The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1754 - The Real Reason Your Airport Is Now A DISASTER ZONE
Aired: 2026-03-23
Duration: 01:06:40


=== Five Hour Shutdown Demands (14:59) ===

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[00:01:01]  Today, the Matt Walsh show, airports across the country have become dysfunctional hellscapes with TSA wait times in excess of three hours in some cases.
[00:01:08]  All of that is bad enough on its own, but it's even worse when you consider the reason Democrats are once again making American citizens suffer for the sake of protecting foreign invaders.
[00:01:17]  Also, a man in Seattle shoots a pregnant woman at a traffic light, killing her and her baby.
[00:01:22]  He's just been found not guilty by reason of insanity.
[00:01:24]  Is it time to actually abolish the insanity defense once and for all?
[00:01:28]  And some good news out of Hollywood for a change as a wholesome family film Project Hail Mary becomes one of the most successful movies in recent years.
[00:01:36]  I saw the film with my family over the weekend.
[00:01:38]  I'll give you my review.
[00:01:39]  All of that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
[00:02:06]  Well, if you've been in an airport at any point over the past few weeks, then you know that they are a disaster zone right now, even more than they usually are.
[00:02:14]  Over the weekend, the chaos has descended to the point that some airports were reporting four or five hour wait times at security.
[00:02:22]  And this is all being blamed on the government shutdown, of course.
[00:02:25]  But if you look back at all previous government shutdowns in American history, you're not going to find anything like the breakdown that's currently taking place in Congress, which is now resulting in those five-hour TSA lines at major airports all over the country.
[00:02:39]  Now, to give you just one example of how bad it's gotten, a reporter at Reason Magazine in New Orleans wrote, quote, I arrived at the airport three hours and 40 minutes before my flight.
[00:02:50]  I ran up to the gate, no exaggeration, as they were about to give my seat away on the last flight out.
[00:02:56]  The highest call-out rates among TSA agents this weekend were at the following airports: Houston Hobby Airport, where 47% of TSA agents didn't show up for work.
[00:03:06]  George Bush Intercontinental Airport, also in Houston, 42% call-out rate.
[00:03:13]  New Orleans International, 34% call-out rate.
[00:03:15]  Atlanta, 33%, JFK, 33%.
[00:03:18]  Baltimore, 29%, Chicago Midway, 29%, Pittsburgh, 23%, Philadelphia, 31%, and LaGuardia, 17%.
[00:03:28]  Because TSA officers aren't allowed to be furloughed, all of those absences were unauthorized.
[00:03:33]  Most of these TSA agents are simply pretending to be sick.
[00:03:37]  Now, you can draw your own conclusion as to why the TSA officers living in the biggest urban centers in the country are more likely to abandon their posts than everybody else.
[00:03:47]  But whatever the case, the result has obviously been disastrous for millions of Americans.
[00:03:54]  And it's a unique situation in many ways.
[00:03:57]  Now, this shutdown is not simply the result of a bog standard funding dispute or opposition to a major new direction in American policy like Obamacare.
[00:04:06]  Instead, it's about undermining the existing authority of the executive branch and punishing American citizens, all in the name of foreigners who have become the primary constituency of the Democrat Party.
[00:04:19]  Now, the way Democrats see it, Americans should suffer, and our airports should fall into total dysfunction in service of their open borders agenda.
[00:04:30]  That's what this is all about.
[00:04:32]  Put another way, the TSA catastrophe is the Democrat Party in a nutshell.
[00:04:36]  This is their foreigners' first ideology, perfectly illustrated.
[00:04:41]  Now, you may have heard that this shutdown is about preventing abuses by ICE or something along those lines.
[00:04:48]  But that is not remotely true.
[00:04:50]  First of all, when Democrats talk about abuses by ICE, they're referring to left-wing agitators like Renee Good, who got shot when they try to run over federal agents with their SUV or otherwise violently interfere with law enforcement operations.
[00:05:05]  Or they're talking about debunked stories like ICE used a child as bait when in reality the child's father abandoned him on the side of the road.
[00:05:14]  So the entire narrative is a fabrication.
[00:05:16]  But more importantly, even if ICE agents were going around terrorizing American citizens, which they aren't, this shutdown wouldn't do anything to stop them.
[00:05:26]  Thanks to the Big Beautiful bill, which passed last summer, ICE, along with customs and border protection, has already been funded to the tune of $75 billion, which won't run out for several years.
[00:05:37]  And therefore, the best Democrats can hope for is that if they shut down TSA long enough, which is what they're doing now, and make it impossible for Americans to board a plane, then the White House might offer some concessions on how ICE goes about its day-to-day operations.
[00:05:52]  In particular, Democrats are demanding that ICE agents take off their masks so that they can be doxxed, stay away from schools and hospitals, and restrict immigration enforcement to foreigners who have committed multiple serious crimes in addition to illegally entering the country, which Democrats obviously don't see as a crime at all.
[00:06:14]  Democrats also demand that ICE obtain a judicial warrant from a federal judge every time they want to arrest an illegal alien inside a residence instead of an administrative warrant, which is approved within the executive branch.
[00:06:26]  So in other words, Democrats believe that illegal aliens are entitled to the same constitutional protections as American citizens, and they don't want to have that fight in court because they know they're going to lose.
[00:06:39]  So instead, they're holding American citizens hostage.
[00:06:43]  They're turning our airports into a dysfunctional hellscape in order to get the Trump administration to concede on the point.
[00:06:53]  So that's the 20,000-foot view of the current debate.
[00:06:57]  You've probably heard some version of it from one outlet or another, but the reality of what's going on here is very different.
[00:07:03]  And if you listen to Democrats talk long enough, they'll explain what they're really after.
[00:07:09]  This is not, in fact, a shutdown that's intended to stop abuses by ICE, whatever those abuses may be.
[00:07:16]  The point of the shutdown is to terrorize Americans into another round of amnesty for the tens of millions of illegal aliens who currently reside in the U.S. Here's Peter Welsh, the senator for Vermont, making that point explicit.
[00:07:31]  Watch.
[00:07:33]  And if we were able to open up the rest of the government and focus on the ICE issue, it may allow us then to have, I think, a discussion that's overdue.
[00:07:43]  The port is secure now.
[00:07:45]  It wasn't under Biden.
[00:07:46]  You say that.
[00:07:47]  And that's true.
[00:07:47]  All right.
[00:07:48]  There's the consensus that we should deport criminals.
[00:07:52]  But there is a lot of concern in the country from Republicans and Democrats about what you had of a mass roundup where we were going to construction sites, we were going to farms, we were going after people who don't have legal status, but who came here sometimes as kids, have no criminal record, and are contributing members of the community.
[00:08:13]  So I think it's ripe for us to have a sensible discussion about a reasonable immigration plan in a reasonable way to deal with some folks who don't have legal status.
[00:08:28]  If we were able to open up the rest of the government and focus on the ICE issue, it may allow us to then have, I think, a discussion that's overdue.
[00:08:35]  The border is secure now.
[00:08:36]  It's ripe for us to have a sensible discussion about a reasonable immigration plan in a reasonable way to deal with some folks who don't have legal status, he says.
[00:08:45]  And that's the part that Democrats, for the most part, haven't actually been saying out loud.
[00:08:50]  This is not actually about ICE at all.
[00:08:53]  It's about protecting the criminal foreign nationals they've allowed into this country so that they and their children can vote for Democrats.
[00:09:02]  Same reason Democrats oppose the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship before someone can vote, which 85% of Americans support.
[00:09:09]  The whole point of the shutdown is to lock in Democrat votes from illegal aliens.
[00:09:14]  That's the whole point.
[00:09:15]  The Democrats leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, also made this objective pretty clear.
