A public school teacher says she won t return to the classroom until there's a cure for the coronavirus. Plus, Kanye West's pro-life plea, and whether a Black woman should get an exemption from cultural appropriation.
00:00:00.000Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Democrats, the media, and many public school teachers themselves are now, in response to the coronavirus, in effect arguing that public school is inessential and expendable.
00:00:12.900And although I disagree with their take on the coronavirus, I agree with them on this point that public school is inessential, and I think we should take them at their word, actually.
00:00:21.300Also, five headlines, including Kanye's powerful pro-life plea, and in our daily cancellation, we'll discuss whether a black woman doing Irish dance should get an exemption from the cultural appropriation charge, or should everybody be held to the same cultural appropriation standard, or should we just do away with the whole concept of cultural appropriation because the concept is itself absurd, stupid, insane, and many other things as well.
00:00:49.200We'll talk about all that coming up, but first, we'll start here.
00:00:51.760An article in the New York Times really captures the heroism and courage of our sainted public school teachers.
00:01:00.080This is the article written by a public school teacher named Rebecca Martinson, and it says,
00:01:06.880I won't return to the classroom, and you shouldn't ask me to.
00:01:09.860Please don't make me risk getting COVID-19 to teach your child.
00:01:13.440As I said, just incredible courage and heroism on display there from Rebecca Martinson.
00:01:23.640Every day when I walk into work as a public school teacher, I am prepared to take a bullet to save a child.
00:01:28.680In the age of school shootings, that's what the job requires.
00:01:31.640But asking me to return to the classroom amid a pandemic and expose myself and my family to COVID-19 is like asking me to take that bullet home to my own family.
00:01:41.360I won't do it, and you shouldn't want me to.
00:01:44.220Okay, so she claims that she would happily jump in front of a bullet, but she won't go to work when there's a pandemic that poses almost no risk to children and only a very moderate risk to middle-aged adults.
00:02:02.700Okay, I became an educator after a career as a nurse.
00:02:07.400I teach medical science and introduction to nursing to 11th and 12th graders at a regional skills center that serves students from 22 different high schools and 13 different school districts.
00:02:15.600My school district and school haven't ruled out asking us to return in person to in-person teaching in the fall as careful and proactive as the administration has been when it comes to exploring plans to return to the classroom.
00:02:25.720Nothing I have heard reassures me that I can safely teach in person.
00:02:29.160Now, she doesn't say what she would need to hear that reassures her that she can safely teach in person.
00:02:36.740I guess what she needs to hear is that the virus has gone away or that there's a cure, that there's a vaccine or something.
00:02:45.080But, you know, as I've been saying now for a while, there's no guarantee that this virus will ever go away.
00:02:52.540There's no guarantee that there will ever be a vaccine that's even close to 100% effective.
00:02:58.200Now, we keep reading headlines about how they're working on a vaccine, they're making progress.
00:06:51.500But they aren't required to dive in the line of fire on purpose.
00:06:54.680Again, some do heroically, and those are the ones we rightfully reward with the, you know, posthumously with the Medal of Honor and other honors as well.
00:07:26.860That's how it's being presented, and it's just not true.
00:07:29.020And by the way, I'm sorry, I don't, the idea, this woman, I don't know anything about her.
00:07:34.500I'm sure she's a perfectly nice woman.
00:07:35.800But the idea that she, her claim that she would willingly jump in front of a bullet for her students, but she won't go to school during coronavirus, I don't buy that.
00:07:49.780On one hand, you're claiming that you will sacrifice your very lives for your kids and for the sake of education, but you're too scared to go teach during coronavirus.
00:08:08.460Kids, we'll show you the numbers here in a minute.
00:08:11.660But as this woman well knows, and she briefly mentions and then moves on from, kids only very rarely contract this, and even more rarely is it fatal for them.
00:08:22.660Let's go to the, in fact, we went over this last week.
