Ep. 1638 - The Fake “Mental Health” Test Coming To Your Child’s School
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, it’s not getting a lot of attention but the state of Illinois just rolled out one of the most horrifying and dystopian policies in American history. It will be very bad for your kids. But very good for Big Pharma. I’ll explain. Also, Donald Trump prepares to send the military to deal with drug cartels. We’ll talk about why this is a good use of American military power. And scientists are saving the planet by developing a new type of butter that doesn’t involve cows, or plants, or anything edible. Plus, an EBT recipient on TikTok declares that she “deserves” brownies and candy, provided by the taxpayer. Is that true? Do EBT recipients deserve free junk food? Do they deserve free food at all?
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Ep.1638
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These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer.
During Answer the Call, I take questions from people just like you about their problems, opportunities, challenges, or when they simply need advice.
How do I balance all of this grief, responsibility?
How do you repair this kind of damage?
My daughter, Michaela, guides the conversations as we hopefully help people navigate their lives.
Everyone has their own destiny.
Everyone.
Thank you.
you you Today, the Matt Wall Show, it's not getting a lot of attention, but the state of Illinois just rolled out one of the most horrifying and dystopian policies in American history.
It will be very bad for your kids, but very good for big pharma.
I'll explain.
Also, Donald Trump prepares to send the military to deal with drug cartels and talk about why this is a good use of American military power.
And scientists are saving the planet by developing a new type of butter that doesn't involve cows or plants or anything edible.
Plus, an EBT recipient on TikTok declares that she deserves brownies and candy provided by the taxpayer.
Is that true?
Do EBT recipients deserve free junk food?
Do they deserve free food at all?
We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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One of the ironies of the medical community is that at a superficial level, conflicts of interest are taken very seriously.
But most of the time, if you look just an inch below the surface, the most obvious and severe conflicts of interest are routinely ignored.
This happens all the time.
There are all sorts of guidelines about how physicians can't directly take cash from drug companies in order to prescribe certain medications, for example.
But at the same time, it's completely fine for big pharma to hire doctors as, say, consultants or speakers.
And then if those doctors in turn happen to prescribe a lot of drugs from big pharma, who's to say there's any connection?
We saw something similar during COVID.
Every medical journal is supposed to inform readers about conflicts of interest that exist in any of their articles.
And yet, when every single virologist who was conducting dangerous bat experiments in Wuhan wrote that infamous letter in The Lancet explaining that this new virus definitely didn't come from their dangerous bat experiments in Wuhan, there was no disclaimer at all.
Instead, virtually everyone in the scientific community took that letter as gospel.
After all, why would the people involved in making a Frankenstein virus ever lie about their role in creating it?
And this kind of corruption happens all the time in medicine, but it's rarely discussed because the pharmaceutical industry happens to be one of the biggest advertisers in the media.
Again and again, conflicts of interest are brushed over or ignored completely.
And one of the most disturbing examples by far is the way that the medical community developed something called PHQ9.
Now, even if that doesn't ring a bell, there's a good chance that you or your child have had a run-in with PHQ-9 at one point or another.
This is probably one of the most scandalous untold stories in medicine.
So essentially, PHQ-9 is a nine-item test that's used to measure whether someone might need psychiatric treatment, including medications.
And it's used by school psychologists and nurses, as well as doctor's offices all over the country.
Pfizer developed it, then released it into the public domain so that it would spread throughout the medical community.
And here for reference is what the test looks like.
It's a list of questions asking patients whether they've experienced a handful of negative symptoms over the last few weeks.
They have to rank the frequency of these symptoms as not at all, several days, more than half the days, and nearly every day.
And possible negative symptoms, quote unquote, include little interest or pleasure in doing things, trouble falling or staying asleep, sleeping too much, feeling tired, poor appetite or overeating, trouble concentrating, moving or speaking so slowly that other people could have noticed.
Now, typically, if five of these symptoms are present for more than half of the past 42 days, then you're diagnosed with depression and handed an SSRI.
And it's supposedly a reliable system.
But as I rattled off those symptoms, you may have noticed the problem already, that many of these symptoms don't necessarily have anything to do with a mental health condition.
At various points in their lives, every human being alive will report that they're having trouble sleeping or feeling tired or having a bad appetite.
In fact, you might have these quote-unquote symptoms for years at a time.
You might have it for your entire life.
You know, that's particularly true for children as well as adults going through stressful periods in their lives.
If you have a stressful job, if you're in school, you might be tired a lot.
That's pretty common.
For example, a woman named Callie Williams was given a PHQ-9 test as part of a prenatal appointment with an OBGYN in 2016.
Williams was recently married and she was a brand new stepmother, which naturally made her feel somewhat overwhelmed and tired and all those things.
And after filling out the form, she was told that she was depressed and that she needed to take Zoloft.
When she asked for more detailed mental health examination, she was denied.
She spoke to Stat News about her experience and here's how they reported on what happened next.
Quote, if Williams didn't take Zoloft, the doctor said she would be marked as non-compliant.
She was unnerved by that threat, so agreed to take the medication.
It didn't help.
It was very easy to rely on the checked boxes, said Williams, who lives in Sacramento, California.
I didn't see an effort to dig any deeper even when I was asking for that.
So here we have an adult, a woman, who was pressured into taking psychoactive medication because of a survey that's obviously imprecise by design.
And if you're the inquisitive type, that might lead you to ask a very basic question, which is who exactly wrote this survey?
Is it possible that the creator of the survey could potentially have a vested interest in getting people to take psychoactive drugs?
Now, as you probably guessed, indeed, there is a major conflict of interest at work here.
But it's actually a lot worse than you're probably assuming.