[00:09:20]  Jeffries is one of the least intelligent members of Congress.
[00:09:23]  He was chosen for the leadership role solely because of his skin color.
[00:09:28]  So, you know, he's not very good at keeping secrets or being coy about this.
[00:09:35]  Watch.
[00:09:36]  Completely and totally out of control group of people.
[00:09:39]  It's the reason why we are in a DHS shutdown right now because Republicans have refused to agree to the type of bold, transformative, meaningful, and dramatic reforms we are demanding in order for the Department of Homeland Security funding bill to move forward.
[00:09:57]  And I won't go through all of the demands, much of which we've talked about repeatedly in the public, but one of those demands is keep ICE out of sensitive locations.
[00:10:09]  And we've defined that as schools, houses of worship, hospitals, and polling sites.
[00:10:17]  We want an explicit prohibition that ICE can go nowhere near any polling sites in the United States of America.
[00:10:25]  It's one of our demands.
[00:10:26]  We're not going to bend on it.
[00:10:30]  Huh.
[00:10:31]  So out of the 10,000 demands that Democrats have, strangely enough, Hakeem Jeffries is really keen on this one very specific demand.
[00:10:42]  He doesn't choose to highlight his demand that ICE agents take off their masks or that ICE agents obtain judicial warrants or any of that.
[00:10:50]  Instead, he makes it clear that he desperately wants ICE to stay away from polling stations in particular.
[00:10:56]  He says it several times.
[00:10:58]  Now, why might that be?
[00:11:00]  Who exactly would be intimidated by the presence of a federal immigration officer at a polling station?
[00:11:06]  I mean, I wouldn't be.
[00:11:08]  Would you?
[00:11:09]  Who cares if they're there?
[00:11:11]  Who would choose to stay at home in hiding rather than go vote if they knew that ICE was going to be there?
[00:11:20]  Well, Jeffries is simply too dumb to realize how transparent he's being here.
[00:11:24]  His overriding concern and the concern of his party is ensuring that tens of millions of illegal aliens can vote in the next election.
[00:11:32]  And so if you have to wait five hours in line to get on a plane for that purpose, that's well worth the sacrifice as far as Hakeem Jeffries is concerned.
[00:11:41]  And that's what the shutdown is about.
[00:11:44]  None of these people care about Alex Predi or Renee Goode or whatever.
[00:11:48]  They're not even hiding it anymore.
[00:11:50]  The only rational conclusion you could draw is that illegal aliens are even more important to the Democrats than we previously realized.
[00:11:58]  This is where a lot of their votes are coming from, and they're willing to take down the airports in this country and make your life worse in every way in order to help these criminals cast a vote in the midterms.
[00:12:10]  That's what this is all about.
[00:12:12]  And by the way, it's not just TSA that's been affected by the shutdown.
[00:12:15]  While ICE and Customs and Border Protection have funding, many other agencies within DHS are impacted.
[00:12:21]  Homeland Security Investigations or HSI is also defunded at the moment.
[00:12:26]  They handle investigations into child sex trafficking and terrorism.
[00:12:30]  The Secret Service, FEMA, the Coast Guard are all impacted.
[00:12:36]  In every sense, at a moment when we're at war with Iran, Democrats are not simply making life less convenient, they're also making life a lot more dangerous for American citizens.
[00:12:47]  I mean, we've had, what, four terror attacks in the past month?
[00:12:52]  And guess what happens when you have a five-hour TSA line at every major airport?
[00:12:57]  You create a large, obvious target for a mass shooter.
[00:13:02]  Hundreds of people are lined up, like sitting ducks, for days on end.
[00:13:08]  And this is before you get through security.
[00:13:10]  So nothing is stopping a terrorist from walking into the airport.
[00:13:16]  You're inviting a terrorist attack.
[00:13:18]  That's what Democrats are doing for the benefit of foreign invaders, and they don't care.
[00:13:23]  But if you ask Democrats, they won't even mention this.
[00:13:26]  Instead, they'll claim that ICE agents, who the Trump administration is going to deploy to airports, has already done to assist with operations during the shutdown.
[00:13:35]  They'll claim that they are actually murderous psychopaths who are going to mow down American citizens when they try to carry more than 3.4 ounces of liquid onto the plane or something.
[00:13:45]  Watch.
[00:13:47]  There are three things that have been true since Donald Trump and Republicans came back into power last January.
[00:13:53]  Life is more expensive, life is more chaotic, and life is more extreme.
[00:13:58]  The last thing that the American people need are for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports all across the country, potentially to brutalize or in some instances, kill them.
[00:14:09]  We've already seen how ICE conducts itself.
[00:14:12]  These are untrained individuals when it comes to doing the current job that they have for the most part, let alone deploying them in close exposure in highly sensitive situations at airports across the country.
[00:14:28]  Yes, ICE is going to kill Americans in line at the security.
[00:14:31]  I was just in the airport last week and I had a water bottle in my bag, my carry-on bag that I forgot about.
[00:14:40]  And, you know, they pulled me aside and they took the water bottle out and it was fine.
[00:14:44]  I went about my day.
[00:14:45]  But thank God it wasn't an ICE agent doing that because if they saw the water bottle, they'd pull the water bottle out and say, you forgot about this water bottle.
[00:14:52]  And I would say, oh, sorry.
[00:14:53]  And then they'd just shoot me in the head.
[00:14:55]  And that would be it.
[00:14:56]  Like, that's what's going to happen now.

=== TSA Security Fears (09:44) ===

[00:14:59]  So he repeats the lie that ICE agents are untrained, which is not true.
[00:15:03]  But even if it were true, so what?
[00:15:06]  I mean, how much training do you think people need in order to fill in for a TSA agent?
[00:15:10]  Exactly.
[00:15:12]  All you got to do is tell people to put their stuff in the bin, be really surly about it and impatient, get mad at people for not following the rules, even though the rules change day to day depending on which TSA line you happen to be in.
[00:15:26]  Pat them down if the machine tells you to.
[00:15:29]  If you see a gun on the x-ray machine, make sure you grab the gun.
[00:15:33]  And actually, you don't even need to do that.
[00:15:35]  A few years ago, the inspector general at DHS found that roughly 70 to 80% of weapons managed to get through TSA checkpoints.
[00:15:47]  TSA has a failure rate of 70 to 80 percent.
[00:15:52]  These highly trained agents who no one could possibly fill in for.
[00:15:57]  Well, they sent undercover agents in and only around a third of them were stopped when they tested this.
[00:16:03]  And that was considered an improvement because in previous years, 90 percent of the guns got through the checkpoint.
[00:16:10]  So if you replaced every TSA agent with an untrained random person off the street, You'd almost certainly get better results than we're getting now.
[00:16:19]  But Democrats who have created a universe in which ICE agents randomly kill people for no reason all the time, they're intent on pushing the narrative.
[00:16:28]  Here's Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, for example, quote, ICE agents at airports will only aggravate delays in lines, disrupting checks, interrogating travelers, dragging parents from children, detaining citizens, brutalizing families, shooting and even killing.
[00:16:43]  It's just going to be a, it's going to be a total bloodbath in line at TSA now.
[00:16:49]  Now, again, if you read between the lines here, it's not hard to see what they're actually worried about because they know that if ICE is manning the TSA stations, they're very likely to come across illegal aliens.
[00:17:00]  It's especially true if the ICE agents are checking IDs.
[00:17:04]  Tom Homan, the border czar, has suggested that that is going to happen.
[00:17:08]  Watch.
[00:17:09]  You know, ICE can check identification before people enter the screening area, right?
[00:17:14]  We're trying to release TSA resources to get to positions that they really need expertise, like the x-ray screening.
