The Matt Walsh Show - June 27, 2018


Ep. 55 - We Are Sitting On A Powder Keg


Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

156.80469

Word count

3,301

Sentence count

233

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Maxine Waters and Sarah Sanders getting kicked out of a restaurant in Virginia have sparked renewed discussion about the possibility that we could be headed into civil war in the United States. What would our civil war look like and what would it look like?

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 Maxine Waters caused a bit of consternation when she encouraged her supporters to harass 1.00
00:00:06.340 Trump cabinet officials and staff. I wasn't especially consternated myself. Is consternated
00:00:13.440 a word? Yeah, it is. It's one of those words that sounds like it isn't a word, but I think
00:00:18.080 it is a word. I wasn't especially consternated myself because I expect nothing but bile and
00:00:24.680 nonsense to spew from the mouth of one Maxine Waters. Although this, I admit, was several
00:00:32.640 steps beyond the normal bile that you expect from her. And it was truly dangerous. And this
00:00:41.500 story along with or this rant of Waters that along with the thing that prompted it, which
00:00:47.520 of course is Sarah Sanders getting kicked out of a restaurant in Virginia, seems to have 0.99
00:00:53.280 sparked renewed discussion about the possibility that we could be headed into a civil war in
00:00:58.540 this country. Now, I don't personally think that Sarah Sanders being interrupted in the
00:01:04.680 midst of her cheese plate is the kind of thing that would normally spark a civil war. It would 1.00
00:01:12.780 certainly be the weirdest civil war of all time if that's what it was fought over. But I do 0.57
00:01:18.660 think that it's symptomatic. It is just one really faint, in itself, insignificant symptom of
00:01:28.360 something. And there have been many other symptoms. The RNC, and I don't usually say this about the RNC,
00:01:36.760 about really anything the RNC does, but the RNC released a truly devastatingly effective ad
00:01:44.400 yesterday that kind of compiles some of the dangerous rhetoric we've seen from the left
00:01:52.000 recently. Can we roll that ad, actually? Can we roll it? No, we can't roll it. I don't. In fact,
00:01:57.740 I'm not talking to anyone. There's nobody over there. I'm just just my webcam, so I can't roll any ads
00:02:03.380 for you. But after this, you can go on YouTube and watch it yourself. It is an effective ad.
00:02:08.080 And it all kind of shows that something not good is happening in America. And we're headed to—well,
00:02:22.100 I won't say we're headed to a civil war. As I've argued before, I don't see a civil war on the horizon
00:02:29.140 for this one single reason. Our saving grace is that we're far too lazy and apathetic to actually
00:02:38.040 fight a civil war, because that requires effort. You know, that requires you to get off your couch
00:02:44.620 and stop watching Netflix and put down the Twitter for a second. And so I just—you can't fight an
00:02:52.600 actual civil war with memes, is what I'm saying. So that's why I don't think we quite have the
00:02:58.760 constitution, the personal constitution, the spine, the motivation to actually go out and fight a civil
00:03:06.060 war. But we could very well be headed to turmoil of some kind, to anarchy, honestly. We already live
00:03:16.880 in a country of moral anarchy. And I think we could see that anarchy bleed out into the streets. It
00:03:24.040 already has. I think the situation we could be headed to is—we already got kind of a preview of it a few
00:03:33.360 years ago with all those riots that broke out in Ferguson and Baltimore and other places. I think
00:03:40.440 we could see a lot of that happening across the country all at once. Maybe that's what our civil war
00:03:48.160 would look like. It is—in other words, it's clear that we're sitting on a powder keg. And in fact, worse
00:03:55.240 than that, I would say we're sitting on five powder kegs all at once. And if they all blow at the same
00:04:03.900 time, then I don't know what happens, but it won't be good. So let's go through and let's look at the
00:04:09.940 powder kegs that we're—our sort of cultural powder kegs, just so we understand the situation in our
00:04:15.480 culture. The first one is one that I've talked about many times. We have nothing in common
00:04:23.420 with each other in this country. There is no unifying principle, no unifying idea or characteristic.
00:04:33.420 We simply have nothing in common. And that's a big problem in any country. It's especially a problem
00:04:40.580 in our country because our country was founded upon an idea. Our country was founded much more like a
00:04:47.600 religion than a country because it was founded on a doctrine. We have founding doctrines. We have a
00:04:54.080 national dogma. Most countries don't have that. They may have their own doctrines, their own ideas,
00:05:01.260 but those developed over time while the country already existed. For us, it was different. It was