And very soon, courtesy of the Democrat Party, this particular conflict of interest has the potential to impact the lives of millions of children.
Now, before we get to that, we'll start at the beginning of the story, which for SSRIs is the early 1990s.
And at that point, if you can believe it, it's hard to believe these days, but SSRIs were not popular among most doctors.
They didn't want to prescribe the drug because they were untested and they came with a lengthy list of severe side effects.
It's the exact opposite of the current status quo where SSRIs are distributed like candy, but at the time that wasn't the case.
But Pfizer, which was producing the SSRI known as Zoloft, a competitor of Prozac, had a plan to change that.
They were going to find a way to make psychiatry a matter of primary care instead of a specialty that involved far fewer patients.
A big part of that plan involved funding the creation of the PHQ-9 test.
So without Pfizer's funding, which amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars, there would be no PHQ-9.
And everyone involved in the project has now admitted that.
But the PHQ-9 was not the brainchild of a hardworking Ernest Pfizer scientist who wanted to ensure the most accurate diagnostic test that he'd come up with.
In fact, it wasn't even the brainshot of an MD.
Instead, it was the creation of a marketing guru named Howard Kroplick.
Kroplik is not a doctor.
He's not a scientist.
He has an engineering degree from Stony Brook University, an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
And that's it.
And immediately After graduating from Wharton, he went to work at Pfizer and very quickly he became one of the most influential figures in modern medicine.
Kroplick is the reason that, for example, Viagra ads don't mention the word impotence because they don't want to insult or demean their potential customers.
A quoting again from StatNews, Janet Williams, a Columbia University professor, confirmed Kroplick's role in creating the PHQ-9, saying he came up with the idea and recruited her and a renowned psychiatrist, Robert Spitzer, to develop a tool.
Both Williams and primary care doctor Kroenke said they understood the form would be beneficial to Pfizer as a way to sell more of its medication.
Potential conflict of interest around the PHQ-9's development is a good point, said Kroplick.
But he said Pfizer didn't interfere with the research.
Now, the last part may be true.
It's quite possible that Pfizer didn't explicitly state that these doctors and the marketing guy had to come up with a test that would result in doctors over-prescribing their products.
In fact, they probably didn't say that explicitly because that's not how these things work.
But the whole point of a conflict of interest is that even without this kind of explicit quid pro quo, everybody understands what needs to be done.
There was clearly a strong incentive here for these doctors, along with Pfizer, to present the PHQ-9 as a diagnostic tool, not merely a survey.
And it appears they did exactly that.
A paper published in 1999 states, quote, the PHQ is the first entirely self-administered diagnostic instrument designed for use in primary care.
Now, on their website, as StatNews pointed out, the PHQ is described as both a screener and a diagnostic tool, but it's not especially useful for either purpose.
Here's the title of a paper published just five years ago: quote, Patient Health Questionnaire 9 scores do not accurately estimate depression prevalence.
Our researchers looked through dozens of studies involving PHQ scores, and here's what they found: quote, an analysis of 44 studies in 9,200 patients found that when the PHQ is used to gauge the prevalence of depression, it's more than twice as likely to find patients have the illness compared to when physicians conduct a clinical evaluation.
By other estimates, including one from the psychiatrist Nicholas Baudre, up to two-thirds of the results from this test are false positives.
Two-thirds.
So, to recap, Big Pharma wanted to market an SSRI.
They hired a marketing guy to invent a survey that resulted in mass overdiagnosis of depression, which could then be treated by SSRIs made by Big Pharma.
And it worked.
They made billions of dollars off it.
Within a decade, SSRIs started printing billions of dollars every year.
And through all of this, no one has any idea how SSRIs even work or if they work.
In fact, a study released just a few years ago from researchers in Saudi Arabia and published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS One found that, quote, the real-world effect of using antidepressant medication does not continue to improve patients' health-related quality of life over time.
And as we've discussed many times, even establishment scientists have abandoned the notion that depression is somehow related to serotonin levels or chemical imbalances, which is how it was sold for decades.
And now they have admitted that that's not true.
So, with this recent history in mind, which no one outside of the niche publication Stat News has bothered to cover, it should be apparent that no one in their right mind would try to expose millions of children to these kinds of phony diagnostics.
Mental health screening is an unreliable and often fraudulent tool that has been used to justify the over-prescription of powerful psychoactive medications.
And that's not debatable.
That is a fact.
That is what has happened.
At a minimum, it's extremely error-prone, even when you're talking about adults who have voluntarily gone to the doctor to seek this treatment.
So, very clearly, we should be reducing the use of these kinds of broad diagnostic tests as much as we possibly can.
That's especially true when there's no reason to make someone take one of these tests because they're not complaining of any problem.
The risk of a bag diagnosis is astronomically, astronomical.
But the Democrat Party, well, they're not limiting the use of these tests.
Instead, they've just announced a plan to drastically expand these diagnostics and to compel children to take them, at least unless parents go Through some kind of opt-out procedure, which most of them won't.
And this doesn't seem to have gotten very much attention, but it should, because I think it's one of the most horrifying policies in modern American history.
And I mean that sincerely, no exaggeration.
So here's what's happening.
The state of Illinois is now demanding that children beginning in the third grade in public school undergo annual psychiatric evaluations.
In other words, even if there's nothing wrong with them, a third grader will probably be asked the same kind of questions that I just ran through.
Now, as of right now, Illinois hasn't announced the specific test they're going to implement, but it stands to reason it's going to resemble, if not replicate, the test that Pfizer has put out in the public domain.
After all, that's the gold standard.
