One of the top public schools in the country sold its blueprints and everything else to the communist Chinese government. Also, the Governor of Michigan appears in a bizarre TikTok video that appears to mock the Catholic faith. A new ad meant to persuade men to vote for Kamala is having the opposite effect. Elon Musk unveils a fleet of robots that will take over the world and enslave us all. And the new Joker movie may wind up being one of the worst flops in Hollywood history. What exactly went wrong and why? We ll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Welch Show.
00:00:00.000Today on the Matt Wall Show, one of the top public schools in the country sold its blueprints and everything else to the communist Chinese government.
00:00:06.120This raises a couple of questions. First, how is that legal? Second, why did the school's whole program get shipped over except the DEI stuff?
00:00:13.860Also, the governor of Michigan appears in a bizarre TikTok video that appears to mock the Catholic faith.
00:00:18.640A new ad meant to persuade men to vote for Kamala is having very much the opposite effect.
00:00:23.020Elon Musk unveils the fleet of robots that will take over the world and enslave us all.
00:00:26.460And the new Joker movie may wind up being one of the worst flops in Hollywood history.
00:00:31.160What exactly went wrong and why? We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show.
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00:01:22.100A question I get a lot from my audience, especially after they've seen one of my movies, is how can I get in the conservative fight?
00:01:27.780Well, for starters, you need to be strategic about where your money's going.
00:01:31.360Most credit cards are funneling millions to left-wing causes and candidates, hoping you're too distracted by cat videos to notice.
00:01:37.300But now you can align your spending with your values and fight back against the woke mob.
00:01:43.040Coin is America's first conservative credit card.
00:02:22.120Go to coin.com slash disclosures for full details.
00:02:26.020A couple of weeks ago, Kamala Harris' campaign went after me because I said that the Department of Education, along with the public school system, should be burned to the ground, figuratively speaking.
00:02:36.720Kamala's campaign didn't make any kind of argument refuting my position, of course.
00:02:40.060They just suggested that what I said was crazy because how can you possibly have a functioning country without a Department of Education?
00:02:47.460You know, it's not like we invented the telephone and won two world wars or landed on the moon without a Department of Education or anything.
00:02:54.680We definitely need a Department of Education to do all of that stuff, even though we did that stuff without the Department.
00:03:00.820And I responded to Kamala Harris' campaign outlining all the reasons why the Department of Education and our public school system are a complete disaster.
00:03:09.480What I didn't talk about at the time, and what almost no one ever talks about in this country, is what the alternative is.
00:03:18.540You know, it's one thing to point out failures.
00:03:20.620It's another thing to suggest tangible improvements.
00:03:23.580What does it look like to have political leaders who actually care about the education system of their country and want to make it as good as it can possibly be?
00:03:33.840What should those leaders be doing exactly?
00:03:35.760Well, this week, thanks to reporting from The National Review and The Daily Wire's Luke Rosiak, we know what they've been doing in China, anyway.
00:03:43.540It turns out that officials in China are very serious about improving their education system to the point that they've effectively cloned the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia.
00:03:55.520Now, if you're not familiar with it, Thomas Jefferson, until recently, was the number one public high school in the United States.
00:04:01.860In China, they now have 20 so-called Thomas schools, all of which are exact replicas of the Thomas Jefferson School in Fairfax.
00:04:12.920These Chinese Thomas School clones have copied pretty much everything from the Thomas Jefferson School in the U.S., including curriculums and floor plans.
00:04:22.840So, say what you will about China, but, you know, they're in this to win.
00:05:03.160But first, it's important to note that there's one aspect of our Thomas Jefferson school that's here in this country that China did not copy.
00:05:13.060They did not clone Thomas Jefferson's new DEI admissions policy, which was implemented a few years ago.
00:05:21.600This DEI admissions policy got rid of standardized tests.
00:05:26.520It also gave bonuses to applicants who couldn't speak proper English and implemented a quota system so that every middle school in Fairfax County got an equal number of slots in the new class at Thomas Jefferson.
