The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1861 - I Watched The Worst Netflix Woke Slop Ever Made, And I Barely Survived The Experience

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00:00:30.000 You know, I don't watch a lot of slop. Generally speaking, I am anti-slop,

00:00:34.240 but every once in a while a bit of slop catches my eye.

00:00:40.560 There's something about the slop that I find intriguing, mysterious. I become slop curious.

00:00:53.040 And when these occasions arise, I know that I will almost always regret giving in to that

00:00:58.240 that temptation, but sometimes the slop impulse is too strong. The siren song of the slop is simply 0.88

00:01:04.900 too much to resist. And that's why today I'm going to offer a review of what is at the moment the

00:01:10.160 most popular piece of slop on Netflix. It's also perhaps the sloppiest slop in the entire history

00:01:16.560 of slop. And the show is called Below, the latest streaming hit that millions of people have watched

00:01:23.200 and already forgotten. My wife and I endured the entire thing, and now I'm going to tell you about

00:01:29.580 it. With all the detail I can remember as the memory mercifully fades, I do this partly as a

00:01:34.720 warning to anyone who might be on the verge of succumbing to the temptation to watch this

00:01:38.940 atrocity, and partly because I wasted five hours of my life on this thing, so now I will waste 20

00:01:43.980 minutes of yours, fair is fair. The logline of this show, which is again called Below,

00:01:50.180 at least as it was presented to me by a few close associates who I will murder in cold blood if I

00:01:56.560 ever see again, is that it's Jaws, but with a giant killer squid. Below is a sort of Jaws-like

00:02:03.560 story about a giant squid that's essentially terrorizing a town. Needless to say, in theory,

00:02:11.100 Jaws with a squid is an excellent elevator pitch. That's what made it irresistible. 0.80

00:02:17.680 It's like heroin for white middle-aged dads.

00:02:20.580 I don't think you appreciate the gut reaction people have to these things.

00:02:24.400 We love Jaws.

00:02:25.720 And we tend to think of like most non-Jaws movies and shows in Jaws terms.

00:02:32.840 That's how we describe them to each other.

00:02:34.460 Like the Grey is Jaws but with wolves.

00:02:37.000 Anaconda is Jaws with a snake.

00:02:39.020 Cujo is Jaws with a dog.

00:02:41.260 Tremors is Jaws with giant worms.

00:02:44.060 The Godfather is Jaws with the mafia.

00:02:46.980 The Devil Wears Prada is Jaws with a fashion magazine.

00:02:49.880 Jaws is Jaws with Jaws, and so on.

00:02:53.040 You know, and Jaws comes in many forms.

00:02:54.560 But as far as I know, nobody had ever done Jaws with a squid,

00:02:58.940 which is an unfortunate and rather baffling oversight.

00:03:02.900 As a huge fan of Jaws, and really an even bigger fan of squid-based horror,

00:03:08.480 that seemed to me like a match made in heaven.

00:03:11.840 But then came the Netflix sleight-of-hand trick.

00:03:15.480 I thought I was getting some entertaining killer squid action,

00:03:18.700 but I got something else entirely.

00:03:20.240 You know, it's like in Jaws,

00:03:21.240 when Jaws thinks he's about to eat somebody at the end,

00:03:23.600 but instead ends up with a scuba tank lodged in his throat,

00:03:26.660 which Brody shoots, causing him to blow up.

00:03:28.640 That's basically what Netflix does to its audience

00:03:30.960 trillions of times across billions of pieces of content.

00:03:34.900 You would think I'd have learned my lesson by now,

00:03:37.280 and I have, but again, it's Jaws with a squid.

00:03:41.280 I wanted to see the squid.

00:03:42.480 You can't blame me.

