Marriage Is Under Attack | Proof For Your Liberal Friend
Marriage is under attack from our society. Additionally, many young men have told me they no choice but to give up on marriage and family and go their own way. But is this kind of surrender really the answer? No, it’s not. Show this video to your friend, liberal or not, as proof.
- - -
Today's Sponsor:
ExpressVPN - Go to https://expressvpn.com/walshYT and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free!
- - -
Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It's just not something that's as scalable as we as a society are trying to pretend it is.
Marriage is like the lottery.
Probably not gonna win.
I've spent a lot of time in my career defending the institution of marriage.
And I defend it because it's the bedrock of civilization, so it deserves defending.
And I defend it because it's under constant attack, so it needs defending.
And one of the most troubling developments in recent years, which we've discussed on this show in the past, is that these attacks are increasingly waged, not just from the left, but from certain noisy segments of the right as well.
Some right-wing influencers with legions of young, mostly male fans have decided that men should abandon marriage and family life and uh go their own way.
And these influencers, many of whom consider themselves a part of the so-called red pill movement, pretend to despise feminists and yet have essentially arrived at the same conclusion as feminists, which is that we should give up on the family.
The two sides hate marriage almost as much as they hate each other.
Now, one of these influencers is a woman named Pearl Davis, who has garnered a relatively large following on YouTube and various social media platforms.
She's in her mid-20s, single and childless, and uh yet full of opinions about modern marriage and family life, a subject that she has no personal insight into whatsoever.
She's spent the past few days on the internet complaining about quote unquote tradcons like myself, who she says promote the nuclear family despite not understanding what it's really like.
Yes, we men who actually have wives and children don't know what it's like to be married, but a woman who is not married and has no children does know what it's like.
In one of her tweets, she wrote, quote, the tradcons push marriage because they aren't old enough to know better.
They don't know the reality of what they're pushing.
This is accompanied by a picture of myself, Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles.
We aren't old enough to know better and don't know the reality of what we're pushing, yet a woman who is younger than us and single does know better and does understand this reality.
Another post, she uh goes on to say that marriage is a terrible deal for men, and she later explains, quote, would you ever sign a contract that fails 75% of the time, where your business partner is paid to break the contract?
Why would you encourage men to sign that contract until the terms are fixed?
Now, you may be surprised to learn that marriages fail at a rate of 75%.
The figure that people like this normally use is 50%.
And the claim that 50% of marriages end in divorce is already spurious, and we'll have more on that in a moment, but 75%?
I was wondering where that number came from, so I scrolled down and I saw something that she reposted from an alleged lawyer who said this quote, it's not 50-50.
That only accounts for divorces.
Another 25% on the negative side for miserable men trapped in cheaper to keep her marriages, unwilling to risk financial destruction and loss of their children.
75% chance of a devastatingly bad outcome is just a bad plan.
No sane person would enter into a commercial contract on such terms.
Now, I did ask him where he got this 75% figure from, and uh he wouldn't say.
Apparently the magic statistic fairy came and whispered it in his ear.
Now, for her part, Pearl later tweeted a picture of Pierce Brosnan with his uh wife of 20 years, and she questioned whether the marriage counts as successful since Broznan wife Brosnan's wife has put on some weight at the age of 60.
So apparently, even if they're happy and have remained married for two decades, they still might fall into that 75% failure rate because they have not both remained in supermodel condition into their 60s.
This debate on social media brought out the rest of the marriage skeptical crowd on the right.
A bunch of these uh red pill influencers decided to hop on an emergency Zoom call and spend two hours talking about me and the rest of the Daily Wire crew and our reckless promotion of society's most fundamental institution.
Now, there's there's one clip here that you should see.
This is um uh uh apparently a divorce a divorce lawyer who says that the failure rate for marriage is not 50%, and it's not 75%.
It is in fact even higher.
Listen.
I think marriage can be successful, of course.
It's just not something that's as scalable as we as a society are trying to pretend it is.
Marriage is, and I've said this a hundred times and I'll say it a hundred more, marriage is like the lottery.
You are probably not going to win.
Okay?
You're probably not gonna win.
Don't make that your 401k.
You're probably not gonna win.
But if you win, what you win is so great that I don't blame you for buying a ticket and trying.
I personally don't buy lottery tickets.
But when somebody says, yeah, I played a lottery, hey man, somebody's gotta win.
And you know what?