Children will presumably be expected to tell their school psychologists whether they've been having trouble focusing or having trouble sleeping or whether they're, you know, sad going to school every day.
Completely normal childhood behaviors and feelings will be reclassified as symptoms of major mental health disorders, and millions of more children will be put on these dangerous potent drugs.
Watch.
Now, Illinois students will soon be taking another type of test, but this one has nothing to do with their report cards or their fitness.
The state of Illinois will now start screening for mental health issues.
The governor's signature today at the Schute School at Evanston makes Illinois the first school in the nation to roll out universal mental health screenings to its schools.
At a time when our kids are struggling with anxiety and depression more than ever before, it's our responsibility to ensure that young people have all the support that they need to get the help that they deserve.
The new law will require public schools to offer age-appropriate screenings to identify mental health concerns in students in the third through 12th grades.
The process will be overseen by the Illinois State Board of Education, who will develop model procedures for districts.
The screenings are designed to be confidential, and parents who don't want their kids to participate must opt out.
The screenings will also connect families with the beacon portal that helps them find psychiatric care in their communities.
What we have heard from families and from young people is that an annual check on sadness, worry, fear, and other problems would help to identify young people who need to talk.
Now, if you listen to Republicans' reaction to this really evil plan that's been concocted by devious people, you'll hear the generic claim about government overreach and so on.
But the actual problem here is much more straightforward, a lot worse, and it needs to be spelled out.
The point of these annual screenings is to ensure that they drug as many children as possible with psychoactive medications so that those children become loyal customers of Big Pharma for life.
And of course, they'll also become profoundly unhappy people, which accounts for roughly 100% of the Democrats' voter base.
So it's a win-win for politicians like J.B. Pritzker and for Big Pharma.
And it's a lose-lose for you and for your children.
If Big Pharma was able to prescribe millions of SSRIs to adults based on bogus tests that were invented by Pfizer's marketing department, then there's no doubt that children in public schools in Illinois will be extremely easy targets.
And not just for SSRIs.
We all know that ADHD medications, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and so on will be distributed to minors as well as a result of this program.
These are drugs that aren't simply unnecessary.
They're actively harmful for children.
In the case of ADHD drugs, even the so-called experts in the field have admitted as much.
The New York Times of all places just published a lengthy article on the topic with the headline, have we been thinking about ADHD all wrong?
Yes, we have, but the drugs aren't being pulled from the market.
No one's being prosecuted.
Instead, the pill pushers are coming up with new tactics to convince more children to take these drugs.
And politicians in Illinois, many of whom take a lot of money from Big Pharma, are happy to oblige.
This is an unmistakable escalation in the ongoing effort to medicalize normal human thoughts and emotions and behaviors and to corrupt and profoundly and Permanently alter the lives of children for financial and political reasons.
For decades, the school system has been a conveyor belt feeding kids to big pharma.
And now that conveyor belt will work at warp speed.
It'll begin in Illinois, but it's not going to end there.
Before long, the only children who will be spared this sales pitch, the only ones who will be insulated from this heavy-handed effort to drug them, will be the children who don't attend public school at all.
And you probably didn't need another reason to keep your children far away from the public school system.
But in case you did, here it is.
If these people can pressure adults into taking drugs they don't need, then they can do it to your children as well.
And with this new law, some of the most prominent Democrats in the country are making it abundantly clear that one fake diagnostic test at a time, that's exactly what they intend to do.
Now let's get to our five headlines.
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Now, the big news today is, as you probably heard, is that Donald Trump has announced that he's going to federalize law enforcement in D.C. And I'm going to talk about that tomorrow.
We're going to do a big monologue on that tomorrow and break it down.
Spoiler, I'm very much in favor of it, but I want to go into that in much more detail tomorrow.
For today, I wanted to hit on a couple other things and some other initiatives, recent initiatives from the Trump administration that were announced.
This one, I also like a lot.
This is from Fox News.
President Donald Trump has secretly authorized military force against Latin American drug cartels designated by the United States as foreign terrorist organizations, according to reports.
The move reported by the New York Times would give U.S. forces permission to engage the cartels with traffic drugs like fentanyl across the U.S.-Mexico border.
New York Post, according to the White House said, according to the New York Post, the president determined to not just dismantle, but completely destroy Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro's cartel, de los Soles, and obliterate their operations in the Western Hemisphere.
Mexican president Claudia Scheinbaum on Friday said the U.S. military would not be entering Mexican territory following reports that Washington could take action to combat the cartels.
It has nothing to do with Mexican territory, she said.
It has nothing to do with, it has to do with their country.
It does not involve our territory.
Now, this is military intervention that I support.
This is how we should be using the military, clearly in defense of the homeland.
Go into whichever countries these cartels are operating in and kill them, kill them all.
The Mexican president, she says the U.S. won't be entering Mexico.
Mexico, it has nothing to do with us, as that country has just been funneling drugs and gangs and violence into our country for decades.
But of course, we should just disregard that.
You know, what is she going to do about it?
I'd love for Trump to say that to her.
It's the kind of thing he would say.
Yeah, we are coming in.
What are you going to do about it?
What are you going to do about it?
You're the president of Mexico.
Oh, yeah, we're coming in.
Oh, you think we're not?
Yeah, no, we totally are.
And there's absolutely not a damn thing that you are going to do about it or can do about it.
What now?
Yes, sit down.
Sit down in the corner over there like a little child and behave.
Okay.
How about that?
I would totally support Trump speaking to other world leaders exactly like that.
Hey, you, just sit down over there.
No, this is not.
You're going timeout.
Yeah, You'll speak when you're spoken to, Claudia.
How about that?