00:08:25.060Let's look at the comparison between how COVID affects especially kids as compared to the flu.
00:08:34.500But let's look at this chart from the CDC, and you see the total death counts.
00:08:39.540And this really puts things into perspective.
00:08:41.020As of July 15th, there had been around 120,000 COVID deaths.
00:08:48.18031 of those deaths were kids age 0 to 14.
00:08:58.920The flu killed three times as many kids in that age range in that same amount of time.
00:09:05.680Now, if you look up, if you look up the age bar, you see the vast majority of deaths are in the 75 and up bracket.
00:09:18.300And a great preponderance of those deaths were in nursing homes and were due oftentimes to horrible policy decisions made by people like Andrew Cuomo.
00:09:26.300The 65 and up bracket accounts for, you know, you add that up.
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00:12:24.020If it were up to me and I could make the decision, of course, I wouldn't want to see anyone die at all, obviously.
00:12:30.840Every death is a tragedy, especially when it's a child.
00:12:32.740But you can't argue that, okay, you can't argue for shutting down schools on the basis of the threat it poses to children because of COVID and then justify it by saying even one death is too much.
00:12:49.020You cannot do that if you haven't also argued for shutting schools down during flu season, which is a disease, again, that kills three times as many children.
00:13:00.880This is an inescapable, logical conclusion.
00:13:05.720If at least part of your reason for wanting to shut down schools is that it's killed, you know, a few dozen children, school-aged children, if that's even part of your reason, then you should have been advocating for shutting down schools during flu season.
00:13:29.440Now, yes, you have isolated cases when the flu season gets really bad or hits a particular area really hard.
00:13:37.520You have isolated cases around the country every once in a while where a school system shuts down temporarily.
00:13:42.500But something like this, where we shut down the schools indefinitely across the entire country, 50 million kids no longer going to school, we've never done anything even close to that for the flu.
00:13:55.500Even though for the third time, and I'm going to keep saying it, the flu is a much, much, much greater threat to children than COVID, even with a vaccine, still is.
00:14:07.700And I think we have to keep emphasizing this because there's no getting around it.
00:14:14.660If you're someone advocating for shutting schools down and you haven't advocated it for the flu, it doesn't make any sense.
00:14:23.040You know your position doesn't make any sense.
00:14:25.060Now, you know, someone on Twitter, and of course we also acknowledge, though, that this is, we're talking about the threat it poses to kids.
00:14:40.400And the reason I'm emphasizing that is because that's the emphasis we're getting from the media and from a lot of school teachers and people that are advocating for shutting schools down.
00:14:51.280Yes, they're also saying it's a threat to adults, but what they're emphasizing is the threat to kids.
00:14:57.820And they're saying that we cannot put our kids in harm's way.
00:15:02.480And if you're doing that, then we have just, you have just, then the flu is going to enter the chat because that is a very relevant aspect of this.
00:15:11.060Now, it is substantially more dangerous to adults than to kids.
00:16:24.340The point is, I'm going to have to function in society in spite of that risk.
00:16:31.260And society is going to have to function in spite of that risk.
00:16:39.480One way or another, eventually, we're all going to have to just figure out how to continue on with our lives, even knowing that this threat, this risk is out there.
00:16:48.520Because what's probably going to happen is that the coronavirus is going to become one of the many threats that we all face as we go about our daily lives.
00:16:59.440One of the many things that could kill us as we go about our daily lives.
00:17:03.180One of the many things that eventually will kill us because we're all going to die.
00:17:09.420For the umpteenth time, that doesn't mean that we're okay with it or we're nihilistic or we're saying, oh, just take me coronavirus, I don't care if I die.
00:17:40.540That what schools are doing here, I mean, what that article I just read to you.
00:17:45.100It's one long article basically making the case that schools are not essential.
00:17:51.660Grocery store workers have been working this entire time.
00:17:57.220You know, we can think of many different bus drivers and we can think of many different people working public transportation, which is pretty damn high risk.
