The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 199 - Will The National Emergency Gambit Work？

00:00:00.000 Today on the Matt Wall Show, Trump signs a disastrous spending bill, but he's trying to

00:00:04.300 mitigate it by declaring a national emergency to build the wall as well. Will that strategy

00:00:09.460 work? Will it pay off? We will discuss. Also, we'll talk about the latest in the Jussie Smollett

00:00:15.780 case. It continues to unravel more and more revelations. We'll get into all that today as

00:00:20.380 well. And finally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is spiking the football and celebrating because

00:00:26.080 she prevented Amazon from bringing 25,000 jobs to New York. Hooray! What does this tell us about

00:00:31.980 the state of the modern Democratic Party? We'll talk about all that today on the Matt Wall Show.

00:00:40.600 All right. A lot of news today. I don't even know where to begin exactly, but I guess we'll begin

00:00:45.060 with the most obvious thing. President Trump gave a speech in the Rose Garden this morning declaring

00:00:50.240 a national emergency so that he could build the wall. Now, he is also signing a disastrous

00:00:57.940 1,000 plus page spending bill that would undermine, undercut, undo everything that

00:01:05.240 he's been trying to do with respect to the wall. It's more than 1,000 pages, like I said. So nobody's

00:01:11.980 read the whole thing, par for the course these days. Nobody knows exactly what's in it. We just kind of,

00:01:18.080 you know, you just sign it and you'll find out. It's fun to find out after you've already signed

00:01:22.760 the thing. It's like one of those, you know, when you went to birthday parties when you were a little

00:01:28.740 kid and they gave you a little gift bags, little prize bags, which was a good thing that everyone

00:01:35.380 had to get a gift at a birthday party, right? Which is maybe why millennials have grown up to be 0.98

00:01:42.140 such whiny babies. It's because we grew up, you know, when we grew up, even we got birthday,

00:01:47.260 got presents at other people's birthday parties. Anyway, so 1,000 pages, nobody knows what's in it.

00:01:53.640 But we do know some of the highlights or the lowlights, I guess we should say. Daniel Horowitz,

00:01:58.300 a conservative review, he's been on top of this, had a good write-up at that website. And he gives us

00:02:03.980 five insane provisions in the bill, including just $1.3 billion for the wall or fence. No wall,

00:02:12.740 by the way, is allowed to be built with this, which will cover only 55 miles. That is instead

00:02:18.600 of the 25 billion and hundreds of miles of wall that Trump originally wanted. It's also less than

00:02:23.860 the 1.6 billion that Democrats originally agreed to. So things have gone down. The deal was negotiated

00:02:32.900 down. Democrats end up with something better for them than their original offer. The bill also

00:02:39.860 prohibits any fencing on federal or state lands. What? And even in the small slice of area where the

00:02:50.060 fence can be built, local officials who happen to be liberal, for the most part, coincidentally,

00:02:56.000 in the little piece of area where they're allowing the fence to be built, just so happens that those are

00:03:02.540 more liberal-controlled areas. And oh, by the way, the local authorities can veto the construction.

00:03:08.180 You have to get their approval. And if they don't approve, it's not going to happen. So of course,

00:03:13.780 what does that mean? It means that probably from this bill, nothing will be built at all.

00:03:21.140 More from Horowitz, he says, there's more funding to manage and induce the invasion of immigrants 1.00

00:03:27.240 rather than to deter it. While offering no new funding for ICE deportation agents or immigration

00:03:33.220 or immigration judges to speed up asylum claims. As the president requested, this bill adds another

00:03:38.520 $40 million for the Alternatives to Detention program, which moves asylum seekers to facilities

00:03:44.160 in the interior of the country. Also, the doubling of low-skilled workers. The bill doubles the number

00:03:50.400 of H-2B non-agricultural, unskilled seasonal workers who will continue to be a public charge

00:03:55.480 in America. There's a lot of other stuff. It provides amnesty for the sponsors of unoccupied

00:04:08.380 minors as well. The bill is just, as I say, a disaster. As for the national emergency part of this,

00:04:18.960 Trump, speaking of disasters, Trump had his chance to get up in front of the country,

00:04:26.980 make his case for it from the Rose Garden to explain everything that's going on.

00:04:34.880 To sign a national emergency, it's a drastic step, right? Everyone can agree with that. Whether

00:04:39.640 you support it or not, we all agree it's a drastic, you're saying emergency, right? So

00:04:43.680 put yourself into the shoes of the president. Let's say you're the president, you're going to

00:04:49.280 be signing a national emergency and using that as a way to allocate billions of dollars to fund this

00:04:57.300 project that you want to do. Okay. Well, when you have a chance to get up in front of America and make

00:05:05.160 the case for it, wouldn't you want to make sure that you've got a very coherent, cogent speech

00:05:14.680 that you're going to give? Isn't that what you would do? But instead, I don't know if you watched

00:05:19.720 the Rose Garden speech, but it was not good. I wanted to say disaster, but I've been using that

00:05:29.460 word way too much. It was not good. He rambled for 20 minutes and barely offered one coherent

00:05:36.640 sentence in the whole thing. Going back, if he's talking about China and talking about North Korea,

00:05:41.560 jumping back and forth to various different topics, doing the kind of thing he does at his

00:05:45.860 political rallies, which I guess if you're into that kind of thing and you like the whole shtick

00:05:50.260 at the rallies, I'm personally not a big fan of it. But when you're giving a speech at the Rose

00:05:54.960 Garden to explain a national emergency that you just signed, this is not the time to just get

00:05:59.440 up with no preparation and no prepared remarks and just ramble. Not the time for it. It was just

00:06:07.200 bad. And of course, I'm watching the reaction on social media and most people were cringing at it

00:06:15.100 and saying, okay, this is catastrophic for the president politically. But I also saw there were

00:06:22.960 Trump's most loyal supporters and fans were saying, oh, this is great. This is wonderful. Yeah. He's

00:06:28.480 talking straight. This is what we like. We need more of this.

