Ep. 1612 - The LGBT Movement Is Collapsing, And Simone Biles’ Apology Proves It
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Simone Biles issues a groveling apology after attacking Riley Gaines for her stance against men in women’s sports. This series of events would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. We’ll talk about it. Also, the media laments that there are more American troops in LA than in Iraq or Syria. Well, yes. That’s what we voted for. Trump un-cancels Robert E Lee. I’ll give a quick history lesson to explain why that is a very good decision. And Republican Senator Josh Hawley joins the Democrats in a bill to impose a $15 minimum wage. I’ll explain why that is a very bad thing.
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Ep.1612
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, Simone Biles issues a groveling apology after attacking Riley Gaines for her stance against men in women's sports.
This series of events would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
We'll talk about it.
Also, the media laments that there are now more American troops in L.A. than in Iraq or Syria.
Well, yeah, that's what we voted for.
Trump uncancels Robert E. Lee.
I'll give you a quick history lesson to explain why that is a very good decision.
And Republican Senator Josh Hawley joins Democrats in a bill to impose a $15 minimum wage.
I'll explain why that is a very bad thing.
And all of that and more today on That Well Show.
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There are few institutions in this country that have disgraced themselves more thoroughly in recent days than the little-known Champlin Park High School in Champlin, Minnesota.
This is a school that just won the Class 4A Minnesota Girls State Softball Championship by fielding a male as their star pitcher in every single game.
And this male pitcher, a 17-year-old junior named Charlie Marissa Rothenberger, pitched all 21 innings across three games of the girls' championship tournament because they do seven inning games in softball.
And what do you know?
Chamberlain Park won all three games.
Rothenberger capped off his performance by throwing a complete game shutout, allowing only three hits in the process.
And that's just the championship route.
He also pitched a complete game shutout in the quarterfinals and overall the entire postseason.
Rothenberger allowed only two runs in 35 innings.
Now, everybody involved in this farce, from the school district to the coaches to the parents to the athlete himself, should be barred from any kind of competitive activity for the rest of their lives.
They should face more serious consequences, which may indeed be coming.
The school district has already been sued.
But at the moment, like most cheaters, these people seem to have convinced themselves that they did nothing wrong.
In interviews, Rothenberger and his coach have suggested that They're simply better competitors than their opponents.
They managed to vary their pitch types and pitch speeds, and their opponents just didn't measure up.
So here's an interview from last season to give you an idea.
Then in the 7th, it's Rothenberger shutting things down with their 10th strikeout of the game.
The Rebels get the win 2-1.
I think it was just spinning my rise ball and pitches through the zone, mixing different speeds and keeping them off balance.
It's been high energy all the time, having a strong defense and picking each other up after every hour, being able to string a couple hits together and getting runs.
We're great in the circle.
Our pitchers do a phenomenal job.
We have two young pitchers, Ava Abramson and Marissa Rothenberger, and they've been doing a phenomenal job.
They keep us in every game, and then we string hits together.
Chaska's a top 10 team.
I mean, they've been in it all year.
Now watching this coach speak, any sane person has to fight to suppress their vomit reflex.
I mean, imagine celebrating your sports acumen and acting like you're some incredible coach with an incredible team when you have a boy pitching every single one of your games in a girls' softball league.
The gall that's required to stand there with a straight face as you cheat in the most flagrant way imaginable while pretending everything is completely normal is hard to comprehend.
I mean, pathetic does not even begin to describe it.
The parents who allow this man to coach their daughters as he teaches them how to cheat are just as culpable.
Everything about this story is revolting.
And the school district knows that.
So does the league.
And that's why they've locked down their social media posts so that no one can reply to them.
Here's what the Minnesota State High School League posted before locking the comments.
Meet Champlin Park, the Class 4A softball state champion for 2025.
Then they attached a team picture, including the boy who dominated the competition.
Now, Riley Gaines noticed the league's decision, the censor replies, and to point out the league's cowardice, she wrote, Now, as we discussed earlier this week, Gaines' post sent Simone Biles, the Olympic gymnast, Into a frenzy.
She accused Gaines of bullying the trans-identified athlete.
Biles also wrote, quote, you're truly sick.
All this campaigning because you lost a race.
Straight up sore loser.
You should be uplifting the trans community, perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive or creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports.
Maybe a transgender category in all sports.
And then for good measure, Biles followed up by writing, quote, bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.
Now, the other day.
We also discussed why her idea of a trans-only league is idiotic for like a million reasons.
For one thing, there wouldn't be enough players, nor would anyone want to watch them play.
Additionally, you'd have to decide how to classify the non-binaries and demisexuals and two-spirits and the 50,000 other genders.
Do they play with the trans men or the trans women?
Do we need a separate league for every variation?
Things get pretty complicated, especially when the trans furries show up and refuse to wear the standard uniforms.
And of course, on top of all these problems, a trans-only league makes no sense because the current system of dividing athletes based on biological reality and not fantasy...
So those are just a few problems with Simone Biles' tweets.
