Ep. 1234 - We Are A Nation Run By Imbeciles
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 8 minutes
Words per Minute
176.66902
Summary
The dumbest human beings in the country are often the ones running the country. Today on the Matt Walsh Show, we re being led by the dumbest collection of imbeciles ever assembled. The saga of Congressman Jamal Bowman and the fire alarm only proves this point. Also, RFK Jr is getting ready for a third party run. Does this hurt Biden or Trump more? And a YouTube prankster gets shot while trying to prank someone. And our daily cancellation, the pause on student loan repayments, ended yesterday. And everyone is taking it about as well as you expected. We ll talk about all that and more on today s show.
Transcript
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Today on the Matt Walsh Show, we're being led by the dumbest collection of imbeciles ever assembled.
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The saga of Congressman Jamal Bowman and the fire alarm only proves this point.
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Also, RFK Jr. is getting ready for a third-party run.
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And a YouTube prankster gets shot while trying to prank someone.
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And our daily cancellation, the pause on student loan repayments, ended yesterday.
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And everyone is taking it about as well as you expected.
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We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show.
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Okay, we're on the line with Philip Patrick from Birch Gold.
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What are the greatest threats facing the dollar right now?
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The key to a global reserve currency is that it is a solid store of value.
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Well, the dollar's lost 16% of its buying power since the start of the pandemic alone.
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I have a lot of, there are a lot of young people, young families.
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Being a safe haven asset, when we see downturns in the economy, it tends to go up.
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The other thing to consider is just track record, right?
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We understand how gold typically performs during times of market correction.
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But if you're looking to protect, to preserve buying power, that's where gold has the advantage.
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Philip Patrick, we appreciate your time, as always.
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And if you want more information, you can text Walsh to 989898 for your free information kit.
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You know, at first I thought I might not comment on this issue at all.
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Everything that needs to be said about it has already been said.
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And there wasn't much that needed to be said in the first place, to be honest.
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But then I realized that this show carries a certain responsibility.
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It is my solemn duty, I believe, and I know, to single out and mock the dumbest human beings in the country.
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In this country, this duty becomes all the more sacred and all the more essential
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when you consider that the dumbest human beings in the country are very often the ones running it.
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Human beings like Kamala Harris, for example, who is a programmed robot with no authentic opinions or personality of her own.
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But she's the worst kind of programmed robot because she's a stupid one.
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Kamala isn't the focus today, but since we're on the subject, I do feel compelled to mention this video.
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It's a supercut put together by the Twitter account RNC Research,
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where we see how Kamala repeats the same line over and over again.
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And this is, it's not even a good line or a vaguely coherent one.
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I can imagine what can be and be unburdened by what has been, you know?
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Where we can be unburdened by where we have been and unburdened by where we are right now.
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I don't know if you caught that, but she's saying that we should focus on what can be unburdened by what has been.
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I repeat, what can be, what can be, up here, unburdened by what has been.
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It's very important that you hear that line, which is why Kamala says it to literally every
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audience she speaks to. And by the way, that montage goes on for another two and a half
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minutes. And we can even leave aside the fact that the sentiment she's expressing is actually
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incorrect. You cannot reach your full potential or focus on what can be if you are, as she says,
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unburdened by what has been. That's because you must carry the burdens of what has been.
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You must be aware of your past and its lessons, or you'll just repeat what has been over and over
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until you die. But that's not even the point. The point is that someone on Kamala's team told her
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this line is brilliantly profound and amazing. And she took that feedback to heart to such an
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extent that she works into every conversation. She probably finds a way to drop that line when
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she's like giving her order in the Starbucks drive-thru. Yes. Hi. Normally I get a venti
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mocha cappuccino, but I'm trying today to remain focused on what can be unburdened by what has been.
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So I'd like a grande americano with cream, please. Thank you. What I'm trying to say is that our
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country is run by some fantastically idiotic people. And yet, even if you were already aware
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of that fact, and even if your faith in the intelligence and competence of the ruling class
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was already as low as you thought it could possibly go, you still were not prepared for this weekend
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and the saga of Congressman Jamal Bowman and the fire alarm. So just to get you up to speed,
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on Saturday, as you've probably heard by now, Congressman Jamal Bowman pulled a fire alarm
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in the House Cannon office building on Capitol Hill at a time when the Democrats were trying to
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delay a vote on a GOP stopgap spending bill. The fire alarm led to, of course, an evacuation,
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a full response by emergency and law enforcement personnel. And we know that this happened and we
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know who was responsible for it because security cameras caught Bowman pulling the fire alarm because
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you're in an office building on Capitol Hill, which means that there are going to be security
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cameras everywhere, especially right next to fire alarms. And that means we have him dead to rights,
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you would think. And you would also think that his motivation, however stupid it may have been,
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is pretty obvious. He wanted to delay the vote. Like, why else would you do that? Very,
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very dumb and an open and shut case, you would think. But Jamal Bowman has a different narrative.
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And it's one that unsurprisingly, the media and his fellow Democrats were quick to accept without
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skepticism, accepting it as gospel. Later that day, Bowman put out this statement. He said, quote,
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I want to personally clear up confusion surrounding today's events. Today, as I was rushing to make a
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vote, I came to a door that is usually open for votes, but today would not open. I'm embarrassed to
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admit that I activated the fire alarm, mistakenly thinking it would open the door. I regret this
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and sincerely apologize for any confusion this caused. But I want to be very clear, this was not
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me in any way trying to delay any vote. It was the exact opposite. I was trying to urgently get to a
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vote, which I ultimately did, and joined my colleagues in a bipartisan effort to keep our
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government open. I also met the vote with, met after the vote with the Sergeant at Arms and the Capitol
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Police at their request and explained what had happened. My hope is that no one will make more of this
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than it was. I am working hard every day, including today to do my job, to do it well
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and deliver for my constituents. So he vigorously denies that he was trying to disrupt official
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proceedings. Of course he denies it as that would be a criminal charge and expulsion from Congress.
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It would be, it'd be January 6th all over again, an attack on our democracy, an attack on our country
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worse than 9-11 and Pearl Harbor combined. But instead he claims that he was perplexed by the door,
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which was an emergency exit, and he pulled the fire alarm to open it. And several media members
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and other establishment figures were quick to defend him on social media, claiming that the door
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and the signage around the door was confusing. So just a couple of examples of this narrative
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being pushed should suffice, I think. Here's political commentator Matt Brunig on Twitter.
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Bowman was trying to walk from the Cannon building to the Capitol building to vote. Unusually,
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the Cannon exit he went to wouldn't open. It had this confusing sign on it. He thought it was
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saying that you had to press the alarm to get out. This all makes sense. What am I missing?
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The confusing sign, the confusing sign says this. Emergency exit only, push until alarm sounds,
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three seconds, door unlocks in 30 seconds. That's what the confusing sign says. Someone else named
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Armand Dumaluski commented on the sign saying, okay, this sign is genuinely confusing. And to that,
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MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes responded, it sure is, exclamation point. And there was a lot of this kind
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of thing. Members of the media proclaiming that the door and the sign were downright perplexing,
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just a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Looking at that sign, it's like trying to decipher an ancient
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Egyptian hieroglyphic. It's like, it's, it's who knows. Now you should know that as Breitbart
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reports, Bowman actually took down that sign and threw it to the side, then pulled the alarm
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and ran the opposite way to a different door and left. So when the media tells us that his excuse
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makes sense, they're telling, they're telling us that that is what makes sense. It makes sense that
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a grown adult man would walk up to an emergency exit and in an effort to leave the building, tear
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down the sign, pull the fire alarm and run the opposite way. This, the media says, is a sensible
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strategy for exiting a building. It makes sense. It makes sense that a grown adult man would react to
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an emergency exit that way. After all, the sign was confusing, which is, which is true. I mean,
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the sign only says that it's an emergency exit and you need to push down on the door handle until the
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alarm sounds. This may mean that it's an emergency exit and you need to push down on the door handle
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until the alarm sounds, or it may mean that you should walk to the opposing wall and pull the fire
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alarm and then run away. Maybe that's what it means. Or it may mean that you should do cartwheels down
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the hallway. Or it may mean that you should stand on your head and sing the 90s hit tub thumping.