00:06:33.360 So you're not helping. First of all, you know, if you watch the speech, you know that it was

00:06:38.240 not good. You know that. So to pretend otherwise, why are you pretending? And you're not helping.

00:06:44.680 Don't encourage the president to do that more often. Look, we all look, everyone agrees. You watch the

00:06:50.860 State of the Union speech. It was a brilliant speech. Great performance. All around, right?

00:06:57.020 Very compelling. Well, all of that is now a distant memory. It's been buried under everything since.

00:07:03.700 Let me ask you, if you're a supporter of the president, do you think we should have more of

00:07:06.760 the State of the Union type moments or more of what we saw this morning at the Rose Garden?

00:07:11.440 What do you think is more compelling? What do you think is going to be more convincing to people?

00:07:18.260 Especially those who are not already huge fans and totally bought in, the people that are more in

00:07:22.920 the middle, the people that, by the way, the president's going to need if he wants to get

00:07:26.680 reelected in 2020. Now, if you are all in and you're a big fan of the president, then he's already got you.

00:07:34.740 No matter what he does and says, you're going to vote for him, right? So he doesn't need to appeal to

00:07:39.260 you. He needs to appeal to everybody else. And the rambling off the cuff, riffing off the cuff

00:07:47.780 thing, it's only appealing to people like you, not to anybody else. So as far as the national

00:07:58.780 emergency itself, you're going to hear, of course, extremes on both sides. Again, Trump's most loyal

00:08:04.360 supporters and fans are going to call this, are calling it a move of brilliance, a win,

00:08:10.360 so on and so forth. It is not that. This is not a win. It's a way out. It's a way around. It's the

00:08:19.260 thing you do when you don't win. A win would have been build the wall. A win would have been a

00:08:26.580 bill that allows him to actually build the wall. That's a win. This is plan B or plan C.

00:08:34.500 Now, whether it's a good plan B, whether it's a good way around, that's another question.

00:08:40.240 But then the usual suspects on the other side, they're all losing their minds, of course, as they

00:08:44.960 do with everything Trump does, claiming that this is some kind of constitutional emergency. It's a

00:08:50.440 catastrophe. It's tyranny. He needs to be impeached and yada, yada, yada. Well, that's not the case

00:08:57.180 either. Presidents have been declaring national emergencies for frivolous reasons for a long time,

00:09:04.060 so even if you think this is a frivolous reason, well, he's not the first one to do that.

00:09:08.660 Obama was certainly a culprit. Obama also rewrote our immigration laws by executive fiat,

00:09:14.060 so this is not new. Now, if we can point out that other presidents have done it, that doesn't

00:09:20.160 necessarily make it good, but that does mean that you can't really panic over it or treat

00:09:25.700 it as unprecedented, especially if you weren't panicking when other presidents did it.

00:09:30.640 So it's not a constitutional catastrophe. It's also not a big win. I think it falls somewhere

00:09:38.440 in the middle. I think the main problem with it is that it is a political stunt that will

00:09:48.580 not lead to a single mile of fence actually being built, especially when you combine it

00:09:54.540 with the spending bill. That's the problem with it. Not a constitutional emergency, but

00:10:00.920 it's not going to do anything. In fact, Trump even said in his speech that he knows, he went

00:10:05.940 on this whole rambling riff about how we're going to get sued, then we're going to end up

00:10:10.180 in the courts, then we're going to go to a different court, now we're going to be in the

00:10:12.660 Supreme Court. He knows exactly what's going to happen, and he knows there's a good chance

00:10:17.060 he's going to get shot down. He knows that. And of course he knows that. Now, should he

00:10:22.060 be saying that when he first signs? I mean, when you're signing a national emergency, you

00:10:26.420 shouldn't say publicly, yeah, by the way, I'm going to get sued for this. But of course

00:10:31.500 he is going to get sued, so that's no surprise. And it seems unlikely to me that the courts are

00:10:36.620 going to be on his side with this, whether or not they should be. It seems unlikely that

00:10:42.500 they will. So there's at least a very good chance that nothing will come of this. And

00:10:48.600 that's my problem with it. Another thing, though, is you're hearing from some conservatives

00:10:56.140 that their worry is that now this sets a precedent, and so the next Democrat president is going

00:11:04.760 to do the same thing, and we're going to get a national emergency declared over climate

00:11:08.220 change. And the president is going to use that as an excuse to do whatever they want

00:11:12.860 to do, appropriate whatever money, do whatever they want. Maybe we'll get a national emergency

00:11:16.260 over guns. Gun violence is a national emergency. And maybe they'll use that and somehow be able 0.99

00:11:21.660 to confiscate guns. I mean, so you've got conservatives worrying about that. I understand that concern.

00:11:26.940 It is not an unreasonable concern. But I think the Democrats will do that anyway. So I'm not

00:11:34.680 in the camp. I don't think that Democrats are waiting for Republicans to set a precedent before

00:11:39.460 they do it. Democrats don't need the permission of Republicans to do something like that. To me,

00:11:45.800 it is all but certain, even aside from this, it is pretty much a certainty that the next Democratic

00:11:51.220 president will declare a climate change emergency because they really do think that it's a net.