As long as you're not blowing money that you need for food or to put shoes on your kids' feet, you're not hurting anybody.
Go out, give it a try.
So I always tell people listen, marriage, when it works, when you have somebody who's married 20 plus years and they're still crazy about each other, that is the exception, not the rule.
But when you do it, it's phenomenal.
It's phenomenal.
So why not buy the ticket, take the ride, but have a prenup?
Wear a seatbelt, guys.
You can be a safe driver, but wear a seatbelt.
So a happy marriage, he says, is like winning a lottery.
And the thing about the lottery is that almost everybody loses.
This is a perfect summation of how this entire club views marriage and the message that they're uh sending to young men in particular.
Sure, it can be great, they concede, but only if you're insanely lucky.
Everybody else is screwed.
This is this is a rather bleak view of marriage, and thankfully, it's also nonsense.
First of all, the claim that marriage isn't scalable is obviously ridiculous because marriage has served as the bedrock of human society since time immemorial.
It has already happened at the scale of civilization for thousands of years.
Now the divorce lawyers come along and say that, you know, this thing that society's been doing forever?
Turns out it doesn't work.
Unless you're the one in a million.
It's it's ridiculous.
It's a ridiculous claim.
Now, what about the failure rate of marriages in our culture?
We've heard 50%, we've heard 75%.
We just heard that they they fail at a rate similar to the rate that people lose the lottery, which would mean higher than 99%, a lot higher.
Um, yet these kinds of astronomical odds are not based in anything but the doom and gloom speculations of the people inventing them.
There is no evidence that having a happy marriage is as unlikely as winning the lottery, or that 75% of marriages end in misery.
And what about the 50% number?
Well, this is at least is a familiar statistic.
It's it's something that you probably heard before.
50% of marriages end in divorce.
Um, it's familiar, but it is bogus.
And one way you that you know that it's bogus is that people have been claiming that 50% of marriages end a divorce since I was a kid.
I've been hearing that my whole life.
And that would mean that divorce rates are static across time.
But of course, that isn't the case.
In fact, we know that divorce rates have gone down in recent years.
So, so where does the 50% figure come from?
Apparently it's a it's a holdover from the 1980s, which is when people first started citing that statistic.
It's not true today.
And it's actually not clear that it was true even in the 80s either.
So, what is the actual divorce rate?
Um, it's a little bit hard to determine.
Probably our best guess is based on US census data, which according to the most recent figures, says that about 35% of American adults who have been married have been divorced.
So it's not exactly the gonna give us a precisely scientific figure of what the divorce rate is, but it's it's as close as we're gonna get 35%.
And 35% is high.
I mean, it's way too high.
It's not 50% though, and it's not 75%, and it's not 99%.
And it's definitely not lottery odds.
Still, isn't it terrifying to think that if you get married, your chance of failure is 35%, and the chance of success is only 65% at the most.
Even if we go with that number, isn't that still very, very scary?
Isn't it high enough that it should dissuade anyone from attempting it?
The answer to that question is no.
And here's why.
If the divorce rate is 35%, or even if it's 50%, it does not follow that your own particular marriage has a 35 or 50% chance of failure.
Now, I'm not saying that you should be cocky or reckless, or that you should see yourself as invincible.
I am saying that you shouldn't, on the other extreme, see yourself as passive debris floating helplessly on the tide of statistical likelihoods.
Because you are an individual.
Your marriage is an individual thing.
And its chances of failure are not set by society at large.
So here's an example to illustrate what I mean.
And this is really, really important to understand, because as marriage rates fall, and those are falling, the thing that that convinces so many people to not marry in the first place are numbers like this.
And this misconception that, well, look at the divorce rate, and that is my own specific chance of getting divorced.
And I'm here to tell you that that's not how it works.
So here's, I think this illustrates it.
The obesity rate in the United States is over 40%.
Does that mean that your own chances of becoming obese are 40%?
No, it doesn't.
Your chances might be 5%.
They might be practically zero.
Or they might be quite a bit higher than 40%.
That's because obesity is the result of behavior and choices.
If you do not engage in the behavior or make the choices that lead to obesity, you will not become obese.
The fact that 40% of people around you are fat does not mean that you automatically have a 40% obesity risk.
Now let's take another example.
Car accidents.
Americans get into car accidents at a certain rate.
I'm not sure what the rate is, it doesn't matter for our purposes.
