Ep. 1509 - Public Health ‘Experts’ Set The Stage For A New Prohibition
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, our hallowed “public health authorities” and the Biden Administration are setting the stage for Prohibition 2.0 with a push to put cancer warning labels on alcohol. They claim that alcohol in any amount causes cancer. But is that actually true? We’ll discuss. Also, Justin Trudeau steps down. Mark Zuckerberg claims that his platforms will once again embrace free speech and open expression—but should we trust him? And, a black NFL coach gets fired. Is it because he’s bad at his job, or is it racism? We’ll try to get to the bottom of that.
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Ep.1509
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, our hallowed public health authorities and the Biden administration are setting the stage for Prohibition 2.0 with a push to put cancer warning labels on alcohol.
They claim that alcohol in any amount causes cancer, but is that actually true?
We'll discuss also.
Justin Trudeau steps down.
Mark Zuckerberg claims that his platforms will once again embrace free speech and open expression.
But should we trust him?
And a black NFL coach gets fired.
Is it because he's bad at his job or is it racism?
We'll try to get to the bottom of that.
and much more today on The Matt Walsh Show.
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You may have noticed that there has been in recent months in the media and among our sainted public health experts, quote unquote, kind of a full court press against booze, God forbid.
We constantly hear now about how incredibly dangerous alcohol is in any amount.
Now, of course, we've always known that alcohol consumed immoderately, consumed in too great a volume or too quickly can be very dangerous.
That's not new.
But the idea that alcohol is significantly dangerous in any amount, no matter how much you drink or how you drink it, is rather new.
It's It's the latest narrative from our self-appointed public health authorities, and it's the opposite of the narrative that they were spreading up until like five seconds ago.
Now, I know that some people will say that it's not worth questioning this narrative.
After all, if fewer people end up drinking alcohol because of it, that's seemingly not a bad thing.
Maybe they're overstating the dangers or even lying about them, but it's for the greater good.
Let's just go with it, is the idea.
But I happen to think that it's always worth questioning the official narrative.
Also, I think that false narratives from health experts for the sake of the greater good always lead to bad things.
And I would like to think we all understand that by now.
So let's just take an honest look at this issue.
Just a few days ago, the Surgeon General issued an advisory that blames alcohol in all its forms for causing cancer.
Watch.
Here's another reason to try a dry January.
Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released a report claiming that alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States.
He says it's responsible for 100,000 cases of cancer and about 20,000 deaths every year.
Alcohol is really good at breaking down protein.
And our whole body's made out of protein.
And over time, it causes damage to cells, inflammation.
It really, not just cancer, it causes more than 200 different diseases in the body, directly or indirectly.
Whether you prefer beer, wine, or spirits, the report says the increased risk of cancer is the same.
Now, the upshot of this advisory is that the Surgeon General wants new prominent warning labels on alcohol products, just like we see on tobacco products.
So that's a significant, that would be a very significant move, and quite a severe one.
He also wants to, quote, incorporate proven alcohol reduction strategies into population-level cancer prevention initiatives and plans.
In other words, the Biden administration wants to set the stage for more regulations, bans, and maybe even prohibition.
At some point in the future.
As the Surgeon General puts it in his advisory, quote, Alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States after tobacco and obesity.
And he goes on to say that, quote, For certain cancers like breast, mouth, and throat cancers, evidence shows that this risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day.
Yes, drinking less than one alcoholic drink per day is now dangerous, apparently.
A sip of wine may be fatal, we're told.
Down the line, anyway.
If you're keeping track, this is the opposite of what we were told for decades.
Just a couple of years ago, as recently as a couple of years ago, for example, we were informed that drinking wine in moderation is actually a great way to live longer.
Watch.
Pop those corks because today is National Wine Day, and if you are a big fan of red wine, you are in luck.
It has some surprisingly good health benefits.
Take a look.
Here are five health benefits of drinking red wine.
One important note, excessive drinking will not give you these benefits and obviously isn't safe.
Doctors define moderate drinking as having a glass of wine a day.
Number one, it's good for your heart.
According to the Mayo Clinic, certain antioxidants in red wine can help protect the lining of blood vessels in your heart.
Number two...
It could help you live longer.
A study from the National Center for Biotechnology and Information has linked moderate wine drinking to a longer life.
So we went from pop those corks to wine is basically cyanide in record time.
So what exactly explains this sudden reversal in public health guidance?
From the Surgeon General's advisory, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of new data.
Pretty much every study he cites is from several years ago.
So I went looking at some other news reports, and as far as I can tell, there's maybe one local anchor who bothered to, you know, ask a question about this, and let's watch that.
Dr. Erica Schwartz standing by.
Doctor, how much of this is new information?
I don't think anybody thought alcohol was good for you.
So what's new about what we learned this week?
We learned that finally the...
Government is supposed to be getting involved now because the Surgeon General has now come up with the idea that we need a black box warning for alcohol.
We've known all along that alcohol is not good for you.
There have been a lot of studies, and then we've been kind of going back and forth about whether one drink is okay, two drinks are okay, there's good stuff like resveratrol in wine, and so we should...