00:11:56.880 They think it's a global emergency. They think and their base certainly thinks that we are on the

00:12:01.940 verge of extinction as a as a species because of climate change. And so it is regardless of any

00:12:09.320 of this, even if Trump was never elected, I think it's was always a certainty that we were going to

00:12:13.620 get a national emergency declared over climate change eventually. And and then whatever comes of

00:12:19.080 that, probably the same for gun violence. So I think we're heading in that direction regardless. 0.69

00:12:24.220 I so I can't join the conservatives who have. I think it's a reasonable concern. But I also think

00:12:31.360 that probably it would happen anyway. My main objection is, like I said, it probably won't amount

00:12:38.760 to anything. But then the second part of that is we had two years. There were two years prior to this.

00:12:49.900 where the wall could have been built. And you wouldn't have needed a national emergency.

00:12:57.600 You wouldn't have needed any of the theatrics. You wouldn't have needed to shut down the government.

00:13:03.720 And I know you could say, well, Mitch McConnell and, you know, they he wouldn't allow the Republican

00:13:10.160 establishment wouldn't allow it to happen. And yeah, they deserve a fair amount of the blame.

00:13:16.460 Um, but Trump at any point during those Paul Ryan, you know, uh, is the other one that gets

00:13:24.820 blamed. But during any point in those two years, if Trump had taken the stand that he took once

00:13:31.860 Democrats got into office and said, no, we are doing this now, I am not signing anything until it

00:13:37.740 happens. If he had done that with Republicans, the ball, the wall would have gotten built 100%.

00:13:43.060 Yeah. They may have been resistant to it, but he has leverage over Republicans. See,

00:13:49.200 the thing is, once Democrats got into office, once they controlled the house, it was a lose-lose

00:13:53.380 situation. There was no way it was going to happen because Democrats have no reason to ever agree to

00:13:59.560 building a wall. Their base doesn't want it. Uh, their donors don't want it. They're, they all hate

00:14:06.780 Trump. Uh, so why would they ever agree to something like this? Of course, politically would make any

00:14:11.940 sense for them. So Trump has no leverage over Democrats at all. None. Um, he does have plenty

00:14:23.440 of leverage over Republicans. So if he had put his foot down and said, we're doing this now

00:14:27.900 and then any Republican who, uh, who refuses, well, then they would have their constituents and their

00:14:37.680 base coming after them. But Trump didn't take that step for those two years. He said he wanted it.

00:14:45.800 He complained that he didn't get it. You know, he made gestures towards it a few times, but nothing

00:14:50.420 like this. It wasn't until Democrats got in that he was willing to shut down the government and if

00:14:54.400 necessary, declare a national emergency, if he had that kind of determination for the two years

00:15:00.360 leading up to this, the wall would be, they'd be building it right now. That's the fact.

00:15:08.500 And you cannot, you cannot absolve Donald Trump of all guilt in this as much as you might want to,

00:15:14.300 you can't. It's absurd. So what we have now is theater. This is just theater. All of this is

00:15:22.500 theater and it's going to end with no, it's going to, it's going to amount to nothing.

00:15:28.500 If this was about actually getting something done, it could have been done.

00:15:32.680 I've got to move on to something else before I have a, an aneurysm, just everything about this just

00:15:37.400 pisses me off. Everything, just everything and everybody, all sides, everybody. I'm just sick

00:15:43.220 of everything and everybody. And I want to go live in the woods. Um, I want to just take my family

00:15:50.240 and go live in the woods in a, in a cave somewhere subsisting on honey and wild locusts,

00:15:57.240 much like John the Baptist. All right. Uh, meanwhile, news broke yesterday that police

00:16:04.560 suspects, uh, Jesse, Jesse, Jesse Smollett may have staged the hate crime attack in Chicago two weeks

00:16:12.260 ago, the hate crime attack in Chicago two weeks ago. Then, um, after those reports surfaced,

00:16:18.280 Chicago police denied, or at least said they could not confirm, um, that that was actually true that

00:16:24.620 there, that they were investigating whether or not it was staged. But what we do know and what has not

00:16:28.820 been denied is that the two persons of interest, most likely the two guys who appear on the security

00:16:35.500 camera footage. Remember, uh, police have security camera footage of Jesse Smollett's entire walk back

00:16:44.100 from subway, except for 60 seconds. They're only missing 60 seconds. And the only other people who

00:16:49.720 appear anywhere on that footage are these, apparently these two guys who they now have in custody or,

00:16:55.860 or, or they are questioning. Um, now these two guys are Nigerian and they are apparently brothers

00:17:03.580 who, what do you know, worked on the show empire with Jesse Smollett. Hmm. So I mean, could they be

00:17:13.880 Nigerian rednecks that could they be Nigerian racist rednecks who, uh, I mean, is that what we're going 1.00

00:17:20.500 to hear next from the left? Look, it was clear all along that this was a hoax, right? I've already 0.98

00:17:25.720 gone off, gone, gone over all the holes in the story. It was literally unbelievable from the start,

00:17:30.080 but then once the video footage surfaced and you could only see a 60 second gap and this whole

00:17:34.280 altercation was supposed to have happened in 60 seconds. Well, then you already know that it's

00:17:38.580 that that's enough. That's all you need to know. Of course it didn't happen. Um, nothing about the

00:17:43.260 story was remotely plausible. In fact, we don't even have to get, we don't even have to look at any of

00:17:48.180 the specifics. We just, we don't have to, we just look at the fact that Smollett was claiming that two

00:17:53.540 racist, um, skinheads essentially would recognize a supporting cast member from the show Empire as

00:18:01.840 he's walking by in the dark at 2 30 AM. Now I guarantee you that almost that anyone who is

00:18:09.620 true, anyone who falls into this category, some kind of crazy, psychotic white nationalist 0.88

00:18:14.960 type of person, um, not only have they never seen Empire, but they probably don't even know that 0.98

00:18:20.700 that show exists. So that detail alone made it impossible to believe, but everything else is

00:18:26.400 just icing on the cake. And it's just, you can't believe it. Now I never thought though,

00:18:32.020 that he necessarily staged the attack. I figured that he just made it up. Uh, he invented the 0.99

00:18:36.400 attackers out of whole cloth. That would certainly be a smarter move because at least if you invent

00:18:41.280 imaginary people, then the cops barring any, barring any actual video evidence, um, of when the thing

00:18:48.820 was supposed to have happened, they can never conclusively prove that, that, that it didn't

00:18:52.960 happen. If you just invent people that who never existed, um, then the cops probably will never be

00:18:59.220 able to prove that you made it up because it's all in your head and they can't read your mind.