00:03:43.360 and I'm not the one on trial here, so back off. Now, the story follows Josh Hartnett, who last

00:03:50.000 starred in the movie Pearl Harbor and was then exiled into the wilderness for 25 years to atone

00:03:54.940 for the movie Pearl Harbor, and now he's back, and based on his performance in the show, it seems he

00:03:59.460 has not repented of his sins at all. Hartnett plays a man with a tragic past that I won't get

00:04:06.080 into, it doesn't matter, who lives at a remote fishing village in Newfoundland, and I will note

00:04:11.720 here that Hartnett and all the other actors have adopted Newfoundland accents for this series I

00:04:17.700 have no idea whether the accents are accurate you go on Ali I just need to stay and see this thing

00:04:25.260 too if that is really how people in Newfoundland speak they should stop you you gotta stop okay

00:04:33.740 they should not speak at all especially not on camera where the rest of the world might be

00:04:39.000 subjected to it. And I mean, no offense to the good people of Newfoundland, but it is just the

00:04:45.520 worst accent I have ever heard in my life. It is the ugliest accent of all time. Like it's basically 0.79

00:04:54.500 what you would get if you took the most grating parts of the Canadian accent and the Pennsylvania

00:05:00.060 accent and you mush them together and then added like a tablespoon of Irish and a cup of speech

00:05:06.440 impediment and a little dusting of Elmer Fudd. It is an ungodly sound. It is the sound of some 0.90

00:05:13.640 ancient curse issuing forth from the bowels of the earth. It is such a bad accent that the New 1.00

00:05:20.340 Jersey accent sounds like a romance language by comparison. But even this I could forgive

00:05:26.320 if the show were competently made or at least watchable or at least not the most unpleasant

00:05:32.620 thing anyone has ever put on film to include the Hindenburg crash and the JFK assassination.

00:05:39.520 Now, Josh Hartnett, I don't remember any of the characters' names and it doesn't matter,

00:05:42.360 lives in the village with his annoying deadbeat son, played by an actor apparently named Charlie

00:05:46.840 Heaton. And with all due respect to Charlie Heaton, and, you know, I don't know whether this

00:05:50.540 just is because of the makeup they use for the show or whether he has some kind of genetic

00:05:55.260 condition, but he looks like Harry Styles if Harry Styles had a decades-long methamphetamine

00:06:01.680 addiction. And put more generously, he looks like kind of like a Rite Aid brand version of Harry

00:06:07.020 Styles. Again, I'm not trying to be rude, but every actor in this thing, it's actually pretty

00:06:12.780 remarkable, resembles a Rite Aid brand version of a better actor. So Hartnett's daughter is Rite Aid

00:06:20.140 Ellen Page before she went trans. Hartnett's love interest, the brilliant female scientist

00:06:25.160 character, looks like Rite Aid Emily Blunt. The actor who plays Hartnett's other son is, I think,

00:06:30.120 a guy who actually just works at Rite Aid. And of course, Josh Hartnett is Rite Aid John Bernthal,

00:06:35.020 who himself was once Rite Aid Josh Hartnett, and they're both still Rite Aid Christian Bale.

00:06:40.880 In any case, these are the principal characters, along with Hartnett's sister, who lives in the

00:06:45.920 village and appears to be involved in some kind of thruple arrangement that is hinted at but never

00:06:50.740 explained or shown in detail, thank God. There's also a boyfriend of the pre-trans Rite Aid Ellen 0.89

00:06:57.460 Page, who, and I swear I'm not saying this just to stretch the joke out, it just is true,

00:07:02.820 the boyfriend of pre-trans Rite Aid Ellen Page looks like post-trans Rite Aid Ellen Page.

00:07:11.580 So there are Ellen Pages running all over the place in this show, except for the real Ellen

00:07:16.820 Page, who apparently decided that this series was even too woke for her. Now, the boyfriend 0.67

00:07:20.840 character doesn't do anything essential to the plot. You could remove him from the story and it

00:07:25.300 wouldn't make any difference at all. And this is in fact true of every other character in the show

00:07:29.420 and every random subplot that pops up and goes nowhere. The brother character, not meth head

00:07:35.860 Harry, but the other one is being chased by two evil henchmen because he owes money to a mob boss

00:07:43.300 or something. It's never explained why he owes money or who the mob boss is or how much money

00:07:48.120 he owes. At the end, one of the henchmen gets eaten by the squid, and the other one, who has

00:07:55.620 no dialogue through the first five episodes except to tell us that he's a Somali immigrant, survives

00:08:01.620 and suddenly becomes best friends with the brother he spent the entire show trying to kill.