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It may mean anything. Who's to say what it means? It's impossible to know. The sign is indecipherable.
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That is, if you are illiterate and if you've never encountered an emergency exit or a fire alarm
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before in your life. But almost every adult has, which is why, and I think I can say this about you
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without knowing anything about you, whoever you are watching this, I can say that in your entire time
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existing on this planet, you have never once heard of anyone ever anywhere pulling a fire alarm in
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order to open a door. You've never considered doing that yourself. You've never done it yourself.
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You've never heard of anyone doing it or considering it. You've never been like walking with a friend
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down a hallway and come across a fire alarm and had your friend turn to you and say,
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is this what we pressed to open the door? Nobody has ever said that to you. Nobody has ever asked you
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that. And if your friend did turn to you and say that, you would look at him in stunned disbelief.
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You might actually start to weep as his stupidity would be at such a level that it would be downright
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tragic to behold. It'd be like seeing a grown man walking around in Velcro shoes because he doesn't
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know how to tie his shoelaces. It is dumbness so dumb that you can't even laugh at it. It just makes
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you sad, if anything. Well, I'll still laugh at it, but nicer people won't. And to be clear,
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this is Jamal Bowman's defense. His defense is that he's a bewildered dunce who becomes confused and
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hysterical at the sight of a door. His defense is that he has the IQ of a hermit crab.
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It's a defense so humiliating and so disqualifying that even if it was true,
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he'd be better off lying and saying that it was an intentional criminal act. I mean, if that was me
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and I somehow did something that stupid, I would lie and say, you know what? Yeah,
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I was committing a crime. Put me in jail. I would rather you all, I would rather go to prison
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than have everyone know that I am that stupid. I would certainly rather be seen as a clumsy criminal
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than a guy with a mental capacity of an amoeba. And here's the thing, whichever is true,
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either way, Jamal Bowman is unfit to serve. Because either he tried to disrupt a congressional
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proceeding by staging a false emergency, or he's an incompetent halfwit who doesn't know how fire
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alarms work. I mean, it's one or the other. And frankly, I don't care which one. Though I strongly
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suspect that maybe there's a bit of both mixed in. Whatever the explanation, he should be kicked out
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of office. He is just another in a large crowd of people in Washington, D.C. who run our country
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and make decisions that deeply impact all of our lives and yet are both morally and intellectually
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bankrupt. These are the kinds of people who always are there to preside over the collapse of empires.
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People whose moral character is in a constant game of limbo against their intelligence,
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competing over who can sink the lowest. These are our leaders. People who can't even open a door.
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God bless America. We're going to need it. Now let's get to our five headlines.
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appointmentnow.com for full offer details. So we begin with some political news once again. This
00:15:17.460
is maybe the fourth show in a row with politics at the top of the five headlines, and that's not a
00:15:23.060
good thing really, but it is what it is. Here's the story from ABC News. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. teased
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an announcement on Friday that he said he said would create a sea change in American politics amid
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speculation that a Democrat candidate may leave the party. Kennedy previously refused to rule out an
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independent run for president in August for the 2024 contest. Kennedy said in a video on Friday that
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voters were frustrated with Congress and the leadership of both political parties, and he
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said that there'd be this announcement next Monday. So here is the video where he teases this announcement.
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Let's watch. Hi, everybody. I'm going to be in Philadelphia on October 9th to make a major
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announcement at the very birthplace of our nation. I'm not going to tell you right now exactly what that
00:16:06.380
announcement will be. I can say, though, that if you've been waiting to come to one of my public
00:16:11.800
events, this will be the one to come to. I'll be speaking about a sea change in American politics
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and what your part and my part is in that change. A lot of Americans who had previously given up any
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hope that real change would ever come through the American electoral process have begun to find new hope
00:16:32.260
in my candidacy. And I understand the deeply felt concern that people have about the way corruption
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has overtaken our government. It's in the executive branch. It's in Congress. It's in the leadership of
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both political parties. And so some people feel a kind of cynicism alongside the hope, or they lose
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hope entirely because they've been disappointed so many times. I want to tell you now what I've come to
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understand after six months of campaigning, there is a path to victory. The hope we are feeling isn't
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some kind of trick of the mind. We all recognize that there's a genuine possibility of national
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transformation, and its source is the goodness of the American people. Okay, so he's running
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independent, obviously. That's going to be the announcement, which is the assumption is the
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rumor, and I think pretty clearly based on the campaign video there. Now, the interesting
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question, of course, is who does this hurt? Again, assuming it's Biden and Trump who are in the
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general election, does RFK Jr. siphon votes more from Biden or more from Trump? Who takes the biggest
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hit? And to me, the answer is very obvious, which is that it's Trump. And there are many Trump supporters
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in social media kind of whistling past the graveyard, claiming that somehow RFK's independent run is a
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bigger problem for Biden than it is for Trump. But that's nothing but cope. Okay, that's rationalization.
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It's absurd. And it's also, by the way, it's what every campaign in this race, in both parties,
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is doing. That's been every campaign, it seems like, just denying reality, whistling along,
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claim, oh, this isn't a problem. Everything's fine. And so we're getting it, once again, from the Trump
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camp on this one, from some in the Trump camp. Now, there are others who are admitting that like,
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yeah, obviously this is a problem for Trump. And how do we know that? Well, it's because RFK Jr.
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has a sizable base of very dedicated, excited supporters. And who are these people?
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Like, who supports them? Well, these are people who are anti-establishment,
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skeptical of vaccines, at a minimum skeptical, and very suspicious of big pharma, right? They have
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other beliefs as well. That's not it. But like, those three things, I think, describe literally
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everyone who likes RFK Jr. And are people who fit that bill more likely to be on the right or on the left?
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It's very simple. Ask yourself that. There is no anti-establishment vote on the left.
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It doesn't exist. If you're anti-establishment, if you're skeptical of vaccines, if you hate big pharma,
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and you should hate big pharma, by the way, then you're on the right. You just are. If this was 15
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years ago, it'd be one thing. If this was 10 years ago, even five years ago. But, you know, back then,
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there was a chance that you could have views like that and still be on the left, because there was
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still the vestigial remains of anti-establishment sentiment on the left. But that's all gone now.
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Post-COVID, that is all gone now, especially on the vaccine stuff. I mean, there was a time when
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being anti-vax or being skeptical of vaccines, if you had that view, there's a very good chance that
00:20:03.380
you were left-wing. There was a time when arguably you would associate that viewpoint more with the left
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than with the right, which maybe was never an accurate association. But there was a time when
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that we were way past that. That is not the case anymore. So RFK's vote can only come from
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the only place where it exists, which is the right or the center right.
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So is this a major problem for Trump? Well, I think, you know, I believe in facing reality
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for what it is. And I think that, yes, this is a major problem for Trump.
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Now, obviously, RFK Jr. is not going to beat Trump. He's not going to win the presidency,
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of course. But the question is whether he can pull enough of the vote to swing the election to Biden.
