Ep. 1204 - Oliver Anthony And The Normal People Uprising
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 7 minutes
Words per Minute
167.01982
Summary
Oliver Anthony went from totally unknown to a famous singer performing for crowds of thousands in the span of less than a week. Also, Joe Biden has no comment for the dozens of people who died in the wildfires in Hawaii, the full content of the Obama letter where he confesses to his gay fantasies has been revealed, and Vivek Ramaswamy performs a rap song at the Iowa State Fair, and a media outlet tries to debunk one of my monologues from last week.
Transcript
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Oliver Anthony went from totally unknown to a famous singer
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performing for crowds of thousands in the span of less than a week.
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Now, as expected, the media has set to work attacking him.
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Also, Joe Biden has no comment for the dozens of people who died from the wildfires in Hawaii.
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The full content of the Obama letter, where he confesses to his gay fantasies, has been revealed.
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Vivek Ramaswamy performs a rap song at the Iowa State Fair,
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and a media outlet tries to debunk one of my monologues from last week.
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All of that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
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Seven years ago, for one night, the attention of the national political class in this country
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was on a small town in the middle of Virginia called Farmville.
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The occasion at that time was the vice presidential debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence.
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A handful of Farmville's 8,000 residents were in attendance for this event,
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and most of the debate focused on issues that no one even pretends to care about anymore,
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like Donald Trump's tax returns and the fact that Trump called Rosie O'Donnell a fat slob.
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There was a lot of talk about the internal politics of faraway countries like Syria.
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What didn't come up in any meaningful way is what either party would do to help towns like Farmville.
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And that's kind of odd when you think about it.
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By the time Tim Kaine, Mike Pence, and the National Press Corps showed up in 2016,
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Farmville had been bleeding population for many years.
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The median income in Farmville was an obvious cause for concern.
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It was less than half the median income in the United States and dropping.
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And yet, despite all that, all that the residents of Farmville heard during the debate
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were vague promises and cliches about an economy that would soon work for everyone.
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Seven years later, both major political parties have had a chance to run the White House.
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The decline of Farmville, Virginia, has only continued in the meantime.
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Four years after that vice presidential debate, the one with all the promises, where all the promises were made,
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Farmville ranked as the single poorest town in all of Virginia,
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with nearly a third of residents living below the poverty line.
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In 2021, the median household income in Farmville was under $36,000.
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That's the median, compared to more than $70,000 in the United States generally.
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Now, what's happening in Farmville isn't unique.
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Multiply the story of Farmville, Virginia, by the thousands of small towns all over the country that have deteriorated in recent years,
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and you get some sense of the scale of American decline that's been completely ignored in Washington.
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Now, politicians, they like to use these towns as props or as picturesque backdrops for their televised debates.
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But once the cameras leave, so do the politicians.
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Now, one of the Farmville residents they left behind is named Oliver Anthony.
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He's a former factory worker who lives with his three dogs in the town.
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And last week, I briefly talked about Anthony's breakout song, Rich Men North of Richmond.
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The song isn't just about the failings of this country's political leaders who long ago abandoned people like Oliver Anthony.
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It's also about dignity, about personal responsibility, about spirituality, all verboten topics in the music industry.
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Now, for context, Anthony was completely unknown and recording songs with his iPhone for an audience of a few dozen on YouTube as recently as last week.
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At this time, seven days ago, nobody had ever heard of him.
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And as of this recording, tomorrow on Tuesday, Radio WV is going to upload the debut of Rich Men North of Richmond.
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And it's going to be the first song to get out there that's been recorded on a real microphone and a real camera, not just on my cell phone.
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And Lord willing, it's going to get some traffic.
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A few days later, that guy had three of the top ten songs on iTunes.
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He was performing for a crowd of thousands in North Carolina where they were all singing along as if they'd been singing his songs for years.
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So here he is performing, Rich Men North of Richmond, for the massive crowd in North Carolina.
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I've been selling my soul, working all day, double time hours for both pay, so I can sit out here, waste my life away, drag back home and drown my troubles away.
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What the world's gotten to for people like me and people like you is I could just wake up and it not be true.
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But it is, Lord, it is, living in the new world with an old soul.
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Lord knows they all just want to have total control.
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Men are putting themselves six feet in the ground.
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Oliver Anthony and the many people cheering him on.
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Or at least you're not supposed to know that they do.
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They don't belong to any of the perpetually oppressed classes.
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Or they don't go around identifying as LGBTQ2S plus or whatever.
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These are people who have actual useful skills.