00:19:04.520 But if you enlist real people into the ruse and then the cops find them and they confess to it

00:19:11.500 under legal pressure, well, now there is positive proof that you lied. So to actually involve people and

00:19:18.380 do some sort of staged thing, it just doesn't, it doesn't, why would you do that? Uh, so is that

00:19:26.500 what Smollett did? I don't know. The involvement of these two Nigerian men who worked on the show

00:19:31.400 certainly adds a lot of credence to that, to that notion. Either way, Smollett is clearly full of it.

00:19:37.280 The only question that remains is, um, is how will the left deal with this? Okay. They really have

00:19:42.680 three options. They can either defend him and, and say that he was traumatized from a life in Trump's

00:19:48.360 America. So we can't be held responsible for his actions. Uh, or they can say that, yeah, you know,

00:19:54.080 he lied, but he started, he started an important conversation about race and sexuality in America.

00:19:59.500 And let's focus on that. So they can do that or they can just ignore it and pretend it never happened.

00:20:04.600 Um, those are really the three options or there is a fourth option. They could be so ticked off at him

00:20:09.840 for embarrassing them and undermining their narrative that they actually do condemn him forcefully,

00:20:15.540 uh, which is much like they did with Kevin Spacey. Remember Kevin Spacey, after he got in trouble for,

00:20:21.820 um, these several abuse allegations by, by, um, teenage boys, Kevin Spacey tried to deflect by

00:20:29.800 coming out of the closet and saying, yeah, I'm a, I'm a gay man as if that was the headline.

00:20:35.480 And I think he thought that that would get at least liberals to come into his corner, but,

00:20:40.240 but it didn't work. They turned against him all the more because he was trying to draw this

00:20:45.680 association between homosexuality and his, uh, and his sexual abuse. And they didn't like that at 0.81

00:20:52.360 all. So he ended up being even more of a pariah. A similar thing could happen to Smollett, um,

00:20:57.680 because he is embarrassing the left and undermining their whole hate crime narrative. Uh, so who knows?

00:21:05.100 A few other points about all this. Um, first is think about the media's role in, in this and just

00:21:14.900 consider their performance over the last few weeks. Uh, we don't even have to think about anything

00:21:21.660 just think about the last few weeks. First, they run with, they run with this out of context video

00:21:27.880 clip of, um, of the Covington Catholic students and they paint them as racist and they tell a version

00:21:34.180 of the story that turns out to be false. And they remember they took that first version.

00:21:39.940 They reported it uncritically without any sign of hesitation or skepticism. And then when the true

00:21:45.680 story came out, the media for a while tried to stick to its original narrative and continue the

00:21:50.080 lie. And then when that became impossible, they just dropped it and moved on like it never happened.

00:21:55.020 And then right on the heels of that, we have this, um, Smollett thing. Once again,

00:22:01.880 they took the first version of the story, they reported it uncritically, uh, many headlines in

00:22:07.060 the first few days said things like empire actor assaulted in hate crime attack. No, no alleged,

00:22:15.360 no reportedly. They just putting it out as a fact amplifying the ridiculous story. The guy was telling 0.86

00:22:23.560 without even showing any signs of skepticism. And these people, these people in media have the gall

00:22:31.420 to get offended when we call them fake news. We've got all the ammunition we need just from the last

00:22:36.820 three weeks, forget about the last two years or 30 years, just from the last two weeks, we have all

00:22:41.480 the, all the reason in the world to discount most of the mainstream media as fake news. Fake news is the

00:22:48.240 most flattering possible thing we could call them. If we wanted to be more accurate, we could call

00:22:53.160 them sniveling, shameless, lying, manipulative propagandists. And I think that would be more 0.98

00:22:57.960 accurate. Second thing just to, to think about is if, if America is, uh, this is, this is a brain

00:23:06.340 teaser. If America is such a racist country, why do liberals constantly have to invent fake hate crimes?

00:23:14.040 We see these fake hate crimes all the time. It's very common, especially after Trump was elected,

00:23:18.840 but if America is so racist, why do you have to invent it? If America is so racist, it seems like if

00:23:25.680 you're a, uh, a black gay man, for instance, there should be plenty of real life examples of, of, uh, 0.92

00:23:32.320 of the persecution and abuse that you faced yet. You're going in and in and coming up with fake ones. 0.96

00:23:39.720 It seems like, uh, this seems to indicate possibly that America is not actually a racist country.

00:23:53.520 America is in fact, probably the least racist country on earth. Um, and it is so not racist

00:24:02.400 that you have some people in this, in this country who are so desperate to be victims and yet they

00:24:11.580 find so little supply of real victimhood. They find so few opportunities to really be a victim

00:24:17.360 that they have to invent it. This is what we talked about a few days ago, that people in this country are

00:24:26.000 from a very young age are raised to see victimhood as a desirable thing. We see victimhood as power.

00:24:37.800 Victimhood equals power. And so people are desperate to be victims.