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And I think that he can. And the real risk here is how Trump responds to RFK Jr.'s candidacy.
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Because this is going to require Trump to actually be strategic and thoughtful, you know, and that
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sort of thing, like strategically hold your fire, which is not Trump's strong suit, but this is what
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he's going to have to do. Because if he comes out and just launches a broadside against RFK Jr.,
00:21:21.440
mocking him, doing the whole Trump routine, then he's going to bury himself in the process.
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Because that will only cause RFK supporters to rally around him even more. And I mean,
00:21:33.420
this is not, you know, there are some people that Trump goes after and he mocks them ruthlessly.
00:21:37.520
And it causes that, even that person's supporters to kind of look at them differently. And he kind of
00:21:42.260
emasculates them and all that. And that's proven to be effective with a lot of people. But I think
00:21:47.620
RFK Jr. is the kind of guy that's kind of like immune to that because of the nature of his support.
00:21:55.620
So the best thing that Trump can do, I think, is to be highly complimentary of RFK Jr., highly
00:22:02.060
supportive, very nice to him, and also publicly offer him a spot in your cabinet. And even if he won't
00:22:11.060
take it, then you've shown, you know, that that's what you want to do. Treating him like an ally and
00:22:17.840
you're signaling to his supporters that you are friendly and that you're someone that they can
00:22:21.900
support. And that you can make the case then that, hey, RFK Jr. is great. Hey, I agree with a lot of
00:22:28.360
his anti-establishment point. I don't agree with everything. I agree with a lot of the fact that
00:22:31.900
he's anti-establishment and all this. The points that he raises about both parties being corrupt.
00:22:37.300
I agree with that. But if you want someone who has those views and can actually win,
00:22:42.300
then come over here. That has to be the pitch. If Trump gets mad and starts lashing out,
00:22:49.360
it's just it's not going to end well because Trump cannot afford to lose
00:22:53.900
even one single vote to RFK Jr. He can't afford it. If he wins in 2024, it's going to be by a razor
00:23:02.600
thin margin. The same goes on the other side, too. Nobody's winning in a landslide. So anyone on
00:23:06.980
either side talking about it's going to be a landslide is is full of it. Yeah, that's just
00:23:12.920
someone that you should ignore. Totally. There's not going to be a landslide. It's going to be a
00:23:17.660
razor thin one way or another. And neither of them can afford to lose votes. And RFK is going to
00:23:24.040
take. And he's got because he's, you know, to me, this is. This would be like if Bernie Sanders
00:23:32.360
had launched an independent bid in 2020. It's a very similar situation to that.
00:23:40.320
That would have been devastating for the Biden campaign because he'd be able to take enough of
00:23:43.720
the vote. And he's got his support is such that it's it's it's it's a smaller group of people,
00:23:50.100
but they're very they're very excited. They're very passionate. And so it's a similar kind of
00:23:57.740
situation. But on the right now, I think, for Trump. All right. This is a fascinating case.
00:24:03.980
I think reading from The Guardian, a jury on Thursday found a delivery driver not guilty in
00:24:08.680
the shooting of a YouTube prankster who followed him around a mall food court earlier this year.
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Alan Colley, 31, was acquitted of aggravated malicious wounding in the shooting of Tanner
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Cook, 21, who runs the Classified Goons YouTube channel. The jury was split on two lesser firearm
00:24:26.080
counts and decided to convict him on one and acquit him on the other. The shooting on April 2nd at the
00:24:32.360
food court in Dulles Town Center, about 45 minutes west of the nation's capital, set off panic as
00:24:36.560
shoppers fled what they feared to be a mass shooting. Colley pleaded not guilty and said
00:24:41.160
he was acting in self-defense. The verdict came on Thursday after about five hours of deliberation.
00:24:45.380
Three hours in, the jury sent out a note saying it was divided in terms of whether the defendant
00:24:48.920
acted in self-defense. The Loudoun County Circuit Court Judge Matthew Snow called the jury back into
00:24:54.440
the courtroom at approximately 3.30 p.m. and urged them to continue deliberations.
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And and then they came down with the verdict at the end of that day.
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Obviously, Colley, who's been in custody since his April arrest, will remain incarcerated.
00:25:08.440
Adam Pulliard, his defense attorney, said during Thursday's closing arguments as client felt menaced
00:25:14.000
by the six foot five inch Cook during the confrontation, which was designed to provoke a reaction and to draw
00:25:19.920
viewers to Cook's YouTube channel. OK, so Colley was acquitted of the serious, the more serious charge,
00:25:27.560
still convicted of the lesser charge. And that part makes no sense, because if you buy his self-defense
00:25:33.400
claim, if you buy that claim, so you're you're acquitting him of the of the malicious wounding
00:25:38.560
charge. Then it makes no logical sense to convict him of the firearms charge. If he's justified in
00:25:45.020
using self-defense, then it's like basically you're saying he's justified in shooting the guy,
00:25:50.920
but not justified in discharging the firearm, which that logically it makes no sense.
00:25:57.380
But juries do this all the time now where they kind of split the baby in a way that makes no logical
00:26:01.880
sense at all. So that at the end of it, you're trying to figure out what their theory of the
00:26:06.320
case even is. And it's it doesn't there isn't one. And his lawyers will, of course, try to appeal
00:26:14.160
the conviction on the lesser account. I think ultimately, you know, they're going to win that
00:26:18.160
argument just just because it doesn't the verdict doesn't make sense. Either he was either his
00:26:23.940
self-defense claim was legitimate or not. And if it's not a legitimate claim that he should have
00:26:27.900
been convicted of the of the malicious wounding charge, he wasn't, which means that the jury found
00:26:32.180
it found it legitimate. And so there should be no conviction of anything. So the question is,
00:26:42.540
should he have been acquitted of the of the more serious charge or of all the charges?
00:26:47.620
I believe absolutely. Yes, he should have. He should have been acquitted. He should be
00:26:50.280
acquitted of everything and he should walk free. He should be walking free right now. He shouldn't
00:26:53.800
be in jail at all. And I've been arguing about this on on Twitter and which is always a productive
00:26:58.740
thing to do. And lots of people are mad at me and they disagree. Even people who profess to be big
00:27:05.860
supporters of the Second Amendment. I've heard a lot. There's been a lot of that. You know,
00:27:09.140
I'm a big Second Amendment person, but you're way off on this. This person was totally wrong.
00:27:14.580
Well, let's watch the video that this YouTube prankster, quote unquote, took where, you know,
00:27:21.100
we can see the whole thing. And this is what the prank, quote unquote, consisted of. And I'm going
00:27:28.180
to show you everything leading up to when the shot was fired, because that's the important part.
00:27:32.420
The actual shot itself, if I play that, then the violence and they'll take down the video and
00:27:37.040
everything. So you can go and find the actual shot itself if you want to find it. But
00:27:40.220
here you can see what led up to him ultimately pulling out his gun and firing. Let's watch that.
00:27:49.040
And then right there, he's about to pull the trigger. So that's the prank. The hilarious prank.
00:28:12.380
The prank is that this large, massive guy, we just heard six foot five inches. And the other guy,
00:28:20.920
quite a bit, I don't know how tall the other guy is, but quite a bit smaller than that.
00:28:24.780
So this massive guy comes up, starts weirdly and ominously harassing a random DoorDash driver.