00:05:06.200 like, this is what we believe, and now we're going to form a country around it.
00:05:10.820 So as I've asked in the past, what happens when a large portion of the country no longer believes in
00:05:20.980 that idea? Well, you can't really have a country anymore. Now, if everybody were to abandon those
00:05:29.540 founding ideas and then coalesce around some other idea, well, then you could have a country. It
00:05:36.620 wouldn't be the United States of America anymore. It wouldn't be an American country. It wouldn't be
00:05:41.640 a country that I wanted to live in, but it would be a country, be some sort of country.
00:05:49.080 But for us, we just have no country because we have nothing in common. There's no underlying
00:05:55.280 thing tying us together. We don't even share a common language anymore. We don't share anything.
00:06:03.780 The things that we share are the most materialistic and superficial kinds of things.
00:06:09.360 Like, we all, you know, it's about, you know what it is? We share the same brands.
00:06:16.200 Okay, we all like Apple, and we drink Starbucks, and we watch Marvel movies. That's what we have in
00:06:22.620 common. But that is not enough to make a country. That's enough to make a brand. That's enough to
00:06:31.280 sustain a company. But a country is not supposed to be a company. It's supposed to be a country,
00:06:37.520 and so it requires something deeper to tie everybody together. It's not enough. This is why
00:06:45.680 all this talk about, and people say to me all the time, they say, well, why are you being so divisive?
00:06:52.860 Let's be unifying. Let's talk about what unites us. Okay, great. Well, then tell me what the thing is
00:06:59.280 that unites us, and I'll talk about it. Go ahead. Let me know, because I, what is it? You want me to
00:07:04.180 talk about the things that unite us? Okay, what? Anything? There's nothing. We don't have, so it
00:07:13.680 sounds really nice to say, let's be united. Let's all unify. You have to unify around something. You
00:07:20.860 can't just unify for the sake of unifying, and that requires some kind of commonality. So
00:07:28.080 here's the problem. If I were to open my door and invite a radical leftist in, which I would
00:07:37.280 certainly have no problem doing. We could sit down, we could have a beer and talk, but the issue is that
00:07:43.960 the radical leftist, and there's really no distinction between a radical leftist and a
00:07:49.080 non-radical. There really is no such thing as a non-radical leftist anymore. So the leftists,
00:07:54.340 you know, they live in a world, or this hypothetical leftist who's coming to my house and is sharing a
00:08:01.600 beer, he lives in a world where there is no God, there is no objective morality, the institution of
00:08:09.860 the family is patriarchal and oppressive, marriage doesn't matter or doesn't really exist, honestly.
00:08:17.140 Um, babies aren't people. There is no bio, there is no, the biological differences between men and
00:08:24.940 women don't exist or don't matter. There is no real difference between men and women. The history of 1.00
00:08:30.340 our country is shameful, and we need to apologize for it. America is fundamentally an evil country.
00:08:38.060 The West is fundamentally evil. Okay. And, and on and on and on. That's the world he lives in.
00:08:45.780 Where's the unity? What am I, I have nothing in common with this guy. That does, yes, I can be polite
00:08:52.020 to him. I can be nice. I can be, um, I can be decent towards him. I can even be civil.
00:09:00.840 Most of the time. It's a little bit difficult, but I, but I can even be civil. But if you ask me
00:09:07.500 to unite with him, well, I just, I literally can't do that because there's nothing there. There is a
00:09:13.400 great, vast chasm that separates me from him. And there is simply no way to bridge it. There is no
00:09:21.400 bridge that will connect those two sides. We live in two different universes. We have different ideas
00:09:29.520 about literally everything. There is nothing. There is no, there is nothing at all to unify around.
00:09:38.780 So it's just not helpful. And this is the problem. There are people who, you know, they want to be the
00:09:43.800 good guys. So they want to talk about, oh, let's, let's tell, let's stop with the divisiveness. Let's
00:09:49.980 unite. Okay. Shut up with that for a second and tell me what we're uniting around. And if you can't
00:09:57.260 tell me that, then stop talking about unity and admit that there can't be any. So that's the first
00:10:04.620 problem. The first powder keg. The second powder keg is that many of us were raised in unstable or
00:10:13.880 broken or emotionally chaotic families. And that links to the third powder keg, which is that a great
00:10:23.760 many of us have had no real moral formation to speak of. Traditionally, typically a person is
00:10:31.800 morally formed. And that is, that's a process that needs to happen. It needs to be an active process.
00:10:37.620 You can't just throw somebody out there into the world and say, Hey, figure it out. What you need to