Drink wine.
So we've been listening to a lot of stuff.
Then COVID came on.
And when COVID came on, people had nothing to do except for drinking.
And the more drinking they did, the more problems started coming up.
And then there's this moment in time when Dr. Murthy has said, it's time to put a black box warning.
She says, we've known all along that alcohol is not good for you.
We have?
Because, no, you guys were telling us for a long time that actually it is good for us in a certain quantity.
It's good for us.
So were you lying?
Were you just trying to get us all cancer that whole time?
Or is there, like, legitimate new information?
That's the question.
Well, apparently there isn't.
You know, apparently during the lockdowns, she tells us, people drank a lot and bad things happened to them.
And therefore, in just the span of a couple of years, we can apparently now conclude.
That drinking extremely small amounts of alcohol can increase your risk of throat cancer.
People drinking large amounts of alcohol while they were locked in their homes, alone and depressed, also tells us that it's bad to drink small amounts of alcohol socially.
That's the logic.
But the logic, of course, doesn't make any sense.
So I pulled up the studies from 2019 and earlier that the Surgeon General cites in his advisory.
And what I found is that the COVID lockdowns, of course, Have nothing to do with this because they happened a year after these studies were even conducted.
And when I read the fine print in these studies, I realized very quickly that they don't actually support what the Surgeon General is claiming.
Most of them are meta-studies that collect a bunch of other studies that supposedly link moderate alcohol consumption to cancer.
But when you pull up those studies, here's what you find.
There's one paper from 2018 entitled Colorectal Cancer and Alcohol Consumption.
It's from the peer-reviewed journal Cancers.
It doesn't say anything about less than one drink causing cancer or anything like that.
Instead, the researchers state that when it's broken down to the body, alcohol does release a substance that could potentially damage DNA. But then they include this very important disclaimer, quote, Alcoholics themselves are predisposed to a poor diet, low in folate and fiber, and circadian disruption, which could further augment alcohol-induced colon carcinogenesis.
In other words, it's difficult to isolate specific effects of alcohol and cancer development because people who drink a lot of alcohol tend to have many other health-related issues, and it's basically impossible to fully control for all of those variables.
Several other studies that have looked into the link between alcohol and cancer have said basically the same thing.
thing.
Here's another one from the peer-reviewed journal Alcohol Research and Health.
Quote, alcohol intake may appear to be positively associated with lung cancer, but the actual association may be confounded by cigarette smoking, which is related with both alcohol intake, because people who smoke also tend to drink, and the risk of lung cancer.
Again, they're admitting that there are confounding factors that they aren't able to fully control for.
Someone who drinks a lot is more likely to smoke a lot of cigarettes, so it's difficult to say that, you know, if they develop cancer, that the alcohol is responsible.
That's especially true since all this information is self-reported and people often aren't honest about how much they're drinking or smoking.
This is all a pretty big...
Problem for the Surgeon General's claim that drinking even small amounts of alcohol can cause cancer or that alcohol is directly causing tens of thousands of cancer deaths or that the situation is so bad we've got to slap these enormous warning labels on the bottles.
He simply doesn't have the evidence to support what he's saying.
Now, it's true that alcohol does release a substance that's been shown to damage DNA, but by itself...
That fact doesn't tell us much.
A lot of everyday substances can damage DNA. Sunlight, for example, damages DNA. Doesn't mean we should never go outside, obviously.
There was also a study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2013 that demonstrated that pretty much everything we eat can in some way increase our cancer risk.
Quoting from the study, we selected 50 common ingredients from random recipes in a cookbook.
40 ingredients, 80%, had articles reporting on their cancer risk.
72% concluded that the tested food was associated with an increased or decreased risk.
Associations with cancer risk or benefits have been claimed for most food ingredients.
So just to reiterate, nearly everything you eat supposedly impacts your cancer risk, and a lot of it supposedly makes your cancer risk higher.
Now, the Surgeon General knows all this, but he's decided to push a political agenda instead of actual science.
And it's not the first time he's done that.
There was a recent deep dive in the Wall Street Journal op-ed, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
And to the Surgeon General, whose name is Vivek Murthy, he's a pro-censorship activist who says that gun violence is a public health issue that needs to be regulated like a virus.
And his timing with this alcohol advisory couldn't be worse.
Just a few weeks ago, in December, this past December, there was a report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and it found that moderate drinkers actually have a lower risk of premature death from a number of ailments.
Then non-drinkers, which is, again, is in line with what they've been saying for years.
So this whole episode is yet more evidence that health and dietary guidelines from our trusted health authorities are constantly changing, backtracking.
They're constantly contradicting themselves.
Because the truth is that nobody has the elixir for immortality.
Okay?
Nobody knows or will ever know.
The precise recipe to avoid disease and live a long life.
There is no such recipe.
Everybody's going to die.
And almost everyone, if they live long enough, is going to get cancer.
Almost anything can therefore be linked to cancer.