Additionally, a few people also pointed out that Simone Biles' position was also hypocritical because back in 2017, she wrote on Twitter, quote, Good thing guys don't compete against girls or he'd take all the gold medals, close quote.
Referring to a male gymnast at the time.
Now, presumably, that post was written before Biles had lost her mind.
But in 2025, Biles, as with so many other prominent public figures, is completely subservient to leftist ideology.
And more than that, she's vindictive and openly hostile to anyone who expresses a contrary position, even if it's the position that most Americans hold, the one that happens to correspond with reality.
But here's what elevates the story beyond a typical social media spat.
And this is why it's worth revisiting.
Five years ago, for these posts attacking Riley Gaines, Simone Biles would have received unrelenting praise from every organ of the left.
The media would be asking her how she managed to be so brave in the face of Riley Gaines' fascism.
Activist groups would be clamoring to invite her to speaking engagements.
Every podcast would be elevating her as a kind of trans messiah.
And then they would have had Riley Gaines banned from the internet, of course.
That's how things used to work.
In 2020, just to give you one of many, many examples, the comedian Graham Linehan was permanently banned from Twitter for tweeting, quote, Men aren't women, though.
That's all it took five years ago.
You'd get dogpiled and permanently censored for stating the truth about human biology.
But that's not what happens anymore.
Very few prominent people came out to defend Simone Biles after her post.
Instead, she was excoriated by almost everyone.
And the backlash was so significant that just a few days after this initial post, Simone Biles put out a lengthy statement apologizing to Riley Gaines.
Here's what she posted.
Quote, I wanted to follow up from my last tweets.
I've always believed competitive equity and inclusivity are both essential in sport.
The current system doesn't adequately balance these important principles which often lead to frustration and heated exchanges.
And it didn't help for me to get personal with Riley, which I apologize for.
Close quote.
This statement continues for a bit, and we'll read the rest of it in a moment.
But it's worth taking a second to think about the words competitive equity, because it's a real triumph of word salad.
What exactly is competitive equity?
Of course, when leftists say equity, we know what they mean.
They mean allowing certain demographics, like self-identifying trans people in this case, to gain advantages over others.
But that's fundamentally incompatible with the idea of competition.
The whole point of equity is to eliminate competition, so that the left's preferred groups win.
And so the idea of competitive equity just makes no sense.
But if you can make it past the oxymoron, Simone Biles does get around to apologizing, which we just heard.
And then she writes this, quote, These are sensitive, complicated issues that I truly don't have the answers or solutions to, but I believe it starts with empathy and respect.
I was not advocating for policies that compromise fairness in women's sports.
My objection is to singling out children for public scrutiny in ways that feel personal and harmful.
Individual athletes, especially kids, should never be the focus of criticism of a flawed system that they have no control over.
I believe sports organizations have a responsibility to come up with rules supporting inclusion while maintaining fair We all want a future for sport that is fair, inclusive, and respectful.
XOXO Simone.
Now, as far as apologies go, this one obviously could have and should have gone much further.
She should have dropped the word salad and stated plainly that boys don't belong in girls' sports, period.
And many conservatives are pointing that out.
They're pointing out that her statement sounds phony, like it was crafted by a PR agency or an AI program.
I mean, when you compare that statement to the original tweets, it's pretty clear it was not written by the same human or by a human at all.
So they don't believe that the apology is sincere.
And they're right about that, of course.
But I think the conservatives that are saying this are missing the point.
You know, the fact that a very famous and popular public figure felt the need to It's not really important that the statement was insincere or incomplete.
In fact, that in some ways makes it more significant.
The fact that, like, we all know she doesn't believe what she's saying, but she felt the need to pretend.
See, this always used to go the other way around.
That it was people who are rational people and conservatives who were issuing these groveling apologies that were insincere, pretending they believe things they don't.
And now it's happening this way, where you've got someone...
No, of course she doesn't.
Is she actually sorry for what she said about Riley Gaines?
Of course she's not.
But she felt the need to pretend.
Okay, which really tells you something.
What's important is that this series of events...
It's yet another sign of just how thoroughly the right has won on the issue of gender ideology.
If this had happened in, say, 2021, there would have been a whole army of public figures circling the wagons around Simone Biles.
And that didn't really happen this time.
And that's particularly notable because it's supposedly Pride Month.
You might remember Pride Month.
This is supposed to be the time of year when They're supposed to be emboldened.
They're supposed to loudly shout down people like Riley Gaines.
They're supposed to dominate the conversation so that no one's allowed to point out that a male just won a girl's softball tournament.
But no one's talking about Pride Month anymore.
LGBT activists are too demoralized and discredited to celebrate at the moment.
That's the same reason they're not really defending Simone Biles.
I mean, a few voices here and there chimed in, but very few.
And it's why she was forced to apologize.
And it's why the Minnesota High School Softball League had to shut down its social media feeds.
Every single one of these liars is aware of the fact that they've lost most of their public support.
Now, yes, technically speaking, Champlin Park High School was named the winner of the State Girl Softball Championship.
But as you watch the players and the coaches gloat, it's hard not to be reminded of all the other frauds throughout history who simply took things too far too quickly.
Pathetic institutions like Champlin Park High School and the Minnesota State Softball League, along with cowardly mouthpieces like Simone Biles, no longer have the cultural power that they had just a few years ago.
And with this latest apology, even if it was generated by a PR firm using ChatGPT, it's evident that Simone Biles and the rest of the LGBT cult are slowly coming around to the reality of their own irrelevance.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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So the movement against American sovereignty has now spread nationwide with riots and demonstrations spreading to cities like Dallas, Atlanta, Boston, New York.
And this is clearly a highly coordinated and well-funded campaign to undermine our national sovereignty and destroy the country.
None of this is organic.
None of this is happening naturally.
This reaction against mass deportations is completely contrived and staged.
And we know that for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that mass deportations haven't even happened yet.
I mean, I hope they do happen.
I want them to happen.
But they have not, in fact, happened at this point.
There have been deportations, but not at a higher rate than other presidents, like Obama even deported people.
So the whole thing is clearly fake.
The violence is real.
The riots are real.
The chaos is real.
But it's obviously being funded and organized and staged very clearly.
And one of the most interesting and sometimes quite funny things about this whole episode has been the attempt to demonize Trump and his response to the riot.
Attempts that often end up making a point that is exactly the opposite of the one that they're trying to make.
And I want to highlight this headline from ABC News, for example.
Here it is.
More U.S. troops are in L.A. than in Iraq and Syria.
There are now more U.S. troops deployed to Los Angeles than Iraq and Syria.
There are 4,800 activated guard and marine personnel in L.A. compared to the 2,500 troops in Iraq and 1,500 in Syria.
Now, we're supposed to hear that, I guess, and find it shocking or appalling or upsetting in some way.
But, of course, most Americans hear that and they think instead, well, yeah, good.
I mean, that's what we want.
That's what we voted for.
So what they're telling us is that U.S. troops are defending U.S. cities and trying to restore order in the U.S. rather than defending cities in random Middle Eastern hellhole countries.
Okay, yeah, again, that's what we voted for.
That is a good thing.
We're happy about that.
We aren't happy that We wish they weren't needed.
But if they are needed, we're happy that they're being used in this country and not somewhere else.
And why is that?
Well, because we don't care about defending cities in Iraq or Syria.
If Iraq and Syria are in a state of chaos, I don't care.
I couldn't care less.
They can worry about their own problems.
Let them take care of themselves.
What does that have to do with us?
But I do care about violence and chaos in American cities.
I care about it in my own country.
And I would rather spend my tax money protecting American cities than cities in the Middle East and countries that, you know, I've never even visited and never will and don't care about.
And this kind of thinking is, I mean, it's intuitive to most normal people.
Right?
But leftists can't wrap their minds around it.
They truly find it confusing.
They're confounded by it.
The idea that we would want to spend our resources on improving and defending our own country and our own community, the idea that we care more about the state of affairs in an American city than in a Middle Eastern city, is truly bewildering to them.
They just can't comprehend it.
This basic instinct, the order of loves, that has been intuitive for everyone since the dawn of time, somehow escapes them.
Because their minds and souls are just that polluted.
And here's more evidence of that.
Here's another story that gives the game away related to this.
The Daily Wire reports, the GOP-led House passed on Tuesday a bill to prohibit non-citizens from voting in local Washington, D.C. elections, overcoming the majority of Democrats who voted against the measure.
A total of 210 Republicans and 56 Democrats supported the legislation.
Which bars foreign nationals from voting in local contests in the nation's capital and repeals a measure passed by the D.C. Council in 2022 that allowed it in the first place.
Another 148 Democrats voted against it.
So it isn't subtle.
Democrats want foreigners to vote in American elections.
Obviously they want that.
They couldn't be more clear about it.
Now, granted, this plan has drawbacks for Democrats.
It's not working as well as they hoped or as well as it used to.
Hispanics are increasingly voting Republican, especially Hispanic men.
But that really has not quelled the Democrats'desire to flood our country with foreigners.
And partly because they're confident, and there was a lot of talk after the election, I think some of it half-joking, some of it not, that I've made similar comments that, oh, you know, Democrats now are going to...
But that hasn't actually happened.
And I think most of us knew that it wouldn't actually happen.
They still support illegal immigration.
They still want to flood our country with foreigners despite the election results.
And that's partly because they're confident in their ability to win the foreign vote by pre- They're confident in their ability to bribe foreigners into supporting them, in other words.
So that's part of it.
But also, this isn't all about voting.
We like to say that Democrats want to import new voters.
And that's true.
They do want to import new voters.
This isn't just about winning elections.
After all, election victories are fleeting.
They're transitory, right?
You win some elections, you lose some elections.
The deeper goal is to reshape America demographically.
It is to make America less white, less European by descent.
It is ultimately about the destruction of Western civilization.
That's the great villain for these people.
That's the great white whale, literally white in this case, that they wish to slay.
You're not going to destroy Western civilization just by winning the next midterms or whatever.
You destroy it by importing non-Western people.
