Ep. 1589 - How The Shiloh Hendrix Case Killed Cancel Culture
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, major controversy over a viral video of a woman using a racial slur at a playground. Now the woman has raised over half a million dollars. Is this evidence that white supremacy is alive and well in America? Or does it show us something else? I'm going with something else—we'll talk about it. Also, Trump announces a plan to reopen the prison island Alcatraz. And Democrats come out to denounce Trump for posting a meme of himself dressed as the pope. Suddenly, the Democrat party has discovered a deep love and respect for the Catholic Church.
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Ep.1589
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, major controversy over a viral video of a woman using a racial slur at a playground.
Now the woman has raised over half a million dollars.
Is this evidence that white supremacy is alive and well in America?
Or does it show us something else?
Well, I'm going with something else, and we'll talk about it.
Also, Trump announces a plan to reopen the prison island Alcatraz, and Democrats come out to denounce Trump for posting a meme of himself dressed as the Pope.
Suddenly the Democrat Party has discovered a deep love and respect for the Catholic Church.
What's that all about?
We'll talk about all that.
And more today on The Matt Walsh Show.
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By now, you may have heard the name Shiloh Hendricks.
Up until last week, no one outside of her friends and personal acquaintances knew she existed.
Now she's at the center of one of the more intense social media controversies that we've seen in recent years.
And it all began in the late afternoon on April 28th, when the woman we now know as Shiloh Hendricks took her young child to a park in Rochester, Minnesota.
And at some point, a black child, reportedly five years old, tried to steal something from her diaper bag.
Shiloh apparently responded in anger, and as the story goes, she called the boy the N-word.
Now, a man named Sharmaki Omar, a Somali immigrant and not the boy's father, allegedly witnessed this altercation and decided to pull out his phone.
And the resulting video has gone extremely viral across every major social media platform.
Here it is.
You call him a n***a child?
Did you call the child a n***a word?
It is my own business.
You call him a n***a?
Okay, why don't you have the boss to say it right now again?
Okay.
Alright, that's what you say.
Nobody dig into your s**t.
That little kid, you call him a n*****?
The little child?
Are you about to hit him?
You chase him here?
So that gives you the right to call a child, five-year-old, a n*****, the n*****?
If that's what he's going to act like.
That's what you're going to call him.
That's what he's going to act like.
You know, that's a hate speech.
And you can be recorded for that.
I don't give a s***.
Okay, we'll see about that, what the internet has to say about you.
Now, before we continue with this story, which takes several more twists and turns, we should note a few things.
First of all, we don't actually know for sure that the boy is five years old.
That's coming from the man filming, who is apparently not related to the child.
In the video, we appear to get a glimpse of the kid.
From the glimpse, anyway, he definitely looks older than five.
Omar has additionally claimed that the boy is autistic, which we also have no proof of.
And we have no footage of the actual encounter between the kid and this woman.
Did she scream the N-word in his face?
Did she mutter it under her breath?
Did she say it about the child after he'd already run away?
We don't know.
And as far as I've seen, we haven't heard anything from the boy's parents.
We don't know where they were in all of this, if they were even there.
Which is very strange.
So there are many aspects of this story that are bizarre and unconfirmed.
And here's another disturbing detail.
The Somali man behind the camera, Omar, was charged a couple of years ago with sexually assaulting a minor.
And according to the local news channel KTTC, those charges were dismissed.
A separate report by the local ABC affiliate adds that the charges were dismissed, quote, in the interest of justice.
Whatever the hell that means.
But whatever it means.
Now Omar, who was previously charged with a sexually assaulting minor, is at a playground with his camera out filming.
So make of all of that what you will.
So there are quite a few details that still need to be filled in here, but the saga continues anyway.
Anyway, what happened next is quite predictable.
The social media mob went to work.
They set out to identify this, at the time, anonymous woman and ruin her life or worse.
Here's one of the guys who got things kicked off.
Watch.
God help us.
She claims that that other child took her son's belongings.
That's what kicked this off.
The guy who recorded the video is familiar with the other child.
When he brings his children there, that child and his siblings are often there and play together.
The kid she's going after has autism.
He doesn't behave in a neurotypical way, and even if he didn't have autism, nothing he could have done would justify her calling him slurs and pursuing him physically, which is what she says she was doing before this guy intervened.
He said after he stopped recording, she sat down, hurled more slurs, told him and his wife that they should leave the country, and then got on the phone and acted like she was calling someone to come down there and handle things.
Fortunately, no one came.
And eventually she packed up her child and left.
But this woman is a danger to children.
She doesn't need to be on a playground or around other kids.
And she has at least one child of her own, which is also concerning.
So Rochester, Minnesota, someone do me a favor.
Take a close look at her tattoos.
You can see her face clearly.
Someone please tell me who she is.
Okay, so she's a danger to children.
She shouldn't be allowed at playgrounds.
She shouldn't be allowed at playgrounds, not the guy that was charged with sexually assaulting a minor.
But he says, please, Internet, find her, and countless others joined in.