00:24:46.220 They see it as some sort of Trump card that they can always play a Trump card that they can use to win

00:24:52.100 any argument, to get sympathy whenever they want it, to get job opportunities, whatever.

00:24:59.540 And if they can't really be a victim, then they'll make it up.

00:25:04.080 But that tells you something that if these, if these, if these frauds would just stop it.

00:25:13.080 I mean, think about there's a, the famous, uh, line from, I believe it was Morgan Freeman.

00:25:18.100 It was interviewed on 60 minutes several years ago. And you see this clip pop up on, on Facebook a lot

00:25:24.280 where, uh, he's asked, uh, first, what do you think if he likes black history month, what do you

00:25:33.780 think is a black history month? And he said, he doesn't, he's not a fan of it. And then he was

00:25:37.800 asked, well, uh, you know, how, what do we do about racism in America? How do we, how do we stop racism?

00:25:42.460 And, and Freeman said, stop talking about it. Just stop talking about it. And this, this is coming

00:25:50.600 from, you know, an elderly black man who, when he was growing up, uh, he really did experience

00:25:57.720 severe racism. And this is coming from him. I think there's a lot of truth that there's a lot of wisdom

00:26:03.400 to that, that if we would just stop trying to make race an issue all the time, stop inventing hate

00:26:11.900 crimes, stop looking for every opportunity to paint someone as a victim, someone as the,

00:26:16.640 you know, persecutor, if we would just stop doing that,

00:26:20.260 we could almost maybe really live in, in, in something close to a post-racial America.

00:26:30.080 Maybe not across the board for everybody, but there are a lot of people that, that, you know,

00:26:34.280 they, they just, when you're a kid, if you grow up in a diverse environment and there are a lot of

00:26:39.580 different races and religions and different types of people that you're growing up with,

00:26:42.540 you're going to school with them, you're hanging out with them after school, then that's just your,

00:26:46.560 it would, it just wouldn't even occur to you to be racist because that's just your environment.

00:26:50.680 You just take it for granted. When I was growing up, I went to a very, uh, you know, I grew up in a

00:26:57.280 very diverse area, went to a school with, with a whole range of, of, of different sorts of people,

00:27:03.920 both when I'm talking race, ethnicity, socioeconomic backgrounds, everything, you know,

00:27:08.520 and it's very common for a lot of people, especially if you live on the, on the East coast,

00:27:12.980 like I did. And I remember growing up all, it just never even race, never even, I never even saw it

00:27:21.880 as an issue at all. When I was in first and second grade and, you know, I was in school and we had

00:27:27.860 Hispanic kids in class and black kids and Asian kids and, uh, white kids, Jewish kids. I just,

00:27:33.960 I didn't look around and see, Oh, there's so much diversity. Look at that. Well, you have that sort of

00:27:38.220 person over there and that sort of person over there. No, these are just kids. These are just

00:27:41.980 my classmates. These are just friends, which is what we're supposed to want, right? Isn't that the

00:27:48.180 kind of country we're looking for? But it seems like what happens, especially with, you know,

00:27:57.500 academia and the media is they see that and they come in and they try to interfere with it.

00:28:03.940 And they say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And especially they start saying to the,

00:28:11.220 to the, you know, to the black kids, Oh no, that, well, that's, that's a white kid over there. He's,

00:28:15.000 you need to be suspicious of him. So he's got privilege and he's got all these things you don't

00:28:18.940 have and all these advantage. You need to be suspicious. And he's inherently racist. And they

00:28:24.820 say to the little girls, no, those, the, the, the, be careful. The little boys over there,

00:28:28.140 Oh, they're dangerous, toxic masculinity. And they say, they say to the kids who have a,

00:28:34.200 who come from, you know, have, who come from a less wealthy families, they say, Oh, look at those,

00:28:39.920 look at the kids over there. Their, their families have more money. You should hate them for that.

00:28:43.420 No, that's, they shouldn't have that money. It's not fair. Look at all these things they have

00:28:47.180 that you don't have. And they start whispering into the ears of kids, like, like serpents,

00:28:53.040 like snakes trying to engender hatred and division and racism and envy and everything.

00:29:02.520 And they're successful. And then you end up with guys like Jussie Smollett, a fraud and a liar 1.00

00:29:09.080 who would make up something like this. And in so doing, he is, he is trying to paint an entire race 0.99

00:29:15.680 of people as potential psychotic, violent bigots. All right. One other point before we get to some 0.98

00:29:25.680 of your emails, uh, Amazon was speaking of, well, this has to do with what I've just been talking

00:29:33.020 about. Amazon was supposed to build a massive new headquarters in New York. Um, they were going to

00:29:38.500 hire 25, 25,000, almost at 2,500. They were going to hire 25,000 people and open a base of operations

00:29:46.020 in the city. But after pressure from liberals, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who didn't want 0.97

00:29:51.660 Amazon in the city, because Amazon is a big corporation and big corporations are bad. Uh,

00:29:56.800 now Amazon has changed their plans and they won't be going there and bringing all the jobs,

00:30:01.160 the jobs and the positions will be filled elsewhere, like places like Dallas and other places.

00:30:06.020 So, uh, Cortez spiked the football yesterday on Twitter. She, she said, anything is possible.

00:30:12.300 Today was the day, a group of dedicated everyday New Yorkers and their neighbors defeated Amazon's

00:30:17.280 corporate greed, its worker exploitation, and the power of the richest man in the world.

00:30:22.760 This is to be clear, a politician celebrating that 25,000 new jobs won't be coming to her city. 1.00

00:30:30.300 She's bragging that she helped to prevent her constituents from getting jobs, which is total

00:30:35.120 madness. What we see now on the left is, is a complete investment in class warfare.

