The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 81 - Why My Generation Loves Socialism

00:00:00.000 Well, I'm sure you've heard quite a bit about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently, probably more

00:00:05.320 than, probably more than you should, probably way too much. You've heard way too much about her. And

00:00:09.700 she is right now riding a wave of, well, she's riding two waves. The first wave is a wave of

00:00:15.400 attention from conservatives, like myself, like the attention that I'm giving her right now as we

00:00:20.360 speak. And that's the way, you'll notice that it goes like this a lot. Like the two sides,

00:00:26.380 conservatives, liberals, they kind of pick out stars for each other because the star on one side

00:00:33.020 is going to be the person that the other side has decided to pay a lot of attention to. So

00:00:36.960 conservatives did that with David Hogg. Now they're doing that with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

00:00:41.080 It's, you know, I'd say 95% easily of the coverage that I've heard about this woman

00:00:47.820 has come from conservatives. The same thing with David Hogg. And, you know, and you could make the

00:00:54.360 argument that Donald Trump is a, is a, probably the prime example of that on, on the right side

00:01:00.860 of the spectrum. But anyway, so she's got that wave. And then she's also got the wave of socialist

00:01:07.340 enthusiasm among the younger generations. And that's why she's caught on because she's a democratic

00:01:13.380 socialist. The fact that young people are so attracted to socialism is, I think, a topic worth

00:01:21.540 inspecting, especially because many people have inspected it and talked about it, analyzed it.

00:01:26.380 And I just, I think that the, uh, the analysis and the conclusions that are drawn are often very,

00:01:31.700 very wrong. Um, now different surveys give you different figures, but they all seem to agree that

00:01:37.820 around half of all millennials at this point find socialism appealing on some level, which is,

00:01:44.980 which is really concerning. That's, I mean, that's a lot. A half is a lot. Okay.

00:01:48.780 And, uh, according to a recent survey that I read, one in 10 millennials believe that Joseph Stalin,

00:01:55.160 who killed 20 million people as a conservative estimate was a hero. One in 10. Again, that is,

00:02:03.680 that's, that's, that's an enormous figure for people to admire Joseph Stalin. And then much higher

00:02:09.700 numbers admire, um, other characters like the killer and terrorist Che Guevara and others. So how do we

00:02:17.100 explain this affinity for socialism among, uh, and communism among America's youth? Well, I don't

00:02:27.800 think it's that hard to understand really. I think the explanation is, is, is really pretty simple. It's,

00:02:32.460 it's kind of a matter of arithmetic. It's, it's sort of a, a mathematical equation and the equation goes

00:02:37.300 like this. Okay. It's failed parenting plus fail, plus failed education system equals socialist.

00:02:44.260 That's how you make socialist. And so let's talk about parents. First of all, it's the, it's the job

00:02:52.500 of a parent to raise their children into independent and self-sufficient adults. And so someone who,

00:03:00.000 a newly minted adult, someone who's just become an adult should, they should want nothing more than to

00:03:07.060 break out of the protective cocoon of childhood and, and go out into the world untethered, free,

00:03:14.660 able to do whatever they want. Energy, ambition, boldness, vision. These are the things, these are

00:03:21.160 the marks of youth, or at least they used to be. They used to be the primary characteristics of youth.

00:03:28.040 But, uh, what we find today is that many young people are, they have no desire to leave the cocoon 0.55

00:03:33.040 at all. They, they, or else they, they desire to leave one cocoon and then promptly enter into another

00:03:38.560 one. So they want to leave the cocoon of the home and their parents, and then they want to go into

00:03:44.460 the cocoon of the welfare state, the nanny state. They want daddy in Washington to supplant daddy at

00:03:55.100 home. That's what they're looking for. And it cannot be overstated just how unnatural this is. And you see

00:04:02.300 it reflected in a lot of, in a lot of ways. Uh, I think one symptom of this is you, you read these,

00:04:08.380 uh, reports now about how young people, teenagers are getting their driver's licenses at later and

00:04:14.580 later ages. They're waiting. I think on average now, what I read is that, well, I don't know if

00:04:20.160 it's on average, but there's a great many, um, teenagers who now they don't get their, they don't

00:04:25.760 get their driver's license until after they turn 18, until after they graduate high school.