And in some cases, they were calling for the woman to be imprisoned for saying a bad word.
Watch.
Share, share, share.
Trying to find the woman who called the little boy the N-word, the five-year-old little boy, artistic boy.
She needs to be found and locked up.
So please tap in.
Now there are many other videos of people hoping that she would be found and physically assaulted or killed.
Some were even threatening violence against her baby that you can see in the video.
Here's one example.
She said, hey TikTok, I just got a real quick question.
So we all know what happened with Shiloh Hendricks and how she got all this money, right?
Off to all the wrong reasons.
But...
You know what?
It is what it is at this point, right?
So, I'm just sitting here thinking, what about the baby?
What about the baby?
Because technically, that baby is going to grow up and be part of the God of the Triple K. That baby might grow up to be Hitler.
That baby is going to grow up and probably be the worst of the worst out there in the world.
And you know what?
I don't want that baby policing children that look like me.
I don't want that baby growing up doing anything else to people that look like me.
All because it was taught that.
But since, unfortunately, CPS is not going to be able to do nothing, what should we do?
I think you guys should let me know in the comments, because part of my thinking was, start a GoFundMe, you know, raise about a million dollars, go slap the hell out that baby, make that baby brainless or something for a while.
At least you still get to live.
I mean, it just might be a little, you know?
But hey, that's what happens when you grow up with racist-ass parents.
You gotta eat their consequences.
Now, I would say that encouraging people to beat a baby unconscious is worse than saying a bad word to a child, a lot worse.
And yet, there's no mob forming against that guy or the dozens of other people who hit like on that video.
So this has all unfolded as you would expect up to this point, leading to the predictable news that the Rochester Police Department is now actively investigating the woman, and others began calling for CPS to get involved and remove her child from the home, for example.
There's a guy we'll put up on the screen who wrote a letter to CPS, which he published on his website, claiming, again, that Shiloh is a danger to her own child and that the child should be taken out of the home.
And pretty soon, with thousands upon thousands of people whipped into a pitchfork mob, she had been identified by name.
But not just her name.
Her phone number was posted all over the Internet.
Her address, her social security number, her alleged places of employment.
People were calling her phone and making death threats and then bragging about it openly.
Again...
So far, this story is following the script that we all know by heart.
A random person is caught on camera doing something rude or offensive.
The video is posted by some third party, usually somebody who wasn't even involved in the incident.
And then thousands of sociopaths set out to destroy the person's life and possibly get them killed, all for sport, as a form of sadistic entertainment.
Nobody stops to think about the consequences.
There's no consideration of proportionality.
Saying the N-word to a child in a moment of anger is bad.
Is it so bad that it warrants the total and permanent destruction of a person's life?
Is it so bad that they deserve to have their physical safety and the safety of their family put in jeopardy?
Is it so bad that they deserve to have their child assaulted?
Now, to the social media mob, the answer is always yes.
It's always yes, that is, provided that the offending stranger fits certain parameters.
And the most important parameter is that the person, the offender, And we all know how this script ends.
The offender, in a desperate attempt to call off the dogs, tearfully apologizes and begs for mercy, a mercy that they surely will not receive.
But that is where the M. Night Shyamalan twist ending comes into play.
Because Shiloh Hendricks did not apologize.
Instead, she posted a crowdfunding campaign on Give, Send, Go where she doubled down and defended her actions and asked for help to relocate and get her family to safety.
And then a double twist.
A different group formed to counter the outrage mob.
They started donating to her campaign, and she surpassed her original funding goal in less than a day.
Within three days, she had earned over half a million dollars.
Now she's somewhere north of $600,000.
So the woman who was supposed to have her life ruined by the mob is instead on her way to potentially becoming a millionaire.
This twist, as you can imagine, has outraged the outrage mob even more, but a large number of prominent people on the right are also horrified by this turn of events.
Just as one example, Colin Wright tweeted, The woke right is now mirroring the woke left's tendency to glorify and martyr immoral degenerates solely based on shared racial identity.
This woke one-upmanship is a race to the very bottom.
Many conservative influencers and commentators, many of them who I like and respect, have echoed this sentiment.
They say that the people donating to this woman are behaving no better than the left.
They say that this is the rights version of the Carmelo Anthony fundraiser that also raised half a million dollars, even though he stabbed somebody to death, which I hope we can agree is far, far worse than saying a bad word.
Some of you have speculated that this whole thing is some kind of psyop meant to delegitimize the movement and make conservatives look racist.
I must assure them, despite how it may seem, that...
Not everything is a psyop.
There are things that really just happen in life.
Some things do just happen, and I think this is one of them.
Now, I understand that some people on my side feel, to put it scientifically, icky about this whole thing.
I understand why they feel icky.
I understand why they don't want to condone saying racial slurs to children.
I don't want to condone it either, and I don't.
And nobody really does.
But I think they're missing the point.
You know, I don't think they understand what's actually happening here or why.
It is, in the end, a net positive that this woman has raised half a million dollars.