00:30:42.720 This goes back to the sewing division that I was just talking about. And they're all in on this.

00:30:49.880 So it's not just about race and gender and creed and sexuality anymore.

00:30:54.620 Now it's definitely about how much money you make. So we've got, we've got Cortez boasting about

00:30:59.500 kicking jobs out of her city. We've got Elizabeth Warren sharing pictures of rich guys on their 1.00

00:31:05.780 yachts and saying, Oh, he shouldn't be able to buy this boat. Um, you've got Democrats screaming at 0.93

00:31:11.640 Howard Schultz for committing the crime of being financially successful. Howard Schultz, who, by the

00:31:16.040 way, uh, I'm no fan of him. The guy's, uh, you know, left wing, I disagree with him on many subjects,

00:31:23.400 but he lived in the projects when he was a teenager. Uh, he started with one little coffee

00:31:31.100 shop in Seattle and he built it into a billion dollar enterprise. And we're as Americans,

00:31:39.960 that's the American dream, right? Or at least it used to, at least it used to be to start from

00:31:44.220 nothing with one little, with one little seed and to plant it and to have it sprout into

00:31:49.960 something incredible. That used to be the American dream. And we used to admire men who were able to

00:31:58.540 do that. But now we have Democrats saying, no, don't admire them. They are, they're thieves. Somehow

00:32:06.720 Howard Schultz is a, is a thief. Somehow he stole. I don't know how exactly he built up his own 1.00

00:32:12.480 operation, made his own money, but he stole somehow. The fact that he has billions,

00:32:19.960 and I have less than billions. Well, that's his fault. He's been, he's been reaching his hand into

00:32:25.140 my pocket invisibly and stealing from him. No, for me, I don't buy it. It's just, it's just

00:32:30.560 un-American. It's un-American to look at rich people and hate them for being rich. Now on the other side

00:32:37.720 of it, I also don't think we shouldn't worship wealth. And I think sometimes on the right, among

00:32:43.840 some, there are certain types of conservatives who can venture a little bit too close to

00:32:49.900 the idol worship of rich people and money and success and all of that. And I'm not on board with

00:32:56.560 that. We shouldn't worship money. And also on a personal level, you shouldn't hoard your wealth.

00:33:04.100 You should help the less fortunate willingly through your own volition, through your own choice,

00:33:09.220 not because you're forced to by the government. So I believe that. But I also believe that envy

00:33:16.560 is not American. That's not supposed to be an American value. And it's not healthy. And certainly

00:33:23.360 not Christian. And we should admire success. We don't worship it, but we admire it. 1.00

00:33:33.660 Because it takes a certain brilliance, ambition, creativity, ingenuity to go from nothing to

00:33:45.660 something. That's, that's American to admire that. This though, what we're seeing with the

00:33:51.040 Democrats, this is not, this is, I don't recognize this. I don't recognize this as American.

00:33:59.420 All right. I guess we'll jump, we'll jump ahead to the, to some of your emails before we wrap up for

00:34:06.520 a Friday. Cause I had a few really good ones that I don't want to miss. You can always email the show.

00:34:11.180 Remember Matt wall show at gmail.com had a few people just kind of chiming in on some of the

00:34:16.320 topics we've been talking about. This is from Ash. She says, hi, Matt, thinking on thinking on this

00:34:20.480 Jussie Smollett thing tonight. And I am really mad if this proves to be a hoax. And as of 1am mountain

00:34:26.220 time, it appears to be that way. Then it is undeniable proof that the left has weaponized racism as a

00:34:30.860 means to silence and intimidate conservatives. I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, the old South in the

00:34:34.660 eighties and nineties. I've experienced real racism and seen older generations of racism up close,

00:34:39.120 making false claims about this, especially if he actually made a noose and put it on his own

00:34:43.660 neck is a bridge too far. This is so wrong as a mother raising three white males. I am pissed off 0.99

00:34:48.360 that a rich, incredibly privileged actor can perpetuate racial stereotypes of white men and

00:34:53.360 falsely claim that something this horrific was done in their name. And you will probably get away

00:34:57.300 with it too. And did his empire co-star make false racism claims about her son recently as well?

00:35:02.460 I don't know about that. I haven't heard about that with the media's complicit complicity.

00:35:06.340 This feels very much like a coordinated attack on conservatives, specifically white male

00:35:10.880 conservatives. As a mom and as an American, I'm outraged. The media is absolutely to blame for

00:35:15.200 the America we find ourselves in. They have way too much power. I give thanks and praise to God for

00:35:19.980 alternative media and for you guys at the Daily Wire. Sincerely, thank you for everything you do,

00:35:25.600 Matt. Ash, I thank you for that. And I completely agree with what you're saying and I sympathize with it.

00:35:31.380 And it makes me angry too. Although I will say that, yes, this is more proof that the left has

00:35:38.720 weaponized racism, but this is certainly not the first piece of evidence that we have for that.

00:35:44.340 This is from Brittany. She says,

00:35:45.960 On the subject of drag queens, I do feel offended by what they do. Not necessarily because it's 1.00

00:35:50.600 disordered, which it definitely is, but because of its influence on girls in our culture. 0.68

00:35:54.920 As a teacher, I see the way young women dress and do their makeup every day. Drag has had 1.00

00:35:59.900 significant impacts on the makeup trends that we see on the internet and in schools.

00:36:05.200 One drag queen in particular has his own makeup line, which he markets to women and girls.