You do it with demographic replacement.
Yeah, I made this point before.
A lot of people have made this, kind of used this illustration, which I think...
But if you were to, let's say, take everybody in Nigeria right now and pick them up and transport them into the United States, and at the same time, you were to take everybody in the United States right now and transport them somewhere else,
let's say, where the left would really want to transport them, let's say, to the sun, just shoot them directly into the sun, Well, if you were to do that, it would mean that the United States doesn't exist anymore.
It's the same land.
It's the same geography.
It may even have the same name for a while, and it may even have the same political structure at least for a while, but it's not America anymore.
It's Nigeria.
You got rid of all the Americans.
You replaced all of them with Nigerians, so this is now Nigeria.
What else would you call it?
And it's easy for people to see this in the reverse, because if we were to do the reverse of this, and round up all the Nigerians, and shoot them into the sun, and then send 100 million Americans, or whatever the population is of Nigeria right now, round up 100 million Americans, particularly white Americans, and plop them right into Nigeria, everyone would rightly see that we haven't just made some slight changes to Nigeria.
This isn't like some redecorating that took place.
We destroyed Nigeria.
Nigeria no longer exists.
It's the same physical location, but it no longer exists.
Now Nigeria is essentially an American state, even if we don't call it that.
Because you cannot have Nigeria without Nigerians.
You get rid of all the Nigerians and it's not Nigeria anymore.
Just like you can't have America without Americans.
And so when we talk about elections and voting, Yes, of course they want to win elections.
Of course they want power.
But they want power and control over American elections because they don't want America to exist anymore.
That's the ultimate goal, is so that America doesn't exist.
And when it comes to the current crisis, the more that America resembles Mexico, the less it is America.
The more you can turn America into Mexico, the more Mexico you have and the less America.
And that is the goal.
All right.
President Trump spoke at Fort Bragg yesterday and he made an announcement about some changes that will be made and have already started making these changes.
They're going to continue to.
Changes that I think are quite good.
But let's listen to the announcement.
For a little breaking news, we are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee.
We won a lot of battles out of those forts.
It's no time to change.
And I'm superstitious, you know?
I like to keep it going, right?
I'm very superstitious.
We want to keep it going.
So, they'll be restoring the names of a bunch of U.S. forts, forts that had been named after Civil War generals, and that includes restoring the name of the fort named after Robert E. Lee, according to Donald Trump.
And I think this is great news.
But, of course, it isn't really being treated like great news by everybody.
Naturally, the left is having a hissy fit about it.
I don't really care about that.
It's not even worth addressing.
Instead, I do want to try to talk about this a little bit and break this down for people on the right who generally opposed tearing down statues and renaming forts and buildings and all that kind of thing, but who supported it and still do for Confederate generals.
There are, from what I've seen, and I don't know what the percentage is, but I've certainly seen a fair number of conservatives who hold that position and who think it's a bad idea to put somebody like Robert E. Lee's name back on a fort or to resurrect his statues, which I think we should be doing that also.
I think we should put up a new Robert E. Lee statue to replace every single one that was taken down and make it five times larger, just to spite the mob that tore it down and to make it impossible for them to tear it down again.
But this is not a universally accepted position on the right.
Far from it, I would say.
So I wanted to talk about this a little bit because I believe that there's a lot of ignorance about the Civil War.
Of course, there's a lot of ignorance about it.
And in particular about men like Robert E. Lee.
And I'm going to focus on his case in particular.
And when I say ignorance, by the way, I don't even mean that as an insult.
because it's not entirely your fault.
If you're ignorant about the real history of the Civil War, Most private schools, it's the same where you are going to be hopelessly misinformed about the Civil War and every other historical subject, particularly subjects, you know, subjects relating to American history.
And unless you specifically went and pursued a better education on the subject.
Unless you did that, then you have never received anything approaching a real education on the Civil War.
If you relied on the school system to teach you about it, and that's kind of as far as your education on the subject goes, then you know nothing about it.
You really have zero understanding.
It's not just that you lack information.
The information you think you have is wrong.
So, but a lot of people, this is the problem with having a hopelessly corrupted school system, is that you're getting a lot of misinformation, you're getting a lot of left-wing propaganda, obviously that's the entire, you're being brainwashed, and then you have to go after the fact, after you graduate, and deliberately try to undo the brainwashing.
But you don't have time to go and explore every single subject that they got wrong in school.
And so a lot of people are just like, Civil War doesn't interest them that much, so they don't spend the time to read about it.
And so they go through their lives harboring all these misperceptions that were instilled in them by the school system.
So with that said, here's the truth about Robert E. Lee, which is, to just summarize, He was not some sort of belligerent racist who led troops into battle in the hope of overthrowing the U.S. government because he wanted to protect slavery.
That's not the case.
I think that's what most people today think.
That's the perception.
That is just not the reality.
That's not what happened.
Lee entered the war on the side of the South, yes, but not for the sake of defending slavery.
Just as Lincoln didn't enter it for the sake of freeing the slaves.
In fact, Lincoln said that if he could save the Union without freeing a single slave, he would do that.
Lincoln said if he could save the Union without freeing any slaves, he'd do that.
If he could save the Union by freeing all the slaves, he'd do that too.
If he could save the Union by keeping some people enslaved and some not, he would do that.
Those were his words.
I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but that was very, very close to the direct quote.
And Lee, for his part, didn't want to go to war to defend slavery.
In fact, Lee said that slavery was a moral evil.
Now, you'll hear that Robert E. Lee owned slaves himself, which is true, but it needs context.
If you're investigating something that happened in history, especially something that happened in another century, something that happened in the mid-19th century or earlier than that, you always need to keep in mind context.
So, did he own slaves?
Yeah, just as some union generals owned slaves.
Grant owned at least one slave for a period of time.
There were other union generals who owned slaves.
Lee owned slaves because he inherited them from his father's estate, and it's said in his father's will that he was to free the slaves after a period of time, which he did.
He was the executor of the estate, and he followed his father's wishes, and the slaves were freed before the Emancipation Proclamation, even though the Emancipation Proclamation actually didn't free a single slave.
Because it was written specifically to free the slaves only in the states that were in rebellion, which were the states that Lincoln did not have control over at the time, and specifically did not free the slaves in the states that he did have control over.
But that's sort of a slightly different topic.
So that's his actual history of slavery.
If you're going to take the position that, okay, yeah, but he still technically owns slaves for a period of time, and he inherited them, he didn't free them right away, he obviously didn't have an enlightened view on the topic.
Yeah, he didn't have an enlightened view on the topic by our standards today.
Nobody did at that time.
And if owning slaves means that somebody is not worthy of being respected or remembered or honored, well, you know, I got news for you about, like, every person in history, if you go back 200 years or earlier, because all of them, If you go by far enough, either own slaves or they didn't own them because they weren't rich enough, but they were okay with the institution.
They believed in the institution.
They were fine with it.
That describes every single person who lived on the planet up until around the 19th century when that started to change.
The Founding Fathers owned slaves.
And this, by the way, is the logic that the left uses to tear down the Founding Fathers.
Take their names off of things.
Tear down their statues.
We're talking about 90 years that separated America declaring independence from the Civil War.
In our day, that's one lifetime, two lifetimes back then.
Not that great of an expanse of time.
And yet, if you're a reasonable person, You can look at our founding fathers and say, yeah, these are men who should be honored and remembered.
And yes, they did also, many of them, own slaves.
But we can understand that in the context of the time.
And if we're not going to read history that way, then we're not reading history at all.
So why did Lee fight for the Confederacy?
Well, because he was a Virginia man.
And back in those days, and this is hard for us to understand, But back in those days, especially in the South, your state was your country.
If you heard somebody refer to their country, they would often be talking about their state.
Lee was more loyal to his state and identified with it more than he did the federal government.
Which kind of makes sense, especially back in those days when people were not connected by modern technology.
And so the only people you ever saw or heard from or heard about or interacted with were the people in your community.
The people who lived in states 500 miles away, you would just never see them ever or hear about them or hear from them or talk to them.
And so he identified with his community where he lived, and it's where his wife and children lived also.
So when he was offered command of the Union Army, He declined.
He declined it because he could not go to war against his own home, against his own community, against his own children.
He had sons that were fighting age.
He'd be fighting against his own kids.
And he gave this as a reason.
His direct quote was, I cannot raise my hand against my community, my home, and my children.
That's the reason.
He saw it as a choice to fight against his birthplace and his home or to fight to defend it.
And he chose the latter.
And I think that's a choice that reasonable people should be able to understand.
It can be hard for us to wrap our minds around the mindset of people back in those days, but that's a poor reflection of our mindset today, not of theirs.
Because people back then, especially guys like Lee, had a very strong sense of honor and duty in a way that almost nobody does today.
Almost nobody does.
But Lee did.
And so for him, the idea that he would, because the other response that you'll often hear Why didn't he just sit it out?
Well, the idea that he would sit it out and not fight at all was just unthinkable.
Like, that just simply was not an option.
Robert E. Lee is a military man, a man of honor and duty, fought with distinction in the Mexican-American War.
He was not going to sit at home while other men fought.
He wasn't going to sit at home while his sons went out and fought.
That just couldn't happen.
He had to take a side.
He didn't want to, but he didn't choose to fight.
He didn't start the war.
In fact, he was opposed to secession.
That's another thing he probably didn't learn if you were relying on the school system to teach you about these things.
His take on secession was that he thought it was a huge mistake and it shouldn't happen.
And yet, at the same time, he also thought that it would be a huge mistake for the North to try to maintain the Union through force.
So he didn't want the South to secede, but he also didn't want the North to try to prevent it by force.
He didn't want the South to secede, he didn't want Virginia to secede, but if they were going to do it, he'd be with them.
And that was his take.
I think it's a pretty reasonable take.
So he was opposed to secession, he thought slavery was a moral evil, and yet he fought for Virginia.
Why?
Well, because he felt duty-bound to do so.
He believed that duty transcends the desires of the individual, which means that he would march in defense of Virginia, even as Virginia did something that he didn't personally agree with.
And again, I know this mentality is just totally unthinkable for people today for whom the desires of the individual always reign supreme, but that was just not the case for almost any of the men who fought in the Civil War on either side.
In fact, there were plenty of guys on the other side who didn't agree that it was a good idea to march down south and force them to stay in the Union at the point of a bayonet, and yet they did it anyway, not because they were moral cowards, but for precisely the opposite reason, because they had a strong sense of duty.
Which came before their personal desires.
They saw their personal desires as less important than their duties as men.
So he marched in defense of his home, and in the process he showed incredible brilliance as a commander and military tactician.
He fought in battles where he was very often hugely outnumbered and outgunned.
He won battle after battle that way.
The Battle of Chancellorsville in particular is considered one of the
But they were smart risks, and the only way to win against those odds is to take smart but bold risks, and Lee was one of the greatest military minds, certainly in American history, when it came to that sort of thing.
And he ultimately lost the war, of course, but he put up a much, much better fight than most people expected.
And then after they lost, he became a champion for reconciliation, for reunification, consistent with his sense of duty that he had.
And he also, because for men like that, back in those days, it was, okay, we're going to go fight.
We're going to fight in this war.
Even if I don't fully agree with it, it's my duty as a man.
I'm going to fight anyway.
Okay, now we've lost, and that's it.
We lost fair and square, and we're going to accept that.
And that's how a man like Robert E. Lee thought.
So, does he deserve to be remembered by history and honored for the positive qualities that I've already listed?
Yes.
So in summary, yes, he does.
And the people who...
He was nothing.
But these people can't even conceive of the level of honor and dignity that guys like Robert E. Lee and men on both sides of the battle possessed.
They don't even have in their pinky finger that level of honor and dignity.
Like, these were men.
These were real men.
And I think that, yes, I think it's a good thing for us to honor and remember them.
And we were able to do that in this country for a long time.
For generations.
What I'm saying right now would have been, it wouldn't even need to be said.
It wouldn't have been a revelation to anybody.
This is generally how people felt.
And only in the last few years are we suddenly acting as though the wounds of the Civil War are just too fresh, too raw for us to have any kind of nuanced view of somebody like Robert E. Lee.
So the wounds are too raw and too fresh for us, and somehow they're more raw and fresh for us than they were for...
Makes no sense.
So there's your history lesson for the day.
Let's get to the comment section.
If you're a man, it's required that you grow a beard.
Hey, we're the Sweet Baby Gang.
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Matt is happy to keep unwanted immigrants away.
Matt wants poor countries to get better by themselves.
That's great.
Like Libya, that tries to create a new coin using the natural resources in Africa, but sadly the legal NATO army destroyed the country.
What else does Matt recommend poor countries to do?
I don't know.
I don't have any recommendation.
I don't have a recommendation for Libya or any other country.
That's up to them to figure out.
It's not my job to fix.
It's not any American's job to fix.
So we always hear this whenever someone says, whenever I say that America doesn't need to be involved in these countries, doesn't need to be taking on their problems, then the response is always, well, what do you want the countries to do?
I don't know.
Why is that my problem?
Why is Libya my problem?
I don't care.
They'll have to figure that out.
I spend 0% of my time thinking about Libya and what Libya is going to do.
I'll leave that to the Libyans.
And if they can't figure it out, then again, that's totally their problem.
If California was part of Mexico, it would look like the rest of Mexico, and the Mexicans would be desperate to get into the next U.S. state.
Yeah, that's the point I was trying to make, though you summarized it much more efficiently.
I mean, never mind who California rightly belongs to.
It belongs to the United States, fair and square very clearly.
More importantly, why is it even a desirable place to be?
It's less and less desirable because of the rampant foreign invasion and also because of failed democratic leadership.
But to the extent that it was ever desirable or it is desirable now, why is that?
Well, it's because it's part of the United States.
And if Mexicans agree that they don't want to be in Mexico, then they also wouldn't want to be in California if it was part of Mexico.
It kind of stands to reason.
Matt, I must say your football analogies will always conquer Tim Walz's football analogies.
Thank you for saying that.
I am proud of my ability to work obscure football analogies that maybe don't always really work in context, but I'm going to use them anyway in any point that I'm trying to make.
Though I think that this skill goes mostly unappreciated, so you're the first person who's ever expressed any appreciation for it, so thank you for that.
California politicians blaming Trump is the most unbelievably stupid thing I've ever heard.
Well, this is the theme, and it extends internationally.
Democrats never take responsibility for the condition of their own states and cities.
It's always somebody else's fault.
And other countries also won't take responsibility for the state of their countries.
I mean, we just heard it in the first comment in this segment.
All these hellhole countries that people want to leave are, we're told, only hellholes because of the U.S. somehow.
So they have no responsibility, take no responsibility for the state of their own countries.
That's the common theme here somehow.
There's been some concerning research about the true safety of the abortion pill that's worth discussing.
A recent report suggests that serious adverse effects from the abortion pill may be more common than previously understood, potentially affecting around 11% of patients, according to their findings.
Given that the abortion pill now accounts for about 60% of all abortions in the U.S., and with roughly a million procedures annually, this could impact tens of thousands of women each year, and of course it impacts 100% of babies who are killed.
Through the abortion pill.
This raises important questions about how we approach these issues.
Organizations like the Preborn Network are taking a different approach, though.
They reported helping over 67,000 women last year by providing comprehensive support that addresses both physical and emotional needs while also offering spiritual guidance through their faith-based perspective.
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They've structured their program so that a single ultrasound costs just $28 and $140 can support five women and their babies.
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Before this deal ends, now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Today for our Daily Cancellation, we have Republican Senator Josh Hawley.
Now, I like and respect Josh Hawley.
He's one of the very few members of Congress who I can say that about.
But the Daily Cancellation believes in equal opportunity.
The Daily Cancellation does not discriminate.
Or maybe I should say it does discriminate.
It discriminates ruthlessly and mercilessly, but it does so equally.
And that is why Senator Hawley must be canceled today.
The Daily Wire reports this week, quote, Senator Josh Hawley joined with a Democrat colleague on Tuesday to introduce a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15.
Quote, for decades, working Americans have seen their wages flatline.
One major culprit of this is the failure of the federal minimum wage to keep up with the economic reality facing hardworking Americans every day.
Along with Senator Peter Welch of Vermont.
The bill would also provide a tax credit for workers making under minimum wage.
We're in the midst of a severe affordability crisis with families in red and blue states alike struggling to afford necessities like housing and groceries.
Every hardworking American deserves a living wage that helps put a roof over their head and food on the table.
$7.25 an hour doesn't even come close.
Okay, so Josh Hawley has joined the ranks of the Democrats claiming that the federal minimum wage should provide a living wage.
Now, granted, this point of view is slightly less crazy now than it was when the Fight for 15 movement first began like 10 years ago or so.
And also, granted, if you're going to have a federal minimum wage, then, yeah, it makes no sense for it to be the same today as it was in 2009.
There's obviously been inflation since then, and not a small amount of it either.
Cumulative inflation since 2009 has been about 45 to 50 percent.
So if we all agree that there needs to be a federal minimum wage, then we should also agree that it needs to be raised.
But we don't all agree that there should be a federal minimum wage.
In fact, the idea itself is absurd.
The federal minimum wage means that the federal government has set a baseline for what all labor is worth.
Everywhere in the country, in every region, for all types of workers and all types of businesses, regardless of local economic conditions or anything else.
Right now, the minimum wage in New York is slightly more than $15 an hour.
That's the state minimum wage.
Alabama, on the other hand, has no state-specific minimum wage, so the minimum wage in that state is the federal minimum, which right now is $7.25.
Hawley's bill pretends that the economic conditions in Alabama...
Are the same as the conditions in New York.
And so Alabama will suddenly be required to have the same minimum wage.
Never mind the fact that the cost of living in Alabama is 12% lower than the national average.
In New York, it's 130% higher.
Now, given that the cost of living is drastically different, it makes a lot of sense that the wages are also drastically different.
But Holly's bill completely disregards that fact, which means that his bill will have no effect on New York.
While proving potentially devastating for businesses, especially small businesses, in Alabama.
And it's not just Alabama.
The states that currently have a minimum wage under the 15 that Holly wants to impose are as follows.
Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
That's 25 states by my count.
Half the states in the country.
And I wanted to list them all because these are all very different states with very different economic climates and local market conditions.
North Dakota is on the list with a cost of living 8% lower than the national average.
Housing price is 30% lower than the national average.
Virginia is also on the list with a cost of living 8% higher than the national average.
And in some cases, like Arlington, in some cities, rather, in Virginia, like Arlington, the cost of living is 10 to 15 percent higher.
Now, Holly's bill...
In Virginia, the current minimum wage is $12.41 an hour, so the bill would only require that employers increase the minimum wage by a little less than $3 an hour, which is still a significant hit.
In North Dakota, the current minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, which means that the employers with minimum wage employees would be required to double their wages.
Which means that the state with the lower average income and the lower cost of living will be required to raise its wages by a much higher percentage.
None of this makes any sense economically, logistically, ethically.
This is why the federal government should not be in the business of declaring what the wages need to be in a country of 340 million people spread out across 50 states and 3 million square miles.
One million workers currently earning the federal minimum wage.
There are another 30 million earning less than 15 an hour.
Josh Hawley wants to wave his wand and declare that all of them, regardless of where they live, how old they are, what job they're doing, how much experience they have, or anything else, all must get raises.
The 17-year-old fry cook in Montana and the 26-year-old cashier in South Carolina both must get a raise and get paid the same.
No matter if their employers can afford it or not.
So decrees Josh Hawley and his Democrat cohorts in the Senate.
It's total nonsense.
And, you know, that's really all that needs to be said about this bill.
You can support the concept of the minimum wage in individual states and still understand why a federal minimum wage and especially a sudden doubling of the federal minimum nationwide makes no sense.