I'm glad she has.
I hope she raises a million.
I will not be joining with some of my conservative friends and wagging my finger at her donors.
And I'll explain why.
First of all...
She does have a legitimate need for the money.
The mob is truly trying to get her killed.
I don't believe that a woman should have her life threatened for saying a word, even a bad one.
You could say freedom of speech, but not freedom from consequences for your speech, all you want.
But if losing your livelihood and having your house burned down is a consequence of your speech, then you do not have free speech.
Supporting free speech means supporting someone's ability to speak without having their family murdered for it.
I mean, that should be pretty obvious.
Second, more importantly, and this is the part that I really need everyone to stop and think about.
This is the most devastating attack on cancel culture that we have seen, possibly ever.
Shiloh Hendricks has, without really trying, effectively ended cancel culture.
As Mark Dice said in his video about the incident, Shiloh is the final boss of cancel culture, or maybe rather the final boss that cancel culture has to fight.
And I think that's right.
And this is the part that many conservatives seem to be missing.
All they see is that this woman said something bad and is now getting rewarded for it.
The whole thing is so unsavory that they can't help but recoil.
And yeah, it is unsavory.
You wish that Shiloh had said or done something that we could affirmatively defend.
That would be much easier.
Nobody wants to affirmatively defend cussing out a five-year-old, even though I don't think the kid's actually five.
But none of that is the point.
The point is that the only way to put an end to this routine, the routine where the outrage mob mobilizes and assembles to destroy somebody's life, is to disincentivize the routine.
And the only way to disincentivize that behavior is to reward the person who's being targeted.
Now, we can complain all we want about the mob tactics and how they silence and punish people and exact vengeance in wildly disproportionate ways.
We can condemn it.
We can write think pieces about it.
We can deliver monologues.
None of that matters.
None of that will stop them.
The only thing that can stop them, the only thing that will make them think twice about doing this again, is if they know that instead of getting their target canceled, They might accidentally make them rich.
And more important, even in the money, they must know that their attempt to isolate and ostracize somebody will fail.
That for every person condemning the targeted person, two more will rally to their defense.
You know, the motto of the cancel mob for a long time has always been, make this person famous.
And a lot of them were saying that about Shiloh.
Let's make her famous.
Now, the assumption is that the fame will have an exclusively negative effect on the person's life.
Making them famous means making them unsafe, making them bankrupt, making them persona non grata.
With this case, that assumption has been flipped on its head.
Because now the mob knows that making them famous might help them more than hurt them.
Rather than the fame being punished, it's rewarded.
That's the only way to stop this.
The making them famous tactic now has a powerful disincentive attached.
Think of it this way.
Justine Sacco is widely considered the patient zero of cancel culture.
Back in 2013, she was on a flight to Africa when she tweeted jokingly that she hopes she doesn't get AIDS when she gets to Africa.
And when she landed hours later, you're probably familiar with the story.
She discovered that her tweet had gone viral across the country.
The mob had made her famous.
And she lost her job.
She was cast out of polite society.
Her life as she knew it was over.
And our culture as we knew it had also been changed irrevocably.
Now, I wish that somebody had started a crowdfunding campaign for her all the way back in 2013.
I wish that while half the internet was trying to wreck her life over a dumb joke, the other half had made her rich.
I wish people had donated half a million dollars to her.
I wish they donated a million.
I wish they donated 50 million.
And that's not because I think an AIDS joke is worth 50 million dollars.
It wasn't that good of a joke.
It's not because I think that Justine Sacco is some great hero.
It's because that would have destroyed cancel culture in its infancy.
The entire incentive structure around this online left-wing version of mob justice would have been broken right at the start.
If they made her famous and she profited from the fame rather than being ruined by it, then the make-her-famous tactic would have died right there and that would have been the end of it.
But it didn't die there.
Instead, the mob was emboldened.
Mob justice worked out really well for the mob nearly every time for the next decade and a half.
Now that's finally changed.
And you don't have to like Shiloh or agree with her choice of words to see that.
Speaking of her choice of words, there is another point that I think has to be made here.
The mob that tried unsuccessfully to cancel Shiloh Hendricks was...
Far, far more outraged over Shiloh saying the N-word than they were over Carmelo Anthony stabbing somebody to death.
Indeed, many of them actively supported Carmelo Anthony murdering Austin Metcalf.
They rewarded him financially for it.
And this is all part of the preposterous racial double standard that has defined American culture for generations now.
It is a double standard that declares it a greater crime for a white person to say a word than for a black person to kill a white person.
In fact, killing a white person could even be a just punishment for saying that word according to these standards.
words.
The rules surrounding this word, the moral weight granted to it, the arbitrary guidelines drawn around it, it's all nonsense.
It's all indefensible on both moral and intellectual grounds.
People are fed up with it.
That's what you're seeing in this story.
People are just fed up with it.
Now, that child, if he's like the average black child in this country, did not hear the N-word for the first time from a white woman at the park last week.
Okay?