You know, Mexico has been sending crime, again, and drugs and violence and gangs into our country for a very long time.
And so we'll do whatever we need to do to protect our country.
And we don't give the slightest damn how you feel about it.
You know, how about get your own country out of control?
How about take care of this problem yourself so we don't have to come down and do it for you?
You know, it's like it's like my kids know this.
If they're having, you know, if they're having some kind of squabble, right?
They're down in the basement in the playroom and they're fighting.
And they know if I call down and say, look, you guys better figure this out because you don't want me to come down and figure it out for you.
Okay, you got about five seconds to figure out your little problems.
If I come down to figure it out, you're not going to like the solution.
How about that?
And that's kind of how we have to deal with these other countries, like children.
Because really, they're lucky that Claudia Scheinbaum is lucky that we don't go down and just conquer the whole country and turn it into a vassal state.
We'd be entirely justified in doing so.
Entirely justified.
All the problems you've caused for us.
Of all the nations in the world, Mexico is the greatest threat, one of the greatest threats.
It's caused the greatest damage to this country.
I think that's like inarguable.
So now the only reason I'd oppose doing that is just that there's easier and cheaper ways of dealing with the problem.
So send in the military, obliterate the cartels, kill every single cartel member, hunt them down, kill them, and go full Sicario on their asses, basically.
And that's what we should be doing.
Which is why I get accused of being some kind of libertarian, anti-war hippie, but I'm not any of those things.
Certainly not libertarian or a hippie.
I'm also not anti-war.
I mean, anti-war is a ridiculous position.
Speaking of children, that's a childish, that's a childish position.
That's the kind of thing that like a six-year-old, I'm anti-war.
Okay, sweetie.
Yeah, yes, war.
Of course you are.
But it's like saying you're anti-sadness or something.
Like there are times when war is the right path.
There's times when war is obviously necessary.
War is a part of life.
It's a part of human existence.
It's a part of having a civilization.
You can't have a civilization without war.
Every war, every civilization requires war, requires the military to maintain civilization.
And the entire history of human civilization clearly shows us that.
Although without civilization, you end up actually with even more war.
So that's kind of the catch-22.
So anti-war, no, that's just a dumb, that's a dumb, useless thing to say.
I'm anti-bad wars.
I'm anti-unjust wars.
I'm anti-wars that we get involved in that have nothing to do with defending our people and our homeland.
I'm anti-wars that are waged on behalf of other countries that are not the United States of America.
I'm against those.
I'm against wars of liberal colonialism, wars that are waged to export liberal values across the globe.
To be distinguished from wars of sort of traditional colonialism, wars where we are conquering a land, bringing it under our control and subjugation.
I'm not opposed to that in principle, you know, because historically that kind of colonialism has clearly been on balance a force for good in the world.
Our country wouldn't exist without it.
So that's where I stand.
And this would be a war, if not a full-scale war, then a use of military power, a use of military force that is clearly in the name of national defense, clearly, you know, actual national defense.
And I'm very much in favor of it.
Here's one that I'm not in favor of, though.
This is the New York Post reporting: President Donald Trump is reportedly eyeing, reclassifying marijuana as a less dangerous drug, a move that could expand medical marijuana research and ease industry restrictions.
At a $1 million plate fundraiser at his New Jersey Golf Club earlier this month, Trump told attendees that he's interested in pursuing the change.
Fundraiser guests include Kim Rivers, chief executive officer of True Leave, a top marijuana company who encouraged Trump to pursue the change and expand medical marijuana research, according to the report.
So, this is one that I'm not in favor of, and this is where I tick off a certain portion of the audience, but that happens like every show, I guess.
So, this is nothing new.
I think this is a terrible idea.
I hope that Trump does not pursue it.
I hope he goes the opposite way.
There's nothing good that will come out of normalizing weed even more than it already has been and making it even more accessible than it already has been, even less stigmatized, right?
There's nothing good that will come of it.
And I know that nothing good will come of it because we've watched it, as I've said, you know, whenever this comes up.
The great thing about this topic, if there's anything great about it, is that we don't have to speak in hypotheticals anymore.
We don't have to engage in thought experiments.
We don't have to guess how this will go because we have now evidence.
We have now real-world experience.
We have watched as marijuana has been progressively normalized and legalized, made more accessible and less stigmatized over the past decade plus, and we've seen the results.
And the results are terrible.
I mean, it's just right in front of your face.
The results are bad.
The results are in, and they're not good.
Okay.
And I've made this point many times.
I've yet to hear a pothead engage with it honestly.
But here's my contention: every single city that has legalized weed has, in the aftermath, become measurably worse by just about every metric.
Okay, cities are dirtier, filthier, grimier, less livable places now with legalized weed than they were before.
That's my contention.
Now, you could easily disprove it if it were possible to disprove.
All you have to do is point to an example of an American city.
I don't care about don't give me some city in Europe somewhere, although I think this holds true in most of the cities too, but we're talking about America.
So, give me an example of an American city that has seen measurable improvements that has become a better place to live after weed was legalized.
So, go ahead, give me an example.
I know the comment section will be filled with potheads that are, you know, freaking out and crying about it.
I'm not interested in your tears.
I'm interested in just like give them, put what I want to see is a whole list of cities in the comments.
Go ahead.
Go ahead, list the America.
Give us the American city.
They say, oh, this place is a lot better now.
I'd love to see it.
I'd love to see you try.
Here's another way of kind of looking at it.
And I was thinking about this.
Think about a task that you might want a group of people to complete.
Okay, maybe you're an employer.
Maybe you're a homeowner and you need, you know, the roof fixed or whatever, any task.
