least I can speak to it, how it applies to boys more than I can to girls.
But in the past, it was always understood that if somebody humiliated you, if they treated you disrespectfully in public, if they, you know, mocked you, if they bullied you, right?
That your honor had been called into question.
And your sense of honor as a man, as a boy, if you're younger, has been called into question.
You had to restore it.
And in many cultures for many centuries, among adult men, they had some form of a duel for such situations.
That's what duels were about.
And it was about restoring your honors.
Your honor had been injured and you have to do something publicly.
There's a ritual, a public ritual in place for you to go and restore your sense of honor.
Even among kids in school, until the past few decades, they had their own version of a duel.
No guns involved, hopefully.
But it was, you know, meet me at the bus stop after school.
Meet me on the playground after school.
It was that kind of thing.
And that's kind of a cliche now, but back in the day, that's what kids did.
That was a real thing.
If you had a beef with someone, if you felt like they disrespected you, it was like, meet me here and we're going to fight.
And then you showed up and you fought.
Or one of you didn't show up.
In either case, as the aggrieved party, you had a chance to restore your honor.
You didn't need to dwell on it.
You didn't need to walk around feeling emasculated.
Here was your chance to even the score, to prove your toughness.
But these days, boys, and also grown men, when they have their honor injured, they don't understand what they're going through the same way.
Bullied kids had their honor attacked, their good name, their reputation attacked.
They don't understand it that way, or at all.
They don't really understand.
They feel injured in some way by their treatment, but they don't understand the injury or why they feel injured.
They don't know why they're feeling the way that they're feeling.
Because we don't have the cultural language anymore to help bullied kids, bullied people, understand why they feel so bad about it.
Instead, we sort of limply insist that words can't hurt you, right?
Sticks and stones and all that.
Like, this is what we've come up with.
We tell the kids when they're being mistreated, we tell them, oh, well, it doesn't matter what they say.
You don't have to be, you don't have to feel, they haven't really hurt you, right?
Because they haven't hurt you physically, and you could just say, no, it doesn't matter what they think.
And we say that to kids, but it's a lie.
It's this fiction that we've all decided that we're going to pretend that we live in and we're going to impose this fiction on kids.
Because we all know that it's not true.
When a kid is bullied and we say, it doesn't matter what they think, you shouldn't care what they think.
Well, of course you care what people think.
Everyone cares what people think.
And when you're at school and that's your whole social environment, Yeah, losing your reputation, having people not respect you, not like you, that's a big deal.
The same way it would be for any of us as adults to walk around in society feeling totally rejected and humiliated.
It's a major deal, and there's no point in telling someone, oh, don't, you shouldn't even worry about it, it doesn't hurt you.
It does actually hurt you, yes.
To be disrespected, humiliated, all of that, it hurts.
It does.
It's a real thing.
It's not imaginary.
There are other forms of being hurt by someone that go beyond the physical.
People have always understood this.
It's only recently that we decided to pretend otherwise.
And we know that we're pretending.
We know that we're lying.
The advice we give to kids about how to deal with bullies these days, we know it doesn't work because we were kids once, and we know it didn't work for us.
Oh, tell the teacher.
People say the dumbest things to kids.
Sometimes, you know, if they insult you, you can agree with them.
And that'll really, that'll disable them.
They won't know what to do.
I've actually heard that kind of advice.
Right?
Kill them with kindness.
Make a joke.
Most of the time, it doesn't actually work.
And it'll probably make it worse.
We all kind of know that.
We were kids once.
We know that from our own lives now.
Um, but we don't have any, the idea of like your honor, your reputation was injured, that we don't, we don't even talk about that.
We don't use those words anymore.
And so we have no way of even explaining to kids or to ourselves what's actually going on internally.
And even if we do understand it, there's no way for someone to restore their honor anymore.
We don't have that.
It doesn't exist.
It's not accepted.
You just can't do it.
As an adult in society, there's really no way to do it without going to prison.
You know, if you try to, you'll go to prison forever.
It didn't used to be that way in society, but now it is.
In schools, you can't.
Like, zero tolerance policy for fighting.
You'll get expelled.
Like, your life will be ruined.
And so we've taken away these methods for men and for boys to reclaim their manhood and feel good about themselves again, reclaim a sense of agency, a sense of control over their lives, prove their courage, prove their mettle, right?
All these things.
We've taken away those things.
We've taken those methods away.
We've taken those rituals away and replaced them with nothing.
And so now kids are just hopelessly sort of floundering and not understanding their feelings, not knowing what to do with them.
And that's the situation.
I wish that I could wrap this up with some suggestion of a solution.
But there really isn't one in the current climate.
The only solution is the one you've heard me say a million times, which is, and this is not a perfect solution, but the best single thing we can do about it is to just get your kids out of the public school system.
Because the honest-to-God truth is that if you send your kid to public school, And they're rejected by their peers for whatever reason, because kids can be vicious to each other, and they could just select someone and say, you're not part of the in-group.
And that label can stick.
And that really hurts a kid, badly, especially these days, but it always has.