00:05:38.340The result, unsurprisingly, is that student quality has dropped by nearly 40%, as measured by the number of national merit semifinalists that Thomas Jefferson produces.
00:05:48.980So Thomas Jefferson is no longer the top public high school in the U.S.
00:05:54.660It was too exceptional, too impressive.
00:05:57.540So the liberals running Fairfax County and the administrators of the school decided that they had to fix that by destroying it.
00:06:04.420And that's exactly what they've done with the DEI policies.
00:06:08.960But before they ruined it, they raised a lot of money from the Communist Party of China.
00:06:14.180From 2014 to 2021, entities in China sent more than $3.5 million to something called the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund.
00:06:23.160This is a nonprofit that was set up to raise money for a renovation of Thomas Jefferson.
00:06:27.520The nonprofit was based in the school and had the school principal on its board.
00:06:33.160So there's obviously a very close relationship there.
00:06:36.140And what did China get in exchange for this $3.5 million?
00:06:40.420When we first learned about these payments around a year ago, we didn't have a lot of detail on that question.
00:06:49.800Fairfax County Public Schools, which are known for pushing critical race theory and lessons on children's sexual identity, are reportedly taking big donations from organizations with ties to China.
00:07:01.900Marianne has all of the details live from Los Angeles.
00:07:08.080Well, that Fairfax County School, Thomas Jefferson High School, launched the Fund Campaign for TJ back in 2014 to pay for educational programs.
00:07:16.420But a chunk of the money raised came from Chinese-connected donors, including a university in Beijing.
00:07:21.840That's according to a report from the group Parents Defending Education.
00:07:26.040Some of that money is going toward programs like college prep.
00:07:29.480Last month, parents of eighth graders received an email recruiting kids who might be interested in going to college.
00:07:34.980But the catch is it's only open to black or Hispanic students, those with disabilities or other criteria.
00:07:40.800The curriculum doesn't mention admission to any students who are either white or Asian.
00:07:46.360So we learned that there were payments coming into Fairfax from China, but we didn't know exactly what they were for.
00:07:53.100According to the National Review, in addition to course materials and outlines, Chinese officials wanted to learn about construction and administration at the school,
00:08:01.420as well as extensive advice on how to manage a school like Thomas Jefferson.
00:08:06.500Thomas Jefferson's director of student services even wrote in an email that the Chinese wanted a handbook that would tell them how to clone the school,
00:08:13.740including research output from students.
00:08:16.440Quoting from the National Review, quote,
00:08:17.740Now maybe the Chinese wanted these senior research projects because they involved materials that students created alongside the leading research institutes in the U.S.,
00:08:45.960including the NIH and George Washington University.
00:08:48.840So there are obvious espionage-related implications here as well.
00:08:54.440Now, to be clear, there's no question that senior leaders at Thomas Jefferson were aware that all this was going on.
00:08:59.340There's even an email from Thomas Jefferson's assistant principal in which he says that the nonprofit has a contract with a Chinese foundation,
00:09:05.380quote, that they will pay a million dollars in exchange for help getting their schools up and running in China called the Thomas Schools.
00:09:12.580And some of these Chinese officials also visited the school.
00:09:14.920On top of that, there's evidence that the Fairfax County public school system tried to cover up what it was doing.
00:09:20.520The group that actually uncovered this scheme and which led to the National Review's reporting is called Parents Defending Education, or PDE.
00:09:28.460And they spent more than a year working on the story, and it only took so long because of all the roadblocks that Fairfax County put in their way.
00:09:36.340When PDE made a public records request seeking information about the school's coordination with China,
00:09:41.200Fairfax County tried to charge them nearly $36,000 in fees in order to produce the documents.
00:09:46.960And they probably expected that that would scare PDE off, but it didn't work.
00:09:49.980The group ended up paying $18,000 for some of the documents, which ultimately exposed what was going on.
00:09:57.080Now, the word treason gets thrown around a lot these days, and there's a lot of discussion about how difficult it is to prove treason under the U.S. Constitution and so on.
00:10:06.860But if we're speaking certainly in the colloquial sense of the word, this seems a lot like treason.