He's no doubt heard it thousands of times.
He likely hears it every day.
He probably hears it in his own home.
Are we supposed to believe that he's heard the word a thousand times, but it's time 1001 that really traumatized him?
I mean, the idea that the word is a common greeting for one race, but unspeakably evil if uttered by a different race, Is laughably ridiculous.
The idea that one race can say the word 10,000 times a day and the other race cannot speak the syllables under any circumstance, even if they're just repeating what someone else said or singing along to a rap song, that idea, again, is totally indefensible, which is why no one has ever tried to defend it.
Instead, it's just yet another racial rule of the road.
That we're supposed to follow without ever asking any questions about it or expecting anyone to explain it or justify it.
People are sick of that.
It's just that simple.
They are sick of it.
Now, it's really, it is simple.
If it's wrong to say the word, then it's wrong for anyone to say it.
If black people want white people to not say the word, then they need to not say it.
If you say it, everyone else can say it.
Point blank.
It's that simple.
That's how life works.
Deal with it.
No, you can't do that.
You can't say, we can do this thing, but you can't.
It doesn't work that way.
It does not work that way.
Well, it did work that way for a long time.
It was indefensible, and it's just not going to work that way anymore.
Sorry.
And no matter who is saying it, it's not any worse than any other slur or vulgarity.
It's not special.
The word is not magical.
It's not some kind of mystical curse.
It's not some kind of dark incantation that conjures evil spirits from the netherworld.
It's just a word.
It's a vulgar word.
It's a rude word.
It's a word that I believe polite people shouldn't say for the same reason they shouldn't use any other vulgarity.
I'm using N-word right now instead of saying the actual word for the same reason that I would say F-word or C-word instead of those actual words.
Those are vulgar words.
That's all.
The reflexive, indefensible, capricious, vacillating racial double standards are over.
People are fed up with them.
They are fed up with the game and they don't want to play it anymore.
And that's all that this word has become.
That's all that our quote-unquote race relations have become.
A game.
A game with arbitrary rules and incredibly excessive punishments for anyone who breaks them.
It's like the societal equivalent of a child.
You know, trying to walk on the sidewalk without stepping on a crack.
Eventually, the kid gets bored with it, starts walking normally again, because it turns out that if you step on a crack, you're not really going to break your mother's back.
The rules are fake.
And eventually, people get tired of following them.
Telling white people, and white people only, that they can't combine two specific syllables under any circumstance, it's like telling them they can't touch their head unless someone says Simon Says.
Okay?
They're not going to play the game forever.
White guilt is the fuel that keeps all this going.
White guilt is what convinces white people to follow arbitrary rules that make no sense, to tolerate, even defend a system that's rigged against them with blatant double standards.
It's what's compelled white people to acquiesce to a culture that says that every race can and should defend and root for their own, but white people, and white people only, should not be conscious of their race at all.
None of it is fair or morally coherent.
And the Carmelo Anthony case, where a black teen raked in half a million dollars as a reward for stabbing a white kid to death, was for a lot of people the final straw.
The final straw of many, many straws.
It is no surprise that the Shiloh Hendricks case comes on the heels of that.
You know, a lot of people online are fretting that...
This is the beginning of some kind of race war.
But I don't think it's a race war, and it's certainly not the beginning.
I mean, there's been a war waged on whiteness for a long time in this country.
So this cannot be the beginning of anything.
But it may be the end of something.
The end of racial level standards.
The end of cancel culture.
This is an ugly story in a lot of ways.
But if history has shown us anything, it's that ugly things die ugly deaths.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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President Donald Trump, CNN reports, by the way, President Donald Trump said in a social media post Sunday that he's directing the Bureau of Prisons to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz, the infamous former president, as a place to house America's most ruthless and violent offenders.
He said in the Post on Truth Social, I'm directing the Bureau of Prisons together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security to reopen or substantially enlarge and rebuild Alcatraz to house America's most ruthless and violent offenders.
We'll no longer be held hostage to criminal thugs and judges that are afraid to do their job and allow us to remove criminals.
Trump said Alcatraz has been a sad symbol, but it's a symbol of law and order, and it's got quite a history, frankly, so I think we're going to do that.
Alcatraz, located on an island off of the San Francisco coast, operated as a federal penitentiary for nearly 30 years before closing in 1963 because the institution was too expensive to continue operating.
An estimated $3 million to $5 million was needed just for restoration and maintenance work to keep the prison open, not including daily operating costs.
Alcatraz was nearly three times more expensive to operate than any other federal prison, according to the Bureau of Prisons.
You'll not be shocked to learn that I quite like this idea.
I think that the concerns about the cost, first of all, are not serious.
You know, it's funny when the left suddenly becomes a bunch of penny pinchers.
We spend trillions of dollars a year, but they object.
They don't object until we allocate it to something like prisons.
And I'm kind of the opposite, really, in that prisons are one of the few things that, as a taxpayer, I don't mind splurging on.
And that's why I'm never dissuaded when somebody says, oh, the prisons are overcrowded.