Public health experts are able to use this kind of uncertainty and anxiety to herd the public in one direction and then in another, and then back in the other direction again, and then back again.
The other thing to keep in mind is the actual level of risk we're talking about here.
Public health experts have been able to manipulate mass amounts of people in all kinds of ways by exploiting the fact that most people don't understand or conceptualize relative risk.
So they just hear the word risk and they get scared.
They hear the term cancer risk and they think, well, that's something I need to avoid at all costs.
Not differentiating in their head between like a.01% risk and a 99% risk.
All that to say, even if moderate alcohol consumption does increase your cancer risk, and that's still a big if, the percentage increase is very likely to be very, very small.
A few years ago, a professor of pediatrics wrote an article for the New York Times reacting to an announcement from the American Society of Clinical Oncology claiming that moderate alcohol consumption increases your risk of cancer.
And so he was responding to that.
And he tried to put that increase into perspective.
Reading now, he says, quote, Let's stipulate that there may be a correlation between light or moderate drinking and some cancers.
We still don't know if that relationship is causal, but let's accept that there's at least an association.
For breast cancer, which is the cancer that seems to be garnering the most headlines, light drinking was associated with a relative risk of 1.04 in the announcement.
A 40-year-old woman has an absolute risk of 1.45% of developing breast cancer in the next 10 years.
This announcement would argue that if she's a light drinker, that risk would become 1.51%.
This is an absolute risk increase of 0.06%.
Using what's known as the number needed to harm, this could be interpreted such that if 1,667 40-year-old women became light drinkers, one additional person might develop breast cancer.
The other 1,666 would see no difference.
Now, you might say that 1 out of 1,666, or rather 667, is still a risk, and you might say it's not worth taking.
That's fine, it's your prerogative.
Although I will say, you have to be willing to take that level of risk in order to live a functional human existence, period.
I mean, you could cut out alcohol, you don't need that to be functional, obviously, but...
Nearly everything else you eat, drink, or do carries some kind of risk, and in many cases, the risk is greater than 1 out of 1,667.
But that's fine.
I'm not trying to convince anyone to drink alcohol or to continue drinking if they want to stop.
But I'm still sick of public health experts, so-called, getting everyone panicked on flimsy or fraudulent grounds.
We should always question when they do that, and we should always wonder about their real motivations.
Especially when their guidance constantly changes and contradicts.
And of course, they never show any humility about this.
They always have supreme confidence in the recommendations, no matter how often the recommendations turn out to be terrible.
No matter how often the recommendations directly refute the recommendations these same people were making 15 seconds earlier.
So what they should say about alcohol is something like this.
Booze definitely isn't good for you if you drink it immoderately.
But if you can control yourself, You're probably fine.
Then again, you might not be.
It might help you ward off heart disease, or if you're the rare unlucky person, it might be one factor among dozens that triggers some form of cancer.
We don't know exactly how it'll work out for you, and we never will.
Just make your choice and accept the consequences either way.
Nearly everyone currently living on Earth will be dead in the next six or seven decades anyway, no matter how much booze they drank or how many booster shots they got.
So just go ahead and print that warning label.
And put it on every food and beverage product on Earth and just be done with it.
But the larger issue here is our government's priorities.
They relentlessly demonize now alcohol, just like they have with tobacco for decades.
Tobacco was almost the sole focus of public health people for decades, was how terrible cigarettes and tobacco, it's the worst thing in the world.
Meanwhile...
Americans are getting hooked on marijuana in numbers never before seen on the planet.
I mean, a recent study showed that for the first time ever, daily use of marijuana has surpassed daily use of alcohol.
This is a major, major, major swing.
The kind of thing that you would think people like the Surgeon General would be focused on.
Like, why is this happening?
And is it good?
There are always trade-offs, and this is the trade-off with the reduction in alcohol consumption.
We often see these celebratory headlines about how younger Americans in particular are drinking far less booze, but the headlines are rarely interested in why that's happening and even less interested in the question of whether the trade-off is an improvement.
As it happens, young people are drinking less because they're getting stoned a whole lot more.
And guess what?
There are plenty of studies claiming a potential link between cancer and marijuana, too.
So why are we seeing this war against alcohol and not weed?
And at the same time, fentanyl and other lethal drugs pour across the border with little being done to stop it.
It would seem that the powers that be prefer to have us high and stoned.
That's also why the tax on cannabis in New York is many times lower than the tax on tobacco products.
That should really tell you something.
Now, I don't think any of this stuff is healthy, strictly speaking.
Booze and tobacco were heavily consumed by many of the most advanced and successful civilizations on Earth, including our own until recently.
That doesn't mean you need tobacco and booze for society to flourish, but history clearly shows that those two substances don't prevent society from flourishing.
On the other hand, I'm not aware of any society of stoners or hard drug addicts that built anything but mud huts and teepees.
So, if this advisory from Joe Biden's Surgeon General tells us anything.
It's that the field of public health hasn't changed at all since COVID. And that we can't trust.
That's the other thing.
Maybe it turns out that drinking a small amount of alcohol increases your cancer risk by 80%.
Well, guess what?
If that was the case and they told us that, we still wouldn't be able to trust them.
We can't trust anything these people say anymore.
Because we know they're still interested in weakening and ultimately remaking this country so that we're all subservient to their edicts.
They still believe that they can terrify Americans into just doing whatever they decide they want us to do or not doing whatever they've decided they don't want us to do.
And they can do that by raising the mere prospect of a risk of death, even though death is unavoidable for all of us.
What they don't seem to realize is that five years after COVID, some of us, anyway, just aren't listening to them anymore.
At all.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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Okay, the big news out of Canada.
I mentioned briefly yesterday, far-left Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, reading out from Daily Wire, announced on Monday that he will resign as leader of his party and as the country's prime minister immediately after the parties selects a successor.
Trudeau's decision comes as polls show him trailing far behind opposition Conservative Party in the upcoming election.
Trudeau gave a statement yesterday.
I think we have some of that statement of him announcing the decision.
Let's watch that.
Last night over dinner, I told my kids about the decision that I'm sharing with you today.
I intend to resign as party leader, as prime minister, after the party selects its next leader through a robust, nationwide, competitive process.
Last night, I asked the president of the Liberal Party to begin that process.
This country deserves a real choice in the next election, and it has become clear to me that if I'm having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election.
Now, I don't pretend to be an expert in Canadian politics.
My take on this is very simple.
Justin Trudeau is resigning because he's totally lost the trust and confidence of the Canadian people.
And he lost their trust and confidence because he's made their lives worse in every way, by every metric.
You know, he's a far-left radical, a true believer, I think, who imposed leftism on the citizenry in a very authoritarian way.
And that will always result in a steep decline in the quality of life.
It will always have a negative effect on the well-being of normal citizens.
It's always just a question of how long people will put up with it.
Are you going to prioritize the well-being of yourself and your family or not?
Any move towards the prioritization of the well-being of individuals and families is always, in effect, a move towards conservatism and a move away from leftism.
I mean, think about it.
Being tough on crime is coded as a right-wing viewpoint.
Now, protecting the border is right wing.
Preserving and protecting the family, right wing.
Cutting taxes and regulations, making sure that people can keep more of their own money, put more food on their table.
All of that considered right wing.
If you value marriage, if you want people to have kids, if you want your civilization to survive and thrive and prosper and grow, right wing, right wing, right wing.
All that's right-wing now, and that doesn't have to be.
I mean, these don't have to be political positions.
Most of them should just be innate.
Again, this is just about valuing the well-being of your family, which is something that should just come naturally to people.
You shouldn't need to read any conservative literature to arrive at that conclusion.
It's right-wing now in relation to the left-wing.
It's because leftism stands in direct opposition to all of that.
It stands in direct opposition to literally everything that makes your life better, makes life worth living, makes life more fulfilling and happier and more purposeful.
And that's what Justin Trudeau was running into.
And it's why he's getting run out of town.
Here's a really big story I want to move to.
The Guardian reports Meta.
We'll get rid of fact checkers, dramatically reduce the amount of censorship, and recommend more political content on its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg, who announced it just this morning.
In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritize free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and said that starting in the U.S., he would get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X. Zuckerberg said that...
Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created.
The tech firm's content moderation team will be moved from California to Texas.
And he also said that he's going to be working with the Trump administration on free speech issues and so on.
So the big headline here, or what most people apparently see as the big headline, is that Facebook is supposedly getting rid of its hyper-partisan, phony, fact-checking regime.
And replacing it with the kind of community note system that they have on X. And that is a big headline.
I don't have to tell you that fact-checking has been used for years as a tool to enforce ideological conformity.
The fact-checkers on Facebook and everywhere else were never worried about facts.
Actually, since they're all leftists, they don't even believe in facts.
I mean, philosophically, they just reject the idea of anything even being a fact.
They're relativists, and relativists can never really be fact-checkers.
They don't think that there is any objective truth that you can measure anything against.
So what they're worried about is a narrative.
They want the world to be presented and seen a certain way, and anything that gives a different view or approaches from a different angle is suppressed by the fact-checkers.
And this has been a system on Facebook for years.
Making it basically impossible to have any kind of open dialogue or honest conversation about anything on that platform.
And it wasn't always this way.
I mean, Facebook, I would not have a career probably without Facebook because I came up as an independent blogger in the first half of the 2010s.
And I didn't work for anyone.
I wasn't getting paid by anyone.
I needed some way to build.
And for years, Facebook was basically my only platform.
And you could do that because you could post anything.
You could say anything.
You could build an audience.
You could have access to that audience.
There were no fact checkers.
There wasn't any...
Whatever, Trust and Safety Council or whatever they call it now.
I don't remember at any point during that time, I was just saying whatever I wanted about any topic.
And there was never a strike.
I never got, you know, suppressed.
There was never anything.
They wouldn't try to shut you down for unapproved opinions.
That's how it used to be.
But in recent years, of course, everything changed and it became impossible.