00:08:07.180 This whole subplot could be cut from the show. It would change nothing in the story. It appears to

00:08:13.620 be there just as a very convoluted way of wedging a Somali immigrant with a heart of gold into the

00:08:20.480 plot. I have to imagine there were much more efficient ways of achieving that goal. I mean, 0.80

00:08:25.620 you could have made the brilliant female scientist Somali, for example. That's much more efficient. 1.00

00:08:30.480 But I guess that even for a show about a giant homicidal squid, the idea of a brilliant Somali 1.00

00:08:34.880 scientist would stretch the suspension of disbelief beyond its breaking point. So they couldn't do 1.00

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00:10:45.900 So anyway, the story kicks off with the arrival of a giant iceberg in the harbor.

00:10:50.600 And along with the iceberg, various villagers and tourists start going missing.

00:10:55.260 and it turns out that eating ice from the iceberg will make you extremely sick and it might cause

00:11:02.380 you to go insane and drown yourself in the ocean. Now you would think that a toxic psychedelic

00:11:08.840 iceberg wouldn't prove to be much of a threat because all you have to do is not eat it. And

00:11:15.560 the temptation to eat a giant iceberg floating miles away in the ocean should be pretty easy

00:11:22.760 to resist. I know that if I were in a fishing village, and I don't mean to Monday morning

00:11:27.840 quarterback this thing, but if I were in a fishing village and somebody pointed at a huge iceberg

00:11:33.760 offshore and said, don't eat that, it might make you drown yourself, I would say, sure, fine.

00:11:42.840 I really wasn't planning to eat the iceberg anyway. Why would I do that? But now that you've

00:11:48.160 told me that, I will continue with my plan not to eat the hunk of ice floating in the harbor.

00:11:54.660 Not eating that iceberg is one of the easiest things I've ever not done, I would say. And that'd

00:12:01.880 be that. But for the residents of this village, and I don't know if this is a Newfoundland thing

00:12:07.960 or what, but they have like this fetishistic urge to eat the iceberg and it overwhelms them.

00:12:14.600 Like, you have to understand that so much of the plot hinges on the unwillingness of the characters to stop eating an iceberg.

00:12:25.360 And many of them consequently get sick and drown themselves.

00:12:28.220 And meanwhile, the giant squid is stalking the waters and killing anyone in its path.

00:12:32.080 And to make matters worse, there's apparently a ghost.

00:12:34.820 There's a skinny white girl with long black hair hanging over her face, which is the form of every ghost in every horror movie from like 98 to 2017.

00:12:42.040 and now again in 2026 for some reason and she's stalking the village and in particular she is

00:12:47.800 tormenting poor meth head harry styles now early on meth head harry styles goes out in a boat with

00:12:53.640 a friend and shoots at the iceberg and the squid doesn't like that very much and responds by

00:12:58.160 chopping harry's friend in half but leaves harry himself alone i guess because he already looked

00:13:03.060 mostly dead from the first scene of the episode one so it was no point in killing him and this

00:13:07.500 speaks to one of the problems with a premise like this. And to some extent, this is a problem shared

00:13:12.080 by Jaws also, which is that the deadly threat is, again, extremely easy to avoid. If there's a weird

00:13:20.420 poisonous iceberg in the harbor and a monster squid murdering random sailors and swimmers,

00:13:27.320 all you really need to do is not go in the water. Now, granted, this is infamously a problem for the

00:13:34.720 horror genre in general. Like if there's a haunted house, just don't go in the house. If there's a