Okay, build more then.
Like, what do you mean?
We got plenty of space, it's overcrowded?
Okay, build more.
Build 50 more.
I mean, who cares?
Build as many as we need.
The federal government allocates like $9 billion a year to the Bureau of Prisons.
That's it, $9 billion.
And to put that in perspective, we spend more than $9 billion in a single month on food stamps.
Okay?
We spend more than $9 billion in three days on welfare.
So don't tell me that $9 billion is some great expense.
And definitely don't tell me that $5 million to do maintenance is a back-breaking expenditure.
I mean, that's how much we spend on welfare in five minutes.
Literally.
Every five minutes, we spend $5 million on the welfare system.
So, you know, so the money is irrelevant here.
The value of sending prisoners to Alcatraz is really the symbolism, and symbolism is important.
Now, yeah, there's the practical consideration it's harder to escape when you're on a prison island, but it's hard to escape from any maximum security prison.
The point is largely symbolic.
It's sending the message that we are serious about punishing criminals.
It's sending the message that prison is a punishment.
I like the idea of bringing back Alcatraz for the same reason I like the idea of bringing back labor camps and bringing back chain gangs where people are chained up on the side of the road picking up trash or whatever.
I think that's a great idea.
There are practical benefits, of course.
You get free labor, which is great.
I know some people freak out about prison labor, and they say, oh, it's slave labor.
Well, it's not exactly.
I mean, constitutionally, it's not slave labor.
The Constitution specifically allows for forced labor in prisons.
Also, historically, across the world, slaves were captured by raiding parties and by prisoners.
They were captured during war, prisoners of war.
But prisoners in this country are in prison because they chose to commit a crime.
So it's not...
It's not literally slave labor.
But whatever you want to call it, I don't really care because there's an easy way to avoid it.
Just don't be a dysfunctional human being.
Don't be a scumbag criminal.
And if you are, you need to be punished.
You need to be taught a lesson.
You need to suffer for your crimes.
And that's the real value of forced labor.
And it's the value of sending prisoners to Alcatraz, I think.
All right.
Let's see.
We also have, speaking of money, NBC News reports President Donald Trump signed an executive order late Thursday to end the public funding of National Public Radio and PBS to stop what he called biased and partisan news coverage.
The White House said in a Friday statement that both organizations had received tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds each year to spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as news.
So he's going to try to put an end to that, and that's the executive order.
Long overdue.
But it's led to the expected histrionics from the usual suspects.
So here's Cory Booker's tweet, just as an example.
Public broadcasters like PBS and NPR give every American access to culture, history, art, and trusted journalism.
They're a cornerstone of civic life.
Defunding them does a disservice to us all, especially in rural communities.
We must defend them.
Not defund, but defend them.
And this is how you know that PBS and NPR should be defunded.
Their supporters cannot muster any reason why they should be funded.
At least they can't give any reason from this century.
I'd like to ask Cory Booker, how many Americans total rely on PBS and NPR for access to culture, history, art, and journalism?
Specifically, how many can only access those things Through the broadcast version of NPR and PBS.
Because this would have to be a category of people who, number one, want to watch NPR and PBS, and number two, don't have the internet.
Because if you have the internet, then NPR and PBS are not giving you access to anything that you can't find a million other places instantly for free.
Which, by the way, is enough reason to defund them.
I mean, we don't even need to get into...
The left-wing bias, which is also enough reason to defund them.
But these things came about at a time before the Internet.
And the Internet just makes them irrelevant.
Like, there's not anything that you can find on PBS and NPR that you can't find in half a second, you know, on the Internet, right?
So why do we have it?
And even if you don't have the Internet, if you're a conservative, you still aren't relying on NPR and PBS.
We're really talking about left-leaning Americans without the Internet.
Those are the only ones who arguably rely on NPR and PBS for access to all these different things.
So how many people is that?
Like, last number I saw, I think, from Pew.
It said that 96% of Americans use the Internet.
And...
The 4% who don't are almost exclusively way out in the country and probably over the age of 70. And those types probably aren't big NPR fans.
So I'm guessing that the number of Americans that Booker is referring to is maybe 3. And I don't mean 3%, I mean 3. So should we keep spending millions of dollars to make sure that these three people...
Can still get NPR and PBS?
I think I would say no.
My answer to that is no.
All right.
A little more political news.
Stephen A. Smith is continuing his unofficial presidential campaign.
He was back on the Sunday shows again this past weekend where he explained his political philosophy, such as it is.
Let's listen to that.
If you were to run for president, though, it would be as a Democrat or no?
You know what?
I'm an independent.
I'm a registered independent.
I would lean at who leans left.
I'm fiscally conservative when it comes to my money.
I'm socially liberal.
I'm liberal when it comes to social issues pretty much across the board.
I believe in living and let living.
So I'm a moderate, and I would say if I had to run, it would be as a Democrat, but I'm not happy with the Democratic Party.
the Democratic Party has presently constructed, it would pretty much need to be purged in order for me to assume that I would want to be associated with them and I would garner their support I think that,
you know, again, if somebody was to associate me with that.