00:36:10.280 Girls are wearing mask-like makeup with drag queen-like eyebrows, gigantic false lashes, 1.00

00:36:15.700 and over-lined lips, as well as overly contoured features. They look fake and feel the need to wear

00:36:21.180 this kind of makeup, but they ironically no longer look feminine because of it. Thanks for bringing

00:36:25.940 this up. I think that's another excellent point. I think girls and women are harmed in many respects

00:36:34.080 by a lot of this gender non-conforming stuff, this idea of gender being this fluid thing so that a man

00:36:44.620 can actually be a woman. I think women are harmed in many ways, not the least of which being when you've 0.84

00:36:49.220 got men coming into bathrooms and locker rooms with your daughter, but this is another angle as 0.99

00:36:55.720 well. I appreciate you bringing that up. This is from Jesse. He says, hey, Matt, love the show. I

00:36:59.400 have a question for you, please. How can you reconcile not believing in the death penalty with

00:37:03.340 the existence of truly evil people? Why should Gosnell, El Chapo, Bundy, Mason, Manson, that is,

00:37:08.780 et cetera, be allowed to sit behind bars for life on everyone else's dime when they could never be set free?

00:37:14.220 If there's eternal life, what's wrong with releasing them for judgment a bit earlier and

00:37:19.700 removing our responsibility of protecting ourselves from that evil? Hi, Jesse. Well,

00:37:24.300 it's not necessarily the case that I don't believe in the death penalty. I've wavered on the issue back

00:37:27.700 and forth. I've flip-flopped on it, I admit, quite a bit. I've never been in principle against it,

00:37:35.040 absolutely. As in, I've never felt that there's no circumstance where it's okay. I've never believed

00:37:39.560 that for a while I was of the opinion that it's only ethically appropriate in third world countries

00:37:46.620 and those sorts of situations where they don't have the prison infrastructure to segregate dangerous

00:37:51.980 people from society for decades. But recently I have expanded my view. I'll admit, I've realized that

00:37:57.160 when you have someone, especially someone as evil as what you just described,

00:38:02.300 if you're going to keep them in prison for decades, that requires, I think, an undue and unfair burden

00:38:08.000 on the public, on the taxpayer. Because if you think about it, some people are so evil,

00:38:14.120 so horrible, so monstrous, that even their fellow inmates won't tolerate being around them.

00:38:20.360 So these people have to be held in protective custody forever, for their whole lives.

00:38:24.700 Or you could have people who are so dangerous and so sociopathic and so manipulative that you can't

00:38:32.720 risk having them around other prisoners because you don't know, you can't risk them kind of

00:38:38.000 sort of starting their own little prison cult and being able to manipulate prisoners

00:38:43.780 and get them to do their whim. So either way, when you have people like that,

00:38:50.140 the Manson types, and we can't execute them, then the only other option is to hold them in

00:38:56.500 protective custody, solitary confinement for their whole lives. And so we have to ask ourselves,

00:39:02.040 are we really morally required to keep someone in protective custody, solitary confinement,

00:39:06.360 for decades, just to protect them because their crime was so heinous that even their fellow

00:39:11.520 murderers don't want to be around them? And I think, no, I don't think so. I think in the end,

00:39:17.780 that doesn't seem ethical to require that of the public and of the taxpayer and of society.

00:39:24.560 And you could even argue that it's actually less humane to keep somebody locked in solitary

00:39:28.660 confinement for 50 years than just to execute them. I was reading about where they're probably

00:39:32.720 going to send El Chapo. I mean, they're sending El Chapo to this fortress in, I think, Colorado,

00:39:38.280 and he's going to be in solitary confinement in a little concrete box for 23 hours a day

00:39:44.640 for the next however many decades. I guess they have no choice but to do that. But is it even,

00:39:53.380 can we even say that's more humane than execution? So I agree with a lot of what you're saying there,

00:39:58.760 Jesse. All right, finally, for whatever reason, I've gotten like three emails in the last few days

00:40:06.680 about space aliens. Did I talk about space aliens recently? Maybe I did. Maybe that's why. But I've

00:40:14.080 got three emails all with a similar point or question. And I want to address that question.

00:40:23.040 The question is basically this. If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe,

00:40:27.320 and I believe there is. But if there is, how does that work theologically? In other words,

00:40:33.060 wouldn't this other race or these multiple other races, wouldn't they have their own salvation

00:40:39.600 histories? And how does that happen? Did Jesus go to all these planets? And how would that work?

00:40:45.320 If Jesus is fully divine and fully human and he went to some other planet, would that make him fully

00:40:50.860 human, fully divine, and fully Klingon or whatever? It isn't such an idea heresy.

00:40:55.620 So there are a lot of difficult questions raised by the idea of intelligent life on other planets.

00:41:02.720 And I have thought a lot about it. This is the kind of thing that I think about all the time. I think

00:41:06.540 about it like every day, probably, because I am mentally unstable. So here's how I respond to that.

00:41:11.280 I don't have a complete answer, but here's what I'll say. First of all, it seems to me that there are

00:41:16.180 many options here. You could have unfallen races. You could have races where no redemptive act

00:41:22.260 was necessary so that this kind of avoids that problem.

00:41:31.240 Or you could have races that are fallen but unredeemed. That's always a possibility.

00:41:36.200 Or they could be fallen and redeemed some other way. There are a lot of theories about the atonement,

00:41:41.680 of course, but I think most theologians agree that Christ didn't have to die on the cross to save us.

00:41:46.680 He chose to. It was a choice. That's the point. It wasn't something that happened by force of

00:41:50.840 necessity, but by his own free will, his own choice. He could have theoretically gone about it some other

00:41:55.220 way. What way? Well, who knows? I don't know. Nobody does. But the cross was a choice. So could

00:42:02.140 it be that if there are multiple races of fallen rational creatures, that they've all been redeemed

00:42:06.240 in dramatically different ways, possibly in ways that wouldn't even make sense to us,

00:42:10.620 that would be literally unintelligible to us if we were told about them? I think that's possible.

