The Matt Walsh Show - May 01, 2018


Ep. 20 - Why 'Cultural Appropriation' Is Nonsense


Episode Stats


Length

18 minutes

Words per minute

160.91106

Word count

2,979

Sentence count

197

Harmful content

Misogyny

25

sentences flagged

Hate speech

31

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A 17-year-old girl in a Chinese-style dress accidentally tweeted a picture of herself in her prom dress. A Chinese-American man saw her tweet and decided to attack her for wearing a Chinese style dress. It sparked a conversation about cultural appropriation.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 So let's talk about cultural appropriation, okay? Over the weekend, a high school girl,
00:00:07.600 just a random high school girl, not a public figure, not a celebrity,
00:00:12.880 she tweeted a picture of herself in her prom dress, innocent enough, she thought, right?
00:00:20.440 And she was tweeting it out to her, whatever, a few hundred followers. And she was wearing,
00:00:25.300 I guess, a Chinese style dress. And so a Chinese man, Chinese American man, it seems,
00:00:33.560 saw this tweet and he thought, well, let me attack this high school girl. And yeah, let me just do
00:00:42.660 that. Let me try to ruin her day and her week for no reason. So he screenshotted the tweet and he
00:00:50.120 sent his own tweet saying, uh, my culture is not your damned prom dress. My culture is not your
00:00:57.760 prom dress, which I mean, he's right about that. She never claimed it was. I don't think she ever,
00:01:03.880 I didn't, I didn't scroll through all her tweets, but I don't think she ever said,
00:01:08.660 I'm wearing Chinese culture today. I'm wearing the entirety of Chinese culture today. Uh, no, 1.00
00:01:16.140 I think she's just wearing a dress, just a dress is a dress, you know? Um, but his tweet attacking
00:01:23.420 this girl, uh, cyber bullying her basically got somehow 170,000 likes, 170,000. And it sparked this
00:01:36.440 avalanche of criticism on this girl. And it started a conversation about cultural appropriation. 0.95
00:01:43.760 And this goes back to something I talked about last week where you see now how everybody who's
00:01:52.220 on the internet now gets treated like a public figure that everybody gets this intense scrutiny
00:01:59.640 over everything they say and do. And anyone at all, no matter who they are, even if just some,
00:02:04.620 some 17 year old girl going to prom, um, anyone can, can come under national backlash for something. 1.00
00:02:12.720 And so this, I guess this girl, her number was up for that. So, um, now ironically, this,
00:02:19.580 this guy, Jeremy Lamb is his name and he's pictured in his Twitter avatar wearing a baseball cap,
00:02:28.360 board shorts, and a t-shirt, none of which are traditional Chinese garb. I I'm pretty sure. 0.83
00:02:35.140 In fact, even his name, Jeremy is not Chinese. That's most certainly Western. Uh, and I, according 0.70
00:02:42.800 to an internet search that I just did a minute ago, the most, just for an example, okay, the most
00:02:47.320 popular name, the most popular male name in China right now is Zhang Wei. Now, the reason I bring it
00:02:54.660 up is, is, can you imagine if some lily white American parents who wanted to be trendy, you know,
00:03:04.560 if they had a baby boy and they named him Zhang Wei and they sent out a tweet or something with a
00:03:10.300 picture of their, of their extremely white baby saying, Oh, my little Zhang Wei was born, uh, eight
00:03:17.560 pounds, nine ounces, you know, what happened? They would come under again, intense national backlash.
00:03:24.040 How dare you appropriate Chinese culture by giving him a Chinese name? But Jeremy has appropriated a 1.00
00:03:31.180 Western name. He's appropriated an entire Western wardrobe. I mean, everything from his hat right down
00:03:38.040 to his shoes. Okay. All of it is Western. And really, if, if, if we're going to talk about appropriation,
00:03:45.180 if we're going to get into the appropriation discussion, and if we're going to get into this
00:03:48.980 game where we say, okay, you're not allowed to use anything or wear anything that doesn't originate
00:03:55.140 with your culture. If we're doing that, it's not going to work out too well for non-Westerners. 0.52
00:04:01.360 Uh, because first of all, by, by the rules of this game, if the rules were applied evenly by the rules
00:04:09.360 of the game, if you're a non-Western, if you are, if you are of non-Western heritage, first of
00:04:15.160 all, you need to stop doing what you're doing at this exact moment. Stop doing it right now. Go
00:04:19.660 away because you can't computers, phones, any kind of phone. These are all Western inventions
00:04:26.100 and you can't use them. It's appropriation, cars, airplanes, much of modern medicine, antibiotics.