The party is presently constructed where Lee's so extremely left or at least has spent the vast majority of time doing that.
Oh, that is not something that I would vibe with at all.
I would definitely be looking to be a game changer in that regard.
Okay, so Stephen A. Smith there serving up the blandest, most basic, most 2011 era talking points that he possibly could.
And it's funny when I hear people saying that, you know, a Stephen A. Smith campaign would be exciting or revolutionary somehow.
Like he's this formidable talent with great insight.
Where are we seeing the political talent?
Where's the insight?
He says nothing.
The parties are both corrupt.
I'm a moderate.
I think the truth is in the middle somewhere.
Oh wow, how brave, how bold.
Like, I haven't seen anyone this edgy since John McCain.
Stephen A. Smith is John McCain.
If John McCain was black and mostly talked about basketball, then he would be Stephen A. Smith.
And by the way, fiscally conservative but socially liberal, that again is not anything new or exciting.
This is the exact brand of faux-moderate slop that allowed our culture to be marched into the cesspit that we're currently trying to climb out of.
Fiscally conservative but socially liberal just means that he's a leftist who doesn't like paying taxes.
That's all that it means.
A leftist who doesn't like paying taxes.
Which, good for him, I don't like paying taxes either.
But that doesn't make him not a leftist.
And besides, these fiscally conservative types who don't like taxes, have you noticed that?
They never end up doing anything about the tax system.
Tax rates go up or down by a few percentage points, but the system is never fundamentally changed.
So this is all, you know, just nothing.
And I've got nothing against Stephen A. Smith, but there's nothing here.
I'm sure he's a nice guy.
I bet I'd like him if I met him in person, you know, because I'm sure he's a nice, friendly guy.
And if I did meet him, I would tell him to his face that he's not presidential material.
He's not bringing anything new or interesting to the table.
What is Stephen A. Smith's core issue?
When you're running for office or when you're potentially going to run for office, there should be some kind of core issue that's driven you to take the leap into running for office.
So what is it?
What is he fired up about, exactly?
I don't trust any politician or any wannabe politician who doesn't have a core issue.
And just saying something like, both parties are corrupt.
I got no use for either of them.
Oh, wow.
I've never heard that before.
Wow.
That's only something that literally every human in the country says every day.
I mean, we get it.
We all, yeah, sure.
That's not anything, though.
That is nothing.
So, that's not a core issue.
What is a core issue?
Is it a core issue?
I don't know.
Or forget about core.
I mean, can he name three specific issues that are important to him?
You know, core issue or not.
Can he name three specific issues that are important to him?
Probably not.
No one seems to have asked him that.
So, but again, I've talked about this a few times, and I always regret talking about it, and yet here I go again running my mouth, because I have no interest in trying, not that Democrats are listening to me, but I have no interest in trying to dissuade them from going this route.
And the way that this guy's name keeps popping up and he keeps appearing on these Sunday shows and they're having these serious political conversations or trying to have serious political conversations with him while he says nothing.
He's not saying anything.
So it really seems that this is serious.
And he's obviously got backers.
He's obviously got people in his ear.
He's obviously got some powerful Democrats.
I don't know who.
But he's got people encouraging him.
And so it seems like this is something that they're seriously considering, and I hope they do because it will just be a total wipe, a landslide, an absolute landslide against the Democrats if they do this.
So please do.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Now, one way to tell that things are going pretty well in a presidential administration is by looking at how dumb the controversies are.
If the opposition party is pretending to be upset about something that doesn't matter, then it's a pretty good sign that everything is running pretty smoothly.
And by that metric, at least, the second Trump administration is currently in the running for the smoothest running administration in the history of the country.
And that's because, over the last several days, Democrats have gone on the war path, not over any White House policy or over any kind of development in the real world, but instead...
Over an AI-generated meme featuring the likeness of the President of the United States.
Now, before I go any further, I need to specify the precise AI-generated meme I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about this image.
It's the one that features the President holding a red lightsaber in a Star Wars outfit, showing off his gigantic muscles while he's flanked by two bald eagles.
And I'm assuming this is AI.
I actually don't know that for a fact.
But I think it's AI.
And this was posted on the White House's official social media accounts.
But to be clear, that's not the image.
Nor is it intended to be a statement of White House policy or anything like that.
I'm also not talking about the animation of Donald Trump signing executive orders accompanied by relaxing lo-fi music, which was posted on the White House's account the other day.
Nor am I talking about the image of Donald Trump wearing a sombrero and sipping tequila, which is making the rounds for Cinco de Mayo.
Instead, the AI-generated image that has enraged Democrats is this one, featuring Donald Trump dressed as the Pope.
And we'll put that on the screen.
There it is.
It's the kind of thing that any AI program can make in about five seconds, and it's pretty clear why the White House made it.
Speaking to reporters outside the White House after Pope Francis' death, Trump said, quote, I'd like to be Pope.