00:28:32.240
He's just trying to pick up some food and deliver it to a customer. DoorDash, I don't know what service
00:28:37.940
he's driving for, but he's delivering food. And this guy comes up and he's got his phone out and
00:28:45.840
he's like putting, it's repeating this weird phrase and he's putting it in, in Kali's face and he keeps
00:28:52.000
pursuing him, getting very, very close to him, you know, and Kali's backing away. And he says,
00:28:58.780
stop three times. He says, stop three times. He's trying, he's trying to get away. He's trying to
00:29:04.580
leave. It's not like he's trying to leave the situation. He's being pursued.
00:29:10.060
And after the third warning, he takes out the gun and he shoots him.
00:29:14.520
And some people have taken issue with it because when he took out the gun,
00:29:17.760
you know, he took out the gun and he did, after taking out the gun, he just fired it immediately.
00:29:20.660
He didn't take out the gun and say, I'm warning you. He didn't warn a fourth time after taking
00:29:24.220
out the gun. He just shot. And I'm, and I'm, I think it's totally justified. I have no problem with
00:29:29.520
that. He had every right to assume that Cook meant him harm because he had no context. Okay.
00:29:38.160
He didn't know that Cook was some stupid, dumb oaf YouTuber who was doing this as a prank.
00:29:45.140
Okay. He's not like, put yourself in that position. This happens. You're not immediately,
00:29:49.200
oh, you're not, you're not thinking, oh, this is a YouTube prank. I'm not thinking that. I mean,
00:29:53.620
you're, you're, you're thinking, why is this massive guy coming after me? What is he doing?
00:29:57.700
He's got this blank expression on his face and he's just got like, you think, obviously you're
00:30:02.620
going to assume that he's crazy. He's like some psycho and, uh, and he means you harm. If I was
00:30:08.940
in that exact situation, I would immediately assume that he meant me harm. That's what I would assume.
00:30:15.900
And, uh, that would be a safe assumption. It's a fair assumption. And it's an assumption that I
00:30:21.640
believe we have every right to make. And the benefit of the doubt in that scenario has to go
00:30:28.560
entirely to Kali, not to the guy who initiated the confrontation to begin with.
00:30:35.440
So for me, not only would I say that Kali was justified in shooting him, but to me, it's like
00:30:40.300
clear as day. There's not even anything. I know I said, it's a fascinating case.
00:30:44.640
Um, it's actually not even that interesting to me. I saw that video. I was like, Oh yeah,
00:30:49.840
of course you shoot him. Go ahead. Like, don't, don't go up to someone harassing them like that
00:30:55.720
in a, in a, in a, in this ominous way. They tell you to stop and you keep going after them.
00:30:59.620
Don't do that. You don't want to get shot. Just don't do that. It's very easy.
00:31:03.100
It's very easy to not get shot in that situation. Just don't do that.
00:31:05.760
And calling it a prank doesn't all of a sudden make it okay.
00:31:12.980
Can Kali, what if Kali, could Kali try that? Could he shoot him and say, no dude, no bro,
00:31:17.460
I'm just, it's just a prank. Shoot him in the stomach, which is what he did. And then what
00:31:22.460
if he had just stood over him and said, just a prank, bro. Don't worry about it. Just a prank.
00:31:26.640
Look, you're on camera. I see you're on YouTube. Don't worry. It's just a prank.
00:31:30.400
No, calling it a prank doesn't suddenly make everything okay. But this is what we find.
00:31:36.720
These, these, these, uh, clout chasers on YouTube or TikTok or whatever, you know, of course the
00:31:42.160
infamous example of the guy on TikTok who does home invasion, walks into people's homes as part of a
00:31:48.540
prank. This is not a prank. This is this home invasion, harassment. These are crimes you're
00:31:54.480
committing. And I think people have every right to, uh, to respond.
00:32:00.400
And I also think, look, I admit that, um, when I look at a case like this,
00:32:07.620
I am not an entirely unbiased observer. I suppose I am very much biased in the favor of,
00:32:16.320
in favor of the person who feels that they're being threatened and has to defend themselves.
00:32:20.340
I'm going to be biased in their favor. Um, now it's one thing, look, if, if that had happened
00:32:28.000
and then the guy, the YouTuber says, Oh, it's just a prank. And he kind of like starts walking
00:32:35.660
away. And then Kali is just mad. He gets pissed off that he was harassed and he walks up to the
00:32:42.860
guy and shoots him. Okay. Well now it's murder. So that's a totally different scenario. We're not
00:32:49.040
talking about that. You, you, that I'm saying that if you are a carry a gun that you should
00:32:54.140
have licenses, kill whoever you want. If you're pissed off, you can just kill someone. Obviously
00:32:57.860
not. But what I'm saying is that in the moment, in that moment where someone is confused, they
00:33:04.540
don't know what you're doing. They feel threatened. Uh, I'm going to give a lot of leeway personally.
00:33:12.340
I think we should be giving a lot of leeway to the person who is feeling threatened and
00:33:16.720
who also is not the one who initiated the confrontation. Uh, and I also think that on
00:33:23.420
a societal level, cause I know there's always this worry about, Oh, it's going to become
00:33:28.340
the wild west. And nevermind that in the wild west, actually, oftentimes the gun laws are
00:33:32.460
quite harsh and there were, you know, many towns you go into, you're not even allowed to
00:33:35.100
bring your firearm in. Uh, but you know, it's going to be the wild west. People are just shooting
00:33:39.440
all over the place. That's the concern. I don't think that is the concern.
00:33:42.320
I don't think that's going to happen. Um, I think the concern is more what we, the situation
00:33:48.980
we currently have in society where you've got these, uh, these thugs and these punks
00:33:54.300
who, who have no compunction. They have no fear. They'll just go up. They'll harass you.
00:34:01.720
They'll assault you. They'll do whatever with no fear at all. No fear of the legal consequences
00:34:08.460
and especially no fear of the physical consequences in the moment. I think it is good and healthy in a
00:34:15.780
society for people to fear for their lives before deciding to victimize or harass someone.
00:34:24.520
Like I think it's a healthy, it's a sign of a healthy society. If you're about to harass someone
00:34:30.180
randomly for clicks and then you stop and say to yourself, I don't know if I want to do that. I
00:34:36.020
might die. I might die if I do that. That's a healthy society
00:34:41.060
where you have to take those kinds of things into consideration.
00:34:46.260
And then, and then if you're not insane, you'll probably say to yourself, yeah, you know, it's
00:34:52.220
not worth it. It's not worth it. I think I'll just, you know what? I'll just, I'll just be a
00:34:55.600
normal person instead and I'll leave this person alone and I'll let them make their delivery and
00:35:00.720
I'll go about my day and that'll be it. Okay. A healthy society to me is one where people are
00:35:07.780
incentivized to make healthy choices and to be just normal, well-adjusted contributing members of
00:35:15.120
society. If you are incentivized in that direction and there are strong disincentives to be a burden,
00:35:22.120
to be a leech, to be just a punk, a thug, you know, that to me is healthy, which is why I think we
00:35:30.280
should be very, very generous to people like Kali in that situation, which the, which the jury almost
00:35:37.560
was, you know, if not for the ridiculous splitting the baby bit there at the end. Okay. Here's a
00:35:45.060
headline from Politico. It says, he, she, they, the pronoun debate will likely land at the Supreme
00:35:50.580
Court. And the article says, once again, a pitched battle in America's culture wars is making its
00:35:55.600
steady way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In this round, the emerging question is whether public
00:35:59.880
school children have a right to choose names and pronouns affirming their gender identity
00:36:03.900
or whether parents' rights to manage the upbringing of their children overrides it.