As it is now, it's basically impossible for anyone to do what I did back in 2012 and 2013 and 2014. You can't show up as an independent, unknown, conservative voice and build an audience on a platform like Facebook now because you just get crushed.
They just crush you right away.
But now, supposedly, Facebook is maybe moving back towards what it was before.
Or at least that...
That seems to be the pledge that they're making.
And what it was before was essentially a free and open platform where you could express your views and connect with whatever audience of people you're able to build.
I think, though, the more significant part of Zuckerberg's announcement this morning, I mean, the stuff about the fact-checkers is pretty big, but I think this part jumped out to me even more.
Listen to this.
We're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.
What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far.
So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
The proof is in the pudding with this sort of thing.
Let's see Facebook actually put the community note system in place.
More importantly, let's see them actually allow the kind of free and open expression that you find on X, that you used to find on Facebook 10 years ago.
Let's see them really do it.
I certainly don't trust any big tech platform.
I need to see it for myself.
But even this statement alone and singling out gender and immigration as topics where people can have different points of view and should be left, that alone is still a pretty monumental sea change.
It's not enough.
We need to see it actually implemented.
But I do think we're seeing a real shift here.
Now, is it the result of some kind of conversion experience or change of heart on the part of Zuckerberg?
No.
I mean, he doesn't even claim that.
That's the thing.
If you listen to the whole statement, it's five minutes long.
He doesn't claim that he's changed his mind.
In fact, he pretends that he's always been a champion of free speech and that all the kind of suppression and censorship that's happened over the last five to eight years has essentially been an accident.
Systems into place because they're trying to root out bad stuff, and then all this other stuff got kind of caught in the net, and they didn't really mean it that way.
So he's not...
There's not a lot of accountability here.
I think this is clearly politics and marketing.
X with Elon Musk is growing.
It's getting all the press.
It's getting all the attention.
It's where everything seems to be happening.
It has all the influence.
Facebook, meanwhile, although it has 90 billion users or whatever, has become a sad husk and has been for a long time.
So I think that's more what has inspired this change, if it is a change, but all the same, it's good news and it's, I think, very significant.
Okay, we'll move to this.
Speaking of sea changes and potential sea changes and maybe some progress, you know, staying on that note, this is...
Report from the Daily Wire yesterday says, the vast majority of parents oppose schools teaching their children transgender ideology.
Polling conducted last month by Parents Defending Education shows the polling first shared with the Daily Wire shows that 75% of parents do not support teachers providing instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity to elementary school students.
Additionally, a large majority of parents indicated that they opposed teachers pushing transgender identity on kids behind their parents' backs, as has happened across the country.
The survey found that 80% of parents believed that schools should not help a child change their gender identity without parental notification, while 19% said they would be fine with teachers changing a student's pronouns or providing things like chest binders to girls without parental consent.
Three quarters of those surveyed said they supported legislation that would require school officials to inform parents if their child wanted to identify as a different gender at school.
Just over 60% of the parents said they disagreed with a Wisconsin school district policy that said parents do not have a right to know about their child's identity.
Now, I've always been a guy who maybe tends to focus more on the dark cloud within the silver lining.
So I have to say I'm still concerned by the 19% of parents who say that they would be.
Okay with a teacher changing their child's pronouns or giving her a chest binder without their consent.
That is a staggering amount of parents who evidently want the schools to undermine them and keep secrets from them and abuse their children.
So, you know, this is a bit like a headline that says a majority of parents are opposed to their children being drowned.
I mean, it's good that a majority are opposed to their children being drowned, but if that majority number is anything less than 100% exactly, we have serious problems.
And in this case, it's 80%.
Now, with all that said, I think this does, yet again, represent progress, which only shows you how bad things were just a few years ago.
It shows that the left is losing the argument.
Because it's the trends that are important.
And it's not the raw numbers, it's the trends.
If 75% of parents opposed gender ideology in the schools, but five years ago 85% opposed it, then these numbers would certainly in that case be nothing to celebrate.
They'd be a sign that we're losing.
But instead, the trend lines are going the other way.
The left is losing ground on this issue.
They're losing badly and quite rapidly.
And they're losing because, for one thing, as we've talked about many times, conservatives finally, I think, figured out how to effectively push back on a lot of this stuff.
But they're also losing because of tactical errors on their part.
They got impatient.
They tried to just go too far, too fast.
I mean, if you think about it, let's just take this one issue of sexual indoctrination of children in schools.
Well, they've been doing this in schools for decades.
They've been doing it successfully with very little pushback for decades.
So-called comprehensive sex education is how the left indoctrinates kids into this stuff.
The entire program of the concept of comprehensive sex education, which has been around since the 50s and 60s, but that very concept, that's why it exists, is to indoctrinate kids into left-wing sexual ideology.
So they've been doing it for a long time, decades and decades.
And gradually the programs got more perverse, became more extreme.
Turning the heat up, you know, boiling the frog more and more, but turning the knob relatively slowly.
And then over the last 10 years, they just threw caution to the wind and they got impatient.