[00:17:23]  So we're going to be a forced multiplier.
[00:17:25]  With respect, if you're doing this in 24 hours, how well thought out could it possibly be?
[00:17:32]  Again, ICE has been at airports across the country for a long time.
[00:17:35]  It's just expanding those things.
[00:17:37]  Look, it does.
[00:17:38]  How much of a plan does it mean to guard an exit to make sure no one comes through that exit?
[00:17:44]  We're talking about security options.
[00:17:46]  And these officers are well trained in security, and they're well trained in identification.
[00:17:52]  And look, we're going to do what we can to help TSA move those people to the line.
[00:18:00]  So what's going on here, in case it's not obvious, is that Democrats and the corporate press are convinced that they're being far more subtle than they actually are.
[00:18:08]  You simply cannot convince any American with a functioning brain that it would be difficult to replace all of these famously highly trained TSA agents.
[00:18:18]  You can't convince any sane person with an IQ above room temperature that we need a plan developed over many days before we can possibly replace the brilliance of the typical TSA employee.
[00:18:29]  We've all been to airports, okay?
[00:18:32]  I mean, we know how mind-numbingly simple their job is and how poorly they do it.
[00:18:38]  We know that these people are calling in sick right now so they can play Call of Duty.
[00:18:42]  So the attempt at deceiving everybody is just laughable.
[00:18:45]  But again, there's a point to it.
[00:18:48]  At every turn, they want to protect illegals.
[00:18:51]  They want to protect illegal aliens at the polling place.
[00:18:54]  They want to protect illegal aliens at the airport when they have to show ID, which is probably fake or stolen.
[00:19:01]  They want to protect illegal aliens so that they can vote for Democrats in November, period.
[00:19:06]  And they don't care if they destroy your life in the process.
[00:19:10]  This is another area where Democrats don't have their story straight.
[00:19:13]  Here was Hakeem Jeffries the other day from that same CNN interview.
[00:19:18]  Listen.
[00:19:20]  So let me ask you about that because you are the whole reason, as you just laid out, that DHS is not funded right now is because you're trying to push the administration to enact some policy changes on how Border Patrol and ICE act when they are out looking for illegal immigrants.
[00:19:41]  And now what you're saying is that you're okay with funding TSA, which has been, I think, the biggest point of leverage that you possibly had in order to get what you want on ICE, because ICE already has its money.
[00:19:57]  So what was the point of the shutdown if you're okay with funding TSA?
[00:20:02]  Well, we never approach these things that are in front of us with respect to government funding in the context of leverage.
[00:20:10]  Our approach is, what is the appropriate use of taxpayer dollars?
[00:20:17]  So Democrats, according to Jeffries, would never dream of using the American people as leverage to enact their open borders agenda.
[00:20:25]  Never even crosses their mind, he says.
[00:20:28]  But Representative Catherine Clark of Massachusetts, the number two Democrat in the House, said something very different in an interview with Fox just back in October.
[00:20:36]  Watch.
[00:20:38]  I mean, shutdowns are terrible.
[00:20:40]  And of course, there will be, you know, families that are going to suffer.
[00:20:46]  We take that responsibility very seriously.
[00:20:50]  But it is one of the few leverage times we have.
[00:20:56]  So in case you missed that, she said, of course, there will be families that are going to suffer, but it's one of the few leverage times we have.
[00:21:04]  It's hard to think of a more on-the-nose quote, if you want to summarize the objectives of the Democrat Party, and it's coming directly from the Democratic whip of the U.S. House of Representatives.
[00:21:14]  Their goal is to terrorize you and your family so that you do what they want.
[00:21:18]  It's why they endorsed and funded the BLM riots in 2020.
[00:21:20]  It's also why they paid for Laken Riley's killer to fly around the U.S. after letting him into the country.
[00:21:26]  It's also why Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman was just gunned down in Chicago, allegedly by a Venezuelan national named Jose Medina Medina.
[00:21:36]  She was walking in a park by the waterfront with her friends on Thursday morning.
[00:21:41]  And according to the authorities, Medina Medina shoots her in the head completely unprovoked.
[00:21:47]  Same situation.
[00:21:48]  Again, the Biden administration caught him at the border in 2023, released him.
[00:21:53]  Police arrested him for shoplifting from Macy's that same year.
[00:21:57]  But again, he was let out of jail and not deported.
[00:22:01]  Never showed up to court.
[00:22:03]  This is why Democrats exist as a political party at this point.
[00:22:07]  If they actually wanted to improve the lives of American citizens, they'd be talking about abolishing TSA entirely right now.
[00:22:14]  I mean, they point out that there are around 20 airports in this country with private security arrangements, including San Francisco International, and all of them are operating smoothly right now.
[00:22:23]  They tell you that TSA operates like a gigantic scam using taxpayer money to purchase extremely expensive body scanners that are sold by companies with high-level political connections.
[00:22:33]  But Democrats don't want to tell you any of that because right now, the TSA is one of the most effective weapons in their arsenal.
[00:22:40]  They're using the TSA to disable American infrastructure in service of their open borders agenda.
[00:22:47]  That's the same reason they don't want to privatize air traffic control, by the way.
[00:22:51]  And speaking of which, late last night, there was a catastrophic collision on the runway of LaGuardia Airport.
[00:22:56]  You may have heard about it, involving a fire truck and a passenger plane.
[00:23:00]  Here's the image there.
[00:23:02]  Really awful.
[00:23:03]  ATC is not affected by the current shutdown, but if you remember just a few months ago, they were.
[00:23:08]  Democrats have no problem leveraging these public agencies to terrorize the public.
[00:23:14]  The only way to solve that problem is to privatize these agencies immediately, which we should.
[00:23:21]  What you need to understand is that while TSA is the issue right now, they have no intention of stopping with TSA.
[00:23:28]  At every opportunity, Democrats will sabotage and endanger your life if it means protecting foreigners.
[00:23:35]  That's their voter base.
[00:23:37]  Their future as a political party depends on it.
[00:23:40]  And everybody else, right now, the traveling public is just collateral damage.
[00:23:46]  Now let's get to our five headlines.
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=== Mental State Defense Debate (09:34) ===

[00:24:43]  Start right now.
[00:24:43]  Go to hillsdale.edu slash Walsh.
[00:24:47]  All right, we'll start with this story.
[00:24:48]  Honestly, I don't even know what to say about this kind of madness anymore.
[00:24:52]  We've been covering these stories for years.
[00:24:54]  We've called it out a million times.
[00:24:56]  It keeps happening.
[00:24:58]  And this is maybe the worst example yet, but here's the story from the New York Post.
[00:25:03]  The man charged in a 2023 shooting that killed a pregnant Seattle woman and her unborn baby has been found not guilty by reason of insanity.
[00:25:11]  Cordell Goosby was charged with first-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder in the death of 34-year-old Aina Kwan and the shooting of her husband's son Kwan, who was also injured.
[00:25:22]  Aina Kwan and her husband were on their way to work at their Japanese restaurant when they were stopped at a red light at an intersection around 11.15 a.m.
[00:25:32]  Goosby allegedly sprinted toward the driver's side of the window of their white Tesla with a gun raised.
[00:25:38]  In a short span of time, he fired a gun after firing all the bullets he had into the victim's car.
[00:25:44]  He turned and ran from the scene.
[00:25:48]  So this is someone who was driving in their car in the middle.
[00:25:52]  It's 11.15 a.m.
[00:25:53]  You're just stopped at an intersection in your car.
[00:25:58]  Door is locked, right?
[00:26:01]  And not even safe doing that.
[00:26:04]  So this is a brutal murder in broad daylight.
[00:26:06]  Pregnant woman is killed along with her unborn child.