That would be my number one choice.
And then after he was done messing with reporters, he said, I must say we have a cardinal that happens to be out of the place called New York who's very good, so we'll see what happens, and that's a reference to Cardinal Timothy Dolan.
Everything was fine afterwards until the White House posted the meme, and that's when all hell broke loose.
As the AP reports, quote, The image featuring Trump in a white cassock and pointed miter or bishop's hat was the topic of several questions during the Vatican's daily conclave briefing on Saturday.
Italian and Spanish news reports lamented its poor taste.
Now, what's great about this report is that it implies that the image would have been completely fine as soon as the nine days of mourning came to an end.
They're really just upset about the timing of the meme, apparently.
The minute the official period of mourning stops, though, all bets are off, I guess.
Now, of course, no matter when it's posted, the truth is that there's nothing especially offensive about this meme.
As an actual lifelong practicing Catholic myself, I found the meme benign.
I mean, it's not especially hilarious, but it's also not some sort of sacrilegious attack on my faith.
It's not even mocking the Pope either.
Trump isn't dressed as Pope Francis in the meme.
He's dressed as the Pope, right?
And if anything, it's actually, I would say, more self-deprecating humor poking at Trump.
Because the whole point of the joke is that...
You know, it's absurd to imagine Donald Trump as the Pope.
So, if anything, it's not, the joke is not, oh, the Pope is ridiculous.
The joke is, it would be ridiculous for Trump to be the Pope.
If I have to explain the joke, that's the joke.
Now, that said, there was at least one aspect of this meme that was truly impressive.
It's that, against all odds, this AI-generated meme...
Has managed to instantly transform Democrats into card-carrying tradcasts.
Yes, the same people who champion the murder of children and the castration of children virtually overnight has become orthodox, traditionalist Catholic, intent on rebuking anyone who dares to misuse papal imagery on the Internet.
Suddenly the Democrat is like full of people who go to the Latin mass.
Who knew?
So...
Here's Governor Kathy Hochul of New York, for example, quote, This is deeply offensive to me and to my fellow Catholics around the world as we continue to mourn our beloved Pope Francis.
Now, if you're keeping track, this is the same Kathy Hochul who told a Brooklyn megachurch that the COVID shot came, quote, from God.
She also said that she wants, quote, apostles to spread the word of Tony Fauci.
It's also the same Kathy Hochul who has repeatedly declared her love of abortion, quote, Abortion is health care and a human right, she said.
She's also signed legislation enshrining child castration into law.
Thanks to Kathy Hochul, New York is now one of several states that allows a parent to fly in from out of state in order to chemically castrate their child, and courts can't do anything about it, even if the other parent objects.
So, in other words, Kathy Hochul is pretending to be mortally offended by a dumb meme, but she's not remotely offended by mortal sins that defy 2,000 years of church teaching.
Like abortion, sodomy, transgenderism, and so on.
Catholicism, according to Kathy Hochul, is whatever the Democrat Party wants.
The experimental COVID shot that doesn't even work was sent from God, but the child that was just murdered in the abortion clinic was not sent from God, apparently.
Hochul has spent her entire public career attacking literally everything that the Catholic Church stands for, and now, in the face of this meme...
She's suddenly pretending that she's a faithful Catholic who never misses Mass.
Even on holy days, Kathy Hochul is there.
She even wears a veil to church.
That's how religious this woman is as of nine seconds ago.
And it wasn't just Kathy Hochul who adopted this approach.
One by one, Democrats who claim to be Catholic took turns declaring that this meme was blasphemous.
It's one of the most shameless and phoniest displays we've seen in politics in a long time, which of course is saying a lot.
Here's what Ted Lieu, the congressman from California, wrote, So now we have the implication that the meme is not simply offensive.
It's also so bad that it's hurting the economy.
The stakes have been raised, according to California Congressman Ted Lieu, who says he's a Catholic.
But what does that mean exactly?
Well, let's see.
Here's Ted Lieu posing with the so-called Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence at the Los Angeles Pride Parade.
You can see the picture there, proudly posted by Ted Lieu.
This is a group that is explicitly devoted to blasphemy and sexual sin.
It's a group whose very existence is a mortal sin, according to church teaching.
They're an anti-Catholic hate group.
You know, they dress up like Jesus and they put on perverse sexual displays all the time with the goal of mocking Catholics.
It's their entire reason for existing.
You might remember them from the whole sordid situation where the Dodgers honored them, but Ted Lieu doesn't object to any of that.
He doesn't find this anti-Catholic hate group to be offensive.
A man in a nun costume promoting sodomy is not offensive, but a meme of Trump as the Pope is, according to Ted Lieu.
And of course, Ted Lieu has no problem with killing children either.
Here's a post from Ted Lieu from a couple of years ago.
He writes, quote, Most abortions occur prior to nine weeks.
Look at the picture below.
Is that a human being?
I don't know.
Close quote.
You know, for a Catholic, it's an interesting statement to make.