00:18:11.860We can think of many different types of jobs where they've been going to work.
00:18:16.360People working at Walmart have been going to work this entire time, have been granted status of essential workers.
00:18:24.040And the interesting thing is there hasn't been nearly as much hand-wringing over grocery store employees and the risk that they're in as it is now over teachers.
00:18:33.040And I think part of the reason for that is that, you know, even though I'm opposed to the government being able to stand up there and declare who is essential and who isn't.
00:18:47.220And, of course, every job is essential, at least to the people that are working that job.
00:18:52.680It's essential to their families, so essential in a very real way.
00:18:55.460I don't like the idea of the government declaring who's essential and who isn't.
00:18:58.520But certainly, I don't think anyone disagrees that grocery stores are essential.
00:19:04.880And that's why there wasn't nearly as much hand-wringing, because we all said, well, grocery stores need to stay open.
00:19:12.860And, you know, if you choose to work for a grocery store, then you're going to go to work and you're going to have a job, you're going to have a salary.
00:19:19.980If you decide that that's too much of a risk, then, you know, you can quit that job.
00:19:24.040But there hasn't really been anyone, there's been hardly anyone arguing that we should just shut down grocery stores, right?
00:19:31.380Because we say we need it for society.
00:19:35.460Now, up until this, most of the people arguing for shutting down schools, up until the coronavirus, they would have been the ones saying, yeah, schools are absolutely essential.
00:19:47.200They're even more than grocery stores, if anything.
00:19:49.960We, you know, we have to have schools open.
00:21:59.000But the point is that most of the people who would have strenuously objected to that idea are now saying public school system is not essential.
00:22:11.500Because eventually, whenever it happens, you know, whether it's a vaccine or whatever, and they start opening up the schools again, and a lot of the people that were saying schools are not essential will go right back to saying, oh, yeah, there's nothing more important than education.
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00:26:27.700Now, Kanye has obviously sustained a lot of criticism recently when he put out the Christian album.
00:26:54.120And he was coming out in support of Donald Trump, even though I guess he's backtracked from that recently and said he doesn't support Trump anymore.
00:27:01.120But all of that criticism was nothing in comparison to what's coming to Kanye now.
00:27:08.900Because once you start talking about abortion, and especially you talk about it the way that he is, that's a powerful testimony.
00:27:15.020Not only as a man who, as he says, almost was never born, and his life was saved by his mother, but he is admitting that he himself, if it were up to him, would have aborted his child.
00:27:34.120And his wife stepped in and said, no, we're not going to do that.
00:27:36.380But now he's looking at his daughter and is obviously grateful every day that he didn't make such a horrible choice.
00:27:41.980That is, that's a very powerful testimony to hear from someone, a man, a black man, you know.
00:27:54.820They simply, they can't have someone going around saying this kind of thing about abortion, their holy sacrament.
00:28:01.720So just watch, if you thought it was bad before, you're going to see the treatment now that Kanye gets, and it's going to be, it already has been ugly.
00:28:13.380Number two, as we get close to, I guess, our third straight month of leftist violence and chaos, there are no signs of it letting up.
00:28:20.700Here are just some examples over the weekend.
00:28:22.620Here are a leftist in Seattle breaking into an Amazon store to steal stuff.
00:28:31.720And then we go over to Portland, there's rioting in Portland featuring the familiar serial arson.
00:28:37.400And here are some Antifa terrorists trying to start fires in the city.
00:28:44.500And it's not just Portland and Seattle either.
00:29:27.920Number one, first of all, all the people you've seen in those videos, those are poor, starving children who just want some bread, according to AOC.
00:29:44.520These are starving people who desperately are, they're just committing crime out of desperation because they're on the brink of starvation.
00:29:52.040And they figure the only way to survive is to throw bottles at police officers.