00:36:08.860
Three separate federal appeals courts have already confronted this issue, which has left school
00:36:12.700
administrators across the country having to pick between the wishes and needs of the student on
00:36:15.900
one hand and the demands of parents that they be alerted to their children's gender and pronoun
00:36:19.820
preferences at school on the other. The legal issues in this case are not easy ones, pitting children's
00:36:24.840
rights against their parents' rights. Upset parents contend that by using a child's preferred pronouns
00:36:29.740
without their knowledge, government actors are illegally providing medical care without the parental
00:36:34.040
consent that their state law mandates. Weighing against the parents are the kids' requests as well
00:36:38.800
as state laws requiring that schools provide non-discriminatory environments in which students
00:36:43.780
can safely express their gender identities. According to the Human Rights Campaign, 22 states and the
00:36:48.560
District of Columbia have laws protecting students from harassment based on gender identity.
00:36:53.020
The outcome, while centering around school administration rather than civil rights of
00:36:57.060
transgender Americans, is likely nonetheless to have far-ranging impacts. Not only does it invite
00:37:00.660
the unelected justices to take sides in the clash between conservatives and progressives over what should be
00:37:05.300
tolerated and taught in public schools, but it could wind up sending a powerful signal about the extent to
00:37:09.640
which the court will permit discrimination on the basis of non-conforming gender identity under the
00:37:14.460
Constitution itself. Then it talks about the latest case, and there's been several cases like this, but
00:37:21.140
the point is that Politico is predicting, and I think rightly so, correctly so, that this debate over
00:37:28.220
pronouns, you know, the pronoun question, at least in the context of schools, will eventually be in the
00:37:34.380
Supreme Court. And that's good news, I think, because I'm reasonably confident that the court,
00:37:41.180
how it's currently constructed, will arrive at the right conclusion. Not totally confident. I mean,
00:37:47.380
you never know with somebody like Roberts, but I'd give it a greater than 50% chance the Supreme Court
00:37:52.240
does the right thing here and affirms the fact that schools cannot change a kid's pronouns or, you know,
00:38:00.160
identify them as an opposite sex without alerting the parents, without having parents involved.
00:38:06.660
And even if the Supreme Court did come to that determination, that would not at all settle
00:38:12.340
all of the issues around pronouns and the transing of kids and everything else.
00:38:20.480
I do want to make one point here, though, and it's an important one.
00:38:26.160
Obviously, the political article is framing this dispute in a way that is meant to be as favorable
00:38:32.020
as possible to the trans agenda. Obviously, we know they're going to do that. It's important to
00:38:37.440
notice the framing, though. So what I just read to you, what is wrong with what I just read?
00:38:45.280
Okay, where is the dishonesty? What are they lying about? And there are a few little,
00:38:49.400
not little things, but there are a few things that you can point out. I mean, everything they
00:38:52.500
said is at least either a lie or intentionally slanted in a certain direction. But the big
00:38:58.540
thing is this. They say that this is a dispute that pits a child's right against a parent's right.
00:39:08.260
And that is a lie. When we frame it that way, you're framing it that way because anyone who says that,
00:39:14.300
it's very clear what side of the issue they're on. It's just not true. That's not the
00:39:19.260
dispute. And one way that you know that it's a lie is that the right of a parent and the right of a
00:39:27.400
child are never at odds. Okay? Parental rights properly understood are never at odds with a
00:39:37.280
child's rights properly understood. This is one of the ways that we know there are artificial
00:39:43.920
fabricated rights, imaginary rights that are codified into law in a corrupt and illegitimate
00:39:51.340
way. That's true. And rights in that sense can just be whatever the government says. Well,
00:39:58.540
you have this right, or you don't have this right. But if we believe that human rights have some
00:40:03.920
underlying, there's an underlying fundamental reality to human rights that go beyond the government,
00:40:11.120
that rights are not just arbitrarily and subjectively determined by whatever governing
00:40:17.240
authority happens to be in power. If we believe that, then we can talk about what are actual rights
00:40:24.080
and what aren't. And so the point is that actual human rights, if there's ever a dispute where you
00:40:33.700
have one person making a human rights claim and another person making a human rights claim,
00:40:36.900
and those claims conflict with each other, then that always tells us that someone in this dispute
00:40:43.700
is wrong, that they're claiming human rights that they don't actually possess, or maybe they both are.
00:40:50.160
So for example, take abortion, for example. Oftentimes this is framed as a dispute between the right of
00:41:00.360
the mother and the right of the child. But it's not. It's not actually. There's no conflict there.
00:41:08.740
The right of the mother is not bumping up against the right of the child. That's because the mother
00:41:12.580
has no right to commit murder, has no fundamental human right to murder her child. That right doesn't
00:41:18.540
exist. We can arbitrarily concoct it by corrupt governing authorities, but it's not an actual,
00:41:26.100
fundamental, natural, human right that exists. It's not. It is another, again, a fabricated and
00:41:35.540
artificial one. So same goes in this case. What we have here is not the child's right and the parent's
00:41:44.120
right conflicting. That's not the case. We have instead the rights of both parties, the parent and
00:41:52.400
the child being infringed by the state. That's what has actually happened. When a child goes to school
00:41:58.980
and, you know, when a boy goes to sixth grade and is, is identified by, you know, is, is treated as a
00:42:07.720
girl and they use a girl's name to identify him and girl pronouns and all the rest of it. And the girl's
00:42:16.060
bathroom is opened up to him and the parents are not even alerted to it. And, and, and, and this is kept
00:42:22.060
from the parents. Um, this is not a case where the child's right is like superseding the parent's
00:42:27.200
right. Um, no, this is a case where both the parent's right and the child's right are being
00:42:33.320
infringed by the school, which is to say by the state, because a parent, you know, it's easy enough
00:42:41.560
to see, I would hope to see the parent's right. In this case, the parent has a right to raise their
00:42:47.220
own parents have a right to raise their own children, um, to, uh, uh, to bring their children
00:42:53.280
up in, in, you know, with, in the truth, with moral and intellectual clarity to raise their kids,
00:43:01.560
to be well-adjusted, uh, human beings. So the parent has a right to all that. And when the child
00:43:09.380
goes to school and is told by the, by the teachers, Oh yes, you're really a girl. That right is being
00:43:14.600
horrifically infringed. What about the child though? Um, does the child have a right to be
00:43:25.080
treated? Does the boy have a right to be treated as a girl in school? No, that doesn't make any sense.
00:43:31.000
What do you mean has a right? What you're asking is does, does the, you're asking, does the child
00:43:37.980
have a right to be lied to by, uh, the, the, the authority figures in his life, by the adults
00:43:44.800
who, who, who he's been entrusted with? You're asking, does the, does the child have a right to
00:43:50.860
be lied to? It doesn't, it's hard to even answer that. I mean, the answer is no, but it's hard to
00:43:58.080
answer because it's such an incoherent question. What do you mean? Does he have a right to be lied to?
00:44:01.880
Because that's all it is. He's being lied to. If the teachers and the faculty and the staff are
00:44:09.340
treating him like a girl and calling him a girl and using girl pronouns and using a fake girl name,
00:44:13.500
um, that is not the name that his parents gave him. And they're, they're saying, go ahead and use
00:44:18.660
the girl's bathroom. They are lying to that child and they are leading that child deeper into confusion.
00:44:24.380
Does the child have a right to be treated that way? No, it goes the other way. The child has a right
00:44:30.600
to not be treated that way. So when you respect the child's wishes, you respect the boy's wishes by
00:44:39.020
calling him a girl, you're not respecting his rights. You're, you are infringing on his rights
00:44:43.580
because despite what this confused kid says, what he actually has a right to is he has a right to the
00:44:51.380
truth. He has a right to be, to be, um, uh, to be properly educated when he's in these institutions.
