A rapper has been shot and killed in the early morning hours of Tuesday morning in the United States of America. This is the latest in a growing list of rappers who have been killed in recent months. Why do rappers fall victim to the same kind of violence that their music glorifies?
00:00:28.000We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
00:00:39.140Inflation continues to plague our economy.
00:00:41.200The Daily Wire reports that in less than two years, inflation has soared from 1.4% to 8.6%.
00:00:47.240As of May 2022, the price of gasoline was up nearly 49%.
00:00:51.580The price of meat, poultry, and fish was up 14.2%.
00:00:54.600And the price of used cars was up 16%.
00:00:57.360The current administration's irresponsible spending patterns, including Biden's $1.9 trillion rescue plan, continue to exacerbate the problem.
00:01:05.620Now is not the time to have all your money tied up in the stock market.
00:02:09.200Rapper Takeoff was shot and killed in Houston in the early Tuesday morning, according to TMZ.
00:02:13.820The 28-year-old recording artist was part of the group Migos.
00:02:16.660Law enforcement sources and several witnesses told TMZ that the fatal incident occurred just after 2.30 a.m.
00:02:22.680when police were called to 810 Billiards in Bowling, Houston.
00:02:28.020The sources said Takeoff, whose real name is Kirshnik Kerry Ball, was playing dice with bandmate Quavo when a fight broke out among participants.
00:02:36.300This led to one person allegedly opening fire and striking Takeoff in or near the head, who was pronounced dead at the scene, to other individuals who were also allegedly injured during the altercation, taken to the hospital, but their conditions unknown.
00:02:49.580So, Takeoff now joins a lengthy list of murdered rappers, and it's a list that seems to be growing with increasing rapidity in recent months.
00:02:59.900Just this past September, the rapper P&B Rock was shot and killed at a chicken and waffles restaurant in Los Angeles.
00:03:06.580A couple months before that, in July, a rapper named Jay DeYoungin was shot by multiple gunmen who pulled up in a black truck and opened fire while he was sitting outside of his home in Louisiana.
00:03:16.440That same month, a rapper named Trouble was killed in a home invasion robbery in Atlanta.
00:03:22.060Overall, this year alone, at least seven rappers have been murdered.
00:03:29.620Five a year on average, which is an extraordinary figure when you consider that the murder rate for performers in other genres is effectively zero.
00:03:38.480I mean, there are more rappers killed in a year than country singers killed in a decade or a century or ever.
00:03:47.600That's not because there's some kind of racist vendetta against rappers.
00:03:51.320There isn't any serial killer on the loose targeting hip-hop artists, as far as I know.
00:03:56.220The difference between rappers and country stars, of course, is that rappers live lifestyles of criminality and violence.
00:04:03.620They promote criminality and violence.
00:04:06.460They glorify criminality and violence.
00:04:09.020And then they fall victim to the very brutality that they encourage.
00:04:12.660In fact, I pulled up the lyrics to one Migos song, totally at random, because I don't know any of their music.
00:04:18.380I'm not very familiar with the catalog, so I just looked it up.
00:04:20.660And the first one that came up was a song called Open It Up.
00:04:24.060And the very first lines in the song are,
00:08:00.280It is a map pointing the child towards his own destruction.
00:08:05.720Now, of course, here's the irony here.
00:08:08.360The left will agree with everything I'm saying about the power of words and ideas, except when it comes to rap music.
00:08:20.200You know, they will say that if you use biologically correct pronouns to refer to a trans person, that you are then directly causing the trans person to kill himself.
00:08:29.700If you, say, criticize a hospital for mutilating minors, your words are directly causing violence and bomb threats against the hospital.
00:08:41.800If you, say, question the election results in 2020, your words directly led to the riot on January 6th.
00:08:50.440They directly caused a crazy homeless guy to break into Nancy Pelosi's house and assault her husband with a hammer.
00:08:55.500In all of these contexts, and in any other context where conservatives are saying anything about any subject, words, we're told, have enormous consequence.
00:09:08.400But when rappers spend decades explicitly glorifying and encouraging street violence, and lots of people who listen to that music commit acts of street violence, sometimes committing them against the rappers themselves,
00:09:22.080the very people who are just sermonizing about the power of words and ideas will throw their hands up and say,
00:09:28.720I don't know, I don't see a connection here.