And they, you know, started putting gay porn in the schools and they started giving out chest binders and changing kids' pronouns.
They kind of went for it all.
They were moving slowly but surely in that direction for decades and decades.
And then all at once they tried to kind of jump over the last few steps.
And they wanted comprehensive sex education to sort of reach its final form.
And they tried to force it.
The public wasn't ready.
The conditioning hadn't been completed.
And so there was a revolt.
Past many decades.
I think that's part of what's happening here.
And it is obviously a positive development, but there's still a long way to go.
All right, let's get to the comment section.
If you're a man, it's required that you grow a bit.
Hey, we're the sweet baby gang.
Okay, we're resurrecting the comment section from the great.
It's been a little while.
But, you know, mainly there are comments here about Sonic the Hedgehog that I felt like that's what inspired me to bring back this segment.
But we're going to stick with it, actually, this time.
Before we get to that, the first one says, I can totally picture Matt mercilessly destroying his kids in a board game and taking pride in it.
Now, I don't know if you meant that as a compliment, but I take it as one.
I don't know how that was intended, but yes, absolutely.
I never let my kids win in any game.
As I said, we played Monopoly two nights in a row over the break.
First night, there was tears.
Kids were distraught.
They landed on my Monopoly.
They were begging me to not make them pay.
I said, now you've got to pay up.
You're out of money.
Now you've got to start mortgaging your properties.
This is the way it goes, okay?
This is the game.
And you know what?
They wanted to play the next night, even after that experience.
And you know what else?
There were no tears the second night.
So they all lost still.
I still won.
There were no tears.
There was no begging.
So they learn.
And this is the value of playing games with your kids and also not letting them win.
The other great thing is that if you play games with your kids and you don't let them win, it becomes a point of pride for you when they actually beat you fair and square.
Like my son, a few weeks ago, beat me.
I played him.
We play horse all the time.
And he's never won.
And he finally beat me fair and square for the first time ever a few weeks ago.
I was super proud of him.
I was also mad at myself.
I asked for a rematch because I can't end on that note.
And I did win the second match.
But still, he earned it.
And I'm a big believer in that.
Play games with your kids.
Make them earn the victory.
And I think there's a lot of value to that.
I'm working on a project now from a loop to an airport entrance.
We have to include bike lanes.
Who rides their bikes to an airport to catch a flight?
Answer, no one.
But we have to spend money to do it in a woke city.
That's amazing.
Bike lanes to the airport.
I mean, that's how you know the bike lane thing is totally out of control.
Why not put one on the runway too while we're at it?
Let's put bike lanes on the runway.
You might think that runways and airports are just for airplanes, just like you might think that a road...
You know, in a city is just for cars.
But no, let's make runways accessible for cyclists, too.
I could actually get behind that.
I consider myself to be a very kind and charitable person, but I would never let a stranger into my house for any reason.
I understand his situation, but no way you're coming into my house.
Maybe he should have stopped at a gas station or grocery store on the way to the delivery, especially with kids in the house.
You absolutely did the smart thing.
Another comment disagrees says, Matt, him telling you that he had to go number two just adds to the urgency to the situation.
The lady not letting him in, I understand, but you not letting him in, I'm ashamed of you.
Imagine yourself in that situation.
Would you ask her at her door or would you just go on yourself?
Of course, they're talking about the video of the DoorDash delivery driver who was trying to use a stranger's bathroom and claiming he had to...
Being very explicit about what he had to do because he was having an emergency.
No, I would not ask a stranger to let me into their house to use their bathroom.
I would not do that.
I simply would not ever do that.
I especially wouldn't frantically scream that I have diarrhea like that DoorDash driver was.
There's never an excuse for that.
But no, I would never ask that.
You have to have some dignity in life.
What does that mean?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But whatever happens is going to happen.
Just make sure it happens far away from the site of civilized society.
Alright, here's some Sonic comments.
There are quite a lot.
Sonic is for adults, but specifically for adults susceptible to nostalgia.
The plot you described is pretty much just the game Sonic Adventure 2, which came out in 2001. Simply put, a five-year-old who played that game is 29 now, so the movie isn't for kids.
It's for people who grew up with Sonic and want to relive that nostalgia.
And hey, it's a free market.
If people want to see that game's plot made into a movie and they're willing to pay for it, I say be my guest.
Another comment says, Sonic 3 is amazing.
He doesn't understand the source material.
The story is a retelling of Sonic Adventure 2. The creators have the most respect for their audience.
There's so much fan service.
Keanu killed it as Shadow.
I have no idea what he's talking about.
Another one, the whole Sonic argument is disgusting to listen to.
But the point of it being corporate slop with no creativity in particular couldn't be more incorrect.
Sonic 3 exists solely because the creatives behind it care about the fans.
If they didn't care about the fans, there would have been one movie and it would have been forgotten.
Yes, these movie studios that cash in on IP, they're doing it because they care about the fans so much.
I mean, my God.
I almost don't...
If you're that naive, if you live...
If that's the world you live in, I almost don't...
It seems cruel of me to ruin that for you.