What does matter is that your own individual chance of getting into a car accident is not the same as every other driver on the road.
The people who compile statistics will say things like, motorists have an X percent chance of getting into a collision.
But you are not just a generic motorist.
You are an individual.
Now you can never bring your own chance of dying in a fiery car wreck down to zero.
But if you're responsible, if you're a responsible driver, then obviously your chances of getting into an accident are much lower than the chances of someone who is not responsible.
All of those stupid drivers who don't understand the basic rules of the road and like to tweet and eat while they drive and everything else, they're inflating the numbers for everyone.
Now, they're also making the roads more dangerous for everyone.
They are actually actively making your own chances of getting into a car accident higher because the roads are filled with stupid people.
But your chances are not as high as their chances.
You do not share their level of risk unless you're as dumb as they are.
Because again, you are an individual, not a mere statistic.
So what about marriage?
It's true that even if you do everything right, things can still fall apart if your spouse doesn't follow that program.
Now, if you both do everything right, or even most things right, then your chance of divorce is basically zero.
But you can do everything on your end, and maybe your spouse doesn't do the same, and then it falls apart anyway, and that happens, and it's terrible, but it happens.
It's also true that there are many, many things you can do in your marriage and before your marriage to make it much more secure than the average.
Obvious things.
Like you can marry someone who shares your same fundamental values.
Not everyone does that.
In fact, a lot of people don't.
A lot of people go into marriages knowing ahead of time that they're marrying someone who doesn't share their fundamental values.
Their chances of divorce are going to be somewhere much higher than yours if you don't make that basic entry-level mistake that they have made.
You can do other things.
Like you can state from the outset that you both in principle don't believe in divorce and won't consider it as a viable option for solving any marital difficulties you may experience down the line.
You can have a strong and shared faith.
You can establish from the beginning a habit of honest communication.
You can make time for each other.
You can continue to date, even or especially as your lives get busier and you start having kids and so on.
You can make a strong effort to be patient with and grateful to each other.
You could take care of your body and your appearance.
You can do all these things and more.
Now, I'm not saying that if you do all of this, it will bring your divorce chance down to zero.
I'm not denying that there are plenty of people out there who did all this, at least on their own end, and yet still ended up divorced.
That's not my point.
My point is that the divorce rate doesn't take any of that into account.
The people who take none of these basic steps are lumped in with the people who do all of it.
And we're supposed to believe that both groups have an equal chance of marital failure.
That's just not true.
Your online activity isn't private.
Data brokers track everything you do online, your browsing, shopping habits, even your beliefs.
And in the US, they can legally sell this information.
Companies buy this data to target you with ads, social media platforms use it to control what content you see.
During elections, it's used to influence your vote.
Also, to protect your privacy and maintain your autonomy online, you should be using Express VPN.
ExpressVPN routes all of my online activity through secure encrypted servers, making it impossible for my internet provider to see what I've been doing.
That means that you can browse without feeling like somebody's watching over your shoulder all the time.
It means you have security, especially when you're traveling.
It also hides your IP address, the unique number that identifies you online and allows data brokers to build and sell profiles about you.
Without access to your IP or activity data, these companies have nothing to work with.
Whenever I'm on the road, whether it be at the hotel or at the airport, I always make sure to have Express VPN while I'm working on my computer.
You can never be too careful.
ExpressVPN makes being cautious easy.
Just one click activates protection across all my devices, and it works on up to 14 devices simultaneously.
Find out how you can get four months free by scanning the QR code on screen.
Click the link in the description box below, or by going to ExpressVPN.com/slash Walsh YT.
We opened the show yesterday with a discussion about the crisis of masculinity and the rise of Andrew Tate.
And to very briefly summarize the key points made in that conversation, boys are growing up in a culture that is openly hostile to masculinity, and many are forced to navigate the minefield without the benefits of strong male role models to show them the path.
And this crisis is self-perpetuating.
It grows exponentially because the young men with absentee fathers eventually become absentee fathers themselves, repeating the cycle indefinitely unto infinity.
And into this field of confusion and man hatred steps guys like Andrew Tate and others, quickly earning an enormous following of young men who understandably flock to somebody who has a message that embraces masculinity rather than treating it like a disease.
Andrew Tate, very often good at identifying the problems in our culture as they pertain to the situation that men face and deserves credit for speaking up in defense of masculinity rather than denigrating it and calling for its eradication, essentially.
