BLM never went away, it just rebranded. Now it s back on the street, marching under the Free Palestine banner. Also, the thugs who mowed down a retired police chief have been in court this week laughing and having a grand old time. We ll discuss. And the state of Oregon is getting rid of their academic requirements in public school. Now you can graduate whether you ve learned anything or not. Plus, fewer adults will be wearing Halloween costumes this year. I ll talk about why that s a rare good sign for society. All that and more on today s Matt Walsh Show.
00:03:02.600Houston, Atlanta, even in our nation's capital, they all saw major demonstrations.
00:03:07.780Here at home, a huge rally in Brooklyn lasted for hours, and we followed the demonstrators.
00:03:14.220As the day gave way to night, as Eyewitness News reporter Anthony Carlos shows us, the mostly peaceful scenes ended with clashes and several arrests.
00:03:23.720Chaos and clashing at nightfall on the streets of Brooklyn.
00:03:30.740Police say more than a dozen people arrested during a pro-Palestinian demonstration.
00:03:57.800The protests starting hours earlier Saturday and much more peaceful, with thousands taking to the streets of Bay Ridge, many marching for a ceasefire in the Middle East.
00:04:07.760So many of the demonstrators are marching for a ceasefire, says the reporter, as the footage shows signs calling for Israel to be wiped off the face of the map.
00:04:18.140That's your first clue that you're not getting the most honest assessment of what's happening at these protests and where they're likely to lead.
00:04:25.700In any event, the gist of the ABC report is that New Yorkers are mainly concerned about the Middle East.
00:04:30.000They're not using the conflict over there as a proxy for anything that they want to inflict on Americans in this country.
00:04:36.660Fortunately, we don't have to rely on ABC News and their version of events.
00:04:40.780Independent journalists have been documenting the demonstrations in New York especially as well.
00:04:46.020Brennan Stultz is one of those journalists.
00:04:49.020And what his reporting makes clear is that if you look closer at these protests, they're hitting pretty much the same notes that we saw three years ago with BLM.
00:04:57.800They also bear a striking resemblance in some ways to protests over the end of Roe v. Wade, protests against parental rights laws.
00:05:06.060The other night, for example, Stultz shot this footage of a protest organized by Gays for Gaza and Queers for Palestine.
00:05:14.140And this was in various locations in New York, particularly in Manhattan.
00:05:27.800And we understand that Palestinian liberation is black liberation!
00:05:35.160I know that a lot of these people have good hearts, but they're, like, riding this wave that is not based on the facts of the history of this region, and it breaks my heart.
00:05:51.000The occupation has got to go, hey, hey!
00:06:37.580And you could just look at it there, and it's, what we see is it's not just one guy in Brooklyn who came up with that sign and decided to run with it.
00:06:45.120Several people are holding that banner.
00:06:55.600You know, we're not cherry-picking here.
00:06:56.840Leftists in New York really came out with a mishmash of every slogan we've heard from the left over the past few years, only with Palestine tacked on at the end.
00:07:04.800They're just kind of changing the order of the words around a little bit and finding a new way to tie them all together.
00:07:09.640Never mind that reproductive justice makes no sense conceptually, and then makes even less sense when you realize that, to them, reproductive justice means the execution of infants.
00:07:19.900The most confusing of all, on the surface, is what the hell abortion has to do with anything happening in the Middle East right now.
00:07:27.040Of course, a lot of conservatives have pointed out the obvious contradictions in using these slogans.
00:07:35.720Showing up in Gaza with any of these banners means that you can probably look forward to being thrown off a rooftop or, if you're lucky, getting jailed for a decade.
00:07:43.580There's also no tolerance in Gaza for what these people are calling reproductive justice, which, again, is just killing your own child.
00:07:48.840So, there is no ideological alignment between Hamas and gays for Gaza, to put it mildly.
00:07:56.120Hamas is not a left-wing organization.
00:07:58.260They also would not qualify as a right-wing organization.
00:08:00.760They largely exist outside of the Western left-right paradigm.
00:08:05.860Yet the left has found it useful to filter this conflict between Hamas and Israel through that paradigm,
00:08:12.040and they've done it in a way that is inevitably totally incoherent.
00:08:17.500But pointing out these contradictions accomplishes nothing on its own because these protesters are aware of them for the most part.
00:08:23.480I mean, they're ignorant, but they're not that ignorant.
00:08:25.820They know that they wouldn't survive a day in Gaza, and that's why none of them are in Gaza right now.
00:08:30.220So, why are they demonstrating for Hamas, especially after they just committed a series of brutal murders?
00:08:35.920What are these left-wing activists getting out of it?
00:08:40.820It begins to make sense when you realize that this phenomenon, as strange as it might seem, isn't exactly new.