00:10:42.520 do with someone from a very young age is morally form them, is to teach them right from wrong and to
00:10:49.320 how to live as a decent person. So traditionally, where do you look for that? Well, first you look
00:10:55.700 to the family. Well, not first, but together you look to the family, the domestic church,
00:11:01.040 and you also look to the church, the Christ church. Okay. So you look to, you look to religion
00:11:08.840 and you look to the family, to morally form people. Well, there's a big problem here because
00:11:16.160 a great many of us have fled from religion. We've fled from the church and we come from broken
00:11:22.960 families. So where are we going for moral formation? Who is helping us from a young age?
00:11:30.460 Who is helping to shape us into moral and decent people? Nobody. We're just, a lot of people have
00:11:38.020 just been left to kind of figure it out for themselves and they haven't figured it out, unfortunately.
00:11:43.380 And understandably, without the church, without religion, without a family, then where do you
00:11:51.880 look? You end up looking to TV, you look to the media, you look to Hollywood, God forbid,
00:11:55.520 you look to academia. Even worse than that, God forbid, you look to the government and politicians.
00:12:00.520 Well, you're not going to find it anywhere there. All you're going to find is moral corruption,
00:12:03.760 insanity, confusion, manipulation. You're not going to find firm formation. So those are two
00:12:12.540 and three. The fourth powder keg is that we have been desensitized. And a big part of this,
00:12:19.600 without moral formation, that makes us susceptible to the desensitization. And then on top of that,
00:12:26.680 we sit around watching screens all day. We watch TV. We sit in front of screens for like 10 hours a
00:12:34.040 day, without exaggeration, 10 hours a day, watching TV or on our phones, on the internet.
00:12:40.580 And so there's this kind of disconnect, especially on the internet. There is this disconnect where you
00:12:46.260 can engage with other people, but without necessarily recognizing their humanity. And that's
00:12:53.520 why people are so nasty and disgusting to each other online. And I know it's really easy to say,
00:12:58.560 well, that's just the internet. You know, that's not the real world. Yeah, people are horrible to
00:13:05.040 each other online. They say the worst kinds of things. If you look at the comment section under
00:13:10.740 a YouTube video, or if you go on Twitter or Facebook or anywhere really on the internet,
00:13:14.720 you're going to find people treating each other just in the most atrocious ways imaginable.
00:13:21.820 But that's not the real world. That's not how it is in the real world. What are you talking about?
00:13:28.740 Those are people saying those things. What do you mean it's not the real world? It's not a fantasy.
00:13:34.700 Those aren't imaginary characters. The person who's anonymously saying disgusting things online,
00:13:42.520 that's a person saying them. That is a person revealing what is inside their own heart.
00:13:49.160 Now, the fact that that person can then put down the computer or put down the phone and go out into
00:13:56.040 the real world, and maybe if you encountered that person at the supermarket, they would nod
00:14:00.100 nicely to you and say, hey, how are you? Good morning. And walk by you. That doesn't prove that
00:14:06.340 what's happening online isn't real. And the fact that you can have a polite exchange with that person in
00:14:12.940 the real world doesn't prove that they're actually a decent person. No, if they act like a monster
00:14:17.920 online, then they're a monster. The fact that they're polite in the real world just means honestly
00:14:24.000 that they're cowards and that they don't have the guts to be that way when they're facing someone
00:14:30.960 face to face. But how they act online, when they're able to be anonymous,
00:14:36.480 and when they have that protection of the screen, and when they're able to remove, as I said, the kind
00:14:47.620 of separate a person from their humanity and engage with a person as if they have no humanity,
00:14:54.820 you know, how a person acts in that context really tells you everything you need to know
00:15:01.380 about them and what's going on inside their soul. If you have ever gone on a YouTube video
00:15:07.860 and told someone to kill themselves, well, you're just a horrible person. I mean, deep inside,
00:15:14.920 you are just a horrible, terrible person. And I don't care how nice you are at work to your co-workers.
00:15:23.240 You're only nice because you're a wimp and you would never say that to their face. 0.87
00:15:26.480 But that's what's going on inside your heart. And the internet breeds that kind of thing
00:15:31.700 because it desensitizes us, it numbs us. And there's just this kind of filter, this separation
00:15:38.840 where we're able to engage with other people and encounter things that are really horrible,
00:15:47.520 yet it doesn't affect us the same way that it would if we encountered those things in the real world.