00:04:29.220 And there are several reasons for that. One, one is just the kids are at home on, on the internet

00:04:35.840 all the time or playing video games. So they feel like there's no need to drive, but that's related

00:04:41.060 to this lack of, this lack of, of energy and, and boldness. And one, I remember when I was a kid,

00:04:51.800 I wanted nothing more than to get my driver's license just so I could leave. And I didn't even

00:04:56.640 care where I went to. I remember the first, when I got my driver's license, the first place I went to,

00:05:00.440 I went to, uh, I went to Rite Aid pharmacy and I got like a pack of gum or something, but it didn't

00:05:05.280 matter. I, because I, I, I was able to go myself. It's one of the great moments of my life is that I

00:05:11.100 was able to go myself to a store and get something. And that was amazing. And that again, used to be a

00:05:20.400 common thing among young people is that you, you wanted the license. You could get out on the highway,

00:05:25.180 be on your own, have freedom. And, uh, it seems like kids increasingly don't really desire that

00:05:31.040 they're fine being at home with their parents and having no freedom and depending on, I guess they

00:05:35.600 have developed this. They've gotten used to dependence and they have no desire to break free

00:05:41.940 from it. And that is a very concerning sign, I think. And this is what lies at the, at the root of the

00:05:49.500 socialist inclination in the younger generations. It's, it's more than anything. It's a failure of,

00:05:54.040 uh, it's a, it's a, it is a failure of personal formation of moral formation. And I don't think

00:06:00.200 it's fair to blame this entirely on parents. I mean, it is theoretically possible that you could have

00:06:05.840 a kid who turns into a socialist, even though he had great parents, seems unlikely it could happen,

00:06:10.860 but there is a link that's obviously hard to ignore. That's parenting. Then you have the

00:06:16.160 education system and the education system has contributed enormously to this problem. Um,

00:06:21.620 because you only need to have a really basic knowledge of, of, of recent world history.

00:06:30.440 We're not even going back. We're not talking about ancient Rome. Okay. We're not going back

00:06:34.020 hundreds of, of, of years. We're not going back centuries. You simply need to have an understanding

00:06:39.440 understanding of what has happened in the world over the last century. If you have that

00:06:46.960 understanding, then there is no way that socialism and communism would seem appealing to you.

00:06:53.720 These, these regimes murdered 100 million people, if not more over the course of a century,

00:06:59.560 leaving many millions more starving, destitute. Um, the 20th century was the deadliest and most

00:07:07.240 miserable 10 decades in human history by far without any competition for the title, by the way. And,

00:07:15.800 uh, this is not exclusively, but largely thanks to the systems of government that now half of my

00:07:22.120 generation want to establish here. And so that is an incredible amount of ignorance

00:07:30.240 that, that, that you, that you, you, you must place at the feet of the school system.

00:07:36.880 Do you think the average socialist millennial even realizes that when he says Nazi, he's referring to

00:07:43.780 the national, uh, socialist German workers party. Do you think he understands that Nazis are national

00:07:50.380 socialists? I assume he doesn't know. Um, but, but how, how, how, how could that be? How could you

00:07:59.200 make it through 13 years of formal schooling or 17 years, including college, or even more than that,

00:08:05.740 and then come away still ignorant of the fundamental facts of recent history? How is that possible?

00:08:14.060 It's almost impressive. You almost have to be impressed with how ineffective our school system

00:08:19.940 is, because you would think that all you have to do is just throw kids into an environment and have a

00:08:25.180 few books around. And if they're in that environment for 13 to 17 years, they're, they're, they're

00:08:30.400 inevitably going to absorb some information. You think you wouldn't even be able to stop them.