00:45:01.460
He has a right to the just basic guidance and clarity that we all had growing up.
00:45:07.840
He has a right to all those things. And, and the school has a responsibility to give it. That's why
00:45:14.340
the child is there. It's why the school system exists allegedly. And so when you respect the
00:45:19.660
wishes of the boy, the alleged wishes of the boy to be treated like a girl, you are in fact,
00:45:24.240
taking away all those things that he has a right to. So that's really the conflict here.
00:45:31.680
It's not parent versus child. Not at all. No, it is a parent and child versus the state.
00:45:38.340
It's actually a question of, does the state have a right to indoctrinate your child into this gender
00:45:49.040
madness? It is the state claiming that right against the parents saying you do not have the
00:45:55.360
right to treat my child that way. And I think the legitimate rights claim, uh, in that dispute,
00:46:01.300
should be obvious to everyone. And if it's not immediately obvious to you, then you're just,
00:46:06.260
you're hopeless. You're just a, you're a hopeless case. All right, let's get to was Walsh wrong.
00:46:12.180
A few comments here. First comment is in response to our segment about the Sixth Circuit Court,
00:46:21.940
circuit court upholding our ban on gender mutilation of children, upholding the ban in
00:46:26.040
Tennessee and in Kentucky, which we talked about on Friday, big ruling. This commentator,
00:46:30.200
commenter rather disagrees with the ruling says, Matt, you're wrong. The lower court correctly
00:46:34.660
upheld the right of parents to raise kids according to their values, not the state's.
00:46:37.880
The ruling you applaud does the opposite. So by your logic, California can enact a law that makes
00:46:42.900
agreeing with your values grounds for losing your kids. I always love these comments. It's a classic
00:46:48.100
argument of, uh, well, if we, if we, you know, if you, if we pass this good law, then the other side
00:46:56.120
might pass bad laws. Oh, this good law is a slippery slope. It might lead to bad laws,
00:47:01.740
which is a ridiculous argument because of course, first of all, uh, California doesn't need the
00:47:09.860
precedent that, that we set in order to pass bad laws. Okay. So if we were to back off and say,
00:47:19.300
we're not going to pass any good laws. We're not going to try to advance our, um, our agenda. We're
00:47:22.920
not going to try to advance what we know is correct and good at all. We're not going to do it. And this
00:47:28.420
is what the Republican party of course has been doing for decades. So, you know, when we have
00:47:31.460
power, we're not going to really do anything. Republican party had total power. The federal
00:47:36.700
government from 2016 to 2018 did nothing, did nothing at all. Passed a tax cut. That was it.
00:47:43.780
And I guess the argument's supposed to be, well, look, we didn't do anything. Um, and now we hand
00:47:48.460
it over to you and, uh, the other side and we trust that you'll do nothing as well. It never really
00:47:53.540
works that way, does it? No, when, when the left has power, they just look at us and say, you, you
00:47:58.920
suckers, you idiots. Now we're just going to write, we're going to ram our agenda down your throat
00:48:03.980
like we were going to do anyway. Um, but also as we just talked about parent, the parents' rights
00:48:11.720
and children's rights, um, this ban on child mutilation has nothing to do with parents' rights.
00:48:18.680
Uh, it's about the right of a child to not be, to not have this torture inflicted on them.
00:48:28.020
A child has the right to not be sterilized, castrated, and mutilated.
00:48:35.100
And it is irrelevant whether the parent wants it or not. Parental rights, of course, are not absolute.
00:48:44.100
Nobody thinks they are. Okay, are you going to sit here and say you think parental rights are
00:48:48.600
absolute? Parents should have the right to just do whatever they want with their kids?
00:48:53.260
Nobody thinks that. Of course, there are limits on it. And yet, when you're trying to establish
00:48:57.820
the limits of, of any rights, um, there's all, cause no right is absolute. You know, I mean,
00:49:06.080
you could be put in prison and have almost all of your rights taken away. You can be executed.
00:49:11.000
You're right to life. Then in that case, uh, is, uh, is, it takes a backseat. Um, so no right is
00:49:19.480
absolute. And, and, and that means that there's always good. Yeah. There's going to be gray area
00:49:23.480
sort of cases and they're going to be, you know, you're gonna have things like that, but that doesn't
00:49:27.360
mean that it's impossible to speak coherently about what your rights actually are and where they end.
00:49:32.480
Like just kind of these broader principles are easy to determine. And, um, when it comes to parental
00:49:39.720
rights, that's definitely the case. Yes, you have, you have the right, you have the right to raise your
00:49:46.080
child, but you don't have the right to horrifically abuse and butcher and mutilate them. That is not
00:49:55.560
included in your right as a parent, which is also, you know, it becomes easier to determine
00:50:04.020
what your rights are, what they aren't, where, where rights end. When you also look at the other
00:50:09.560
side of the rights coin, which is responsibility, responsibilities and rights go together.
00:50:16.960
You know, for every right, there is a, there is a responsibility that comes with it.
00:50:20.960
Um, and many times it's, it's more coherent and I think more useful anyway, to talk about
00:50:25.760
responsibilities rather than rights. So rather than talking about the rights of parents and
00:50:29.640
parents have plenty of rights, but we should also talk about the responsibility of parents.
00:50:35.520
You know, as a, as a parent, you have the responsibility to raise your child, to love your child, to care for
00:50:41.400
your child, to, um, bring them up in the world to be, uh, you know, well-adjusted, um,
00:50:50.960
moral, uh, moral, virtuous people. That is your responsibility. And it's also your right.
00:50:57.860
It's both. But when you, if you, if you do something to your child that, um, egregiously
00:51:06.380
conflicts that with that, then, then you are well outside of your rights as a parent.
00:51:12.860
Uh, Sherry Ann, speaking of, uh, where our rights end, Brittany's not a bad mom, Matt. Yeah,
00:51:20.480
she's done some not cool things, but she should never have been put in the conservatorship
00:51:25.140
in the beginning. She wasn't ill or of unsound mind. She was just a young girl at the peak of fame
00:51:31.660
and those around her took advantage. It's so sad. Um, I think I mentioned when we talked about this
00:51:38.260
on Friday that one of the quote unquote uncool or not cool things she did to use your phrase
00:51:44.900
was she, uh, barricaded herself herself into her home with her children and had a standoff with
00:51:52.200
emergency personnel and, uh, threatened to kill herself in front of her kids. So that's just one
00:51:57.880
of the not cool things she did. And, uh, I would say that goes well beyond not cool. Uh, that goes
00:52:04.180
into the realm of you do that and you're, you're, it's unsafe to have you around your own kids.
00:52:10.600
Um, now granted that was, uh, many years ago, but, um, it's such things like that incidents like
00:52:17.800
that is what led to the conservatorship in the beginning in the, in the, in the first place.
00:52:21.780
And whether or not you lift the conservatorship is really, it's just a matter of like, is this
00:52:27.280
person now, they were not of unsound, of sound mind before. Um, are they now though of sound
00:52:34.040
mind? Are they able to care for themselves? Are they, uh, are they no longer a danger to
00:52:38.120
themselves and those around them? And I think for a long time, the court said, uh, looked at
00:52:43.460
Britney Spears and said, no, she's still, it's, it's just not safe to leave her to her own devices.
00:52:51.680
And, uh, then the social media mob had their say, and now she's left her own devices. And I think
00:52:58.320
it's pretty clear that, you know, in this case, the courts were right, right. The first time.