00:13:40.000 chainsaw murderer living in a creepy cabin in the middle of nowhere, just go literally anywhere

00:13:46.040 except the five mile radius around that guy's property. If there's a demonically cursed

00:13:51.760 videotape that will kill you if you watch it, just don't watch it. And so on. So the job of the

00:13:58.280 writers then is to manufacture plausible reasons why the characters would put themselves in the

00:14:03.860 path of whatever hellish force the plot revolves around. And writers have varying degrees of

00:14:09.460 success in that regard. But in Below, the writers dispense with any plausibility concerns whatsoever

00:14:15.660 and they have their characters do things like get drunk and take a boat out to the pathogenic

00:14:21.900 iceberg in the middle of the night in squid-infested waters to shoot the iceberg.

00:14:28.120 They also rely heavily on my least favorite dopey Hollywood trope of all the dopey Hollywood

00:14:33.460 tropes, which is that characters possess important life or death information, but fail to convey it

00:14:40.360 to the other characters. Or they do convey it, but the other characters don't believe it for

00:14:45.480 some reason. I hate this trope in any show or film. A plot where like this whole thing could

00:14:51.120 be solved if you just told the other person this information that you have, and there's no reason

00:14:57.520 to not tell them. At one point, Josh Hartnett and the scientist lady, they watch camera footage of

00:15:03.000 the evil squid dragging two unsuspecting tourists off the beach and into the water where they're

00:15:08.620 then eaten alive. And for anyone who's ever lived in a tourist area, this is one of the feel-good

00:15:12.660 moments of the show. But later, Hartnett and Scientist Lady are trying to convince the other

00:15:17.420 villagers that there's a giant squid in the water. And for reasons that are never explained,

00:15:23.560 they don't show the footage they have in their possession. The villagers, they're like,

00:15:29.360 there's a squid out there. And the villagers are like, there's not a squid. What are you talking

00:15:32.060 about. It's on tape. Just watch the tape. But they never do. So the villagers therefore spend a while

00:15:40.380 believing that there is no squid and that all the suspiciously squid-like deaths happening in the

00:15:45.040 neighborhood must be the result of COVID or something. So if you're keeping track, okay, we

00:15:51.060 have four major problems facing our heroes. There's a giant killer squid, pretty big problem.

00:15:56.900 there's an iceberg with apparently supernatural mind control powers. There's a ghost, a white

00:16:03.800 girl with a bad haircut haunting the village. And there are really terrible accents that cause 1.00

00:16:07.940 anyone who hears them to gouge their eardrums out with ice picks. At last, it's more of a problem

00:16:12.340 for the viewer than the characters. So that leaves three problems the characters have to sort out.

00:16:18.600 Now, I don't need to spend much time explaining how these issues are resolved because they aren't.

00:16:23.600 the show spends several episodes implying that there might be more to this squid than just a

00:16:30.720 squid because of like the mind controlling iceberg there's the ghost there must be more to this

00:16:37.000 squid this is not just a normal squid you think but then it turns out no the squid is just a

00:16:43.060 regular squid it's just a squid that's that's it's all it is the iceberg is the nest where

00:16:49.540 the squid has laid her eggs. Why does it have mind control powers? Who knows? It just does. 0.80

00:16:58.220 It just does. I mean, that is the answer to every mystery in the show. Sorry to spoil it, but the

00:17:03.920 answer to every mystery in the show is that it just is that way. Why did that happen? Well,

00:17:11.060 just because it did. And the end. The white girl ghost. Okay. Remember the ghost that's haunting

00:17:18.900 people's dreams it turns out she's just a regular white girl she lives on a nearby island she's not 0.68

00:17:25.960 a very nice person it turns out but there's nothing paranormal about her well that's a problem 0.74

00:17:31.920 because she shows up in people's dreams she haunts them in their bedrooms there's a scene where meth

00:17:38.200 head harry styles is sleeping he wakes up this ghost is drenched in water her hair over her head

00:17:44.660 standing on his bed, creepily looking at him. And then she disappears. It turns out she's just

00:17:51.760 a girl from like a few doors down. Why was she doing that? Why was she drenched in water? Why

00:18:00.080 is she in the guy's room? They don't explain it. She just was. Who knows? Don't worry about it.