00:42:18.300 All of that seems weird to me, I admit. Hard to imagine. Kind of unsettling. But they are

00:42:22.980 possibilities. And here's the other point. I think theological challenges are raised

00:42:27.420 more so by the idea of aliens not existing than by the idea of aliens existing. And I'll explain what I

00:42:34.980 mean. We know that the universe is a very, very, very, very, very, very large place. There are

00:42:42.020 something like 100 billion stars in our galaxy. That's just in our galaxy, 100 billion. And if each

00:42:47.700 star has a few planets, then that means that there are easily 200 or 300 billion planets, possibly more

00:42:52.960 in our galaxy. How many galaxies are there? Well, probably 100 billion at least. So 100 billion galaxies

00:42:59.340 times 100 billion stars, times however many planets on average, what does that equal? It equals a lot.

00:43:08.140 It equals an incomprehensible amount. It equals an amount so huge that we may as well call it infinity.

00:43:14.800 I mean, for all intents and purposes, we may as well say there are an infinite number of planets in the

00:43:19.640 universe because the number is just so big that you couldn't even write it. It would take you days to

00:43:26.360 even write the number of zeros that would be required. Is it really plausible that all of those

00:43:34.100 planets, all of those trillions of planets are dead except for ours? Then why do they exist in the first

00:43:41.060 place? Why make a universe so vast and so dead and so full of pointless, mindless violence and explosions and

00:43:48.860 black holes and emptiness and everything if it's all just meant to be the home of one tiny little group of

00:43:53.800 mortals on one small speck of dust in one unimpressive corner of one terribly ordinary

00:43:58.780 galaxy? I mean, yeah, it could all serve some sort of mysterious cosmic purpose that we can't

00:44:03.700 understand. Fine. But the point is that such an idea, such a theory does raise its own unanswerable

00:44:08.840 questions. And there's a bigger question or challenge, I think. Keep in mind that the most commonly used

00:44:13.500 proof for God's existence is the fine tuning argument. Okay, the fine tuning argument, which I think is a

00:44:18.340 great argument. I use it all the time. Very forceful argument. It says that the universe was

00:44:22.240 finely tuned for life. Basically, there are certain constants in the universe that had the dial been

00:44:27.980 turned just a hair this way or a hair that way would have made life impossible. And it is so vastly

00:44:33.600 improbable that things would be calibrated this way to make life possible that you almost have to admit

00:44:38.700 some kind of God to explain it because it's the only way to explain something that improbable

00:44:42.940 happening. That's the argument in a nutshell, if I didn't just butcher it. But if this universe of

00:44:51.860 100 billion galaxies with 100 billion stars apiece is almost entirely completely dead, except for one

00:44:58.440 infinitesimal little speck of dust hiding out in one little corner of it, then it seems that the

00:45:03.980 fine tuning argument loses a lot of its force, right? Because then the atheist can just say, well,

00:45:09.100 it's not finely tuned. I mean, look at the universe. It's almost completely dead. What are

00:45:13.780 you talking about? Finely tuned for life? There's almost no life in it. It's dead.

00:45:18.300 They could also say that, yeah, life is very improbable, but the universe had trillions of

00:45:22.580 chances on trillions of planets to roll the right combination of dice to make life arise. And so

00:45:29.020 if you mix up a bunch of chemicals on a zillion planets, it's almost certain that one of them will

00:45:34.060 turn into life. That could be their argument. Now, I'm not saying that it obviously doesn't

00:45:38.480 disprove God. If we're alone in the universe, that wouldn't shake my faith any, but I'm saying

00:45:44.640 that it would make one of our best arguments less compelling. Saying that a universe with 50 trillion

00:45:52.300 dead planets is finely tuned for life is like saying, I don't know, it's like walking into an

00:45:56.240 abandoned shopping mall with five stories and seeing a little raccoon eating a stale Cinnabon over in the

00:46:01.940 corner and coming to the conclusion that the mall was built for the raccoon.

00:46:06.140 Um, it just, it, it just, it, maybe it was, but it just doesn't, it doesn't make as much sense.

00:46:12.520 But if the universe is teeming with life, which I believe it probably is, then the fine tuning

00:46:16.960 argument is back in play, back with a vengeance, because now you've got this huge, massive thing

00:46:22.720 with life all over the place. And again, it's, you can say, well, clearly it was fine tuned for life.

00:46:27.560 So in my view, I think a universe with other life presents fewer challenges, uh, theologically than

00:46:33.180 the other option, though, in the end, it doesn't matter. Um, because we'll never know anyway, we will

00:46:37.900 never know what life is, is, or isn't out there. So it just doesn't, it doesn't really factor in,

00:46:42.680 in the end. Um, the alien hypothetical is just that hypothetical. Um, but it's an, it's an interesting

00:46:51.380 hypothetical to think about in any case. All right. I'm glad I was able to get my alien spiel in at

00:46:57.760 the very end there. Uh, and if there are aliens out there, I can only hope that somehow they're

00:47:02.880 watching this show right now. All right. I'll talk to you on Monday. Have a great weekend. Godspeed,

00:47:08.760 everyone. Today on the Ben Shapiro show, Jussie Smollett's hit crime story begins to utterly

00:47:26.480 collapse. President Trump prepares to declare a national emergency and the 2020 Democrats move

00:47:31.140 even further to the left. That's today on the Ben Shapiro show.

The Matt Walsh Show - February 15, 2019

Ep. 199 - Will The National Emergency Gambit Work？

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript