The Matt Walsh Show - February 15, 2019


Ep. 199 - Will The National Emergency Gambit Work？


Episode Stats

Length

47 minutes

Words per Minute

172.9063

Word Count

8,224

Sentence Count

501

Misogynist Sentences

8

Hate Speech Sentences

12


Summary

Trump signs a disastrous spending bill, but he s trying to mitigate it by declaring a National Emergency to build the wall as well. Will that strategy work? Also, we ll talk about the latest in the Jussie Smollett case. And finally, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is spiking the football and celebrating because she prevented Amazon from bringing 25,000 jobs to New York. What does this tell us about the state of the modern Democratic Party?


Transcript

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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
00:18:14.960 type of person, um, not only have they never seen Empire, but they probably don't even know that
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
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
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
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
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,
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.
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
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
00:29:15.680 of people as potential psychotic, violent bigots. All right. One other point before we get to some
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
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.
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
00:31:05.780 yachts and saying, Oh, he shouldn't be able to buy this boat. Um, you've got Democrats screaming at
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
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.
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
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
00:35:50.600 disordered, which it definitely is, but because of its influence on girls in our culture.
00:35:54.920 As a teacher, I see the way young women dress and do their makeup every day. Drag has had
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,
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
00:36:49.220 got men coming into bathrooms and locker rooms with your daughter, but this is another angle as
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.