[00:26:09]  And the killer is not guilty by reason of insanity, which means that he can be and likely will be, it says in the article, can be released.
[00:26:19]  Last line of the article says, Gooseby's future release would depend on approval from multiple state and court entities, the station added.
[00:26:26]  So he could be released.
[00:26:29]  And he will be eventually.
[00:26:32]  And then he'll do it again.
[00:26:33]  I mean, we know how this movie ends or, you know, that's not even the end.
[00:26:38]  We know how it goes, how it continues.
[00:26:41]  The fact that he is too delusional to know, allegedly, that he shouldn't murder innocent women means that he will be released back to the public to murder more innocent women, which he will almost certainly do.
[00:26:55]  Now, like I said, we talked about this lunacy many times.
[00:26:58]  It just keeps happening.
[00:26:59]  I've made the case against the insanity plea on several occasions in the past.
[00:27:06]  I think the plea should not exist.
[00:27:08]  And just to summarize again, because it's important, the insanity defense should not exist in the law.
[00:27:16]  It has been, I think there are a lot of conceptual problems with it, a lot of problems in principle.
[00:27:24]  But even if you think that in principle it makes sense or you can make an argument for it, the fact is that it has been abused.
[00:27:33]  At a minimum, we can say it has been abused horrifically for decades, and a lot of people have died because of it.
[00:27:42]  And so it just should not exist anymore.
[00:27:45]  I mean, first of all, not guilty by reason of insanity.
[00:27:49]  What does that even mean?
[00:27:50]  I mean, you are guilty, right?
[00:27:53]  The guy in this case, he definitely did it.
[00:27:57]  He admitted to it.
[00:27:59]  They went to arrest him and he said, and I quote, I did it.
[00:28:01]  I did it.
[00:28:03]  So there's no question that he did it.
[00:28:06]  So then how can a person be not guilty of doing something that they did?
[00:28:12]  I mean, even if I accept the premise that he was insane and not in control of his faculties, he still did it.
[00:28:20]  I mean, it was a thing that happened.
[00:28:23]  Somebody did it.
[00:28:26]  And no one else did it but him.
[00:28:29]  Just as a factual matter.
[00:28:32]  And, you know, for as long as courts have existed, not guilty has always meant that the person accused of doing something didn't do it, or at least it was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they did it.
[00:28:49]  That's what not guilty means.
[00:28:51]  Not guilty means you're accused of doing something, but the prosecution did not prove that you had done it.
[00:28:59]  But a ruling that says, yeah, you did it, and we all know you did it for 100% certainty, but you're not guilty of doing it makes no sense.
[00:29:09]  I mean, like, imagine just if this was something innocuous, like if you walk up to an insane person who's wearing a red shirt and you go, you put on a red shirt this morning.
[00:29:21]  It wouldn't make any sense for somebody else to run up and say, no, no, he didn't.
[00:29:25]  He's insane.
[00:29:27]  He didn't put on a red shirt.
[00:29:29]  No, he might be insane, but he did put on a red shirt.
[00:29:32]  I mean, that's a thing that happened.
[00:29:34]  It's a thing that happened.
[00:29:37]  He is guilty of putting on a red shirt.
[00:29:40]  That's what guilt means.
[00:29:41]  Now, if you want to argue that he did the thing, but his guilt is mitigated because of other factors.
[00:29:48]  Well, we already have that kind of distinction built into the system.
[00:29:54]  That is why we have degrees of murder.
[00:29:57]  It's why we have manslaughter.
[00:29:59]  It's why we have all these other distinctions that are already in the system.
[00:30:04]  It's also why we have a judge who's in charge of sentencing and is supposed to weigh mitigating factors.
[00:30:10]  But the question of whether he did it, whether he's guilty of doing it is one of objective reality.
[00:30:16]  And the objective reality is that he did the thing.
[00:30:19]  He is guilty.
[00:30:20]  Not guilty of doing what you did is incomprehensible.
[00:30:28]  And even if the person is crazy, but are they even crazy?
[00:30:31]  What does crazy mean?
[00:30:33]  Nobody can tell you that.
[00:30:35]  Did you know that?
[00:30:36]  No one can define what the word crazy means.
[00:30:40]  There's no real agreed upon definition.
[00:30:46]  Like, where do you draw the line in crazy?
[00:30:49]  There's all kinds of people out there all the time doing things that I would judge as crazy, doing things that are irrational, self-destructive.
[00:30:58]  Are they all crazy?
[00:31:01]  It's entirely subjective.
[00:31:03]  And the idea is that, you know, well, he's crazy because he didn't understand what he was doing while he did it.
[00:31:08]  Well, that's impossible to prove.
[00:31:10]  Impossible.
[00:31:13]  And the facts on the ground indicate otherwise.
[00:31:15]  He ran away.
[00:31:17]  He ran away.
[00:31:19]  If he didn't know that what he was doing was wrong, why did he run away?
[00:31:26]  And this almost always happens with these insanity cases, by the way, that you've got someone who does something terrible, tries to run away, and then is caught.
[00:31:37]  And then we're supposed to believe they didn't know that what they did was wrong.
[00:31:40]  Well, then why did they run?
[00:31:43]  Running away is a universal sign that is a universal form of communication saying, I did something bad.
[00:31:54]  You know, if we're making judgments about a person's mental state, as I've argued a million times, every person who's ever committed a heinous crime has at the time of the crime been in a state of mind that could not be considered normal or healthy by definition.
[00:32:12]  I mean, how do you distinguish every sane killer in history from this guy?
[00:32:17]  You can't.
[00:32:17]  It's totally arbitrary.
[00:32:19]  Because murdering somebody is not something that you do if you're a well-adjusted, clear-thinking, normal person.
[00:32:28]  And that's true of a lot of other crimes, armed robbery.
[00:32:32]  Normal people don't commit armed robbery.
[00:32:34]  Normal, healthy people don't do that.
[00:32:38]  The mental state of every murderer, armed robber, etc. is automatically, by definition, impaired compared to you or me.
[00:32:51]  Right?
[00:32:52]  I mean, you take anyone who's a murderer, and if that person had my mental state or your mental state, they wouldn't have done that because you or I would never do that.
[00:33:08]  But in their own mental state, they did do it.
[00:33:11]  Okay.
[00:33:15]  Okay.
[00:33:17]  Well, that's what prison is for.
[00:33:18]  Prison is for people with that kind of mental state.
[00:33:21]  That's what it's for.
[00:33:23]  So we just need to get rid of the insanity defense, which by the way, we can.
[00:33:27]  States can abolish the insanity defense.
[00:33:30]  It's happened.
[00:33:31]  Four states have already done it.
[00:33:32]  Idaho, Kansas, Utah, Montana, I believe are the four states without an insanity defense.
[00:33:41]  And there was a Supreme Court decision on this relatively recently, back in 2020.
[00:33:46]  This went to the Supreme Court.
[00:33:48]  The question of whether or not states can abolish the insanity defense or is it like a constitutional right that people have to plead insanity.
[00:33:57]  And so states can't abolish it.
[00:33:58]  The Supreme Court found that states can abolish it.
[00:34:03]  You're not actually entitled to be able to plead insanity.
[00:34:08]  And so this is something that certainly every red state at a minimum should do this.
[00:34:14]  And if they won't do it, then they should have to explain why.

=== Civil War History Rewritten (10:54) ===

[00:34:18]  This episode is sponsored by Balance of Nature.
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[00:35:26]  New York Post says this, a new statue of Christopher Columbus went up on the White House grounds Sunday that was built using pieces from a monument to the Italian explorer the protesters destroyed six years ago.
[00:35:36]  The 13-foot one-ton replica of a Columbus statue toppled in Baltimore in 2020 was commissioned by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations and is part of White House's celebration of America's 250th anniversary.