00:04:32.580 Uh, most of the appliances that you have in your kitchen, dishwasher, refrigerator, all that.
00:04:37.960 You can't use that electricity, light bulbs, movies, TV, photography, democracy. Okay. Air conditioning.
00:04:44.160 I could go on and on and on. And I haven't even gotten to clothing yet. Jeans, ball caps,
00:04:49.460 t-shirts, sneakers. Can't wear those under these rules. Can't wear them. This is why cultural
00:04:55.380 appropriation is utter nonsense. One of the reasons anyway, because it puts cultures into these boxes
00:05:00.940 and it doesn't permit crossover. And it denies the very diversity that the left pretends to value
00:05:08.420 above everything else. They say, we let, you know, diversity is the best thing in the world.
00:05:11.700 And yet they're the ones saying, no, you can't have that. That belongs to the other culture. 0.99
00:05:16.620 You got to stick with your own cultures. Separate, but equal cultures. Okay. Stay separate, 1.00
00:05:22.920 stay segregated. That's what they're saying. Or, or I should say, let me, let me clarify back up for a
00:05:28.260 minute. It denies you the, the right to cross over into another box if you're white. So it's a one way 0.97
00:05:37.060 ticket here, basically. If you, it tells whites to stay in their box and never go outside of it. 0.91
00:05:44.980 But people of other races and ethnicities, they can come into our box all they want. They can take 1.00
00:05:50.260 what they want, browse around, you know, look around, take this, take a sneaker, put on a ball cap,
00:05:54.920 use some air conditioning, take a, you know, take a flight back and forth from, I mean, they can do
00:05:59.440 whatever they want. But for us, we have to stay right here in this box and we can never go and do
00:06:06.080 anything else out of it. So the double standard, the double standard is so blatant, just so extremely
00:06:12.820 blatant and in your face. And they just, just so unashamed is this shameless, I should say, is this
00:06:20.100 a double standard that it's almost shocking as a custom, as we all are to the double standard,
00:06:25.580 it almost succeeds in shocking. But the real double standard with this appropriation stuff
00:06:32.480 has nothing to do with culture or race or anything like that. The thing is that because there is one
00:06:40.580 place, there is one place, there's one area where, where, where real live, honest to God appropriation
00:06:50.720 actually does occur. Harmful, degrading, demeaning appropriation. That is happening. But the one
00:06:59.560 place where it actually happens, the one place where appropriation actually happens and is actually
00:07:06.360 harmful and is actually offensive and degrading, that's the one place where the left celebrates it.
00:07:12.060 And of course, I'm talking about men who appropriate womanhood by pretending to be women. That is the one 0.68
00:07:20.120 actual, real example of appropriation. And it's the one place where the left, not, it's not that they
00:07:28.040 look the other way. They actually applaud it and say, yeah, it's brave. It's inspiring. It's beautiful.
00:07:33.880 But here is real appropriation. Here's a man who has reduced femininity to a caricature, to a cartoon,
00:07:42.280 basically. And he says he has an urge to wear dresses and to wear high heels and to wear lipstick.
00:07:47.180 And that, this urge somehow indicates that he's really a woman inside. By intruding on womanhood, he turns
00:07:55.420 womanhood into nothing more than a fashion choice, essentially. He empties it of all of its substance.
00:08:03.000 He says that a woman's body, what goes on inside her, what goes on inside her mind, all of that, what goes on
00:08:09.560 inside her soul, her ability to create human beings and to, and to, you know, harbor them inside her body and 0.90
00:08:17.800 to nourish them with her body, all of that. Okay. Those things that are really authentically, uniquely,
00:08:25.880 fantastically, beautifully woman, those things, none of that, all those things don't matter. None of that
00:08:34.920 matters. According to the new way of looking at it, because in order for the man to take part in
00:08:43.760 womanhood, well, then we've got to strip womanhood of all the things that are unique to it because he 0.92
00:08:48.920 can't, he can't, uh, he can't have any part of that. He can be a woman, he says, without any of that. 0.57
00:08:56.240 So none of that matters. As long as he puts on a dress and maybe he changes his name and he grows
00:09:03.240 his hair out and maybe he gets implants or something and he mutilates his genitals. If he does all that, 0.56
00:09:08.780 well, now he's a woman, all the rest of the stuff that used to be the territory, the, the, of women 1.00
00:09:16.180 doesn't matter. So, so see here we have the actual consequences of appropriation