But in my view, he misses the mark when it comes to the remedy.
He seems to basically understand the disease, but he doesn't have the right prescription for it, or at least the full prescription.
Yes, men should reject the programming that our culture wants to subject them to, programming which seeks to neuter and feminize them.
Yes, they should work hard, they should take care of their minds and their bodies.
Yes, they should strive for success, including financial success.
But a life of hedonism and materialism and luxurious wealth remaining unmarried while sleeping with a dozens of different women and so on is not the ideal to strive towards.
Rather, what men are called to and created for, and the only sort of life that will be truly happy, that they'll find true happiness and joy in is a life of service as protector and provider.
Men, the vast majority of men, anyway, are called to be husbands and fathers, to be leaders of their families.
Now, they may be called to lead in other ways too, but first they must care for their families.
If there's any saving, our civilization at this point, which I think there is, but if there is, this is how it will be done.
And this is who will do it.
It's not going to be saved by influencers who are sitting in front of cameras, whether the guy in front of the camera is Andrew Tate or me or anyone else.
It'll be saved through the formation and preservation of strong, intact, loving, and well-led families.
That is the only Way.
It is the only way forward.
If every man in the country starts going to the gym and starts making lots of money and starts having sex with lots of attractive women, and yet they don't get married and stay married and have children and raise and love those children, then we will still be headed to ruin.
It'll be a slightly different kind of ruin, but ruin all the same.
Those men themselves will ultimately find the happiness that uh that they are able to derive in that lifestyle.
They'll find that it's shallow and it's fleeting, and in the end, they'll die alone, loved by no one, loving no one, remembered by no one, leaving no legacy behind.
The feminized and neutered and effeminate man that our left-wing culture seeks to create, and then this other sort of man, both unmarried, both childless, will look very similar in the end, having taken two very different paths just to arrive together at essentially the same place.
It's the family man, the devoted father and husband, whose different path actually leads to a different and much better conclusion.
Now, I've of course been preaching this message for as long as I've had an audience to preach to, and I have found that there are like two or three basic responses or rebuttals, I guess, that I always hear from young men who may for the most part line up with me ideologically, but who doubt the wisdom of the get married and have kids prescription.
And I was uh greeted with these same responses after the show yesterday and many messages and comments.
What I'd like to do today is answer the objections, or at least what seems to be the one principal objection.
The claim that I so often hear is that, well, marriage and family life is a trap.
It's a scam, especially for men.
The whole thing is rigged against us.
There is nothing for a man to do but give up on the entire enterprise and go his own way.
In fact, there's a whole movement online, men go their own way.
And that's basically the idea.
Just give up on this stuff and do something else.
This argument was summarized in a comment from a listener named Joshua, which I'll read because I think it just is representative of this sort of mentality.
He says, still sounds like Matt in most Tradcons definition of what masculinity means is exclusively through the lens of women and children's wants and needs.
Unfortunately, that ideal will no longer work in the modern world with birth control, hookup culture, social media, and court systems that favor women and the denigration of traditional masculinity.
I don't agree with all of Tate's views, but it sure beats Matt's prescriptions for young men.
Again, I've read a great many comments making the same kind of point.
A private message from another listener has a similar theme.
Says, Matt, I agree with many of your opinions, but your message to men is off base.
Young men follow Andrew Tate because his lifestyle is the ideal, whether you admit it or not.
Wealth, fame, status, beautiful women were biologically programmed to want those things.
Marriage is a losing game.
The only solution in modern society is to reject the life of service as you call it.
So what is the problem with uh this view?
Well, to begin with, it's nothing less than a full unconditional surrender to the culture.
It's true that the culture has increasingly made it difficult for both men and women to form and maintain strong, intact, lasting families.
And that's because the elites who run our society don't want you to live that kind of life.
They prefer that you focus on your individual wants, on fulfilling your own needs and satisfying your own desires.
That's what they prefer for you.
That's the life they want for you.
A self-focused life is precisely the sort of life they wish for you.
Makes you easier to manipulate, less of a threat to their agenda.
Not really a threat at all.
I mean, if you're just out there focused on yourself, um, you know, being a consumer, buying lots of things for yourself, consuming things for yourself, um, you know, uh, and all the rest of it, you're not a threat to their agenda at all.
I mean, you're you're going along with it.
Um, all of the things mentioned by Joshua in his comment, all of those things represent a conspiracy against the family.
He's right about that.
The way the family court systems are set up, birth control, all the rest of it.
It's an attack on the family.
So what is the answer?
To give up?
To give the conspirators exactly what they want, to reward them for their efforts by turning your back on the very thing they've been assaulting for decades.
The family is the fortress that they have been attacking.
And you can defend it with your life, or you can wave the white flag.
But if you choose to surrender, then at least be honest about what you're doing.
Be honest, this is not a rejection of the left's agenda of a cultural elite's agenda.
You are you are submitting to it.
It is a submission.
It is certainly not the strong or masculine response to run away and abandon your post, to stop fighting because the fight is too difficult.
I mean, that approach is many things, but it certainly isn't manly.
And where do you go instead?
I mean, what is the next move?
To give up on the family is to give up on human civilization, seeing as how there cannot be a human civilization without the family.
So what's plan B after you've given up on civilization?
Where what's next?
You're also giving up on yourself, on your own legacy, your own bloodline.
You are descended from a long line of men stretching back thousands of years who formed families and raised children often under circumstances far more dire than what we face.
And you're giving up on them too.
You are surrendering your future and your past.
You're giving up on everything.
And what is your consolation prize?
Finding financial success.
I mean, the unfortunate irony is that many of the people that, many of the men who uh give up on these things in favor of, well, I'll just focus on myself and try to be financially successful, many of them are never even going to be financially successful.
So they end up with just nothing.
They end up broke and alone with nothing.
But even if you find it, the financial success, so what?
I mean, who cares about money if you have nothing meaningful to spend it on?
I have money.
I don't have Andrew Tate's money, but I have money.
And nearly all the joy and happiness I derive from having money is that it allows me to provide for my family.
That's pretty much it.
That's the entire thing.
That's why I like having the money.
Proud of that fact.
If I didn't have them, the money would mean very little to me.
I mean, I could buy nice things and drive a fancy car and live in my nice house alone.
But for what?
Now, does that mean that if you start a family that you're guaranteed to live a joyful and fulfilled life?
Well, of course not.
It's a risk.
And yes, the risks are in some ways much greater in modern times.
We have all been poisoned by this demonic culture to one extent or another.
We are all poisoned.
If you marry someone, you are marrying someone who has been poisoned, who has ingested the poison, who has uh, you know, had taken a drink from the well of modern culture.
Everybody has, as have you.
And yes, if things go sideways, if you're a man, you marry a woman and your wife turns out to be a disloyal vulture, or if you turn out to be a disloyal vulture, or you both do, um, the death will be stacked against you in court.
No, no, there's no question about that.
Divorce may ruin your life.
And you know, if you give your heart to someone, if you bind yourself to them, not only through the marriage vow, but then also through children you conceive together, then you will have, they will have all they need to rip your guts out and burn your life to the ground.
That is absolutely true.
That's the risk.
Okay, but it's a risk worth taking.
Every great joy can become a great tragedy if you aren't careful.
Or if you have very bad luck.
That's true.
So is the answer then to forego all joy?
To say forget about joy because it might not work out?
To embrace a life of loneliness and misery because you're worried that if you aim higher, you'll end up lonely and miserable.
You're worried that in the end you'll end up in this state.
So instead you say, well, I might as well just live in this state to begin with.
Doesn't make any sense.
So you take the risk and you mitigate the risk at the same time by being smart about who you marry and by grounding your marriage and your family in faith and mutual devotion.
And by working hard every day to hold up your own end of the bargain.
Because yeah, there are some men out there who do everything right, and they're the and and you know they're great men and they're devoted to their families and they're intensely loyal and all of that, and their families fall apart anyway because they accidentally married a soulless, disloyal scumbag.
I mean, that does happen.
And sometimes it happens in the reverse.
But that's not, that's not the majority of cases.
Most of the time it takes two to tango, two to get married, two to ruin the marriage.
Which means that marriage is not a mere roll of the dice.
There's quite a lot you can do to secure your good fortune.
That's why I never cared about the statistics.
You know, when I get was getting married and I heard about this statistically, this is I'm not a statistic.
I'm not just some number on a spreadsheet.
And neither is my wife.
We're human beings.
I'm not subject to statistics.
Not merely subject to them.
Because the one thing statistics don't take into account are choices.
It's about the choices you make.
Whether your marriage works or not, it's about choices that are made in the marriage.
If one or both of you make bad choices, your chances are going to be very poor.