[00:35:50]  The statue has been placed outside the Eisenhower Executive Office building.
[00:35:54]  And that just, that statue just went up, which is great.
[00:35:59]  I'm a huge fan of this move, as you would expect.
[00:36:02]  And it's important.
[00:36:03]  You know, one of the most important things we can do for the culture is to build and rebuild statues and monuments to our heroes, our real heroes.
[00:36:10]  And Columbus is a real hero.
[00:36:12]  He deserves to be recognized, admired, remembered, as along with many of the other historical figures who've had their statues torn down.
[00:36:23]  You know, I've said before that when you think about Columbus in particular, he was operating at a time during the, you know, what we call the age of discovery or the age of exploration, where, and this is a time where some of the most impressive human beings who have ever lived on the planet were alive and they were ship captains.
[00:36:48]  Like ship captains during the age of discovery were some of the most impressive humans who've ever lived.
[00:36:56]  And I think that we have trouble appreciating, especially these days, we have trouble appreciating just how unimaginably great these men were.
[00:37:08]  Like we actually just can't fathom it.
[00:37:12]  We have no frame of reference.
[00:37:13]  I mean, you or I have never been in a position to do anything like what these guys did, take on the responsibility that they took on.
[00:37:26]  You know, if you were a ship captain in the year 1500 or 1600 or 1700, then you had to play the role of navigator, cartographer, astronomer, logistics manager, military commander, judge, police captain, diplomat, CEO, recruiter, dietician, right?
[00:37:55]  I mean, accountant, governor.
[00:37:58]  And you had to do all of that at the same time under extreme duress in the middle of the ocean, cut off from the rest of the world.
[00:38:07]  And if you made a wrong decision, the penalty is likely to be that everybody dies.
[00:38:15]  And dies in the most horrific ways imaginable, by the way.
[00:38:18]  Dies of like scurvy.
[00:38:21]  Okay, where your like teeth are falling out and you're coughing up blood and your insides are basically liquefying.
[00:38:30]  So they just, they had leveled levels of both skill and physical courage and intellect, brilliance that really don't exist on the planet anymore.
[00:38:41]  And Columbus is one of the best examples of that.
[00:38:46]  He was very great and he deserves this statue, especially in the District of Columbia, the city that bears his name.
[00:38:54]  You know, we've obviously spent a lot of time objecting to the removal of monuments and statues, which we should.
[00:39:03]  But now it's time to move past objecting and start building, start actively doing, because this really does matter.
[00:39:11]  The memorials and statues and stuff that we surround ourselves with are reminders.
[00:39:17]  And I'd like to see this go beyond Columbus.
[00:39:20]  Yeah, put up all the Columbus statues.
[00:39:22]  Absolutely.
[00:39:23]  Let's go beyond that.
[00:39:25]  We should also go and erect and re-erect the Robert E. Lee statues that came down.
[00:39:31]  Speaking of impressive men, you know, ship captains in the Age of Discovery, I think were arguably the most impressive men who ever lived, but also military generals in the 19th century and before, and also today, in some cases, a few cases.
[00:39:50]  But in the 19th century, in the Civil War era, in particular, I mean, Civil War generals, these were, again, some of the greatest men on both sides that this country has ever produced.
[00:40:02]  And part of it is a similar thing to the ship captain.
[00:40:05]  I mean, they were not as cut off from the world, certainly, and they were more supported than a ship captain would be.
[00:40:12]  But when you think about all the roles they had to play and the duress that they were under and the threat of not just death, but horrifically painful death that they were facing every second of the day.
[00:40:30]  And Robert E. Lee was the best of them, which is a fact that everybody in this country, no matter their political persuasion, used to be able to acknowledge.
[00:40:40]  But there's a very effective propaganda campaign that has changed that.
[00:40:43]  And it's given many Americans a kind of cartoonish idea of the Civil War, in which guys like Robert E. Lee are these cartoon villains.
[00:40:51]  And which speaking of that, that's why our latest episode of Real History, which comes out today on Daily Wire, deals with precisely this issue.
[00:41:00]  It's debuting today in Daily Wire.
[00:41:01]  It's the real history of the Civil War.
[00:41:03]  And we're going to tell you the truth about the Civil War.
[00:41:05]  We're going to give you an objective, balanced summary of it, something you'll be hard-pressed to find anywhere, because we know that in the schools and from the media and Hollywood, we get the one where the version where the Confederates are these evil villains.
[00:41:23]  And the South has all the moral complexity of serial killers.
[00:41:27]  As I said, cartoon villains.
[00:41:30]  And then on the other side, you do have this kind of pendular response, which is to make the North into the villains and the South into the heroes and to say that, well, they were fighting for reasons that had nothing to do with slavery whatsoever.
[00:41:45]  But what we do in this episode is we try to give you the actual truth, something objective, which is to say a version of history where actually neither side are villains.
[00:41:56]  In fact, the motivations on both sides are coherent and comprehensible and understandable.
[00:42:03]  And there were great men on both sides, men of great dignity and courage.
[00:42:10]  I mean, you can't say that of every conflict that's ever been fought, but you can in this case.
[00:42:16]  And all of this will be focused around, not solely focused on, but it'll be organized around Robert E. Lee, and he's kind of our case study.
[00:42:24]  So here's a clip of that watch.
[00:42:28]  Robert E. Lee witnessed the 1860 election results from a U.S. Army post in San Antonio, Texas.
[00:42:35]  As the fervor over secession began to boil over, Lee wrote his father-in-law, quote, if the union is dissolved, which God in his mercy forbid, I shall return to you.
[00:42:45]  According to historian Alan Guelzo, as the states of the Deep South left the Union, Lee complained that the behavior of the cotton states was wholly beyond any justification, and he was worried that their selfish and dictatorial bearing would make life for Virginia miserable should she determine to coalesce with them.
[00:43:04]  In a letter to one of his cousins, he wrote, secession is revolution.
[00:43:09]  He wrote that, quote, our people will destroy a government inaugurated by the blood and wisdom of our patriot fathers that has given us peace and prosperity at home, power and security abroad, and under which we have acquired a colossal strength unequaled in the history of mankind.
[00:43:23]  According to Guelzo, Lee wished to live under no other government and to have no other flag than the Star-Spangled Banner.
[00:43:30]  But that government was now going to disappear.
[00:43:32]  And the only alternative was to go back in sorrow to my people and share the misery of my native land.
[00:43:38]  Like so many Americans from this period, Lee was a patriotic American and a war hero, but he saw himself first and foremost as a Virginian.
[00:43:51]  Yeah, that's the reality of Robert E. Lee.
[00:43:52]  He was not a, he didn't want to secede.
[00:43:55]  He was not in favor of secession.
[00:43:57]  He was not, he wanted to avoid the conflict altogether.
[00:44:01]  But then secession happened and he faced a choice, which was he could either fight for the North or fight for the South.
[00:44:11]  And not fighting at all would not have been something that a guy like Robert E. Lee would even consider.
[00:44:16]  You know, he considered it his duty to fight one way or another.
[00:44:18]  He was a military man.
[00:44:20]  And but to fight for the North would be to march against his hometown, to march against his family, to march against Virginia, which was, which is, which is where he had his allegiance.
[00:44:31]  That was his home.
[00:44:33]  And the idea of marching and drawing a sword on his own home was something that he could not do.
[00:44:39]  And so he decided to fight for the South instead.
[00:44:41]  And like I said, if you're an honest and fair observer, you should be able to understand that choice.
[00:44:49]  You know, it's a serious moral dilemma, one which you or I have never been faced with, never will be faced with, hopefully.
[00:45:01]  But that's what he faced.
[00:45:03]  And he chose to fight for his home, Virginia, instead of fighting for the federal government.
[00:45:11]  That's what it came down to.

=== Honest Moral Dilemmas (15:32) ===

[00:45:13]  A lot more where that comes from.
[00:45:14]  You can go to dailywire.com right now, become a subscriber, and watch real history with Matt Walsh.
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[00:45:49]  Okay, this is kind of funny.
[00:45:52]  Post-Millennial has this report.
[00:45:53]  As CNN's ratings continue to fall, the hosts have appeared to be moving toward a production format that looks more like a podcast and less like a broadcast news station.
[00:46:02]  Host Jake Tapper was recording a show from his office chair, and Anderson Cooper was speaking from a desk mic with rolled-up sleeves.
[00:46:10]  Dylan Byers at Puck observed, CNN has been experimenting with new formats this week, including Anderson and rolled-up sleeves, massive desk microphones, and a physical map channeling early Edward R. Murrow-era broadcasts.
[00:46:23]  Experiment will continue today with Jake Tapper broadcasting from his audience.
[00:46:27]  So CNN viewership is declining.
[00:46:31]  They're getting their lunch eaten by new media and podcasts.
[00:46:36]  All cable news is.
[00:46:39]  They're losing huge parts of the market share to new media.
[00:46:44]  And so the solution over at CNN is to basically cosplay as podcasters.
[00:46:50]  And Anderson Cooper was appeared, sleeves rolled up, sitting at a desk in the middle of the office, looks very unproduced, which is the vibe they're going for.
[00:47:03]  And then Jake Tapper.
[00:47:05]  So here's Jake Tapper.
[00:47:06]  This was, I guess, a show a couple of days ago in his office, in his very cluttered office, I might add.
[00:47:14]  But they didn't want to clear away any of the clutter because they want it to look unproduced, authentic.
[00:47:19]  And here it is.
[00:47:20]  Watch.
[00:47:22]  So you're probably wondering what's going on, why we're in my office for the first hour of the lead today.
[00:47:29]  So it's an experiment.
[00:47:30]  This is my actual desk where I do my actual work, not the desk in the studio.
[00:47:35]  And we thought we would bring you into the space where me and my team do our actual journalism and plan the show every day.
[00:47:41]  So here we are giving it a shot.
[00:47:43]  You might also be wondering about the decor, the posters and the kerchiefs and such on my wall.
[00:47:49]  Well, the theme is these are all losing presidential campaigns.
[00:47:52]  And this hobby started 26 years ago after I covered my very first presidential campaign in the year 2000.
[00:47:58]  Campaigning and hopping from bus to plane to bus to plane, I collected the lawn signs and posters of all the candidates I covered.
[00:48:04]  And by the end of the election, I had a really great collection of, well, losers.
[00:48:09]  And there's an autographed Gore Lieberman one from 2000.
[00:48:14]  So anyway, this all became a hobby.
[00:48:16]  Here, come back to me here.
[00:48:17]  You'll see this is one of the grand achievements in my collection.
[00:48:23]  It's an Al Smith poster.
[00:48:25]  He lost in 1928.
[00:48:27]  Democrat to Herbert Herber.
[00:48:28]  Republicans, too, on the wall here and from the modern era.
[00:48:31]  There's autographed Romney and Ryan from 2012, autographed McCain, Palin from 2008, the oldest one in the corner there.
[00:48:39]  Wow.
[00:48:40]  Wow, this is so cool.
[00:48:42]  These CNN guys, you know, they're really, they're really cool.
[00:48:44]  They get it.
[00:48:45]  They're with it.
[00:48:46]  They're so hip.
[00:48:48]  They're not like those old stodgy news anchors.
[00:48:50]  No, these guys are, they're so informal, so casual.
[00:48:53]  He's in his office.
[00:48:55]  Not even in a studio.
[00:48:57]  He's in his office.
[00:48:57]  That's so awesome.
[00:48:59]  I'm so impressed.
[00:49:01]  And how perfect is it that a CNN anchor has a hobby of studying the great losers of history?
[00:49:07]  I could not think of a more appropriate hobby for a CNN employee.
[00:49:11]  I can see why it resonated with him so much.
[00:49:13]  I can see why he related to it.
[00:49:16]  He reads about these losers and thinks, wow, that's just like me.
[00:49:21]  And then he's inspired.
[00:49:24]  He's inspired to go off and, you know, continue losing.
[00:49:28]  So that's great.
[00:49:29]  And look, I hate to be the killjoy here, but for CNN, but this is not going to work.
[00:49:35]  This is not going to revive CNN's ratings.
[00:49:37]  And in fact, they're just making their situation worse.
[00:49:40]  They're trying to compete with podcasts by resembling podcasts, which just means more informal, more casual, more opinion-based.
[00:49:49]  But what they should do is go in the opposite direction.
[00:49:52]  Not to help CNN at all, okay?
[00:49:55]  Not that they would take my advice anyway.
[00:49:58]  But what you should do is go in the opposite direction.
[00:50:03]  But this is how unimaginative people are these days, especially in media.
[00:50:07]  It's also why marketing departments are worthless.
[00:50:10]  I guarantee this is an idea dreamed up by someone in marketing at CNN, where they looked at popular podcasts and then they called a meeting and they said, hey, guys, we got it.
[00:50:22]  We know what to do.
[00:50:23]  You see this thing over here that's popular?
[00:50:26]  We should do that.
[00:50:28]  This thing that's popular, let's do the thing that is popular rather than the thing that is not.
[00:50:37]  That's what a marketing department is.
[00:50:38]  And everybody is listening and they're just blown away by the brilliance of the strategy.
[00:50:45]  Everyone applauds.
[00:50:46]  They're wiping tears away.
[00:50:48]  They were so inspired.
[00:50:50]  But another strategy is to see the trend, see what everybody is doing and actually go the opposite way, present a real alternative.
[00:51:00]  Now, there's nothing wrong with the podcast vibe.
[00:51:02]  Okay.
[00:51:02]  I mean, you know, look around me.
[00:51:05]  I understand the podcast vibe, but I have a podcast.
[00:51:09]  So I'm a podcaster.
[00:51:10]  God help me.
[00:51:11]  Lord, forgive me.
[00:51:12]  I am a podcaster.
[00:51:13]  And so that's why, you know, things look the way they do.
[00:51:16]  If you're a news channel, be a news channel.
[00:51:21]  Like, it's okay.
[00:51:23]  Not everything has to be informal and casual.
[00:51:26]  I know that that's ironic coming from me, but still, not everything has to be informal and casual.
[00:51:35]  I mean, we were just talking about this the other day with a CBS report and the guy was looking into fraud to Medicare fraud or something.
[00:51:42]  And he's like in a t-shirt, sweating, doing a selfie video, giving this report.
[00:51:48]  It's like, put on a suit.
[00:51:51]  Be a news channel.
[00:51:52]  Be a news.
[00:51:53]  Be a journalist.
[00:51:55]  Be a professional.
[00:51:56]  Not everything has to be like this.
[00:51:59]  I mean, and just because it works in this context, just because you can see something that works in a certain context, doesn't mean it'll work in your context.
[00:52:07]  And just because people are going to podcasts looking for a certain thing, it doesn't mean that's the only thing they want.
[00:52:15]  So give people an alternative.
[00:52:17]  You know, the market is saturated with one kind of thing.
[00:52:20]  Give them a different kind of thing.
[00:52:23]  Just doing what everybody else is doing is unimaginative.
[00:52:26]  It's also not going to work.
[00:52:30]  So if I was running a news channel, I'd go the opposite way.
[00:52:32]  I would say we're going to make things more, even more formal.