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00:19:24.300 or call 1-866-531-2600. Terms and conditions apply. As for the squid, not only is it a regular

00:19:30.660 squid, but it's a nice squid. It's a mommy squid. The squid has been horribly misunderstood. You

00:19:37.940 see, she's a single mom trying to make her way in this topsy-turvy world. She's a feminist icon, 1.00

00:19:44.360 this squid, like Lena Dunham. Now, sure, she's a giant gelatinous monstrosity who grabs her 1.00

00:19:51.560 horrified prey with long, slimy tentacles, drags them into the icy depths, and devours them whole 1.00

00:19:57.440 while they scream in terror. But that's just how Lena Dunham says hello. But back to the squid, 0.96

00:20:03.220 we learn that this girl boss cephalopod only stalks and mass murders humans because she wants 1.00

00:20:08.400 to protect her babies. Now, granted, the tourists she killed were on shore and nowhere near her 1.00

00:20:14.860 babies, but they were tourists, so it's fine, I guess. Actually, none of the humans she killed

00:20:20.560 were threatening her babies in any way. But whatever, stop nitpicking, I guess.

00:20:27.160 In the season finale, and I'm not making this up, rather than trying to defeat and kill

00:20:33.160 the giant murderous squid, Josh Hartnett teams up with the scientist lady to save the squid.

00:20:39.200 The whole show is like, what are we going to do about this squid? In the last episode,

00:20:43.740 they realize, oh, it's a nice squid, and they try to save it. And specifically, they want to save

00:20:48.760 her from the evil white male corporate guy who shows up out of nowhere in the final episode

00:20:54.460 with a plan to bomb the village in order to kill the squid, in order to secure the rights to mine

00:21:01.580 for minerals? What do any of those things have to do with each other? Why would you need to bomb the

00:21:07.820 village to kill the squid, and how would either step help you in your mining efforts? Nobody knows.

00:21:16.640 He's just evil, and evil people like to build mines and blow stuff up. That's it. Hartnett and 0.97

00:21:22.300 the scientist lady tried to explain to the evil corporate white man that it's not the squid's

00:21:26.480 fault. You know, she was driven out of her natural habitat because of climate change, but evil 0.99

00:21:30.560 corporate white man doesn't care. You know, he says that she's dangerous and she's already 1.00

00:21:34.380 slaughtered 19 people. And so she must be exterminated, which is actually a pretty good 0.99

00:21:40.300 point. Okay. I'm on his side when it comes to the squid issue. And I'm also on his side when it 0.99

00:21:45.800 comes to bombing the village, actually, because these villagers are some of the dumbest, most 1.00

00:21:49.580 irritating people who have ever been assembled in one location. So by the end of the episode, 0.99

00:21:54.660 by the end of the show, I'm saying, yes, please just bomb these people, kill all of them, please. 1.00

00:22:00.560 but that's not the side the writers want us to be on. So our heroes, well, the writers' heroes, 0.99

00:22:06.500 my hero is the evil corporate white man. I'm totally on his side at this point, 0.76

00:22:10.120 but they devise a plan to save the squid from the military, which has arrived along with the 0.83

00:22:15.160 white guy to blow the squid up. So what was sold to me as Jaws with a squid actually becomes 0.53

00:22:23.300 Free Willy with a squid. This is Free Squiddy, let's call it. And their plan to Free Squiddy

00:22:29.260 involves moving the enormous 150,000 ton iceberg out of the harbor so that Squiddy will follow it.

00:22:35.800 But the iceberg is too big to move. So the strategy is to shoot it and break it in two.