00:09:31.900I just, I don't see it. I don't know what you guys are talking about.
00:09:36.680Words have consequences, unless they're said over a bass-heavy beat, in which case they exist in this kind of consequence-free zone, apparently.
00:09:46.300Yet, we know that that's not the case at all.
00:09:51.680In fact, in few areas of life, do words have greater consequences, or worse consequences, than in the rap industry.
00:10:03.160Consequences that even now, the people peddling this stuff can't escape.
00:10:09.780Well, the midterm elections are here, and I hope you're ready to vote, because all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 seats in the Senate are up for grabs.
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00:11:13.220The assailant in the Paul Pelosi case has been in custody for a few days, and more information is coming out.
00:11:19.880The media's job then, of course, is to organize that information in such a way as to support their already pre-decided, predetermined narratives.
00:12:00.440They say the papes, evolving beliefs show how today's extremist threat complicates easy left-right categorization, a shift that's confusing to the public, and a bonanza for trolls who exploit the messiness to push disinformation and justify violence.
00:12:20.860Cynthia Miller-Idris, who heads the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, says,
00:12:28.360You get stuff that just feels contradictory, but when you understand how online exposure to propaganda works, it makes perfect sense.
00:12:35.060It's a choose-your-own-adventure type of radicalization.
00:12:37.780By the time DePay 42 allegedly broke into Pelosi's residence on Friday and attacked 82-year-old Paul with a hammer, his writings were laden with far-right messaging that indicated a dark conspiratorial spiral.
00:12:49.120His blog posts in October were a mix of bloody images and hateful screeds aimed at a variety of targeted groups, including Jewish, black, and trans people, as well as Democrats.
00:12:57.520He also shared delusional thoughts about an invisible fairy that sometimes appeared as a bird.
00:13:03.340A purported former romantic partner, Oxane Gypsy Tobe, has told reporters that DePay is mentally ill.
00:13:13.620Well, he's talking about an invisible fairy, so I think that's probably a pretty good indication.
00:13:18.160But Washington Post says those details were largely ignored by right-wing figures, including elected Republicans and MAGA stars with millions of followers,
00:13:26.960who instead reached years back to portray him as a leftist, hemp-bracelet-peddling hippie, perhaps part of a false flag operation to blame the right for the assault.
00:13:36.760Now, all right, so a couple of things here.
00:13:40.940Just to be clear with you, Washington Post, we aren't ignoring the details.
00:14:13.680It's at Nancy Pelosi's house in San Francisco.
00:14:17.100I have no direct access to information about it.
00:14:19.740There's no way that I can really investigate it on my own.
00:14:23.600I'm not going to show up to the crime scene with a notepad and start doing my own investigation.
00:14:29.180I don't think they'd allow me to do it anyway.
00:14:30.460So I, along with everybody else, you know, we have to rely on the disseminators of the institutions that have positioned themselves as the official kind of disseminators of information.
00:15:06.680And so all of the speculation, what you call conspiracy theories, these are just people who are aware that they can't trust you lying hacks.
00:15:17.720And so they're trying to make sense of it on their own.
00:15:50.200All of the conspiracy, the so-called conspiracy theories online, what you call misinformation, disinformation, it is 100% all your fault.
00:15:59.240You have yourselves to blame for that.
00:16:02.140When you put yourself in the position of being the arbiters of information, the arbiters of what is true and what is not, but you don't live up.
00:16:10.840You don't even come close to living up to that, to the responsibilities of that position, then, you know, it's a free-for-all.
00:16:20.420Now, all that said, personally, and I said this from the very beginning, I have no problem accepting the basic outline presented by the Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets about this story.
00:16:32.860The basic outline of a guy breaking into Nancy Pelosi's house, getting into a physical altercation with her husband.
00:27:10.920I said, I think you understand that it's a b**** tactic to publish a story, wait until the initial push of traffic has died down, and then ask for comment from the people you've smeared in the article.
00:27:19.300I don't care if you guys are partisan vultures masquerading as journalists.