[00:52:35]  You sit at the desk and you have your suit on and people are going to be professional.
[00:52:39]  They're going to be adults.
[00:52:40]  We don't need to see your stupid selfie videos.
[00:52:42]  We don't need any of that.
[00:52:44]  We don't need to see the background.
[00:52:45]  We don't need to, like there's a, I mean, I think there's important stuff going on in the news.
[00:52:48]  Why are you wasting time on air showing us your posters?
[00:52:55]  I think there's important stuff happening.
[00:52:57]  And he just wasted two minutes of airtime saying, hey guys, you want to see my posters?
[00:53:02]  Look at this cool, look at these cool posters in my office.
[00:53:08]  You know, I mean, that's, that's the kind of thing I would do.
[00:53:13]  Like when I'm showing you my fish cam, for example.
[00:53:15]  We haven't done that in a while.
[00:53:16]  Let's put, let's, let's check on the fish cam, actually.
[00:53:18]  Now that I'm, see, I can do, I can get away with this.
[00:53:21]  This is fine.
[00:53:22]  I'm doing a podcast.
[00:53:24]  And so no matter what's happening in the news, I will make you stare at the wooden fish on the mantle behind me.
[00:53:31]  And that's fine.
[00:53:34]  But you're the news.
[00:53:35]  So be the news.
[00:53:36]  That's all I'm saying.
[00:53:37]  Okay.
[00:53:39]  All right, we can come out of that now.
[00:53:40]  That's that's a checking in on old Bob the Fish.
[00:53:46]  I named him, by the way.
[00:53:48]  Speaking of being imaginative, that's the name I came up with.
[00:53:51]  I spent hours thinking about it and I came up with Bob, Bob the Fish.
[00:53:56]  But it kind of looks like a Bob to me.
[00:53:59]  Legacy media holds Americans like us in contempt.
[00:54:02]  Coverage on any issue from immigration to crime accuses you, not the criminals, of being the ones really at fault.
[00:54:08]  But my friends at PragerU will not stand for any of that nonsense.
[00:54:12]  They promote American values with content that teaches what matters most in new and creative ways through videos and more.
[00:54:19]  If you ever thought of supporting PragerU, now's the time to do it.
[00:54:22]  Every dollar you give is triple match for maximum impact, but time's running out.
[00:54:26]  That match opportunity ends on March 31st.
[00:54:28]  PragerU can help you win over your family, friends, and neighbors and anyone else who might be too trusting with what they see on social media.
[00:54:35]  If you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to regularly check out all of its really powerful content.
[00:54:40]  PreggerU somehow offers it all for free, too.
[00:54:43]  It doesn't take a dime of taxpayer money.
[00:54:44]  PregerU relies on supporters like you to shine a light for everybody.
[00:54:48]  We all need PragerU to be equipped with quintessential American values and ideas that make our country so great.
[00:54:54]  Don't let the lights go out on this beacon of American freedom.
[00:54:57]  Visit PragerU.com slash DW and support its important work before it's too late.
[00:55:04]  All right, finishing with some news out of Hollywood, positive news for change, Project Hail Mary debuted in its opening weekend with $140 million, which is a pretty massive achievement for an original film.
[00:55:16]  You know, it's a good sign that an original film is performing this well.
[00:55:19]  Original, as in not a franchise film, not a sequel, not a remake.
[00:55:23]  I mean, it's adapted from a book, obviously, so it's not original in that sense, but it's original in the sense of not being franchise slop.
[00:55:30]  And so on.
[00:55:34]  So anyway, on Friday, I did two things I rarely ever do.
[00:55:38]  And one is I went to see this movie on its opening weekend.
[00:55:42]  I can't remember the last time I've done that.
[00:55:44]  And two, I took my wife and kids to the movie, which I don't think I've ever done that.
[00:55:47]  Now, I've taken my wife to movies and I've taken my kids to movies, but we've never gone to a movie as a family, all of us.
[00:55:54]  And that's because Hollywood stopped making family movies decades ago.
[00:56:02]  Hollywood makes children's movies that are really hard to sit through if you do take your kids to them, but you do because you love them and so you endure it.
[00:56:11]  And then they make adult movies, but they don't really make movies that are actually intended to be enjoyed by the entire family.
[00:56:17]  Project Hail Mary is that kind of movie, which to me is its greatest achievement.
[00:56:20]  You know, that's my, that's my, if I'm going to review it, that's my, you know, I'd probably give it four stars out of five, mainly for this reason, is that it's a family movie and we all really enjoyed it.
[00:56:34]  It's a solid, fun film.
[00:56:37]  Some of the hype is a little bit overblown.
[00:56:40]  Okay, it's not a great film.
[00:56:42]  It's not a cinematic masterpiece by any means, but that's okay.
[00:56:44]  It's an enjoyable, fun movie that you can actually watch as a family.
[00:56:50]  It reminded me of the PG movies that, even though this is PG-13, I don't know why.
[00:56:54]  It could have been PG.
[00:56:56]  But back in the 80s and 90s, they used to put out these PG movies all the time that were, you know, like family movies in that they were a little bit more mature than, you know, just a standard children's movie, but they weren't totally over the head of a child.
[00:57:12]  And, you know, this is very much a spiritual descendant of something like E.T., which is a movie I loved as a kid, still do.
[00:57:19]  And I can tell you for any parents out there that, so I will give this my official parenting seal of approval.
[00:57:25]  We brought our two 12-year-olds and our nine-year-old to it.
[00:57:27]  Didn't bring the six-year-old, but having seen it now, you know, we could have brought her.
[00:57:31]  We'll probably let her watch it on streaming with us when it comes out.
[00:57:34]  The really frustrating thing about movies today as a parent, if you're a parent, you know this, is that very often you'll see a movie that's like 95% appropriate for all ages, but then out of nowhere, for reasons that don't serve the plot at all, they'll just have a random sex scene or they'll sprinkle in, you know, three or four F-bombs where they didn't need to.
[00:57:56]  And it's like, you could have just not done that and expanded the reach of your film by, I don't know, 500%.
[00:58:08]  So what's the point?
[00:58:09]  Now, I'm not saying that every movie has to be appropriate for kids, but if your movie is already 95% appropriate and it's thematically appropriate, it's a story that kids would like, why not take it all the way?
[00:58:21]  If you've got 95%, this is a movie that a family could watch and you could bring your nine-year-old to, why throw in the 5% that's not appropriate for them?
[00:58:29]  It doesn't.
[00:58:30]  Now, if it's like 50% not appropriate, then I get it.
[00:58:33]  Then like trying to take the 50% out totally changes the movie.
[00:58:35]  But if it's only 5% or 2%, just don't do that.
[00:58:41]  You know, you're almost at a family movie.
[00:58:43]  Take it all the way.
[00:58:44]  And that's what this movie does.
[00:58:47]  And it was good.
[00:58:50]  I mean, as to the quality of the film itself, I thought it was good.
[00:58:53]  It was entertaining.
[00:58:54]  It's about 30 minutes too long, which oddly enough is really common these days.
[00:59:01]  It's kind of counterintuitive because everyone's attention spans are dwindling.
[00:59:07]  And, you know, if you, if you go online, like the average amount of time someone spends watching a video is like two and a half seconds.
[00:59:14]  And yet movies are getting longer.
[00:59:16]  Blockbuster movies in particular, two and a half hours is standard out.
[00:59:19]  It used to be 90 minutes.
[00:59:20]  They've added like an hour on to the standard runtime for a blockbuster film.
[00:59:24]  And I think most of the time that's unnecessary.
[00:59:28]  So 30 minutes they could cut from it.
[00:59:30]  I don't think they edited this one enough.