Because it suggests a complete lack of familiarity with the catechism or with scripture.
Which both make repeated references to the humanity and moral worth of children in the womb.
If you're a Catholic, then the answer to that riddle is definitely yes, it's a human being.
Catholic teaching could not be more clear about that question.
But Ted Lieu, the Catholic, is confused somehow.
He's the type of self-described Catholic who expressly disavows Basically, every element and every teaching of Catholicism, which is quite a trick.
And again, he's choosing to become indignant over a meme.
This is the red line for him.
It's not the slaughter of infants that's a red line.
It's not men dressed up as nuns engaging in sexually graphic blasphemy.
It's the AI picture from the White House's social media team.
That's the thing.
Amy McGrath, the failed candidate who ran against Mitch McConnell, Who describes herself as 100% pro-choice during the campaign, went for the same line of attack, quote, To all my fellow Americans raised and practicing Catholics, are you cool with this?
Is this just funny stuff that everyone's laughing at?
I follow a lot of Catholic priests on this platform.
I wonder if there will be any response at all to this, close quote.
And because the Democrat Party is now indistinguishable from satire, on Saturday, Colin Jost, who was on SNL, Repeated the same talking points.
And he announced that as a Catholic, he's upset by this AI image as well.
Listen.
Well, guys, it happened.
Last night, President Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as the Pope, apparently ordering a one-way ticket to hell.
Who posts a photo of themselves dressed like a guy who died a week ago?
Trump was at the Pope's funeral.
That means he walked past an open casket and was like, oh, we should do a who wore it best.
Truly like if the week Queen Elizabeth died, I posted this.
I don't know.
I just feel like as a Catholic, Trump's photo just feels slightly disrespectful.
Also, if Trump really wants to be Pope, he should probably stay away from J.D. Vance.
I mean, again, it doesn't matter because obviously this is all the outrageous fake, but I do have to continue to stipulate that the image was not Trump as Pope Francis.
The whole joke is that Trump will be the new Pope.
He's not dressing up as Pope Francis.
He's the new Pope.
That's the joke.
So, no, it's not the equivalent of doing an AI image where you look like the Queen.
It's the equivalent of after the Queen dies, you make a joke and say, hey, you know, I'll be the new King of England.
That's the joke.
And if you had made that joke, nobody would be offended.
It would be nothing of a joke.
Now, you'll notice that there's no outrage about Colin Jost joking about J.D. Vance murdering the Pope, even though you could make the case that that's pretty insensitive, especially as it takes place during the nine days of official mourning.
The outrage is explicitly targeted at one thing and one thing only, which is the AI picture of Trump.
Michael Steele, the former RNC chair who still pretends to be a conservative on MSNBC, put it this way, quote, Trump in his narcissism gets off on our being offended.
More to the point, this affirms how unserious and incapable he is.
At 78, he remains a 10-year-old child, emotionally scarred and broken, while desperate to prove he could be somebody.
His problem, he can't grow up to prove it.
Yes, Michael Steele, the washed-up chairman of the RNC from the first two years of the Obama era, wants you to know that Donald Trump is desperate to prove he could be somebody.
Just to be clear, Michael Steele is talking about the current president of the United States serving in his second term.
He's talking about the man who was already president once and then survived an assassination attempt and became president again.
That guy just wants to be somebody.
You know, Trump is like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront.
He could have been a contender instead of a bum.
A bum who is the most famous and powerful human on the planet currently.
Unlike Michael Steele, who flunked out of his position as RNC chair and spent the rest of his life as a talking head on the least-watched cable news channel.
Trump could only dream of being that successful.
Now, it's not worth going through Michael Steele's previous statements in support of abortion, because by now the pattern is pretty clear.
Despite all this bloviating and faux outrage, the fact remains that there is nothing in church teaching or in scripture that prohibits us from Making a harmless joke about not even the Pope, but the papacy.
In fact, in my experience, actual conservative believing Catholics...
First of all, number one, every Catholic in the country has already made that joke.
That's the most offensive thing about the joke, is that it's old.
I mean, every Catholic in the country has already made the joke about, maybe Trump could be the new Pope.
And also, you know...
Actual Catholics tend to have darker and sometimes like a more morbid sense of humor.
And that's okay.
On the other hand, it's not okay to be a Catholic who explicitly denounces every pillar of Catholic teaching as all of these Democrats have done.
You know, that's what Michael Steele and Amy McGrath and Kathy Hochul and Ted Lieu and the SNL comedian, that's what they don't want you to realize.
They're not actually upset about the AI image of the Pope.
They're not actually Catholics.
None of them are.
They're just desperate.
And while that's a very good sign for the Trump administration, it's about the worst possible sign for the Democrat Party, which has had no shortage of bad signs lately.
And that is why everybody pretending to be outraged by the AI image of Donald Trump is today canceled.
That'll do it for the show today.
We'll talk to you tomorrow.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
John Bickley here, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief.
Wake up every morning with our show, Morning Wire, where we bring you all the news that you need to know in 15 minutes or less.