00:53:05.040
Finally, this commenter is offended that I said parenting is harder today than it's ever been
00:53:08.800
in history. Uh, says quote, uh, making that statement is ridiculous. You have no idea what
00:53:13.520
it was like to raise kids in any other era than today. I wonder what it was like raising
00:53:17.360
children in Roman days. Hmm. St. Monica raising St. Augustine during pagan times. So you're wrong,
00:53:23.220
Matt. Please stop the sniveling. Uh, I think I acknowledge that it's to have lived. I am happy to
00:53:33.640
live now instead of any other point in history for the simple fact that, you know, because I live now
00:53:40.160
and I have six kids, I can be, you know, the barring tragedy. I can be confident that they
00:53:46.640
will make it to adulthood. Um, whereas in the past, you don't have to go that far back into the past.
00:53:52.740
And if you had six kids, like the chance that they would all make it to the altar is very,
00:53:55.540
very slim. And so for that reason alone, I'm happy to live now rather than at any other time
00:54:00.580
in history, but it doesn't change the fact that we have these very unique challenges as,
00:54:07.040
as parents. Um, and you know, the comparison game, it's like, it's, it's pointless anyway,
00:54:12.920
because you're, you live in the time period you live in, you can't compare it to any other time
00:54:16.540
really. But I think it's worthwhile to acknowledge what those challenges are and that there are some
00:54:23.100
really significant challenges parents face now that are actually completely unique in,
00:54:29.580
in the history of human civilization. And prior to recent times, you really couldn't have said that
00:54:35.640
because it's kind of like up until recently, parents, there's kind of like the same basic
00:54:41.360
challenges you face when you're trying to raise your kids and they kind of manifest themselves in
00:54:45.180
different ways as technology changes and culture changes, but it's always kind of like the same thing.
00:54:49.980
But now living in the internet age, when you have these devices in the home and you know,
00:54:57.160
your child, many children have direct access to the entire world and the world has direct access
00:55:04.080
to them. That's just a dynamic that didn't exist at any other point. There's no, there's no parallel
00:55:11.160
here. Like, what does it correlate to? Nothing. And I think it completely changes the game as a parent.
00:55:19.380
And it also does mean that if you raised kids before the internet age, yeah, I mean,
00:55:23.940
there are some insights and wisdom you can offer, but you just don't, you really don't quite
00:55:27.740
understand what it's like now, what the challenges are. You know, is there anything scarier than gender
00:55:34.760
ideology infecting bedrock American brands and turning them into some insane woke zombie? Well,
00:55:40.140
maybe a night in Vegas with Hunter Biden. It's a good joke. But the truth is that these companies
00:55:45.680
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation. Vote buying has always been a calling card of most
00:56:22.780
corrupt governments in the world, from Latin America to Nigeria to Zimbabwe. It's a pretty
00:56:26.620
simple transaction. The government gives you cash and you vote for them. This is a familiar territory
00:56:31.400
in the third world. And speaking of the third world, we have a lot of these kinds of schemes in
00:56:35.800
our country. Student loan debt has been at the center of many of these schemes. And the schemes
00:56:41.200
are always incredibly stupid. So for example, three years ago, the government put a pause on
00:56:45.760
student loan payments because of COVID. For some reason, COVID meant that you shouldn't have to pay
00:56:49.400
your student debt back, even though you still had to pay all of your other types of debt. But student
00:56:53.800
debt was an exception. And Biden, after taking office, proceeded to extend the pause and then extend
00:56:58.460
it again and again and again and again. Until just yesterday, on Sunday, just 24 hours ago,
00:57:02.740
Joe Biden's three-year quasi-loan forgiveness program came to an end. All of a sudden, as of
00:57:08.980
yesterday, tens of millions of people who took out massive loans to pay for their college degrees,
00:57:13.600
whether it was a degree in astrophysics or LGBTQIA plus studies or whatever it was,
00:57:18.760
had to start, once again, making payments on those degrees. You might remember that Joe Biden came out
00:57:24.920
with what was supposed to be a more permanent loan forgiveness plan a few weeks before the last
00:57:31.400
midterm election. He said that the government would permanently forgive, quote unquote,
00:57:36.260
up to $20,000 of federal student loan debt for borrowers. A lot of voters believe that was true,
00:57:42.880
even though the Biden administration knew the plan was never going to hold up in court.
00:57:46.640
You can't just cancel debt. He had no authority to do it. And somebody in the end has to pay for it.
00:57:53.520
That's the reality. And in this case, predictably, several states went to federal court saying that
00:57:57.640
they have their own student loan programs, which were funded by tax dollars. And these states said
00:58:01.720
that they stood to lose a lot of that money if the Biden administration's plan took effect.
00:58:06.780
As the Supreme Court heard arguments on Joe Biden's plan this year, a swarm of blue and purple-haired
00:58:11.760
activists popped up in Washington, D.C. They made a series of incoherent and, frankly,
00:58:16.820
hilarious arguments in favor of this student loan forgiveness plan. And here's just one of them,
00:58:23.040
for example, watch this. I get paid about $73,000 a year, more than I could have imagined as a young
00:58:29.740
person. I was thrilled to start making a salary after grad school. I thought I'd be rich. And yet,
00:58:37.260
I am still drowning in debt. What's worse is it's considered less than many people's debt,
00:58:43.300
only $30,000. I'm lucky compared to a lot of people to only have $30,000 of debt, which we have
00:58:51.280
to admit is unacceptable, right? Yes. This is absurd. Absurd, yes. Now, if you're paid $73,000 a
00:59:01.220
year, that's a good salary in most of the country. A lot of people maintain households on far less
00:59:05.660
money than this graduate student makes. In fact, she's making more than $10,000 above the median
00:59:10.120
household income in states like Oklahoma and Louisiana and other states. But no sane person
00:59:15.480
would ever think that $73,000 is ever going to make them rich. Unless you live in the year 1847 or
00:59:21.040
something, $73,000 does not equate to being wealthy. So why would anyone presume that $70,000
00:59:26.040
is somehow going to make them wealthy in the year 2023? And perhaps most disturbingly,
00:59:31.720
how did someone with this level of financial illiteracy manage to earn a graduate degree
00:59:36.300
in the first place? The more you watch that video, the more depressing it gets. Here you have a woman
00:59:41.100
who earnestly believes that going through the motions and racking up degrees should lead inevitably to
00:59:47.940
wealth, because that's how you get wealthy. You check a bunch of boxes your whole life and you
00:59:51.820
follow orders. You definitely don't innovate. You don't strike out on your own path. You don't do
00:59:56.460
something different. No, you just follow the program. You go to the classes, you get the piece of paper
01:00:01.500
that says degree, and abracadabra, wealth should just appear. This is the expectation. And shockingly for
01:00:08.500
many people, it has not been met. And she's not alone. Here's an NBC News segment from a couple of days
01:00:13.760
ago featuring a salon owner who's really upset that she still owes $4,000 for her community college
01:00:20.040
degree and that now she's going to have to start paying on it. Let's watch that.
01:00:25.220
After three years of a pandemic pause, federal student loan repayments are set to restart Sunday,
01:00:31.340
three months after the Supreme Court struck down President Biden's student loan forgiveness program.
01:00:36.900
Now many people are facing thousands of dollars of debt, and they say they still have no way of paying
01:00:42.280
it back. NBC News business and data reporter Brian Chum has more.