00:27:22.540I just preferred if you didn't insult my intelligence by pretending that you want to hear my perspective for an article that you published yesterday.
00:27:34.620They published the article with all the smears and everything, making claims, you made threats, you engaged in slurs and all the rest of it.
00:27:43.660Then you get the initial push of traffic, get the traffic overnight, you wait until the traffic has died down, and no one's reading the article anymore.
00:27:50.960Now, it's NBC News, so not that many people are going to read it to begin with.
00:27:54.340But like 90% of the people who will read it will read it in the first few hours.
00:28:31.260But yeah, it's just insulting my intelligence I don't like.
00:28:36.020You know, don't insult my intelligence.
00:28:39.080You think I'm stupid enough to buy this?
00:28:41.340You use a tactic like this and I'm not going to notice?
00:28:43.460It's like, it's like I say to my kids sometimes when I, you know, I tell them to go clean their room and then they go up there and they just shove everything right under the bed.
00:28:54.500And like, and I can, and I can see it poking out from under the bed.
00:28:56.880And I come up and, and I say the same thing.
00:29:49.020I, you know, I thought, as naive as I am, I thought that, I just, I didn't think that she would go for a third time around.
00:29:54.520But she's been all over the place recently.
00:29:56.400And here she is with Joy Reid expressing her concern for Nancy Pelosi.
00:30:02.200I want to take this a step further away from the incident, that terrible incident with Paul Pelosi and broaden it out.
00:30:12.880Because what we have with the rhetoric coming from the Republican candidates from their party right now is so disturbing.
00:30:22.520I didn't see a big outpouring on the part of elected officials to stand with Nancy Pelosi the way she has stood with Republicans as well as Democrats in times of real terror, like on January the 6th.
00:30:37.780And so ask yourselves, please, why would you entrust power to people who are either themselves unable to see how terrible it is that someone would be attacked in their home or don't really care because they think it will somehow get them votes that will get them elected?
00:30:59.380This is a real threat to the heart of our democracy.
00:31:03.020Threat to, I'm shocked to hear her say that it was a threat to democracy.
00:31:09.620You know, those words have a lot of power and they resonate a lot because, you know, Democrats, they rarely call anything a threat to democracy.
00:31:17.400You rarely hear them say, they only say it in every single sentence they speak.
00:31:21.840Okay, it's only every time they open their mouth, they call something a threat to democracy.
00:31:25.140And so, given that they bring it up so rarely, when you hear that, it really, it sinks in, doesn't it?
00:32:13.500Now, has Nancy Pelosi, what about actual violence against Republicans?
00:32:20.720When Rand Paul was attacked, when Bernie Bro shot up a GOP baseball game, conservatives and Republicans being canvassers and campaigners being assaulted.
00:32:31.720You know, there's been several different cases of that.
00:32:48.380Joe Biden also, that's the other thing.
00:32:50.080You know, when Democrats are getting desperate, we know about all the threat to democracy stuff.
00:32:54.440But the other thing they do, right on cue, as we get close to the election, is they start ranting and raving about the dastardly Republicans that are coming to take away your social security.
00:34:09.920That's why we always hear them quoted.
00:34:12.240It's the interesting thing is that we, anytime you hear a Republican, you hear about a Republican who wants to take away social security, it's always coming from Democrats who are insisting that the Republicans know you.
00:34:20.520But you don't hear, you don't see the Republicans.
00:34:22.380You know, you're not going to find very many clips of Republicans in front of a microphone talking about why we need to just get rid of social security altogether.
00:34:39.340Republicans and Democrats together both understand that it would be electoral suicide to actually advocate for getting rid of social security.
00:34:49.780Because for one thing, you would be directly ticking off the demographic of people who are most likely to vote, which would be older people.
00:35:02.540Now, I'm not a Republican elected official.
00:35:05.140And I can say that there are many things that I will say and do say that you can't blame Republicans for because they're not going to say these things.
00:35:13.580But I am willing to say that I do think we need to get away from social security.
00:35:16.920I think the whole thing is it's a Ponzi scheme.
00:35:45.120And I also know that, you know, 30 years hence, when I'm eligible for social security, it's not going to be available to me because it can't go on.