00:10:13.440These people were orchestrating the sale of proprietary information to China to benefit Chinese schools while simultaneously kneecapping our own schools with DEI admissions policies.
00:10:26.840They didn't sell those DEI admissions policies to China because everybody involved knows that they're garbage and China would have no interest.
00:10:35.200And the proponents of DEI themselves seem to recognize that, at least when it comes time to make some money from the Chinese Communist Party.
00:10:43.100The whole scam is reminiscent of how Chinese billionaires will promote transgenderism in the U.S., but not in China.
00:10:50.100It's deliberate sabotage from the people running the single most successful school district in the U.S.
00:10:55.500In Fairfax County, which also, by the way, houses CIA headquarters and much of the intelligence community, along with the workforce at the Pentagon,
00:11:02.760the former president of Thomas Jefferson, Evan Glazer, even suggested that he didn't think twice about giving inside info to our chief foreign adversary
00:11:10.920because it would be racist to discriminate based on national origin.
00:11:16.100But when it comes to discriminating against students using affirmative action admissions policies,
00:11:21.320school administrators in Fairfax have no objection to that, of course.
00:11:25.800There have been a lot of parents speaking out at school board meetings over the past few years.
00:11:31.380They've been complaining about the poor quality of their children's education since many schools are now graduating students who can barely even read.
00:11:40.680Parents have also been understandably furious about the deliberate efforts to indoctrinate their children with gender ideology,
00:11:47.340to expose them to explicit pornography in some cases.
00:11:51.000And some of those parents, as you might remember, were investigated by the DOJ
00:11:55.240because they just, you know, wanted to ensure that their children had an actual education.
00:12:03.800Meanwhile, we're allowing China to copy the blueprint of our most successful schools,
00:12:08.440and the DOJ hasn't said a word about it.
00:12:11.560You won't find a clear illustration of why our entire education system is in a tailspin.
00:12:17.220Right now, the government officials who are truly interested in our education system are not located in Washington.
00:12:24.700They probably aren't working for your local school board either.
00:12:28.500Thanks to the work of Parents Defending Education, we know that, unfortunately for children in this country,
00:22:47.820In fact, the efforts to ban kids to take like classic literature out of the schools, that's entirely on the left.
00:22:57.600If anyone ever tries to do that, 100% of the time, it's the left doing that because there are things about classic literature that are not politically correct anymore.
00:23:06.000And I don't know if that's the case with little women or not, but if there's, if there was ever any, if anyone ever was trying to take little women out of the schools, guaranteed it was happening on the left.
00:23:27.700And, and especially on this topic of the book bans.
00:23:31.040I mean, they are the, I, I, I, you know, I've said it a million times, but the, the, the only books that conservatives are trying to take out of the schools are gay pornography.
00:23:42.780All the rest, if you ever see a list of banned books, like all the rest of it is stuff that liberals didn't like because it's, it's insensitive because it was a book written more than five years ago.
00:23:54.060Anyway, so in this ad, you've got one guy who's morbidly obese.
00:24:01.400You got a couple others who are, you know, noticeably effeminate, you know, even have a lisp.
00:24:09.220And this was supposed to be an ad with stereotypically masculine tough guys telling you to vote for Kamala.
00:24:15.080And yet they couldn't find even a single stereotypically masculine tough guy to appear in the ad.
00:24:21.640They don't even know what that looks like.
00:24:24.080They don't know how to identify one of those guys.
00:24:28.280And so you end up instead with something that is indistinguishable from parody.
00:24:32.180Now, if you go to TikTok and you find the original video and read the comments, you'll see, and this might change now that this ad is being mocked all over the place and it's made it outside of the liberal bubble.
00:24:46.040But at least this morning when I looked, it, it, the, the comments are overwhelmingly positive, almost, almost entirely positive.
00:24:54.300And they're coming also almost entirely from women, from liberal women.
00:24:58.600All the comments are liberal women who love the ad and they think the ad is great and wholesome and charming and funny and it resonates with them.
00:25:10.520So liberal women love this ad that's ostensibly for men, which tells you everything you need to know.