00:08:35.480 But our school system has somehow managed to prevent, uh, kids from developing even the basic

00:08:43.060 fundamental understandings of, of, of history. It is an incredible thing. And again, we're not talking

00:08:49.340 about events from ancient times. We're talking about events that many people walking the earth now today

00:08:54.480 actually lived through and are still living through in places like Venezuela. Yet the Democrat party has

00:09:02.200 managed to tap into this very large supply of supposedly educated people who possess almost

00:09:09.980 no functional knowledge whatsoever. At least they possess no functional knowledge when it comes to

00:09:14.760 history. And I would submit when it comes to many other subjects as well. So with that in mind,

00:09:20.680 how can we call our education system, anything other than a cataclysmic disaster that it has produced

00:09:30.260 ignorance and intellectual laziness and idiocy on a, on a, on an unprecedented scale. And it has somehow

00:09:39.040 managed this feat at precisely the moment when knowledge and information have never been more readily

00:09:45.360 available. This is, this is what's happened. I know people don't like it when I, when I blame the

00:09:53.380 education system. And I always hear from teachers and who say, I, I, I'm, I'm, I care about my kids.

00:09:59.260 I'm educating my kids. I'm not, I know that there are good teachers out there. I don't deny that,

00:10:03.820 but, but, and if you're a good teacher, then good for you because you're, you are working against the tide.

00:10:08.100 You've got everything stacked against you. And at the end of the day, even if you're the best teacher

00:10:13.020 in the world, in most high school environments, you're only going to have your kid for the kids,

00:10:19.360 any, any particular kid, you're only going to have for 45 minutes a day, if not like 45 minutes a week

00:10:24.300 or every couple of, or every, you know, a couple of times every week. And there's, it's, there's only so

00:10:31.520 much you can do in that time. But I think even if you're in the system and you work for the system,

00:10:38.800 you can't deny, I mean, look, look around you at the incredible ignorance that people are displaying.

00:10:47.740 And remember, we are, this is ignorance in a time when there is no excuse for it at all.

00:10:55.000 Because as I've pointed out many times before, we, we all carry around in our pockets

00:11:01.440 all of the knowledge that you could possibly need. It's all here.

00:11:08.220 And then in school, it's supposed to be presented to you in a, in a, in a, in a kind of systematic way

00:11:15.600 that you can absorb and understand. Um, so the, the, the rise of socialism is an enormous failure on

00:11:24.080 the part of schools and the part of parents. The crop of, um, the young crop has been, I guess

00:11:29.060 you could say fertilized by bad education, bad parenting. And now it's really no trouble for

00:11:35.780 socialists to just kind of come along and pick the fruits. And there's no real way to stop them

00:11:41.900 either, unless we make drastic changes to our homes and, and to our schools. So if you're wondering why

00:11:49.260 people are socialists, that's why it's not because the socialist program is really that appealing.

00:11:54.540 It's only appealing. Well, I should say it is appealing to ignorant people who have not been

00:12:00.200 properly formed personally and morally. That's who it's appealing to, but to rational, intelligent

00:12:06.020 people who have been educated and who have been properly formed as human beings. Um, it isn't,

00:12:12.100 it is the most unappealing thing in the world, especially at this point. Now that we have a hundred

00:12:16.080 years of history, we can look back and see all the bloodshed, misery, and death and say, wow. Yeah,

00:12:19.980 no thanks. Alexandria, um, is, is having a wonderful time tapping into that.

00:12:31.760 All right. We're going to cut it off there, but, uh, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening.

00:12:35.540 Everybody have a great weekend and, um, I'll talk to you next week.

00:12:37.860 Bye.

The Matt Walsh Show - August 10, 2018

Ep. 81 - Why My Generation Loves Socialism

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