00:22:41.560 Now, that might make some kind of sense, maybe, if they were shooting the mountainous chunk of 0.91

00:22:45.140 ice with a bazooka or a missile or something. But instead, they shoot this iceberg the size

00:22:53.380 of a mountain with a hunting rifle. And meth head Harry takes a couple of shots at it to no effect,

00:22:59.280 of course. So then Rite Aid pre-trans Ellen Page takes the rifle and says, let me do it, and shoots 0.99

00:23:05.840 it. And with her magical feminine powers, the bullet causes an iceberg bigger than the one 1.00

00:23:14.800 that sank the Titanic to splinter into a million pieces. Now you'd think, by the way, that, well, 0.98

00:23:22.060 isn't that where the babies are? Like where the eggs are on the iceberg or something? And

00:23:25.660 so didn't you just kill all the babies? Wouldn't that make Squiddy really angry since her babies 1.00

00:23:32.100 are in there? But I guess Squiddy understands that they're trying to help her. So next,

00:23:35.840 Josh Hartnett takes a fishing net and somehow wraps it around the remaining piece of iceberg,

00:23:42.120 which is still probably like 90,000 tons, and then drags it into deeper water with a small

00:23:49.200 fishing boat, and that's enough to save the day. Although he doesn't even take it that far into

00:23:53.940 deeper water, so the killer squid is still only about six or seven miles from innocent women and

00:23:57.860 children. But even so, the squid appreciates the gesture. So at the final scene, she comes to the

00:24:03.760 surface and locks eyes with Josh Hartnett, and the two, like, wordlessly express their love for one

00:24:11.260 another. Again, I'm not making this up. This is what actually happens in the show, I promise you.

00:24:18.160 Imagine if at the end of Jaws, rather than blowing up Jaws, Brody was a PETA activist

00:24:24.240 who throws himself in front of the shark as a human shield to prevent him from being killed.

00:24:30.520 And then imagine if, recognizing this selfless act, Jaws came to the surface and like flapped

00:24:37.560 his fin at Brody in a show of gratitude. And then you will have an idea of just how

00:24:42.840 incomprehensibly retarded this show is. If I made a parody of a woke Netflix series with exactly 1.00

00:24:50.500 this plot and resolution, you would think it was way too on the nose and preposterous even by woke

00:24:56.880 leftist standards. You would watch it and say, come on, there's a giant squid killing people

00:25:02.440 because of climate change. And so a female scientist and Josh Hartnett plus his polyamorous 0.95

00:25:07.800 sister have to save the squid from an old white male capitalist in the colonialist military

00:25:13.040 that wants to murder the squid, who's actually just laid a bunch of eggs and is suffering from

00:25:17.640 postpartum depression? Really? Give me a break. But that is, again, I stress, the actual plot

00:25:25.040 of this show. A show I sacrificed five hours of my life to watch. I am five hours closer to death

00:25:36.220 thanks to Netflix. And my only regret is that it didn't come while I was watching it. Yes,

00:25:43.380 this is what I get for watching Netflix. You don't have to tell me that. This is what I get

00:25:48.120 for falling for the classic squid jaws bait and switch. But it's not my fault. I didn't deserve

00:25:55.080 this. I'm the victim here. And let's not lose sight of that. Now that we've spent some time,

00:26:01.640 too much time talking about an especially grotesque piece of Netflix slop, I think now

00:26:06.200 is a good opportunity to remind you that there are other options out there. You can escape the

00:26:12.260 slop. There are people making non-slop content, and one of those people is me. For example,

00:26:18.440 we have our Real History series, which in many ways is the antidote to slop. It's the anti-slop

00:26:23.440 because it's dense, it's well-researched, informative, important, and entertaining.

00:26:29.380 Next week, we have perhaps my favorite installment of the series dropping on Daily Wire. This is our

00:26:34.500 episode on Hernan Cortes and the conquest of the Aztecs. It's not exaggeration to say that this is

00:26:40.320 one of the most important events in the history of the human race. It's also one of the least

00:26:46.720 known, or at least it's not nearly as well known as it should be. You know, the gap between how

00:26:53.800 important it is and how well known it is, is wider with this story than it is maybe with any other.