00:25:17.320And this is why the left is terrible at messaging to men.
00:25:20.900For all the grief that Republicans get for their struggles with women, it is so much worse on the other end of the spectrum.
00:25:28.600Because Republicans and conservatives, you know, we do know how to speak to most demographics of women, right?
00:25:39.100That's, that's why many demographics of women actually vote Republican more than they vote Democrat.
00:25:45.780The only demographic that conservatives tend to struggle with is the, is, is specifically young single women.
00:25:55.820Um, but married women, women who have families, uh, it's, it's all of a sudden it flips.
00:26:05.100On the other end though, Democrats can't speak to men of any type.
00:26:09.380They, they don't know how to message to young men, single men, married men, older men.
00:26:16.800They have no idea how to connect with men in any category, in any stage of life.
00:26:22.100The problem is that all of their messaging for men is really messaging for women.
00:26:30.820They, they can't develop, um, you know, again, just to use on all the other, if, if, if Republicans or if conservatives, uh, struggle to message to young single women.
00:26:46.200And if there, if there, if there is a problem there with the messaging, it's probably because they're trying to connect with young single women as if they are married women.
00:26:55.660Like they're talking to young single women, like they talk to married women.
00:26:59.900So if there's any kind of mistake being made, it's there.
00:27:02.920Um, but with Democrats, uh, they talk to men as if the men are women, right?
00:27:12.340It's not like they're not understanding what stage of life these men are in that they're talking to.
00:27:17.120They don't even, they don't, they talk to men as if they're talking to women because really they're talking to women.
00:27:22.680They can't develop messaging to men because they can't even bring themselves to acknowledge men as a group that they should speak to in the first place.
00:28:06.660If you're a woman and you really want to understand men, there's really only one way that you'll ever understand men.
00:28:13.040And if you're a man and you want to understand women, there's only one way you'll ever be able to do that.
00:28:17.740And it's not going to be perfect because, but, but there's only one way that you'll come close to understanding the opposite sex.
00:28:23.000And that is to get married, uh, get married, stay married and love your spouse.
00:28:28.180That's how, that's how a man will understand women.
00:28:31.480He will understand women by understanding a woman and a woman will understand men by deeply understanding a man.
00:28:40.260And that's not going to tell her everything about all men because this man is an individual.
00:28:44.240But, but if you can come to understand at least, you know, if you're a married woman and you love your husband, you've been married for a while, uh, you're in a faithful, loyal marriage, you will, you will come to understand your husband on a very deep, intimate level.
00:29:01.820And if you can, if, if, if that's the case, then you will through your husband, learn a lot about men generally, not everything about your husband applies to all men, but there are some like basic fundamentals there that you will understand.
00:29:13.960You'll understand men because of that.
00:29:15.260And the same thing goes for men understanding women.
00:29:17.360Um, but liberal feminist women are either single, divorced, or they're in strained marriages to men they despise.
00:29:32.320And this is how you end up with stuff like this.
00:29:34.800Um, my, you know, my wife, uh, would, would look at that ad and she, like, my wife would, if anyone had consulted with my wife and said, well, what do you think you think is a good ad for, for men?
00:29:52.080Um, and any, any, again, any married woman who loves her husband and is in a functional marriage would, would, would respond the same way.
00:29:59.880So this is what marriage, this is one of the reasons you need marriage on a societal level.
00:30:05.860The more we move away from marriage, the less marriage that we have in society, the more that these divisions between the sexes will grow wider and deeper.
00:30:15.720Um, and, and the less that men and women will understand each other.
00:30:19.740There is only one way again, to close the gap, to heal the division, to avert the, uh, the gender war marriage, marriage is the only way.
00:30:28.220And, uh, and, you know, without that, you have, you have the sexes talk, you, you, you have the sexes talking to each other like this ad, right?
00:30:36.420So this, this is the way they communicate.
00:30:41.780Speaking of effeminate men, Doug Emhoff, a second gentleman hoping to become first lady.
00:30:46.400Many revelations have come out about this guy in recent weeks.