And it's just too much, actually, to expect a kid to endure that for years on end.
You can't say to them, well, this is what your life's going to be for the next Yeah, 10 years, I mean, depending on how old he is.
And because you can't, you might like to say to him, hey, if somebody bullies you, find him on a playground, punch him in the nose.
That'll work.
And actually, it will work.
But many times, that will work to, again, restore your honor and get the bully to back down.
But if he does that, he might get expelled, like the schools have a zero tolerance policy for it.
And so what do you do?
You just have to get your kids out of these systems entirely.
These systems that are completely rigged against them every step of the way.
It's designed at every level to make things as hard as possible for them.
Next Thursday night is a pretty big deal, in case you hadn't noticed, on June 27th.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden will square off in the first presidential debate of 2024.
Part of the rules for the event is that these candidates will occasionally have their mics muted, but rest assured The Daily Wire will not be silenced.
We'll be bringing you exclusive, uncensored coverage And commentary during a special Daily Wire backstage.
Our nation is hurtling towards total disaster.
Inflation is through the roof.
The border is being overrun.
Our cities are rotting from within.
Violent crimes continue to spike.
That's why the Daily Wire is bringing you front row access to watch every single second of this presidential debate live on Daily Wire+.
I'll be joined by Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan and Jeremy Boring as we eviscerate all the nonsense and lies in real time.
You're going to get a clear window into what's actually unfolding on that stage and what it means for the future of the country.
So join for the live debate coverage that only The Daily Wire can provide next Thursday night starting at 8.30 Eastern on Daily Wire+.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
But we have something miraculous today for our daily cancellation.
The New York Post reports, far-left squad member Representative Cori Bush performed multiple miracles as a religious faith healer, according to her autobiography.
Quote, as I learned how to apply God's Word to my life in new ways, I better understood the power that was already residing in me.
Bush wrote of her abilities in The Forerunner, a story of pain and perseverance in America.
It was there, waiting for me to acknowledge it, to use it.
I had the confidence to heal others with God's power.
Now, Any savvy media consumer, who also happens to be Christian, may be expecting this story to go a certain direction from here.
We've seen this before.
The media reports that somebody claims to have miraculous supernatural abilities, but in reality, the person is simply a Christian who spoke about the power of prayer and faith and so on, and they are, you know, making a caricature of it in the way they're reporting it.
Is that what's going on here?
Did Cori Bush really claim to have miraculous powers?
Is that what she really said?
Well, yes, it is.
Reading on.
Bush relayed a story of a toddler she met during a prayer service in St.
Louis.
The child had a bleed in her brain shortly after she was born, and she couldn't walk.
She had never taken a step in her life, Bush recalled.
I carried the child from the prayer room in the back of the church out into the sanctuary.
Walk, I said gently to the three-year-old.
You will walk.
And this girl took her first step.
Then another, and another.
She walked.
Her grandmother walked in the sanctuary just in time to see the child take about two dozen steps.
She screamed.
Then she kept screaming.
Bush continued.
When she caught her breath, she looked at me in wonder and said, praise God.
She grabbed her granddaughter and walked with her out of the church.
There you go.
You thought that Cori Bush was just an uber-woke, far-left, useless politician who's wrong about everything all the time.
But no.
Well, yes, I mean, she is that.
But also, she has supernatural powers.
In an interview with PBS, Bush offered some more details about these mystical capabilities.
Listen.
You're a pastor.
Yes.
You write about healing through faith.
At one point, you came across a woman with, quote, several visible tumors on her torso.
Tell me what happened.
So, at that time, I, along with a group of friends, we would go out on the street.
And just meet with people and pray with people and offer them food.
And this lady came to us and she had these tumors.
I mean she wanted us to like feel them.
And I just remember I put my hand on her and my hand just began to move and the lumps that were there were no longer there and she was so happy and she I went on about her day, and I never saw her again.
So you think the tumors disappeared?
I do.
I do.
Now, look, I'm a Christian.
I believe that it is possible for diseases to be miraculously healed.
I believe that such things have happened many times, in fact.
But there are three big problems here.
First, Cori Bush, who calls herself an ordained pastor, and apparently in that capacity performed these miraculous healings.
Is a false teacher.
She's a wolf in sheep's clothing.
And I know that because she is a charlatan in general who pushes an evil agenda.
She supports and facilitates the murder and mutilation of children, for one thing.
Also, I know this because she's a woman.
And women cannot be pastors.
Any woman who claims to be a pastor is a false teacher.
This is very clear in scripture.
Jesus selected only men to be his apostles.
He could have selected women, but he didn't.
Don't like it?
Don't find it progressive enough?
You think Jesus should have done more to smash the patriarchy instead of explicitly upholding it at every turn?
Which is what he did?
Well, too bad.
Too bad.
So, you might think, you might wish that it had been set up so that women could be pastors.
It wasn't.
It just wasn't.
So, Cori Bush is a false teacher.
Every female pastor is a false teacher.
God does not give miraculous healing powers to evil charlatans.
Second, even among spiritual leaders who are not evil charlatans, this is not how miraculous healings work.
You pray to be healed.
You submit yourself, or the person who's sick, to the will of God.
You could certainly, obviously, pray for someone to be healed.
Any Christian has done that many times.
The healing is done by God, if it is done at all, and it may not be done.
But what you don't do, what you can't do, is command that a sickness leave a person's body, as if the authority rests with you.
Cori Bush claims that she said to the girl, walk, and she just did.
You will walk!
That's not how it works.
Okay?
It's how it worked for Jesus.
But she isn't Jesus.
She's about as far from Jesus as a person can be.
You don't put God on the spot and demand that he perform this supernatural act on your timing, right then and there.
God doesn't do magic tricks.
That's not how it works.
If it did work that way, like if Cori Bush could really just summon these powers to, for example, heal cancer on the spot, which is what she's claiming, If that's true, then she's even worse than I thought she was.
If she herself possesses the power to cure cancer with the touch of her hand, why isn't she touring the country and doing just that?
Why has she never visited a children's hospital and cured all the children?
The fact that she has this power but instead chooses to spend her time angling for the spotlight on Capitol Hill just means that she's a negligent narcissist.
Indeed, she's arguably criminally culpable for the death of every single person who perishes from cancer.
I mean, she could easily cure them all, and yet she chooses not to.
This woman's evil, which again raises the question of why God chose to give her this power, so it's a good thing that it's all nonsense.
He did not give her this power.
In fact, any human being walking the earth today who claims to have the power to heal people instantly with the touch of a hand is a wicked, evil scam artist in league with Satan.
Okay?
God does heal people.
Miraculous events do occur.
We can pray for them.
We should pray for them.
But that is not how it works.
Okay?
So that the... And she's far from the only person who's claimed to have this kind of power.
We know that.
But if you want to know, like, who's... which ones you can trust, which ones you can't, if somebody says, oh, you're suffering affliction, I will pray for you, that's someone you can trust.
That's someone who has your best intentions in mind.
If somebody says, come here, I'm going to put my hand on you and cure you on the spot, that is a charlatan.
That is a con artist.
That's a scam artist.
Every time.
Third, finally, even putting all this aside, we know for damn sure that these corporate media journalists don't believe in miraculous events, least of all faith healings, and yet here is this supposedly serious journalist asking a politician about her supernatural powers and expressing no skepticism.
Watch how she follows up.
Watch this.
What do you say to people who are likely to disbelieve that story?
You know, they're not the woman that had the tumors.
That was it.
That was the only follow-up.
And by the way, you're right, Corey, true enough.
I don't believe you, and I'm not the woman who had the tumors.
Speaking of which, say, since you bring it up, can we hear from the woman who had the tumors?
Like, somewhere walking the earth today is a woman who was supernaturally healed on the spot, By somebody who is now an elected official in Congress.
Why hasn't that woman come forward?
Why isn't she campaigning for you?
I mean, it's the least she could do.
You made her tumors disappear.
And she can't even show up to a campaign rally?
I mean, talk about ungrateful.
What an ungrateful brat this person is.
Unless the woman doesn't exist, which would be a valid excuse for not showing up.
Um, these are follow-ups that the journalist, Margaret Hoover, who's there in the interview, these are follow-ups that she could have used.
She could have asked these questions.
Any follow-up at all would have been nice.
Instead, we get the whole, uh, what do you say to the people who don't believe you thing.
And that's it.
Can you imagine, can you imagine if Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed to have faith-healing powers?
Okay, can you imagine if Marjorie Taylor Greene said that she cured cancer?
Can you imagine the response by the media?
The manic, hysterical screeching about misinformation?
The fact checks?
Snopes would have a field day.
It would be the greatest day for people working at Snopes.
It would be the greatest day of their lives.
This would be like Christmas and New Year's and all wrapped up into one times a hundred.
That they would get to debunk something like that coming from Marjorie Taylor Greene.
They would love it.
It would be the greatest thing that ever happened to them.
But what does Snopes have to say about a black Democrat woman who said that she discovered the cure for cancer but has only given it to one random woman?
Nothing at all.
They say nothing.
Not a thing.
Look, I don't blame Cori Bush for making up these stories.
She's a pathological liar.
Lying pathologically is what pathological liars do.
Besides, if you have no moral compass and you know that you can make up anything, you can get away with making up anything at all.
Why not claim that you can cure cancer?
I mean, you might as well have fun with your superhuman ability to lie without consequence.
Maybe next Cori Bush can tell us that she invented time travel.
Maybe she'll claim that she traveled to the center of the earth through a volcano and found a T-Rex, Santa Claus, and Elvis living down there.
Why not?
You have no integrity.
The media that's supposed to hold you accountable has no integrity, and they'll just amplify anything you say.
Might as well just go to town.
And that is why the people letting Cori Bush get away with telling whatever lies she feels like, along with Cori Bush herself, are all today cancelled.
It's not my birthday anymore.
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪ ♪ Happy birthday dear Matt ♪