00:09:24.080 that the left worries will happen with cultural appropriation.
00:09:29.440 Here we have it actually happening because their arguments, what is their argument against a white
00:09:36.140 girl wearing a Chinese prom dress? What's their argument against it? What, why are they worried
00:09:40.180 about it? What's the big deal? Well, according to them, by wearing the dress, she reduces Chinese 1.00
00:09:47.440 culture to a fad and to a novelty. She takes part in it. She benefits from it. She borrows its beauty.
00:09:54.080 She kind of like steals it without understanding it. And thus she makes it into something superficial 0.79
00:09:59.700 and hollow and just like something to parade around like a costume. Basically she turns,
00:10:05.800 she turns Chinese culture into a, into a costume. That's the argument. Now that doesn't really happen 1.00
00:10:13.140 when a white person wears a Chinese dress or when a white person, I don't know, whatever else gets
00:10:20.920 them accused of a, listens to Beyonce or something like that. Um, that's not, that, that doesn't,
00:10:26.340 that doesn't do any harm to anybody. It doesn't cheapen Chinese culture, black culture. It doesn't
00:10:32.080 because cultures intermingle, they blend and fashions and styles change. And so that's,
00:10:37.540 there's this exchange between cultures that goes on. And that used to be what the left,
00:10:43.360 you know, celebrated and said we should be doing is, is this intermingling and exchange of cultures,
00:10:49.000 but womanhood and manhood on the other hand are absolutes. They are poles. Okay. They're like 0.95
00:10:57.940 North and South poles. And when men come in and they blur those lines, they really do blur the lines 0.90
00:11:06.700 that give women their identity. Because this is what define, in order to have an identity, 1.00
00:11:12.800 there must be lines of distinction. And it used to be, and it still is scientifically,
00:11:19.220 but our culture doesn't recognize it anymore. It used to be that we all recognized that the,
00:11:23.840 there were certain lines that defined a woman. And those lines were really obvious among them.
00:11:30.680 As I said, she can create a person. Okay. She could conceive a person within her and bring that 1.00
00:11:38.700 human being into the world. I mean, this is incredible. It's like a supernatural ability.
00:11:43.020 It's such an incredible power that she has. The fate of all human civilization rests on the woman
00:11:50.640 because we need the woman to propagate civilization. Of course, the woman needs the man to take part in 1.00
00:11:56.240 that. But the woman has this very essential role of actually harboring the child, bringing the child 1.00
00:12:03.440 forth. And then the child, even when he's born, you know, after he's born, the child has a real
00:12:10.020 physical need for the mother. Technically, the child doesn't even need the man. I mean, kids do need
00:12:15.400 their fathers. Don't get me wrong. But a newborn child has a physical need for the mother. The newborn
00:12:22.600 won't even notice his dad for like several months. Believe me, I've had three. He needs his mother.
00:12:28.500 So there's that motherly maternal connection, you know, and it's just that those were the things
00:12:34.520 that used to define womanhood. But we've torn down those lines. We've destroyed them. We've 0.90
00:12:40.000 obliterated them for the sake of these cross-dressing men. And so the LGBT, um, lobby has actually done 0.96
00:12:49.880 to womanhood what the left says this girl did to Chinese culture. But the girl in the Chinese prom 0.85
00:12:55.900 dress is villainized. A man in a prom dress is canonized. The girl in the dress is accused of
00:13:04.180 turning Chinese culture into nothing but a dress. The man in the dress actually has turned womanhood 0.95
00:13:10.640 into nothing but a dress. He's actually done it, at least in the eyes of society. Yet he gets away
00:13:17.320 with it. It's incredible. All of this talk about appropriation, here it is. It's actually happening.
00:13:25.780 Let's talk about that. And it's doing real harm to women. It's part of the reason why now you've got 1.00
00:13:33.020 to worry about your, about your, um, you know, your, your daughter ending up in a locker room or in a,
00:13:38.600 in a bathroom with a man because of this. Men have come in and appropriated woman. They've, they've, 1.00
00:13:44.940 they've even taken their bathrooms from them in their, their locker rooms, their private intimate
00:13:49.180 spaces. Men have come in and taken, or I should specify the LGBT camp has come in and taken. 1.00
00:13:57.020 So how is this happening? How, how is it, how is this being allowed to happen? Well, the answer is,