00:30:49.620We're not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I, you know, we know the media, the media has presented him as the new model of masculinity.
00:30:56.480Uh, another indication that these people don't understand men or how to connect with them, you know, that they, they think they could put forward somebody like Doug Emhoff, you know, as a model for men.
00:31:08.720They think that any man would look at Doug Emhoff and say, yeah, I want to be like that guy.
00:31:11.880Um, so it turns out that Emhoff had an affair and impregnated the nanny, which destroyed his first marriage.
00:31:19.920Now we find out that he publicly assaulted a former girlfriend, allegedly.
00:31:23.840And he was asked about this by, uh, by Joe Scarborough, Scarborough.
00:33:57.700But mainly it's relevant because, again, they are the ones.
00:34:01.460Kamala's campaign, the media, they decided to put this dude forward as a role model for men.
00:34:10.020And we can only imagine that if Kamala is the president, that how often we're going to hear this.
00:34:17.940And so when you do that, you have made this guy's story, his biography relevant.
00:34:24.440So if you don't want us talking about it, then take this guy off, get him away from the cameras, and stop talking about him, and stop trying to convince us that, you know, he's a role model that we should be emulating.
00:34:39.860Elon Musk unveiled three new Tesla high-tech products, including a surprise autonomous passenger van at a highly anticipated event in California Thursday night.
00:34:47.100Musk rode up to the stage in a long-awaited driverless cyber cab that Tesla was expected to showcase during the evening titled Wee Robot at Warner Bros. Studios.
00:34:57.680But a never-before-seen 20-person robo van and the newest generation of Tesla's humanoid robots also made their debuts during the reveal, which was live-streamed with more than 3.6 million viewers at one point.
00:35:07.400Tesla deployed 22 two-door fully autonomous cyber cabs for the driverless vehicles that were unveiled, which are probably, you know, especially in the near future, the more significant things.
00:35:25.940But I think what's getting even more attention are the humanoid robots that he unveiled as well.
00:35:35.120And he said that these robots, I don't know when they're going to be available to the public, but he said that they'll cost somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000, which is pretty cheap.
00:35:48.280You know, that's less than a lot of people pay for a car.
00:35:52.940Musk told the crowd, so what can it do?
00:35:54.840It'll be able to do anything you want.
00:36:15.060And as you can see, we started up with someone in a robot suit.
00:36:19.120And then we've progressed dramatically year after year.
00:36:26.740So if you extrapolate this, you're really going to have something spectacular, something that anyone could own.
00:36:34.780So you could have your own personal R2-D2-C3PO.
00:36:43.780And I think at scale, this would cost something like, I don't know, $20,000, $30,000.
00:36:51.780Probably less than a car is my prediction long term.
00:36:54.880Now, it'll take us a minute to get to the long term, but fundamentally at scale, the Optimist robot, you should be able to buy an Optimist robot for, I think, probably $20,000 to $30,000 long term.
00:51:54.920And yet, it still failed, both commercially and artistically.
00:52:00.120The question is, why and how did it happen?
00:52:04.980How did the director, Todd Phillips, manage to take all of the immense resources and advantages at his disposal and convert them into this historic box office humiliation?
00:52:16.840Well, the short answer is that the movie sucks, which should come as no surprise.
00:52:23.000It was probably always doomed to suck.
00:52:25.920Sequels in general are notoriously awful in most cases.
00:52:28.960There are rare cases where a sequel meets or even exceeds the original in terms of its quality, but those are almost always sequels that were planned from the beginning, before the first movie was even released.
00:52:39.560You know, Godfather 2, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and so on.
00:52:42.940If the sequel is a continuation of the story, a part of the filmmaker's original creative vision for the project, then in those cases, it might turn out well.
00:52:52.440But sequels that were not planned, that the filmmaker did not have in mind, and were only conceived after the fact as a way of capitalizing on the unexpected success of the original film, those sequels are terrible in literally every case.
00:53:07.140I cannot think of an outlier or an exception to the rule.
00:53:10.100Maybe there is one, but it's hard to think of what that would be.