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These are people who don't think their sexuality or race is a substitute for personality or ethics.
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Who understand that they themselves are not all powerful and all knowing.
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They are not the controlled opposition the left has grown familiar with.
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Now, Anthony made much of this very clear this weekend.
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Moments before the performance that you just saw, he delivered an important message to the crowd that had gathered.
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And as you watch this, I want you to put yourself in Anthony's position for a moment.
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Just a few days ago, you're a complete unknown.
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Now, all of a sudden, you're getting all kinds of offers for interviews and record deals and everything.
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You're one of the top trending topics across all social media platforms.
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Well, given that sort of platform and that attention, how would you begin your first show after all this attention?
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For the power of the wicked will be broken, but the Lord upholds the righteous.
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The blameless spend their days under the Lord's care, and their inheritance will endure forever.
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Though the Lord's enemies are like the flowers of the field,
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they will be consumed, and they will go up and smoke.
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So he opens his concert not with a plug for his Instagram or with some kind of narcissistic celebration of his own success.
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The wicked will perish, he says, and the crowd erupts, which is quite an applause line.
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They've probably never seen anything like that, at least not from a famous musician.
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This isn't Sam Smith's Satanism or Cardi B's sexual perversion.
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In fact, most of the people in that crowd probably haven't even heard a message like that in their churches,
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where most pastors would consider it insufficiently welcoming to quote the Bible's warnings about the punishments doled out to evildoers.
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So it's not just that he started his first concert, really, after getting all this tension.
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No, he didn't just start it with a Bible verse.
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Now, I don't think that Anthony was trying to do anything revolutionary by reading that particular passage.
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You can tell he's getting emotional reading it.
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And it's a beautiful verse and an important one.
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He's a normal and authentic guy, which is the whole appeal.
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Now, that simple fact makes him a clear and present danger to the many talentless and eternally bitter members of the so-called entertainment industry,
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along with their friends and the equally joyless news media.
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And that's why, predictably, Rolling Stone just published the first hit piece on Oliver Anthony.
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But for its part, Rolling Stone chalked Anthony's success up to, quote,
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right-wing influencers who have artificially promoted Anthony's song, they say.
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Now, the piece mentions me, a few other people who are guilty of promoting Oliver Anthony.
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For the record, I very much object to being called an influencer.
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But we have to ask, is that really the explanation for the success of Richmond, north of Richmond?
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The crowd didn't look like a bunch of influencers to me.
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And they didn't even look like the sorts of people who pay very close attention to influencers.
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TMZ managed to miss the point even more, implying that Anthony wrote the song in order to make money.
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This is a pretty fascinating trend we're seeing.
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It appears when right-wingers perceive something like a song they think addresses their grievances and perspectives, they lean into it.
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And from that small sample size, we've noticed it can be effective in the marketplace.
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In other words, he's just trying to make a quick buck.
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As if it was so obvious that a song like this would instantly go to number one on iTunes.
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As if Anthony stood in the woods next to his deer stand and played an acoustic song about his troubles as a working man,
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all in some cynical ploy to make millions of dollars from an audience who, at that point, didn't even know he existed.
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Now, it's pretty obvious that what happened is this.
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Anthony was singing from his heart about his own experiences.
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He assumed the song would be heard by the same few dozen people who heard his other songs.
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And he was fortunately quite wrong in that assumption.
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Now, as weak as these hit pieces are, the truth is we know that Rolling Stone and TMZ are just firing the warning shots here.
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We already know that the media will set to work to destroy Oliver Anthony.
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No doubt they're digging through his past right now looking for skeletons as we speak.
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As the Daily Beast and Huffington Post ghouls scour through Anthony's social media feeds,
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start interviewing his high school friends looking for dirt.
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Let's take a step back here because what we're seeing here, as remarkable as it is, shouldn't be viewed in isolation.
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All of the biggest hit songs that have gotten the buzz and attention in recent weeks have been country songs.
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Recently, the top three songs on Billboard were country songs.
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Before Anthony, it was Jason Aldean with a song centered around similar themes.
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The media freaked out about the Aldean song just as they're starting to freak out about Anthony's song
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because it's music that attacks the elites and gives voice to the normal concerns of normal people.
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Americans who aren't demented, as it turns out,
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don't like it when hordes of BLM rioters torch small businesses and courthouses in their communities.
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They don't like it when politicians send billions of dollars to Ukraine while towns like Farmville fall apart.
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Normal people have been told to shut up about all this for years and years.
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You know, a moment ago, I scoffed at the idea that Anthony would make a song like this
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as some sort of marketing or self-promotional strategy.