00:08:47.500Some of the most vocal proponents of BLM, like George Soros, Barack Obama, Kamala Harris,
00:08:52.720who literally organized a bail fund for the rioters,
00:08:55.180they understood that they needed to live far, far away from where all the BLM foot soldiers exist
00:09:02.720and where they're causing all the damage.
00:09:04.840There's a reason Barack Obama lives on Martha's Vineyard and not in Larry Krasner's Philadelphia or downtown Kenosha.
00:09:12.000It's the same reason why the vast majority of liberal women with BLM lawn signs live in the suburbs instead of the inner cities.
00:09:19.560So, the point is that this desire to promote a murderous ideology,
00:09:25.260one that, if unleashed worldwide, would kill a lot of people, including leftists,
00:09:29.980is not unique to the current war in the Middle East.
00:09:33.280It tells us something fundamental about how leftists think.
00:09:37.460Specifically, it exposes how heavily they rely on abstraction
00:09:41.300rather than practical thinking informed by real-life consequences.
00:09:45.400As Chris Ruffo pointed out the other day,
00:09:47.000leftists have long been enamored with the idea of the noble savage,
00:09:51.780especially the noble savage who resists the tyranny of the white oppressor.
00:09:56.800And they see Hamas fighters, like BLM rioters,
00:10:00.040as a physical manifestation of the many anti-American concepts that they've been taught in school.
00:10:05.000These barbarians are the decolonizers, the anti-oppressors.
00:10:09.640They are the answer to whiteness in all of its forms.
00:10:12.680The left will humanize its allies, like George Floyd, and rioters, and Hamas terrorists.
00:10:20.700But they will abstract their enemies as oppressors and agents of white supremacy,
00:10:25.420and then celebrate their destruction and murder.
00:10:29.040The precise vehicle for this destruction isn't what matters.
00:10:32.180I mean, that's why many of the same organizations and politicians
00:10:34.480who fervently supported the BLM riots a few years ago
00:10:37.300are backing Hamas now, using pretty much the same lingo.
00:10:40.260Take the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, for example.
00:10:44.000After Hamas launched its attack on Israel,
00:10:46.200the DSA held a rally in New York City to show, quote,
00:10:49.180solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist.
00:14:21.520The same people are supporting both movements because they perceive the enemy to be the same in both cases.
00:14:27.240For leftists in America, for all their talk about moral ambiguity and various forms of fluidity and, you know, everything is ambiguous, everything is fluid.
00:14:38.060Really, although they say that, for them, everything is actually black and white in a very literal sense.
00:14:43.700Because they see every social conflict in terms of white people oppressing non-white people.
00:14:50.840In the Middle East, they simply side with the group that is less white for no other reason than the fact that they are less white.
00:14:57.940As a get-out-the-vote effort for Joe Biden's party, this latest resistance movement, we must say, probably will not work as well as BLM did.
00:15:09.200And that's because, in part, in recent days, a lot of liberals have been, you know, getting cold feet about some of this and have been shocked to discover that their so-called allies actually want them dead.
00:15:20.040Wealthy donors have pulled funding from universities like UPenn and Harvard, where students are embracing Hamas.
00:15:25.460Democrats are issuing statements denouncing members of their own party, which almost never happens.
00:15:29.900But what they haven't done, and what they probably will never do, is recognize that we all saw something very similar unfold three years ago.
00:15:39.100Political leaders and corporate media outlets, they don't want you to see that connection.
00:20:36.280The most just and sensible thing here is to put them in front of a firing squad, put them down like dogs, and bury them in unmarked graves and forget that they ever existed.
00:20:47.560Like, you don't even get, well, the victims' families don't have the privilege of forgetting these people exist.
00:20:52.720But society, like, you don't get to be remembered.
00:20:55.940You don't even get to have a name when you die.
00:20:58.480You're just, you failed at everything.
00:21:56.580And I think those of us who advocate real justice in the form of the death penalty need to start, you know, we tend to concede sort of the compassion argument to the other side.
00:22:07.220Almost like we're saying, well, yeah, you want to be compassionate, but we want justice.
00:22:16.140It's actually not compassionate at all to advocate for a system where people do not get what they deserve for the crimes they've committed.
00:22:24.000And for me, like ultimately it's as simple as that.
00:22:28.460If you get in a car and you run somebody over, run two people over actually, kill them, one of them you kill, the other one you tried to but didn't, and then you laugh about it, do you deserve to be put in front of a firing squad or not?
00:22:46.220Are you going to tell me they don't deserve it?
00:22:58.200Giving someone what they deserve is justice.