00:53:14.040Maybe, this Joker sequel only exists because the first one made a billion dollars.
00:53:23.660And the chances that a movie studio will make a movie for that reason, and somehow wind up with a quality piece of art at the end of it, is vanishingly small.
00:53:35.280Like, again, I'm not sure that it's ever happened in the history of the film industry.
00:53:38.700But it's even worse than that for this film.
00:53:41.800As nearly all critics and nearly all fans, whether liberal or conservative or somewhere in between, have noted about Joker 2, this movie not only has no narrative justification for existing, but it also functions as a direct repudiation of its own audience.
00:53:57.800The film's fundamental misstep is that it hates the people who are watching it, which is a pretty significant misstep.
00:54:03.540So, spoiler alert, you can mute this now if you don't want to hear how the movie ends.
00:54:08.700I'd be doing you a favor if you let me ruin it for you, but it's up to you.
00:54:12.960If you haven't heard yet and you don't want to hear, then stop listening.
00:54:17.040But the basic plot of the movie is that Joker's in prison.
00:54:20.640He meets Lady Gaga's character, who's supposed to be Harley Quinn.
00:54:24.580And the first part of the movie is basically just him in prison as Arthur Fleck, not the Joker.
00:54:29.160And then in the second half, it turns into kind of a courtroom drama where they literally re-litigate the events of the first movie, basically recapping what everybody saw in that film.
00:54:39.220They're just like telling the story again.
00:54:41.620There are random musical numbers that are sprinkled in throughout because the movie is sort of a musical for some reason.
00:54:46.800And by the end, Joaquin Phoenix's character has a change of heart, repudiates his Joker alter ego, and is shortly thereafter stabbed to death by one of his own fans, who then carves a smile into his face and, I guess, becomes the new Joker.
00:55:01.880So it's a Joker movie where Joker spends almost the whole movie not being the Joker until he renounces the Joker and is killed and the movie ends.
00:55:09.520And this, again, is being interpreted by most viewers as a very unsubtle critique of the fans of the first film, which it probably is, although there is another explanation.
00:55:23.300With these cash-grab sequels, there are really only two ways that they ever go.
00:55:28.560And one way is for the sequel to basically just repeat all of the events of the original, just kind of more of a remake than a sequel, which is the approach that Phillips took for his hangover sequels, for example.
00:55:39.880Hangover two and three are just hanging over one, done again in a different environment.
00:55:45.040The other strategy that you see sometimes, though not as often, is for the second movie to just do the opposite of whatever the first movie did.
00:55:53.260And that's what happens in this film. At least that's where it ends up, is in the opposite place.
00:55:58.580The problem is that doing the same thing or doing the opposite both result in redundancy and pointlessness.
00:56:06.000And in both cases, the movie has no new ideas.
00:56:12.140And so my point is that you can't underestimate Hollywood's hatred for its own audience, but you also can't underestimate its total lack of imagination.
00:56:19.100And so I suspect that a combination of both of those factors work together to create this disaster.
00:56:25.800And in both cases, the message is the same.
00:56:28.960The film industry has no respect for its audience.
00:56:32.660Now, they hate some segments of their audience for their perceived political leanings, but they have contempt for all segments of their audience because they believe that the audience, no matter their politics, the audience is unintelligent and unsophisticated and will mindlessly consume whatever content is put in front of their faces.
00:56:50.800Hollywood, Hollywood, for the most part, no longer tells stories that they believe are worth telling, which is the only reason any story should ever be told.
00:57:01.200And it's the basic motivation behind every great film ever made.
00:57:04.780A great artist wanted to tell the world a story.
00:57:08.100That's why movies, good movies are made.
00:57:10.280And that may be a significant oversimplification, but this is the basic reason why every good film exists.
00:57:16.380It seems so obvious that you just can sort of take it for granted, but you can't take it for granted anymore.
00:57:22.420Because these days, stories are constantly being told by Hollywood, despite the fact that even the people telling the story don't really think it's worth telling.
00:57:31.160Like, there's nothing about the story that resonates even with the storytellers themselves.