00:26:58.960 So I'll leave you with an extended preview of the episode. You can watch this and then tune in for

00:27:04.120 the whole thing next week on the daily wire enjoy and godspeed by then in his early 30s and living

00:27:11.200 in cuba though not without controversy he was charismatic and young and he had a penchant for

00:27:15.760 womanizing he had briefly been imprisoned by governor belasquez due to a personal dispute

00:27:20.560 over a broken promise to marry belasquez's sister-in-law at the time no one thought he

00:27:26.460 was the man for the job and yet against all odds he convinced belasquez to make him the commander

00:27:31.900 of the upcoming voyage.

00:27:33.660 It was a feat of shadow diplomacy

00:27:35.460 that foreshadowed much of what was to come.

00:27:38.380 Cortez met with the governor's secretary

00:27:40.240 and the king's Cuba-based accountant

00:27:42.060 and offered to split his share of the spoils

00:27:44.500 if they proposed him for the job.

00:27:47.180 They agreed to his terms

00:27:48.340 and convinced Governor Velasquez

00:27:49.760 to appoint Cortez to run the mission.

00:27:52.900 The appointment shocked the population of Cuba.

00:27:55.920 Cortez had no experience commanding an expedition,

00:27:58.260 only recently he was considered a criminal.

00:28:00.840 now he was going to lead a voyage to mexico cortez bet everything on this mission he

00:28:06.120 invested his entire fortune he mortgaged his encomienda and used the money to buy ships

00:28:11.960 arms and provisions he recruited 300 men and smartly won them over through charisma

00:28:17.720 and overt displays of generosity he made a huge banner embroidered in gold

00:28:22.840 featuring a giant cross that bore the message brothers and comrades in true faith let us follow

00:28:28.200 the holy cross and we shall conquer huge crowds turned out in support of cortez ready to join

00:28:34.360 him on his mission as cortez's force and popularity grew belazquez grew jealous it occurred to him

00:28:41.640 that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to give such a charismatic and talented young man so much power

00:28:48.200 while cortez was gathering his fleet in santiago cuba he received a warning that belazquez was

00:28:54.600 was about to revoke his charter.

00:28:56.500 Frantically, and despite not being ready,

00:28:59.040 Cortez rushed to purchase enough food

00:29:00.820 to launch and set sail immediately.

00:29:03.080 He moved west along the south shore of Cuba.

00:29:05.660 Horses for the cavalry raced along Cuba's beaches

00:29:08.860 as the ship moved west.

00:29:10.840 The governor sent letters to port officials

00:29:12.620 and municipal leaders telling them

00:29:13.940 to stop Cortez and arrest him.

00:29:16.280 But Cortez's men were enthusiastic.

00:29:18.540 According to Richard Lee Marx's book,

00:29:20.220 Cortez, the Great Adventurer in the Fate of Aztec Mexico,

00:29:24.040 There, quote, would have been a riot of resentment,

00:29:26.320 so the port officials and Belazquez's relatives

00:29:28.680 and friends chose to ignore the governor's entreaties.

00:29:31.680 The original plan was for Cortez's fleet to rendezvous

00:29:35.160 at Cuba's western tip and travel together to Mexico,

00:29:38.220 but one of the ships left the north coast of Cuba

00:29:41.360 and, defying Cortez's orders,

00:29:43.220 went directly to the island of Cozumel,

00:29:45.520 where they ransacked abandoned villages,

00:29:47.740 stole gold from a prayer house,

00:29:50.060 and took dozens of turkeys. 0.98

00:29:52.000 Once Cortez arrived the following day,

00:29:53.720 was livid and made them give the gold back paid for the turkeys and put the navigator in irons

00:30:00.120 once again he lectured his men that this new land would be permanently pacified and truly conquered