I mean, you live in a world of rainbows and sunshine and puppy dogs.
But look, that's not the world.
That's not the world you live in.
So I can tell you right now, the movie studio behind the Sonic trilogy...
The reason they're making it, it's not solely for, it is solely to cash in on an IP. And mainly they do that, by the way, not from the movie, but by selling the merchandise associated with the movie.
And so the movie is actually mainly just a commercial for all the merchandise.
That's why it exists.
I don't mean to, I'm sorry to break it to you.
I mean, these are grown adults.
Again, you know, I don't think these are kids leaving these guys.
These are grown adults claiming that Sonic films are for adults, that they're amazing.
And my favorite of all, that in order to appreciate them, you have to understand the source material.
And the source material are Sonic video games.
Understand the source material?
That's the kind of thing you might say about a film that's based on, like, The Old Testament?
Or Shakespeare?
You know?
It's what you might say about a film adaptation of a Tolstoy novel.
Okay?
Understand the source material.
But you're saying it about Sonic the Hedgehog.
My God.
And on top of that, I'm being told that the Sonic film, it's creative.
It's really great.
But then also, it's just a shot-for-shot Remake of a video game from 25 years ago.
Which is it?
Is it a creative masterpiece or a shot-for-shot remake of something that already exists in 25?
I don't know.
It can't really be both, can it?
Look, this is the last thing I'll say about this.
Look, there are a lot of adults in this country who are just clinging onto their childhood interests and refuse to allow their interests and tastes to mature and develop at all.
And for those adults, they're not open to hearing any opposing viewpoint from someone like myself.
They get very, very upset about it.
And I get that.
But, look, the way this, if you grew up as a kid and you liked the Sonic video games, that's fine.
I like Sonic, I got news for you.
I liked Sonic, the Sonic video games when I was a kid.
I didn't play them a lot, but, you know, I enjoyed them.
What kid wouldn't?
And so if you liked them as a kid, and then there's some new Sonic product coming out 30 years later, to say that, well, no, it's not for kids, it's for me, because I liked it when I was a kid.
Do you see how backwards that is?
That's not how it's supposed to work.
It's supposed to be that you pass on, maybe, the things that you loved as a child, that you can pass them on to your own kids.
But those things are now, they're not for you.
They're for your kids.
They're for this new generation of kids.
If they're for anyone.
Now, I think that these soulless corporate algorithmic remakes and stuff are not really for anyone.
They're really just about making money.
But if they're for anyone, if they are for anyone, they are or should be for this generation of kids.
And the problem is that you have adults in my generation who enjoyed things as kids and are clinging on to them and won't let go of them.
And claim ownership of them even now.
So that the new Sonic film has to service them.
It has to serve what they want.
You know, it should be about entertaining them and not about kids.
And it's just not...
I mean, would you go to Chuck E. Cheese and like...
With a bunch of adults and jump in the ball pit and say, this is for me.
I loved this when I was a kid.
Or do you realize that, no, yeah, it was for you when you were a kid, and now it's for the kids who are kids now.
And I realize I say that, and there are probably plenty of adults who will tell me, oh, I go to Chuck E. Cheese all the time, just myself.
It's not weird.
It is weird.
It is a little weird.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Now I know that this fact is of no interest to many of you, but the NFL playoffs start My Baltimore Ravens will play the Pittsburgh Steelers in Baltimore on Saturday night.
I'll be watching the game with my whole family, as I have over the course of many years.
I have successfully indoctrinated my kids into Raven fandom.
I have to say, you know, it's actually kind of difficult to brainwash your kids into caring about your favorite football team.
At least I found that it is.
This is a challenge that nobody tells you about.
There are no parenting books about it.
Slowly but surely, though, my kids have come into the fold.
Though they still have a long way to go before they know what it's like to have their day actually ruined because the guys in a certain color jersey scored fewer points than the guys in the other color jersey.
Maybe they'll get there this year.
Maybe we can all experience the crushing heartbreak together when the Ravens inevitably lose by three points in the second round of the playoffs.
It'll be a family bonding experience.
This is what being a sports fan is all about.
But there was another source of excitement in the NFL world this week.
Monday was the day when the teams that didn't make the playoffs started.
Firing their coaches, a day that over the years has been dubbed Black Monday.
The New England Patriots certainly qualify as a bad team after winning only four games this season, so they fired their coach, a guy named Gerard Mayo, after one year coaching the team.
Now, we talked about Gerard Mayo on this show actually almost exactly a year ago when he was originally hired, and he used his introductory press conference as an opportunity to deliver a...
Rather incoherent speech about race.
Let's watch that again.
I do see color, because I believe if you don't see color, you can't see racism.
And whatever happens, black, white, disabled person, even someone with disabilities, I always, for the most part, people are like, when they're young, they kind of make the spot hot.
Younger people know what that means.
But what I would say is...
Like, no, I want you to be able to go up to those people and really understand those people.
So it goes back to whatever it is, black, white, yellow, it really doesn't matter, but it does matter so we can try to fix a problem that we all know we have.