00:23:01.720And to me, it is cruel when you are too afraid to administer justice, when you allow this kind of mockery to continue, a failure or refusal to make violent criminals suffer for their crimes.
00:23:16.900It's cruelty to the victims' families.
00:23:20.860It's cruelty to the victims themselves.
00:23:22.960It's cruelty to the future victims who will become victims in the future at the hands of other violent criminals who are emboldened by the kid glove treatment.
00:23:33.480I mean, you heard from one of those guys bragging in the cop car, wait, I'm going to be out in 30 days.
00:23:39.480Okay, so it is a fact that our lenient system is encouraging more crime.
00:23:47.420Because the criminals themselves aren't stupid.
00:24:01.400They see how people commit heinous violent crimes and end up back on the street.
00:24:04.940And so they say to themselves, well, I'll do the same thing.
00:24:06.820There's no consequence for my actions.
00:24:08.540So it's cruelty to allow this to continue.
00:24:12.000It is cruelty to society in general to allow this.
00:24:15.400Because society craves and needs justice.
00:24:18.040And when you've got two people who commit a heinous crime like that, the most morally correct way to respond is, first of all, to wipe that grin off of their faces.
00:24:34.700Like, as a society, we should not allow that.
00:24:37.920You're going to sit in the courtroom and laugh at the victims' families, and we allow that?
00:24:44.900No, what we should be saying to them is, oh, you think this is funny?
00:24:51.880You put the noose around their neck, and you say, is it still funny to you?
00:24:54.440You're still having a good time with this, huh?
00:24:57.240But to simply allow this spectacle, to allow criminals to make a mockery of the whole system and of their own crimes, and to make light of it, it's just untenable.
00:30:16.900There's been kind of a movement in that direction in many school districts across the country.
00:30:21.540But I think we should acknowledge that standardized tests are already a really poor way of judging a student's aptitude and grasp on the subject matter.
00:30:34.260Standardized tests have their own problems, which are really quite significant.
00:30:37.620When you have standardized tests, you end up with teachers that are teaching to the test,
00:30:43.420which means that you're trying to get kids to memorize certain bits of information because that's all that these tests really can measure.
00:30:50.760All they measure is whether a student has memorized stuff.
00:30:57.080Memorization and regurgitation are what these tests are for.
00:31:00.640That's what the tests test for, right?
00:31:02.980But memorization is not the same thing as learning.
00:34:00.440But what they're doing in Oregon and in other places is they are throwing out the measuring sticks entirely.
00:34:09.100Which to me is obviously not the solution.
00:34:11.860So I'm saying that we should find better and more effective ways to measure a student's comprehension.
00:34:20.340But what they're saying is that they're not going to measure it at all.
00:34:23.240And the reason for not measuring it, it's the worst possible reason, which is this racial disproportionate impact bull crap.
00:34:33.080So if you had a place like Oregon where they said, look, standardized tests, they're not racist, obviously, but they're just not the best way to figure out if students are absorbing the information.
00:34:50.500And so we're going to do something else, we're going to come up with a new system, then I'd be all for that, depending on what the new system is, I suppose.
00:34:58.940But they're just discarding the system completely and just going to graduate everybody, regardless of whether or not they grasp the material.
00:35:09.080Which is, again, it's the worst possible way to deal with this problem.
00:35:13.400All right, here's a fascinating story from Yahoo before we get into the next segment.
00:35:55.200The article says Halloween is around the corner, but data from the latest Yahoo YouGov poll suggests that most U.S. adults won't be donning costumes for the celebration this year.
00:36:02.920According to the poll, while 22% are opting to dress up for the spooky holiday, 63% have chosen to skip out this season, while 14% haven't decided one way or another, many of us might find all the hoopla surrounding Halloween a bit debilitating for one reason or another.
00:36:21.140Dr. Shaina Ali, a mental health counselor and educator who's written about Halloween, okay, now we know who the experts are, a mental health counselor and educator who's written about Halloween anxiety, which is a thing, says that whether someone loves it or hates it can often be a sign of something deeper.
00:36:38.580Ali tells Yahoo Entertainment, a big divider is if the person values Halloween.
00:36:44.200Some of those factors may be related to their upbringing, such as not being from a family who takes part, being part of a religion with strong beliefs against Halloween, or financial costs for those who don't have disposable income to spend on the holiday.
00:36:55.680Let's see, childhood triggers aside, they also say that this year can be especially tough for adults who find it hard to have fun while tragedies are actively occurring across the globe, such as the devastating Israeli Hamas war.
00:37:08.580Okay, sorry, there's nothing funny about what's happening in the Middle East, but I can't help but laugh at the image of like a 32-year-old woman staring at her sexy Frankenstein costume and saying, no, I just can't this year.