Now, can you think of a task where you would want your workforce that you've put on this task, whatever it is, to consist of people who smoke weed every day?
Okay, like in what context would you look at the people that you've assigned to a task and see them smoking weed and say to yourself, oh, good.
Oh, oh, good.
These people are perfect for the job.
If you needed, if you had a task, you want to complete it and you had to choose and someone gave you an option.
Well, we got group A and group B, and you don't know anything about them.
All you know is that Group A, they smoke weed every day and group B doesn't.
Is there any world where you'd say, oh, give me group A?
Yeah, give me the weeds.
Definitely them.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe if you needed to write a song or something, then maybe the people that are smoking pot would be maybe.
In fact, I'm not even sure if that's the case.
Maybe it depends on the genre.
But aside from that, it's hard to imagine any task where pot smoking would be considered an asset.
And all that proves, again, is that marijuana is a net negative for society.
And if it's a net negative, then we shouldn't encourage it or normalize it or legalize it.
It seems like a really simple calculation to me.
As you know, I am a simple man and I look at things in a simple way.
I'm accused of that often.
Oh, you simplify.
Yeah, you're right.
That's what I do.
Because I actually think that a lot of problems, and one of the reasons why problems aren't solved in this country is because we just make them way more complicated than they actually are.
And a lot of times, there are some problems that are more complicated, but most problems are actually pretty simple.
Really pretty simple.
How do you solve obesity?
It's not, well, we need the right equation, the right this.
We need the, you got to figure, no, just, just get some exercise and don't eat as much.
It really is that simple.
No, you don't understand.
No, it's really that simple.
It really is that simple.
But it doesn't work.
No, you're not doing it because you're lazy.
Don't lie.
You actually haven't tried it.
You're claiming you've tried to be having.
So that's how it works for most things.
And in this case, I think it's also very simple.
That it's kind of clear from the recent historical evidence that marijuana is a net negative for society.
And if it's a net negative for society, then we're asking ourselves, oh, should we continue to legalize this and make it more accessible?
Well, it's a net negative.
So no.
Why, why?
Why would you?
If it's undeniable that this like overall is harmful to society, then why, what, what would be the reason?
And you can't respond.
Well, why don't we want to, if it's net negative, why don't we want it?
I don't know, because it's a negative.
That's why.
And that's the answer is in the question.
Marijuana makes people lethargic, lazy, unmotivated.
These days, it also can make you psychotic.
I mean, the kind of weed people are smoking these days is very potent, way more potent than stuff back when I was a teenager or when my parents were teenagers.
And for plenty of people, it causes psychotic episodes.
I mean, that's a real thing.
And again, the potheads will scoff at it and they'll laugh.
It's like, oh, when is that ever happening?
I don't know.
It happens all the time.
I mean, there's a lot of research on this.
There's a lot of literature.
There's plenty of just examples.
It's a thing.
I'm sorry that it upsets you, but it is actually a real thing.
And you just going, yeah, right.
That's not an argument, okay?
That's not an argument.
Rolling your eyes and going, yeah, okay.
Not an argument.
Marijuana does, in fact, cause psychotic episodes.
It happens all the time, especially the stuff people are smoking these days.
So why would we do anything but prohibit it?
And you can tell that I'm right because the only thing that potheads can or will do in response is to claim that alcohol is worse, right?
That is the go-to.
Every time, oh yeah, what about alcohol?
Now, I think that alcohol's effects on society is very, these effects are very demonstrably better than weed's effects.
Again, history speaks for itself.
Societies where everybody smoked tobacco and drank booze thrived.
Our own society went from horse and buggy to rocket ships in the span of a few decades and everybody was drinking whiskey for lunch.
Okay.
Now, I'm not saying that those things happened because of the booze.
What I am saying is that the booze obviously didn't prevent it.
So I can make a factual statement that is 100% proven by history, which is that a society can thrive while people are also drinking booze and smoking cigarettes.
That's a factual statement.
There is historical evidence of it.
Lots of it.
Hundreds of years of historic, thousands of years, really.
I can also make another claim, which is that societies of stoners have not thrived.
There's really no example of that.
I mean, the societies of stoners, you're talking about people that wear loincloths, cloths, and sleep in mud huts.
Okay.
Societies where everyone is stoned all the time.
It's like you had a society where people drink whiskey for lunch.
Well, I'm not saying that that's good.
I'm not saying you should drink whiskey for lunch, but we know that that doesn't, it's not going to send society crashing down.
We've seen it a society where everyone is smoking weed at lunch Well, all the historical evidence tells us that what you end up with is a mud hut okay and sleeping in pig in a in a in a in a in a you know in a tent right that's that's what those societies look like okay that's it and that's the uh that's the the proof but but regardless again even if i were to acknowledge yeah alcohol is terrible even if i said alcohol is
worse than weed.
I don't think it is, but if I did, that doesn't help you at all.
That would only be an argument for also prohibiting alcohol.
It's not an argument for permitting marijuana.
Like by pointing to, right, by, it's like if I said that carjacking is bad and you said, well, murder is a lot worse.
Well, yeah, but that doesn't make carjacking any better.
And if we lived in a society where murder was legal, actually we do, it's called abortion, that would not be a reason to make things even worse by also legalizing carjacking.
That's, that's actually argument not for legalizing carjacking, but for making murder illegal.
Right.
So if, if someone is saying that something is bad and your response is, yeah, maybe it is, but this other thing's also bad.
All you've done again is if you've done anything, all you've done is make an argument for also prohibiting that other thing.
That is in no way an argument for permitting the thing that you're ostensibly trying to defend.
All right.
Um, I have some, uh, news here that will actually interest, uh, the, the potheads.