00:30:05.160 only if the indians were induced to accept spanish rule it was his policy marx wrote that

00:30:11.240 the indians must be given the chance to welcome christ and the king he had 508 fighters including

00:30:17.400 16 cavalrymen with mounts plus a foal. He had powder-shot cannons, arquebus, servants, a

00:30:24.760 translator who had been captured on the previous mission, and even, according to Marx, a few 0.90

00:30:29.480 Negroes. While on Cozumel, Cortes climbed to a temple where the idols stood in a pavilion at

00:30:35.640 the top and the walls were black with blood. He had the idols smashed, the room whitewashed,

00:30:41.800 and set a painted figure of the Virgin Mary on the altar where the men had been killed.

00:30:46.980 The conquest had begun. 0.96

00:30:51.680 These Indians were vastly different from the American Indians who inhabited the United States.

00:30:57.220 The area spanning modern Mexico had many tribes, but the most notable were the Maya and the Aztecs.

00:31:03.560 The Maya lived on the Yucatan Peninsula near modern-day Cancun,

00:31:07.620 and their territory spread into modern Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize.

00:31:11.620 These were the first mainland Indians the Europeans encountered in Mexico, and they spoke their own set of languages.

00:31:18.960 Further west and north along Mexico's Gulf Coast, the Europeans encountered Nahuatl-speaking Indians,

00:31:24.240 a language still spoken by more than a million in Mexico today.

00:31:28.000 It was the official language of the Aztec Empire, the biggest and most impressive of the Mesoamerican Indians.

00:31:34.400 These tribes were, in many ways, civilized, and their civilizations were complex and impressive.

00:31:39.620 As Richard Lee Marx put it, Aztecs were, quote,

00:31:42.620 amply productive, sustaining millions of people in place

00:31:45.620 without having them wander as nomads in search of sustenance.

00:31:48.620 And there was enough excess production to support nobility, clergy,

00:31:52.620 and an artisan class of builders and artists.

00:31:55.620 They had massive cities and impressive architecture, including canals, roadways,

00:31:59.620 sophisticated levees, dikes, aqueducts, floating gardens.

00:32:04.620 They also had accurate calendars to keep track of holy days,

00:32:07.620 And they built temples, often on pyramids, the largest of which exceeds in volume the famous pyramids of Egypt.

00:32:14.600 It was at these temples that the Mesoamerican priests carried out their most notorious practice, human sacrifice.

00:32:21.200 The anthropologist Marvin Harris, in his book Cannibals and Kings, notes that the Aztec gods ate people. 0.61

00:32:28.420 They ate human hearts and they drank human blood.

00:32:31.280 And the declared function of the Aztec priesthood was to provide fresh human hearts and fresh human 0.52

00:32:36.080 blood in order to prevent the remorseless deities from becoming angry and crippling, 0.95

00:32:40.880 sickening, withering, and burning the whole world. In his memoirs, the conquistador Bernal

00:32:46.080 Díaz del Castillo described the gods as having distorted and furious-looking eyes,

00:32:51.680 large serpents, monsters. He entered one temple besmeared with blood,

00:32:57.360 and the stench was worse than in a Spanish slaughterhouse with five human hearts roasting

00:33:02.400 there. Victims were usually prisoners of war, and on the day of sacrifice they were taken up the

00:33:07.840 steps of the pyramid, held down on the stone, and the priest opened the chest and tore out the heart.

00:33:13.280 The body was thrown down the steps, beheaded at the bottom, butchered, and the flesh eaten.

00:33:27.920 My teammate says he plays pickup basketball, quote, for the cardio.

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00:33:42.900 Sean's getting his steps, but I'm getting paid.

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00:33:50.460 Please play responsibly.

00:33:51.380 If you or someone you know has concerns about gambling,

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The Matt Walsh Show - October 22, 2026

Ep. 1861 - I Watched The Worst Netflix Woke Slop Ever Made, And I Barely Survived The Experience

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