00:15:52.880 And so again, there's that, it just has the effect of numbing us. And then you add on top of that
00:15:57.840 media, movies, TV, video games, everything else, where we just typically, we look to the most horrible,
00:16:07.480 the darkest, most violent things for entertainment. And then that continues to numb us even more.
00:16:14.980 And then we get to the fifth powder keg after we've already, you know, we're already living in a
00:16:20.340 country that's not united. We have nothing in common. Many of us come from unstable families.
00:16:25.300 Many of us have had no moral formation. Many of us are desensitized and numb. And then you get to,
00:16:30.980 now we're, now we're very vulnerable for this fifth step, this fifth powder keg, which is
00:16:37.060 the dishonesty and manipulation of the media and politicians and academia,
00:16:43.880 and basically all of our leading institutions, the institutions that are, that have taken on the
00:16:51.160 responsibility of leading the culture. And unfortunately they are all infested with dishonest,
00:16:59.780 manipulative people. And we, most of us are very susceptible and vulnerable to those dishonest and
00:17:08.880 manipulative people because of the last four things that I mentioned. Those are the powder
00:17:14.180 kegs. What happens when they all blow up? I don't know. Like I said, I don't know exactly. 1.00
00:17:21.140 What can we do about it? I mean, how can we avoid this explosion? How can we reclaim America? How,
00:17:29.920 how can we come right up to the precipice of disaster and then quickly swerve and go the opposite
00:17:38.300 direction? I don't know exactly, but I do know one thing. I've been saying this for a long time.
00:17:45.460 I know it's not what people want to hear because what people want is a quick kind of just snap your
00:17:51.720 fingers, switch on a light sort of solution. And I don't have that. And I don't think that solution
00:17:57.320 exists. What I do know is we've gotten to this point as a culture over the course of generations.
00:18:03.780 So what does that tell me? It tells me that if we're going to go the other way and we're
00:18:08.260 going to solve these problems and we're going to have a real country again, where we're actually,
00:18:12.540 where we are meaningfully united around something. Well, it took us generations to get away from that
00:18:18.740 point. It's going to take us generations to get back to it. So you and I, we're not going to see,
00:18:26.460 more than likely, what we're going to see is we're going to see things get worse.
00:18:30.220 We're not going to see the united America. I'm sorry. We just won't. Because you can't wander that
00:18:38.180 far away from it for so long. And then all of a sudden just, you know what, never mind. And then
00:18:43.680 the entire culture says, you know what, let's just change and do this instead. That doesn't happen.
00:18:48.200 I'm sorry. It is a generational struggle, which is going to require selflessness on our part.
00:18:57.400 Where we're saying, you know what, we're in for some rough times, you and I. But we need to start
00:19:04.100 thinking about the future. We need to start thinking about our kids and our grandkids.
00:19:07.160 How can we put them on a trajectory where they don't have to suffer through the same kinds of
00:19:14.620 things? How can we put them on a trajectory where maybe they can live in a real country? Because we
00:19:20.560 don't, and we won't. So that's what we need to work on, is accept the fact that we have kind of made
00:19:29.280 our bed, culturally speaking, and you and I, we're going to have to lay in it. And it's not going to be
00:19:34.920 fun. But I think generally, over the course of generations, maybe we can, maybe there's light,
00:19:41.880 you know, there at the end of that tunnel. And that's going to require what we look at these five
00:19:46.700 steps. Well, we kind of have to do the opposite with our own kids. We have to get married, form
00:19:52.860 families, have kids, and do the opposite of all these things with them. Number one, we have to give
00:19:59.620 them real solid principles and ideas that can motivate them, and also they can unite with others
00:20:09.940 around those ideas. Number two, we have to be a stable family. Number three, we have to morally form
00:20:19.000 our children. Number four, we have to avoid, we have to do what we can to protect them from the
00:20:27.500 desensitization that happens online and when you're obsessed with screens and everything else. And then
00:20:33.240 number five, if we do all that, then maybe they won't be as vulnerable to the manipulation of
00:20:38.400 politicians and the media and academia and so forth. That's the solution. Where there is hope,
00:20:44.180 but it's further down on the horizon. And we have to be willing to do the work to get there.
00:20:50.840 All right. So it's not all doom and gloom. I mean, unfortunately, there's a lot of doom and gloom
00:20:56.240 before you get to the hope. But you know, we just we have to be willing to to suffer through that.
00:21:01.160 Thanks for watching, everybody. Thanks for listening. Godspeed.