00:14:02.260 um, it's, as I've explained in the past, the left has what I call a victim pyramid or a victim
00:14:09.200 hierarchy. Now we know that victimization is currency on the left. Victimization is power on
00:14:17.100 the left and whoever is the, the most victimized victim of all. Well, they're going to have the
00:14:23.480 most power. They can do whatever they want and they can't be questioned. So there's this jockeying
00:14:27.800 for position among the various demographics on the left, who can be the most victimized. And there's
00:14:31.720 always this competition, but who's the most depressed, who's the most persecuted, who's the most
00:14:35.600 bullied and so on and so forth. Um, right now the LGBT folks are at the very top of the victim of the 0.99
00:14:42.620 victim hierarchy. They're all the way at the top. They've ascended to the peak. And this is a big
00:14:47.720 moment for them where they're here at the top and they're reaping all the benefits. And what it means
00:14:53.220 is that they can do whatever they want and nobody can criticize them. And really the transgenders 0.91
00:15:01.420 have even ascended to the top of the top, which is what, well, you know, now you find even, I, I saw
00:15:08.700 some headline on Twitter recently that, um, uh, gay men are being told that, uh, they, they can't dress
00:15:16.500 as drag queens anymore because I mean, oh my gosh, just try to wrap your head around this. The new 1.00
00:15:25.460 thing that I, that I've seen is that gay men cannot dress like drag queens because they're appropriating 0.96
00:15:32.280 from transgenders. Okay. They're that's what now men, now men in dresses are, are, are appropriating 1.00
00:15:42.980 from other men in dresses. So I, anyway, um, so the transgenders have ascended all the way to the top
00:15:50.440 of the top of the top and they can do whatever they want. And no one can criticize them because they're
00:15:55.140 the most victimized of all, um, from some, you know, from my own observations of studying the
00:16:00.100 left, uh, it seems to me, and they're, like I said, there's a jockeying for position and kind of
00:16:04.100 it's a sort of this game of thrones that goes on. But right now, transgenders at the top and then the 1.00
00:16:09.280 rest of the LGBT XYZ, um, squad, they're there right underneath them. And then racial minorities 1.00
00:16:16.040 are right below them. And then women, women are actually kind of at the bottom right now on the left 1.00
00:16:22.440 in terms of, um, the victim hierarchy, which is why even after all the, the work that feminists 1.00
00:16:29.980 have done, after all the, you know, feminists, especially modern feminists, they spend a lot 1.00
00:16:34.400 of time finding persecution where it doesn't actually exist. They find rape culture where
00:16:39.400 it doesn't exist. But meanwhile, that you've got actual dudes walking into their bathrooms and 1.00
00:16:45.380 their locker rooms, and they're not allowed to complain about that. They can complain about
00:16:49.460 manspreading on the subway. They can complain about anything else, but they can't complain about
00:16:53.900 that. They basically been told, shut your mouth and go with the program. And for the most part on
00:17:00.200 the left and the feminists, most of them do. They're put in their place by the LGBT. And, uh, so they just 0.99
00:17:07.640 go along with it. So that's why, you know, that's how we've ended up in this, um, really absurd
00:17:15.420 situation. And I'm sort of waiting and it's happened a little bit. There's been a few examples
00:17:22.000 of it. There've been a few liberal feminists who have sort of very gingerly ventured into the 1.00
00:17:30.080 territory of kind of criticizing the transgender thing. But I'm waiting for the moment when the
00:17:35.980 feminists really just get fed up with it. And they say, you know what? No, I, we're not going to 1.00
00:17:40.720 tolerate this anymore. I mean, they've spent all this time telling men that you're not even allowed
00:17:46.560 to have opinions about women's issues. If you don't have a uterus, that's been their refrain for 1.00
00:17:52.180 decades. They've said no uterus, no opinion. And now they've got to sit there and just deal with it
00:17:58.520 while men not only have opinions about women, but actually become women without uteruses. And they're
00:18:04.380 not allowed to. So eventually I think the feminists are, um, going to get fed up of it with it. And 1.00
00:18:10.000 there's going to be a full-on civil war on the left over this issue. But as it stands right now,
00:18:15.680 men can appropriate all they want. And, uh, it's the one kind of appropriation that the left 0.91
00:18:22.180 never says anything about. And that is the real reason why appropriation is nonsense.
00:18:28.980 All right. Have a great day, everyone. Godspeed.