But you know me, I can never leave it at the more moderate position that most people can hopefully agree on.
So I will also say that any kind of minimum wage, including state minimum wages, also make no sense.
The problem with Hawley's federal minimum wage bill is first that it's federal and second that it's minimum wage.
There should be no governmentally decreed minimum wage at any level.
I mean, leaving aside the question of whether the government properly has the right to even wield this kind of power to begin with, the concept is still hopelessly flawed.
The claim that the minimum wage must be a living wage assumes that all minimum wage workers and all hourly workers making less than $15 an hour are working to earn a living, but that is plainly not the case.
Half of minimum wage workers are under the age of 25. A sizable portion are under the age of 20. 70% don't have kids.
That's because a lot of them are kids.
These are teenagers living at home, many of them, and working to gain experience and some spending money.
Should employers be required by law to pay 16-year-olds as though they have a mortgage and two kids at home?
Of course not.
The idea is, again, absurd.
Now, yes, there's a minority of minimum wage workers who do have kids, and some of them, an even smaller minority, are the primary breadwinner in the home.
Again, there's a very small number of people, but the whole point here is that minimum wage laws do not distinguish between a high school sophomore working a summer job and a very rare 35-year-old trying to raise two kids on minimum wage.
And that's the problem.
Overall, 25% of fast food workers in this country, Many of them are not making $15 an hour.
And that's because almost none of them are working to earn a living, least of all support a family.
They are kids working very easy, low-pressure, low-skill jobs.
Who's to say what the minimum value of their labor is?
How do we determine that?
What magic eight ball are we reading to find out the mystical minimum that the labor of a 17-year-old drive-thru employee is worth?
Well, I'll tell you the minimum that any labor can be worth.
Zero dollars.
That's the actual minimum that a thing can be worth.
And considering that slavery was abolished a long time ago and nobody is conscripted into working a job and forced to do it against their will, it makes sense that there would be no minimum.
So if, for example, let's just say, I decided to open a lemonade stand, and I get all the permits and everything, so don't worry about that, and I want to find someone to help run it, but I can only afford to pay them $3 an hour to pour lemonade into cups, And I find someone who would like to perform that menial task for that menial amount of money.
Why shouldn't we be allowed, as two individuals, acting of our own free will and volition, to enter into that agreement with each other?
I mean, if I'm saying to someone, I need this task done, I can only pay you three bucks an hour, you'll work three hours, I'll give you about ten bucks, we'll round up.
If I say that, and they say, okay, sure, yeah, I'll take that.
And then the government comes in and says, sorry, no, it doesn't work for us.
No, sorry.
Well, yeah, but it works for us, though.
We're the ones entering into it.
Yeah, but we don't like it.
Now, if I contractually promise to pay $20 an hour for the labor, but the moment they start work, I tell them it's only going to be $3, well, that would be different.
That's fraud.
But if I tell them what I can pay them ahead of time, and they decide they want to work for that amount of money, what exactly is the problem?
They could just say no, and they could get a job somewhere else.
Now, will they be able to support a family of five on their lemonade stand salary?
No.
Which is why I would recommend that anybody with a family of five to support doesn't look for work at a lemonade stand.
Here's the thing.
Not every job is meant to be a career.
Not every job is meant to support families.
There are other kinds of jobs that exist.
In an economy, it's okay for those jobs to exist.
It's good that they exist.
We should want them to exist.
My first job when I was a kid, when I was, I don't know, 14 or 15 or something, was at a snowball stand.
Now, there is no universe where a part-time job at a snowball stand could ever support a family.
So, should snowball stands just not exist then?
Because that's the only other option.
But if I'm a 14-year-old kid and I have zero financial obligations at all, and there's a snowball stand that wants to open, but they can't afford to pay more than $5 an hour, why shouldn't they be allowed to give that to a 15-year-old kid?
What are we talking about living wage for in a case like that?
That's insane.
Insisting that even these kinds of jobs provide a living wage will mean not that those jobs will provide a living wage, but that they simply will not exist.
If you tell me that I have to pay my lemonade stand employee $15 an hour, that will not mean that now my lemonade employee gets $15 an hour.
It will just mean that now my lemonade employee gets $0 an hour because I won't be able to hire him in the first place.
I'll have to either close up shop or pour lemonade myself, or if I'm a big corporation with lots of lemonade franchises across the country, I will solve my lemonade dispensing problem with automation, which won't be difficult to do.
Either way, because you insisted that I provide a living wage to someone who doesn't actually need it for a job that does not warrant it, now all you've done is create fewer jobs.
Oh, and by the way, now my lemonade will be like five times more expensive.
Congratulations.
All of this because you insist that a kid at a lemonade stand has to make enough to afford a two-bedroom apartment.
That's what the minimum wage gets you.
It's a bad idea with even worse downstream consequences.
Precisely the kind of idea that Democrats specialize in.
And now that seems to have rubbed off on Republicans like Josh Hawley, who is normally really solid on most issues, but not on this one, which is why he is today, regardably, canceled.