It's about, it's about butter and that's news that I, that I also take seriously because I am a devoted fan of butter.
So CBS news reports on a new company backed by Bill Gates that, uh, makes butter without the use of the, uh, and, uh, and, uh, you're probably thinking, well, haven't, we've already done this a million times plant-based, no cows, no plants, nothing, nothing edible is involved in the creation of this new butter that Bill Gates is gracing the world with.
This is another way to save the planet allegedly, but, uh, let's watch the, uh, the clip from CBS news.
Here it is.
It looks, smells, and tastes like the butter we're all familiar with, but without the farmland, fertilizers, or emissions tied to that typical process.
And this butter breakthrough, it's happening right here in Batavia.
In the middle of an industrial park in a suburb west of Chicago, something unprecedented is happening.
So you're using this gas right now to, like, cook your food.
Um, and we're proposing that we would like to first make your food with, with that gas.
The company is called Saver, and you better believe it.
Their pioneering tech uses carbon and hydrogen to make the stick of butter you see on this plate.
This is pretty novel to be able to make food that looks and tastes and feels exactly like dairy butter, but with no agriculture whatsoever.
And no long ingredient list the average person can't pronounce.
It's really just our fat, some water, a little bit of lecithin as an emulsifier, and some natural flavor and color.
How?
Fats are made up of carbon and hydrogen chains.
The goal here?
Replicate those chains without animals or plants.
And they did it.
They tell me, to simplify, they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heat them up and oxidize them.
The final result?
It looks like a wax, like a candle wax at first.
But they're fat molecules, like the ones in beef, cheese, or vegetable oils.
Sustainability is why we are here.
It's all done releasing zero greenhouse gases, using no farmland to feed cows.
We're like not at full capacity in this facility yet.
How does it taste?
I love butter, so I'm going to take a really healthy amount.
Admittedly, surprisingly, like butter.
Cheers.
We're tasting butter.
Yeah, no it doesn't.
no it doesn't you're you are a filthy liar uh i you are you are lying now i have two major problems with this the first is that i know damn well that it does not taste like butter you We all know that.
Every day they have some new alternative product on the market, you know, alternative butter, alternative milk, meat, cheese, thousands of alternatives.
I've tried many of them, always just sort of out of morbid curiosity.
And it never tastes like the thing that it's imitating.
Never.
Here's another statement I'll make.
There is not an alternative product like this on the market that actually tastes like the thing that it's imitating.
That does not exist.
And yet there will always be someone who will swear to you that it does, no matter what it is.
There's always going to be someone handing you the glass of like fake milk made out of liquefied mulch or whatever it is, claiming, claiming, oh, dude, this tastes just like right.
You will never tell the difference.
If I gave you this in a blind taste test, you'd never even know.
And then you taste it and you say, no, that's, yeah, that's mulch.
That's definitely mulch.
That tastes exactly like mulch, undeniably, unmistakably.
So I guarantee this is no different.
This is a, I absolutely guarantee it.
Second, regardless of the taste, I really just object in principle to artificial slop made in a laboratory.
I reject it.
I object to it in principle.
And if you think the word, if you think the word slop is too harsh, well, let me call your attention back to the video because you might not have noticed this, but let's look at the freeze frame from minute 138.
There's the freeze frame, and there you can see it.
There's a giant vat in the background at this factory that literally says slop water.
I mean, they are literally calling this stuff slop water.
So if you want to be a good little planeteer and eat your emulsified slop water, then you go ahead.
I'll pass.
I'll take a pass on the slop water.
I'll take a pass on the slop water that they turn into candle wax and then expect you to spread it on your toast.
You know what I want?
I want real.
Okay.
I want, that's what I want.
This is my cry in the wilderness.
This is this is my cry, my protest against the darkness.
I will not go silently into the into the dark because I'm sick of, I'm sick of fake.
The last thing we need is more fake.
Give me something real.
Everything's fake now.
You go on social media, half the accounts are bots.
So much of what you see is generated by AI.
People spend all day, you know, staring at their screens, the reality filtered through, curated by algorithms.
And it's all fake.
Even the real people are still fake.
Right?
Everything I saw another video the other day, one of 900 million of a woman crying and having a meltdown on camera on a selfie video.
It's fake.
The emotions are fake.
It's all fake.
The food is fake.
The emotions are fake.
The butter is fake.
So this is the dividing line.
I think in the future, there will be those of us who are satiated by all the fake stuff.
Those people who will eat the fake butter and watch the fake movies generated by fake AI and just sit in this totally fake world, numbed by it, satiated by it.
There'll be people like that.
And then there'll be people who, you know, and these are people who no longer hunger for authenticity because their souls have grown numb.
They don't even have the urge for it.
Like they don't even understand.
These are people that they'll never even look outside the window ever again.
They have no interest.
There could be a beautiful sunset and you'll tell them, go look at the sunset.
They won't even turn their necks to look at it.
It's not worth the effort.
And so there'll be those people.
And then on the other hand, you're going to have people who just deeply long for what is real and what is natural and what is authentic and what is genuine.
You're going to have those people too.
And that really is going to be, I think sort of the core issue, like the dividing line in the culture will be that people that are satisfied with fake and people who want something real.
And they want what is real for its own sake.
It won't matter.
I mean, this will be why AI will not take over everyone's lives.
It'll probably take over a lot of people's lives.
It won't take over everybody because if you still have a soul, it won't matter how realistic it is or how close it is to the real thing.
It won't matter.
You just want the real thing.
Right?
It's like if they put you in a windowless box and replaced all the windows with screens so that it looked like a beautiful sunset, it looked exactly like the real thing.