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And that is an idea that deserves to be scoffed at because it's totally absurd given the context.
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But we should note that, yes, there is indeed a huge market for this kind of thing.
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Just like there's a huge market for movies like Sound of Freedom.
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That's the other context we should consider all this in.
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Think about the songs that are getting all the attention right now,
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the biggest hit songs right now, and the biggest hit movies.
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Millions and millions of people, normal people, are starving for art
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that speaks to them and their values and concerns.
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There is, in fact, many millions of dollars to be made here.
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That wasn't Anthony's motivation, but the money is there to be made.
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And now he'll likely make some of it, whether he wanted to or not.
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This just makes it all the more remarkable that the mainstream music industry,
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absolutely refuses to cater to this audience or give them art that will actually resonate with them.
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Now, sure, you can make plenty of money by churning out another demented rap song
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that talks about female genitalia in graphic terms
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and openly encourages the listeners to act in depraved and lawless and self-destructive ways.
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You can make plenty of money with another mindless, soulless pop song
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But the songs that have set the world on fire recently,
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the ones that have topped the charts and gotten people talking,
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are songs that connect with an audience that despises all of that stuff.
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And those of us who relate to that lyric, as I certainly do,
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are made to feel this way in large part because of the sort of art,
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quote-unquote, that the entertainment industry vomits out.
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We see all that stuff and we listen to it and our souls are crushed just a little more each time.
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It grieves us to be surrounded by such ugliness and stupidity.
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And to think that so many people are just marinating in this filth
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So many that we made a literal overnight superstar
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out of one simple, authentic guy strumming his guitar in the woods.
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So the question is, given that this huge market exists
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and that it is hungry for this kind of content, this kind of art,
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Even if it is just for the sake of capitalism, baby, as TMZ says,
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why don't they produce songs like Rich Men, north of Richmond?
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Well, the answer is exactly what we've already established.
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They hate normal people, you know, people who read their Bibles
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and have traditional quote-unquote values and care about things like hard work and honesty.
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They hate us and they want us all to become lazy, helpless, degenerate parasites.
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They want to create a population of stupid, weird, hollow people.
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They will even forego profit to make that happen.
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We'll give it to guys like Oliver Anthony instead.
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If you want some positive news on the culture war,
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the left has lost their mind making abortion their official sacrament.
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The pro-life efforts, which are more important now than ever, are booming.
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Despite the narrative, pro-lifers didn't go away.
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As one of the largest pro-life organizations in the world,
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no one's in a better position than 40 Days for Life to end abortion in each state in a post-Roe America.
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40 Days for Life is changing hearts and minds in the most blue pro-abortion states.
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They've had a record number of locations since Roe was overturned,
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and they grew in both volunteers and locations.
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With about a million volunteers in 1,500 cities,
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they hold peaceful vigils outside abortion facilities.
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You can help them fight the ongoing legal battles by protecting free speech for their volunteers
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by giving a tax-deductible gift of any amount at 40daysforlife.com.
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Bloomberg reports the death toll from the fast-moving wildfires in Maui
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rose to 93, making them the deadliest wildfires in the U.S. in more than 100 years
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as concerns grew about the effectiveness of the island's emergency alarm system.
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The number of fatalities is expected to climb further
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as authorities continue to search and rescue efforts.
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Hawaii Governor Josh Green reported a news briefing on Saturday.
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Just 3% of the area has been searched, officials said,
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adding that they're bringing in 12 more cadaver dogs to help with the effort.
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On Sunday, officials said it's still unclear when residents may return to the area.
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this is the largest natural disaster we've ever experienced.
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It's also going to be a natural disaster that takes an incredible amount of time to recover from.
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The death toll makes the wildfire the deadliest since 1918
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when 453 people were killed in Minnesota and Wisconsin by the Moose Lake fires.
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Losses are estimated to be approaching $6 billion
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after roughly 2,200 structures were destroyed in West Maui
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across the more than 2,000 acres burned by the blaze.
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So this is a truly historic, unfathomably awful catastrophe,
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what does the President of the United States think about all this?
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Well, you're going to have to keep wondering, I guess,
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Joseph Sink is a White House correspondent for Bloomberg,
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HOTUS was asked about the rising death toll in Hawaii.
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I don't know how many vacations this guy has taken,
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And we know this is kind of a game that's played,
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it's a game that's played on both sides a little bit,
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where depending on if it's a Republican or Democrat,
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then you keep track of the time they spend golfing,
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So the Democrats did the same thing with Trump.
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and ask you a question you're not prepared for,