Whatever happens, black, white, disabled person, even someone with disabilities, I've always, for the most part, people are like, you know when you're young, you kind of make the spot hot.
Younger people know what that means.
I'm just quoting him verbatim.
Well, then maybe a younger person can translate that because a year later, I still have no idea what he was trying to say.
I really don't.
All I know is that he decided to somehow, you know, in his own way, try to make his hiring about race.
And so it's inevitable that his firing would also become a story about race.
Now, Mayo himself, as far as I know, hasn't made that claim, at least not yet.
But some race baiters in the media have piped up right on cue.
To announce that Mayo was actually fired for being black, not for being a really bad coach, which he is.
MSNBC published an op-ed with this title, There's a double standard for black NFL coaches.
Gerard Mayo's firing shows it.
The article written by somebody named Keith Reed says this, The NFL has a history of giving lopsided opportunities to white male coaches.
The short leash the Pats gave Mayo shows how far the league is from fulfilling its promises to do better at creating racial equity in its coaching core.
Mayo's termination is a reminder of how rarely black head coaches get fair shots at turning their teams around, assuming fairness is defined, at least in part, by getting more than a single season to make progress.
Now, sure, if you define fairness as getting a second chance in an extremely high-paying job after utterly failing the first time around, but that's not how you should define fairness.
Because when you're getting paid millions of dollars, you're expected to perform right away.
You don't get a year-long runway to figure it out.
And you probably won't get a second chance if you fail to figure it out.
That's especially the case in football, which is a results-oriented business and always has been.
All that anyone cares about is whether you perform.
Players who don't perform get benched or cut.
Doesn't matter if they're legends of the game.
They can still get benched or cut.
Coaches get fired.
That's because football is still and will always be a ruthless meritocracy.
That's why I love it.
It's also why it's America's sport, in my mind.
But that didn't stop the race baiters from doing what they do best.
Stephen A. Smith on ESPN also joined this chorus.
Listen.
That's what this is about.
This is about Mike Vrabel.
That's who they wanted.
No question about it.
And he's a more seasoned, more experienced coach.
I don't like this.
They call it Black Friday for, you know, Black Monday rather for a reason.
This certainly typifies it.
I don't know why it's not called White Monday.
Doug Peterson got fired from Jacksonville.
He deserved that firing.
Gerard Mayer clearly was not given a lengthy enough opportunity considering what Bill Belichick left him with from a talent perspective.
Considering the record, considering the way the team performed.
He didn't help himself with some of the comments he made calling the team soft and what have you and having to retract statements.
And we get all of that.
But no matter what we can point to, at the end of the day, the folks in New England were turning against Gerard Mayo.
We all know this.
And I think it has something to do with the fact that Vrabel is available, and that's really what's going on here.
They don't want to lose him, especially to a team like the New York Jets.
They want to be in the running, and they can't do that with him as the head coach.
Now, the problem for the race baiters is that five head coaches have been fired in the NFL this season so far.
Only one of them is black.
Three are white, and one is, I think, Lebanese or something.
Now, it's true that the other fired coaches had more than a season under their belts, though in most cases not much more than a season.
So is it then the case that, as the MSNBC article claims, that black head coaches are more likely to get the axe after just one year on the job?
Well...
Let's take a look.
According to an article in The Athletic, over the past decade and a half, there have been 13 coaches fired after one season.
By my count, nine of the 13 are white.
Four are black.
So that's more than twice as many white head coaches as black who were fired after one season.
And one of them, Lovey Smith, was fired by the Houston Texans and replaced by another black coach.
His replacement, D'Amico Ryans, went on to win his division and make the playoffs his first two years on the job.
One of the other black head coaches on the list is Hugh Jackson, who was fired by the Raiders after one season in 2011. A few years later, he got another opportunity as a head coach of the Cleveland Browns, in this case.
He coached, I think, 40 games for them and won three of them.
He also tied once.
So his overall head coaching record is 11-44-1.
He is, statistically speaking, the worst NFL head coach since 1941. So since before the Super Bowl existed.
So to review, while the media claims that black head coaches get a short leash and are fired more quickly than white head coaches, it turns out that over the past 14 years, only four black head coaches have been fired after one season, while double that many white head coaches were fired after one season in the same time frame.
At least one of them, it might be more I didn't check, was replaced by another black coach.
In fact, the longest tenured head coach in the NFL right now is black.
Mike Tomlin of the Steelers has...
Been their coach for 18 years.
He also hasn't won a playoff game in almost a decade.
He's 0-5 in the postseason since 2016, and he's about to be 0-6 after this weekend.
And this is the league that allegedly is unfair to black coaches.
The league where a black man is the longest tenured head coach in the league, despite a total lack of playoff success in nearly a decade, and where every one-and-done coach for the past 15 years or so, save two, has been white.
But, you know.
These are all just facts.
And as we know, the race hustlers don't let pesky things like facts get in the way of the narrative.
Which is why Stephen A. Smith and his fellow race-hustling sports commentators are, once again today, canceled.