00:29:59.340And second, also remember that even in spite of everything you've seen there and everything we've seen over the last two or three months, we should really be worried about the real problem.
00:30:09.880The real threat is that federal law enforcement officers in scary camo uniforms are, quote, unquote, abducting people off the street, otherwise known as making arrests.
00:31:07.440And we laugh about it, but that is really actually what the left wants.
00:31:11.460That's basically their vision of how policing should work.
00:31:13.940Number three, reading from The Daily Wire, it says,
00:31:18.820A pair of doctors in Australia want to do away with terms like Adam's apple and Achilles tendon, with one doctor calling them misogynistic.
00:31:28.600Dr. Kristen Small, a Queensland specialist, obstetrician, gynecologist, and anatomy lecturer, calls for the terms to be phased out, saying that they represent older generations.
00:31:37.660I think we have personal choice to decolonize our language, and these historical terms will fade out, says Small.
00:31:44.580She still teaches the terms known as eponyms for exam purposes, but notes that there are alternatives for the dead man's names.
00:31:51.940She says the century-old anatomical terms are named after old men, kings, and heroes.
00:31:57.600And I guess we've got to get rid of Adam's apple, because it's believed to be named after the biblical figure of Adam, okay?
00:32:05.100Of course, Achilles tendon named after the Greek hero of the Trojan War.
00:32:08.600I don't know why that's sexist exactly, but apparently it is.
00:36:28.280Second, though I was not involved, let me say that I understand why this happened.
00:36:34.800Whatever happened, I understand why it happened.
00:36:37.200And we banjo players, we members of the banjo community, we banjoists, as we call ourselves, have been minimized and otherized and stigmatized and marginalized and dehumanized and vaporized and cauterized.
00:37:26.840So, is it any wonder that a community which has been the target of such degrading stereotypes and prejudices would lash out in this way, in whatever way this was, whatever happened?
00:37:40.560Can you blame us for communicating our anger and our sorrow in a way that gets your attention?
00:37:45.900I'm not justifying it, whatever happened.
00:37:53.000A little bit of empathy, I think, would be necessary.
00:37:56.000We're going to go to our daily cancellation.
00:37:57.220But first, you know, in the midst of all this news we've been talking about, Ben Shapiro has a new book out called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
00:38:05.960And, you know, he really, this is a prophetic book in a lot of ways because we're seeing a lot of what he's been writing about, a lot of what he wrote about in the book, coming to life all around us.
00:38:16.320The book goes on sale Tuesday, July 21st at 6 p.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. Pacific.
00:38:22.460And Ben will be doing a virtual live signing event on the day of the release.
00:38:26.240With your purchase of a signed book, you can write in a question which may be read and answered as he signs your books live on air.
00:38:31.780You can preorder your signed copy and write in your questions at dailywire.com slash Ben.
00:38:36.360As far as the book itself, you know, it covers two fundamentally different visions of America that are on the table right now.
00:38:40.960One vision is unifying, finds our unity in shared philosophy and culture and history.
00:38:46.560The other disintegrates our culture and our country in the name of fundamental change.
00:38:52.280How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps details how this alternate worldview has gained so much cultural ground so quickly.
00:38:59.200How has this happened? Why is it happening?
00:39:02.200Again, go to dailywire.com slash Ben, order your signed copy, and join Ben's live signing on Tuesday, July 21st.
00:39:09.260Okay, today for our daily cancellation, I have to issue a cancellation begrudgingly, not because I want to, with no personal animosity behind it.
00:39:18.800In fact, in performing this cancellation ritual, I am following the rules and customs of our modern society.
00:39:26.740I am enforcing the rules, their rules, not my own. These are not my rules.
00:39:32.260The subject today is a young woman by the name of Morgan Bullock, and she was profiled by the BBC recently.
00:39:38.640That profile has gotten some attention online.
00:39:41.580Let me, it's about a five minute video, we won't play the whole thing, but let me play just a clip of that for you.