[00:59:32]  And this one does suffer a bit from the kind of like jokey, ironic detachment that has plagued basically every blockbuster film for 15 years.
[00:59:42]  And in this movie, the movie, you know, in this case, the movie is kind of a quasi-comedy and many of the jokes land.
[00:59:48]  So I'm not going to hold it against it.
[00:59:50]  Didn't ruin the movie by any means.
[00:59:52]  But there are moments.
[00:59:54]  Like, for example, spoiler, well, maybe, I don't know if it's a spoiler.
[00:59:57]  Probably.
[00:59:58]  It's not really a spoiler, but I'll just say it.
[01:00:01]  In the very first scene of the movie, Gosling's character wakes up on a ship and finds himself in space, like in another solar system, and doesn't remember anything.
[01:00:14]  And the film kind of breezes through this sequence in like three minutes and plays it partially as a joke, which I think dulls the impact.
[01:00:22]  It could have been a really stirring and suspenseful start to the film.
[01:00:26]  I mean, just imagine waking up on a ship in another solar system alone with no memory of how you got there.
[01:00:33]  It's the kind of thing that would bring you very close to a psychotic break and probably would break most people.
[01:00:39]  So it could have been a really intense scene, but the movie plays it very lightly and Gosling's character acclimates to the situation very quickly.

=== Alien Perspective in Film (05:04) ===

[01:00:45]  He's kind of like cracking jokes the whole time.
[01:00:48]  So there's that kind of thing.
[01:00:49]  But generally, I found it entertaining.
[01:00:51]  And there are still moments of genuine emotion, heart in the film.
[01:00:56]  There's even some moments of tragedy and suspense.
[01:01:01]  And that's another trend I'd like to see continue.
[01:01:05]  That's what I liked is the sincerity of the film.
[01:01:10]  We need not just original stories, but films that are also earnest and sincere and have the courage of their convictions, which isn't to say they can't be funny.
[01:01:19]  I mean, you can be funny.
[01:01:21]  But what I'm saying is that one of the many things I absolutely hate about Marvel movies, hate them, is that they are all so painfully self-aware and embarrassed to be what they are.
[01:01:38]  So they constantly have all the characters basically pointing out in the movie how dumb everything is.
[01:01:44]  Anytime something ridiculous happens in a Marvel movie, they'll have a character practically turn to the camera and go, this is ridiculous.
[01:01:53]  And that's somehow supposed, and then everyone's supposed to laugh like, oh, it's ridiculous.
[01:01:56]  And the guy said that it's ridiculous.
[01:01:58]  That's hilarious.
[01:01:59]  But the only reason they're doing that is because they're embarrassed by what they're doing on screen.
[01:02:04]  And that's supposed to absolve them of the guilt of like putting a bunch of ridiculous nonsense on the screen, I guess.
[01:02:10]  But it's like, no, it's a superhero movie.
[01:02:12]  If you think it's dumb and not worth making, then don't make it.
[01:02:17]  But if you're going to make the movie, then take it seriously and, you know, embrace it and tell the story.
[01:02:25]  Stop apologizing for it.
[01:02:27]  It's like I tell my kids if they want to come out, hey, Dad, I wrote a story.
[01:02:30]  I wrote a poem.
[01:02:32]  And they want to kind of like apologize for it ahead of time and start explicit.
[01:02:34]  No, no, don't, don't apologize for it.
[01:02:37]  Like you made this thing.
[01:02:38]  Be proud of it.
[01:02:41]  If it's bad, you're going to be in big trouble.
[01:02:43]  You know, you're going to have to go to your room, but be proud of it.
[01:02:46]  No, I'm kidding.
[01:02:47]  But so that's one thing that I don't like.
[01:02:50]  And Project Hell Mary has a little bit of that, but not much.
[01:02:53]  And it's mostly an entertaining, wholesome film with some moments of real tension and stuff like that.
[01:03:00]  I'd put it in the top five probably space slash alien movies of the past 20 years.
[01:03:05]  It's a little bit like a family-oriented arrival, which is a great film.
[01:03:11]  It's a better film, but this is still good.
[01:03:14]  Also has shades of Brad Pitt in Ad Astra, which is a criminally underrated masterpiece, in my opinion.
[01:03:21]  I love that movie.
[01:03:22]  Much more adult, more contemplative, definitely a slower film.
[01:03:26]  And so I'd put this below that.
[01:03:28]  But this is above.
[01:03:29]  I tell you what, one thing I would do, I'd put it above Interstellar.
[01:03:31]  It's kind of similar to Interstellar.
[01:03:33]  I'd put it above that, which was one of the most overrated movies of the century.
[01:03:37]  And the last thing I'll say about Project El Mary that I liked is that, and that I thought was kind of thought-provoking, is that the alien, again, spoiler, I guess, but I think this is in the trailer.
[01:03:49]  The alien, Rocky, is not at all humanoid.
[01:03:54]  And I was thinking about this.
[01:03:56]  It's one of the, maybe the only sci-fi movie I've ever seen that features a rational, intelligent alien that is not remotely humanoid.
[01:04:06]  Because even in Star Wars, for example, they got all kinds of aliens, but they're all still basically humanoid.
[01:04:11]  And if you take it like Job of the Hut even is still, you know, still looks humanoid, looks like a human that turned into a slug.
[01:04:18]  But this film imagines an alien creature that specifically does not resemble human beings at all.
[01:04:24]  Like doesn't have a recognizable face, doesn't have any sort of human-like sensory organs.
[01:04:31]  It's sensory.
[01:04:32]  There's a few brief moments where it gives you a first-person view of what this alien sees and how it sees the world.
[01:04:37]  I thought that was really interesting.
[01:04:38]  Then it just sees the world like maybe the way that a bat would see it or something.
[01:04:44]  And I found that interesting.
[01:04:48]  It makes you think about the vastness of the universe and just how alien an alien species could be.
[01:04:54]  We can't help but think of aliens in human terms.
[01:04:57]  But if you think about it, a creature on a planet totally removed from Earth, separated by trillions of miles, there's no reason why it has to resemble us in any way whatsoever.
[01:05:10]  And if you start thinking about that, like what, think about a creature that does not resemble human life in any form at all.
[01:05:18]  What could that look like?
[01:05:19]  And that's sort of what they present in this film.
[01:05:21]  So I thought that was imaginative and interesting.
[01:05:24]  So overall, give it a thumbs up.
[01:05:26]  Like I said, four stars out of five.
[01:05:28]  And I am grading it on a curve a little bit because it's a successful family movie.
[01:05:32]  And so I'm giving it like an extra star for that reason.
[01:05:35]  But I'd recommend it.
[01:05:37]  Go check it out.
[01:05:38]  And that will do it for the show today.
[01:05:39]  Thanks for watching.
[01:05:40]  Thanks for listening.
[01:05:40]  Talk to you tomorrow.
[01:05:42]  Have a great day.
[01:05:42]  Godspeed.

=== Treason and Historical Truth (00:49) ===

[01:05:50]  I do believe that if people have committed treason against the United States of America, their statues should not be in the Capitol.
[01:06:00]  History is written by the victors.
[01:06:01]  And since the 1960s, we've been told, mostly by people whose ancestors didn't even live here during the war, the South committed treason.
[01:06:09]  But if the Confederates were traitors, then why was Jefferson Davis never put on trial for treason?
[01:06:18]  What were Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson the Freighter?
[01:06:22]  Do they know something they're not allowed to say today?
[01:06:26]  It's time for the truth.
[01:06:27]  So here it is.
[01:06:28]  Robert E. Lee was a military genius and a man of immense honor.
[01:06:32]  He was beloved by Americans from the North and South for a century after the war.
[01:06:37]  This is the real history of the Civil