Well, there are going to at least be some people who still have a soul and say, no, I want to see the real sunset.
And it'll be no use to say, yeah, but this looks exactly like it.
Yeah, but it's not it, though.
It looks like it, but it's not it.
And I want the thing that is it for its own sake.
And you can have people that understand that and people who don't.
And the fake people will go off and live in their fake world in a matrix that they willingly plug into while the rest of us take what is real, what is true, including the butter, especially the butter.
Am I making too much of this?
Maybe.
But no, I'm not.
I don't think I. You know, I've talked before about one of the problems we have in society is that sometimes there are too many choices.
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Food stamps have been a topic of conversation on the show several times over the past few weeks.
The EBT program has been in the news thanks to extremely belated efforts by a number of states to exercise some basic level of control over the kinds of food items that people on the program can purchase or can force taxpaying Americans to purchase for them, I should say.
And we've also talked about the rise of EBT influencers.
These are food stamp users who upload videos showing off their tax-funded grocery hauls.
In the process, they confirm every negative stereotype about EBT recipients.
It's almost as if these videos are really part of a vast right-wing conspiracy to turn public opinion against welfare programs.
Here's just a case in point.
Here's another example of a recent entry in that genre.
Watch.
First thing I got is these jumbo beef meatballs.
Got these.
These go in the refrigerator.
Without you seeing these soyloin, no, these sliced grass-fade beef, soyloin.
Go in the refrigerator as well.
I've been seeing these on TikTok.
So we got this.
We got, I don't know if these are new, but these are the marshmallow crispy cookies.
So we got the.
I'm going to go fast because it's hot.
We've got the chicken milk.
There's 15 individuals in here.
I see these on TikTok too.
These brie and cheese.
Dusty cheese.
I've got these.
These go in a refrigerator as well.
Obviously, we had to get these pizzas.
What is it?
For dinner.
Muffins, obviously.
Pringle thing of paper plates.
240.
Got it.
30 packs of the Layton Snicks, which should have been right here.
Now, if I were to script a video designed to portray the EBT program in the worst possible light, it would look exactly like that video.
Everything from the morbid obesity to the food selection to the smoke detector beeping in the background.
It so perfectly proves the point that it seems staged, but it's not staged.
And there are hundreds of videos like this.
In every case, their grocery haul consists predominantly of junk food with no nutritional value.
If there's any protein or anything resembling actual nutrition, it's always a pre-cooked or frozen meal, which is almost certainly really high in sodium, among other problems.
These are people who definitely don't need more sodium in their diets.
The vast majority of EBT recipients don't have full-time jobs, keep in mind.
Most of them don't have jobs at all.
And yet they refuse to take the time to cook a fresh meal from scratch.
They only buy meals that can be reheated in three minutes or less, saving even more time so that they can, you know, waste it by staring at a TV or their phones.
Now, maybe that wasn't fair.
EBT recipients don't just watch TV and scroll TikTok.
As we've covered, they also make TikTok videos, which takes time as well.
Several minutes of their day, which is why they can't cook, I guess.
And of all the EBT influencer videos I've seen or played on this show, this next one is perhaps the most obnoxious.
And it does perhaps the best job of demonstrating everything that's wrong with the food stamp program and the welfare state generally, particularly because of one word that she uses that I want to spend a little time analyzing.
But before we do that, watch.
I am so dumbfounded right now.
There are people that genuinely think that people who use EBT don't deserve soda, candy, or desserts.
You're going to tell me that my daughter doesn't deserve a popsicle?
You're going to tell me I don't deserve to get brownies.
You're going to tell me I can't have Dr. Pepper with my dinner.
And all I'm hearing is be grateful, be grateful.
It's free food.
Get off of your throne of entitlement and take a look around you guys.
Everyone is one bad day away from being homeless or even needing government assistance.
Do you guys not see how that makes you look?
Your lack of empathy and understanding is outstandingly atrocious.
Yes, get off your throne of entitlement, says the able-bodied woman demanding that American taxpayers buy her a brownie.
This is an adult whining because other adults won't give her a treat.
And somehow we are the entitled ones.
Now, never mind the fact that even if she was banned from buying popsicles and brownies with her EBT card, she'd still be able to have popsicles and brownies.
I mean, she could buy that junk with her own money, or she could even use her EBT card to purchase the ingredients to make that stuff herself.
Now, I'm not much of a baker, admittedly, but I do know that you can make brownies with some flour, a couple eggs, sugar, cocoa powder, a few other ingredients.
Making a popsicle is even easier.
Buy some fruit, blend it with water, throw it in the freezer.
You're done.
Again, you have the time to do all this.
You don't have a job.
So keep in mind, when food stamp users complain that they can't buy junk food, they're actually complaining that we won't provide them with ready-made junk food that they can purchase and eat right away.
So they want it for free and they want it quickly.
And they want it with maximum convenience and minimum personal effort.
This is not just entitlement.
This is a kind of snobbishness and sense of privilege that used to be reserved for the children of billionaires and royalty.
And now we find it among people who have no wealth at all.
People who, by their own testimony, can't afford to buy a popsicle.
It's the worst of all worlds, really, coming together.
You've got the, you have the vices of wealth, but none of the wealth of wealth.
It's really just the worst possible thing for a person.
But is it even true that they can't afford it?
Well, let's go back to the woman in the last video, not to keep picking on her, but she did volunteer for it.
I mean, don't post a video demanding that we buy you brownies if you don't want to be heavily scrutinized.
And so what do we notice in this video?
Well, this woman has manicured nails, wearing lots of makeup, highlights in her hair, obviously has a smartphone, obviously has an internet connection.
There's a TV on in the background.
Which streaming service is she subscribed to?
How many streaming services?
So just in that brief selfie video that we just played, I can see, I can see more than enough money to buy brownies and popsicles for like several months.
Now, I want to take a moment to reflect on a word that she uses repeatedly in that clip.
It's a word that comes up a lot in these kinds of videos.
It's a word that comes up a lot when we talk about welfare and EBT and food stamps and all the rest of it.
It's a word that finds its way into our political debates in this country all the time.
It's a word that a lot of people seem to use hundreds of times a day.
And it has become maybe my least favorite word in the English language.
And that word is deserve.
This woman is offended by the idea that she doesn't deserve soda, candy, or desserts.
You're going to tell me that I don't deserve a brownie?
She asks incredulously.
Well, yes, I am going to tell you that.
You don't deserve a brownie.
You don't deserve soda.
You don't deserve candy, cookies, cake.
I'll take it a step further, ma'am.
You don't deserve any of the free food that you receive.
Okay?
You don't even deserve bread or rice from the taxpayers.
You don't deserve any of it.
You don't deserve a single dime from your fellow Americans.
Not a single one.
Every single thing you own that was paid for by the taxpayers, you don't deserve any of it.
What does the word deserve mean?
Well, it means literally merit.
To deserve something is to merit it.
It's to have a claim to it.
In other words, earn.
You deserve what you earn.
If you get a job at a, at a, you know, you get a job at a certain salary, You deserve the salary.
If your boss tries to pay you less or nothing at all, you'd be justified in marching into his office and demanding that he pay you what you deserve, what you merit, what you've earned.
You would agree to perform a certain task for a certain amount of money, assuming you actually perform the task in a satisfactory manner, then you deserve that money in both a legal and moral sense.
You deserve it.
The word deserve has another word that's implicitly attached to it, and this is the point here, okay?
The other word that's attached to deserve, the other side of that coin, is owe.
Okay.
If you deserve something, it means that someone else owes you something.
Nothing can be deserved by one party unless it is owed by another.
That's why it wouldn't make any sense to say jump off a building and then say that you deserve to land safely on the ground.
I mean, you could say that as you're plummeting to the ground, you can say, I deserve to live through this.
You can say that, but it won't matter because who are you making the claim against?
Gravity?
Gravity can't owe you anything.
The laws of physics can't owe you anything.
So the word deserve is irrelevant.
Only another person can owe you something.
You can only deserve what another person owes you.
Deserve is an obligation.
If you have an obligation to me, then I deserve to have that obligation fulfilled.
If I pay you to build a fence in my backyard, I deserve to have that fence built after I've paid you.
If I lend you money, I deserve for it to be paid back.
Now, sometimes you can deserve something that isn't explicitly owed to you, but that requires that you make the case and essentially convince the indebted party that they are in debt to you.
If you're performing well above expectations at your job and your value far exceeds the salary that you're paid, then you should go to your boss and make the argument that you deserve more money.
If you win the argument, it won't be because your boss agrees that you possess some kind of mystical entitlement written in the stars, decreeing that you should make more money.
It'll be because you've successfully made the case that your work merits the pay increase.
You have earned it.
It is something that you have achieved.
So let's go back to our friend with the manicured nails and the EBT card.
You say you deserve brownies.
Deserve it from who exactly?
From us?
From the taxpayers?
From me?
So what?
We owe you brownies?
We're in debt to you.
And the debt is brownies.
That's what you're saying.
But where do you get this idea?
What did we do to suddenly find ourselves in debt to you?
What agreement did we make with you?
What did you do for us that puts us in debt to you, lady?
How do you know that I owe you brownies?
Maybe you owe me brownies.
I mean, if we could just impose a debt on a stranger out of thin air, then it's kind of a wash.
I mean, you're placing that magical debt on me, but I'm placing it back on you.
You say I owe you brownies.
Well, I say you owe me a brownie and ice cream and whipped cream and a cherry.
You owe me an entire fudge Sunday, okay?
Every single day.
That's what you owe me.
So you could play at this game.
Now what?
See, this is the problem with throwing the word deserve around so carelessly.
In reality, you can only deserve a brownie from us if you've done something to earn it.
So what have you done exactly?
What have you done for us to merit this reward?
The answer is nothing.
The answer is you've done nothing for us, which means we owe you nothing.
Zero dollars.
I'll say that again.
We owe you nothing.
We don't owe you a brownie.
We don't owe you a cookie.
We don't owe you a can of soda.
We don't owe you a cup of rice.
We owe you nothing.
Now, does that mean that I think all forms of welfare and quote-unquote social safety nets should be abolished outright?
No, I don't.
I think there's a reasonable argument to be made for that, but it's not my argument.
I think it's good to have programs in place to temporarily help people who are actually in a desperate situation until they're able to get back onto their feet.
I think it's good to have those.
But even then, we are not helping because it's owed.
We're not giving what's deserved.
In fact, we're giving what is not deserved.
When you're on EBT, you get what you don't deserve.
That's called charity.
In this case, it's forced charity, but that's what it is.
And the only appropriate response to charity, the only appropriate response to getting what you don't deserve, the only words out of your mouth should be thank you.
We don't owe you what you're getting, but we are owed something from you.
We are owed at least a thank you.
And maybe just a little bit of humility.
That's what you owe.
And like JFK said, you should spend a lot more time thinking about what you owe the country rather than what you think it owes you.
And that's why all entitled EBT recipients demanding tax-funded junk food are today canceled.
That'll do for the show today.
Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Have a great day.
Godspeed.
Hey there, I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley.
And I'm Georgia Howe, and we're the hosts of Morning Wire.
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