01:00:48.060
Josie Bridges is a single mom living paycheck to paycheck. It's hard enough dealing with rising
01:00:52.600
prices at the store. My student payments are sitting right now at about $400 is what they're
01:00:57.300
expecting each month. So I mean, that's my food budget right there. The pandemic freeze on student
01:01:02.200
loan payments allowed Josie to open up her own salon in Portland, Oregon. But with $4,000 in outstanding
01:01:08.020
debt from her community college degree, she says she simply won't be able to make the
01:01:12.120
payments once they resume in October. It's kind of out of my hands at this point. If I can't make
01:01:16.820
it, I can't make it. It's a game changer. The Biden administration's plan to forgive up to $20,000
01:01:22.220
in student debt would have wiped Josie's slate clean. Instead, a challenge from six Republican
01:01:26.960
states resulted in a Supreme Court decision in June striking down the plan after Josie had already put
01:01:32.440
thousands of dollars in investments into her salon. I don't know what's going to happen in the future,
01:01:36.840
and that's kind of scary. Now, you know, I'm a big supporter of small businesses. I love it when
01:01:41.880
people go out and do their own thing, start their own businesses, showing that entrepreneurial spirit
01:01:46.620
that once made this country get great. But the message from this report seems to be that Josie
01:01:52.060
took major financial risks on the assumption that the government was just going to wipe away her debt.
01:01:58.000
Unfortunately, the magic debt forgiveness fairy never arrived, and now she's stuck paying back the
01:02:03.200
money that she decided to borrow in the first place. So it's hard to think of a better illustration
01:02:07.080
of the fact that this pause on student loans was a self-defeating and ridiculous and pointless policy.
01:02:14.420
You know, it's the quintessential example of the government kicking the can down the road,
01:02:18.080
which is the only thing they ever do. In response, predictably enough, many college grads
01:02:24.300
kick the can down the road also. It's not like most of them have spent the intervening years
01:02:29.460
saving money, whether it's because of Biden's terrible economy or inflation or their own
01:02:35.360
reckless spending habits or some combination of these factors. Many of these college grads
01:02:39.020
are now in the same spot they were in when the pause took effect, if not an even worse spot.
01:02:43.880
Now the unpause button is pushed and nothing was accomplished. They're still broke and they're
01:02:48.860
desperate for more handouts. Social media right now is ripe with videos from people panicking that they
01:02:54.620
have to pay back their loans again. Many of them have advanced degrees. Some of them have
01:02:58.580
multiple bachelor degrees. They've spent years and years and years accumulating degrees
01:03:03.840
and now the bill is due and they're demanding that somebody wave the magic wand and make it all go
01:03:09.160
away. And of course, what is the magic wand? Well, the magic wand is someone else's bank account
01:03:14.240
because there is no loan forgiveness. There is only loan transfer and they want their loans transferred
01:03:21.740
from them to you. As I've argued for many years, this idea is flagrantly immoral. It's evil,
01:03:29.000
you know, and it makes no sense. If it's somehow unjust to expect a college graduate to pay his own
01:03:35.260
loans, then it is self-evidently much more unjust to expect someone else to pay his loans.
01:03:43.000
Like someone has to pay the debt and it only makes sense that the guy who owns the debt should pay it.
01:03:48.220
So everyone, I think, intuitively understands this point when it comes to most types of debt,
01:03:54.480
but college debt is somehow treated as an exception. That's because the whole scheme is
01:03:59.380
just a form of upper class welfare. Most student loan debt is held by high wealth households. More
01:04:04.240
than 60% of it is held by the rich and the upper class. People with graduate degrees account for a
01:04:08.620
half of all student debt. So these are, for the most part, upper class people. And they are looking to
01:04:16.080
get bailed out and the bailout would inevitably come, in many cases, from people who have less
01:04:22.520
money than they do. And while college grads try to reach their hands into your pocket to take your
01:04:28.580
money to pay off their loans, the real villains in this story get off the hook completely. Villains
01:04:33.260
like the university system itself, which is charging these exorbitant fees for what often turns out to
01:04:37.480
be a useless education. These universities operate like hedge funds, but they're taxed like charities.
01:04:42.760
They've been raising tuition for decades with the help of federally backed loans. And
01:04:46.640
when the students default on those loans, the university owes nothing. The student or the
01:04:51.040
taxpayers have to pay. We've also been letting employers off the hook, as I pointed out many
01:04:55.540
times, you know, we rarely blame them for needlessly requiring a degree for jobs that can just as easily
01:05:00.680
be done by people without them. Corporate America and the education system, they have created this
01:05:05.640
problem, yet they get none of the blame and the working class is expected to pick up the bill. It's a tale
01:05:11.140
as old as time. How many entry-level consultants or government bureaucrats really need a $200,000
01:05:17.780
bachelor's degree to work, you know, an Excel spreadsheet and send some emails? It's absurd.
01:05:24.700
And that last point is the thing that I think is rarely mentioned in the student debt conversation,
01:05:29.080
even though it's the most important point of all. As we see all these college grads weeping over their
01:05:33.780
loan burden, and it is indeed an enormous burden, we rarely state the obvious, which is that most of
01:05:39.200
these people never should have gone to college to begin with. We have people running around with
01:05:45.420
multiple degrees who never needed one. There are people with master's degrees who could have been
01:05:51.400
just as successful, if not more successful, with nothing but a high school diploma. Now, yes, as
01:05:58.020
already covered, some employers have created a sort of artificial demand for a degree, which means that
01:06:02.580
if you don't go to college, you will not be eligible for those jobs, even though you can actually,
01:06:06.720
you actually are more than eligible, like you could do them, but artificially they're saying that you
01:06:11.860
can't get in the door because you don't have the degree. But there are many other career paths that
01:06:16.440
you can venture down where nobody cares if you have a degree. I am more financially successful than most
01:06:21.860
people with doctorates, and my highest level of formal education is 12th grade. So it is possible
01:06:27.480
to find success without a college degree. I know that from experience. Now, I'm not denying the hurdles
01:06:33.900
that you'll find in your path if you decide to skip college and free yourself from the scam. I also
01:06:38.500
know about those hurdles from experience as well, but the only real long-term solution to the student
01:06:43.700
loan crisis, the only way to put an end to this lunacy, the only path out of this wilderness is for the
01:06:51.980
majority of young people to abandon the university system entirely. That is the only way, and it's the one
01:06:56.820
thing that we don't talk about when we have this conversation. I've been screaming it from the rooftops
01:07:01.700
forever, but more people need to join in the chorus or nothing's going to get better.
01:07:09.400
Because until that happens, until we see millions of young people going, just bypassing the university
01:07:17.120
system completely, they graduate high school and they bypass the system completely and they go out
01:07:21.760
and they live their lives and they get jobs and they do something else. Until that happens, tuition will
01:07:27.320
not go down at all. It's only going to go up because there's no incentive for it to go down.
01:07:33.540
The university, why would they lower tuition? They know that parents are going to shuffle their
01:07:38.600
kids into the colleges anyway. They know that you'll pay anything. And so they're going to keep
01:07:43.940
raising the tuition. There's no incentive. And corporate America will continue needlessly demanding
01:07:49.740
degrees for jobs that a well-trained monkey could perform. Because again, they have no incentive to
01:07:54.960
stop demanding it. As long as we go along with the program, the program will not change. That's the
01:08:00.820
simple reality. If people reject the program and they reject the programming, the student debt crisis
01:08:08.040
will eventually become a moot point, a thing of the past. This is really the only path forward.
01:08:15.660
And it's the only way that we will really ever be able to say that the student debt problem is
01:08:21.800
canceled. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening.