The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1163 - The Left Turns Mother's Day Into Anti-Father Campaign
Episode Date: May 15, 2023Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the Left predictably celebrated Mother's Day by insisting that men can also be mothers, which is to say that they celebrated Mother's Day by erasing the existence of moth...ers. Meanwhile, CNN published an article extolling the advantages of single motherhood. Also, thousands of people have lined up to contribute over a million dollars to Daniel Penny, the good samaritan who restrained Jordan Neely. But Neely's family has now come out placing the blame on the subway commuters who physically restrained Neely rather than "offering to help him." Joe Biden says that white supremacy is the greatest threat we face in America. In our Daily Cancellation, another tale of a hostile work environment. This time at the Kelly Clarkson talk show. What do we make of all of these hostile work environment claims? Ep.1163 - - - Click here to join the member exclusive portion of my show: https://utm.io/ueSEm - - - DailyWire+: Become a DailyWire+ member to gain access to movies, shows, documentaries, and more: https://bit.ly/3JR6n6d Pre-order your Jeremy's Chocolate here: https://bit.ly/3EQeVag Shop all Jeremy’s Razors products here: https://bit.ly/3xuFD43 Represent the Sweet Baby Gang by shopping my merch here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj - - - Today’s Sponsors: PureTalk - Switch to PureTalk and get a FREE 5G Samsung Galaxy phone! https://bit.ly/42PmqaX Innovation Refunds - Learn more about Innovation Refunds at https://bit.ly/3LEwYnO. ZipRecruiter - Rated #1 Hiring Site. Try ZipRecruiter for FREE! ZipRecruiter.com/WALSH - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Rv1VeF Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3KZC3oA Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eBKjiA Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RQp4rs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Today, the Matt Wall Show, the left predictably celebrated Mother's Day by insisting that men can also be mothers, which is to say that they celebrated Mother's Day by erasing the existence of mothers. Meanwhile, CNN published an article extolling the advantages, advantages, they say, of single motherhood. Also, thousands of people have lined up to contribute over a million dollars to Daniel Penny, the Good Samaritan who restrained Jordan Neely on the New York subway. But Neely's family has come out now placing the blame on the subway commuters who physically restrained Neely rather than, quote, offering to help him.
Joe Biden says that white supremacy is the greatest threat we face in America.
In our daily cancellation, another tale of a hostile work environment this time at the Kelly Clarkson
talk show. What do we make of all these hostile work environment claims? We'll talk about all
that and more today on Matt Wall Street. The first step in growing up and being a real man is getting
off your parents' phone plan. Getting your own cell phone plan gives you a sense of independence
and responsibility. It's a step towards becoming more self-sufficient. By paying for your
own finances, you learn how to budget and manage your money. There are a ton of cell phone providers
out there. Unfortunately, most of them want to lock you into horrific contracts and we'll tack on
hidden fees at any chance they get. That's why I'm a huge fan of Pure Talk. There are no contracts,
no hassle. You can cancel at any time. Pure Talk is also giving you the free 5G Samsung Galaxy
phone whenever you sign up for the $55 per month unlimited plan plus hotspot today. They use the
same nationwide network as major carriers. So you get the same coverage. Everything is exactly the
same as far as you're concerned. But you get a much better service with Pure Talk. It's so easy to
switch over. You can make the switch. Keep your cell phone, keep your phone number, and do it very
quickly. With their U.S. customer service team, you can make the switch in as little as 10 minutes.
Pure Talk is so sure you're going to love your service. They're backing it up with a 100%
money-back guarantee. You don't see that everywhere. So go to PureTalk.com, enter promo code
Walsh to save 50% off their first month. That's PureTalk.com. Promocode Walsh. Pure Talk is
simply smarter wireless. Yesterday was, of course, Mother's Day, a holiday that was first celebrated in
1907 and declared a national holiday seven years later.
Concept was pretty simple at the beginning.
Mothers play a very important role in human society.
In fact, we can't have a society without mothers.
And it makes sense then to set aside a day celebrating and recognizing this reality,
even if it did become very quickly an overly commercialized hallmark kind of holiday.
That was always inevitable.
And in spite of it, there was value to the tradition.
But these days, even our commercialized hallmark holiday,
holidays, which are, you know, basically all of them at this point, can't be allowed to remain
simple and straightforward. Everything must be made complicated. Everything gets sucked up into the funnel
cloud of leftism and tossed back out, five miles away, shattered and broken. Or perhaps it would be
better to make, you know, Wizard of Oz reference here and say that the leftism tornado
picks everything up and drops it off in the land of Oz, where everything is bizarre and uncanny
and makes no sense at all.
In the case of Mother's Day, as expected,
many of the attempts to complicate and confuse the matter
came from the LGBT camp.
Now, I probably only need to give one representative example
to make the point.
So here's a trans activist on TikTok
trying to make the concept of Mother's Day
seem somehow confusing
and also quite upsetting to him.
Listen.
Okay, so Mother's Day is tomorrow,
and this is the second day that's rolling around.
There's two different days.
in the year that I question. There's Mother's Day and there's Father's Day. As a trans person,
as a trans woman, which one do I celebrate? Father's Day rolled around. I don't feel like a father.
Mother's day's tomorrow. I feel like a mom, but who celebrates me? It's not a situation that
pity me or anything. I just genuinely want to know. Is there other people out there that
you don't know which one you fall under.
Are you a mom?
Are you a dad?
Where's parents' day?
Why can't we just have a parent's day?
Like you're a parent, that's worth celebrating.
Why does it have to be one or the other?
It actually bothers me a lot.
I didn't think about that until today.
I don't know.
Who celebrates me?
That should be engraved on the tombstone of the trans movement when this is all said.
Who celebrates me? What about me? Well, the answer is everybody celebrates you all the time, relentlessly.
You have entire months set aside to celebrate you. So can you leave Mother's Day alone? Can that just be its own thing?
Of course not. No effort is being made here at all, either, by the way. Of course, even if he took the drugs and his voice changed and he got the surgeries and all the rest of it, he would still be a man.
but he represents the increasingly common trend
where there is just no effort, no attempt at all
to actually transform into a woman.
He's just a dude who grew his hair out and dyed it green.
But even if he had his hair up in a hat or something
so you couldn't see it,
he would look and sound exactly like a middle-aged dad
that you might see in the stands
at a Little League baseball game or something.
And in some ways, the people who transition
just by throwing on a wig or dyeing their hair
and doing nothing else, are tacitly admitting that they are stuck with the sex they were born with.
It's like, what's the point of doing all that other stuff? It's not going to change anything.
They're also, I imagine, leaving themselves an escape hatch for when they do change their minds.
But even so, he's not sure which day between Mother's Day and Father's Day he should celebrate.
Well, here, let me help you out, sir.
Which one do you celebrate? Well, you celebrate Father's Day, assuming you have kids. God forbid.
Your kids have a mom and a dad. They don't have two moms.
You say you feel like a mom, but the only feelings you've ever had in your life are your own feelings.
You can't say you feel like a mom because you have no idea how moms feel since you're not one.
You can only feel like yourself.
So whatever feelings you're having, those are the feelings that you have.
You can only have the feelings that you yourself have.
You have only felt like you.
You've never felt like anybody else.
which means that your feelings cannot prove that you're something other than what you physically actually are.
It's more that your physical body proves that your feelings are a man's feelings because you're a man having those feelings.
How do I know that you have a man's feelings? Well, because you're a man, and this is what you're feeling.
The feelings that incline you towards claiming that you're a woman and the feelings that would drive you to the point where you would make your hair look like that, those may not be normal feelings.
They certainly aren't feelings that I can relate to, but they are your feelings, and you are a man, so they are the feelings of a man.
I don't know how else I can, I don't know what else they need to say to make this clear.
The feelings of a man, the feelings not of all man, thankfully, but yours, and you are a man.
It wasn't just gender-confused men, though, trying to co-opt the holiday, however.
The media also took the opportunity to heap special praise on their second favorite kind of mother.
Their most favorite are people like that, dads who pretend to be mothers.
That's their favorite kind of mom.
In other words, their favorite kind of mom is someone who's not a mom.
But coming in at a close second are single moms of either sex.
To commemorate today, CNN published an article which, according to their caption on Twitter,
purports to show that, quote,
advantages of being raised by a single mother outweigh expectations and outlast childhood embarrassment.
advantages. This is not simply an argument that single mothers can make the most of their situation
and mitigate the harm that broken homes do to children ensuring that they have a good chance
of living happy and successful lives. If that was the argument, who could disagree? I mean,
nobody doubts that children can live good lives in spite of being raised by single moms.
Sure, they can. But that's not the argument the author here makes. The argument is, again, that single
motherhood is in some sense ideal. There are advantages to it. Let's go through some of this article.
Headline, let us now praise single moms, as if we don't do that all the time already. Because like I said,
anytime a politician brings up moms, as a politician going through the constituents and all that,
the first kind of mom that will be mentioned, and usually the only kind will be, and single mothers,
helping to make America great.
So it says, quote,
roughly 24 million or one-third of all-American children under age 18
are living with an unmarried parent,
according to a 2018 Pew Research Center analysis
of U.S. Census Bureau data.
And 81% of those single-parent homes are headed by a mom.
This has been a growing trend since the late 1960s.
The number of kids being raised by mostly single moms
has more than doubled between 1968 and 2017.
So far, this is all true, and it's catastrophic.
We've been running this social experiment for decades to see if fathers are expendable for children individually and society generally.
And we've gotten an answer to that question.
The answer is the one that the moderately perceptive people decades ago already knew and warned about.
But few listened.
The answer is no.
Every child has a mother and a father, which means that they need a mother and a father.
They may get by with only one parent, just as plenty of people who have been forced to get by with only one leg.
But it's not ideal.
It's not the surest path to fulfillment and happiness.
The author seems to admit this fact early on, detailing his own trials and tribulations growing up in a single mom household.
Then he tells us this, quote,
there's been a lot of research over the decades that has shown children of single parent households
report more family distress and conflict and live at a lower socioeconomic status compared to those growing
up in two-parent households. Two-parent families usually have more income and are generally able
to provide more emotional resources to children. That's also a reflection of how little the
United States in general does to support working mothers with parental paid leave and access to
more health services and quality education. Well, the first part of that is mostly right. There's a
A ton of research measuring the effect of divorce or unmarried parenthood on kids, and the
research almost always turns up the same results. Kids without fathers in the home are worse
off in nearly every way. They're far more likely to be poor, far more likely to drop out of school,
more likely to do drugs, to commit crime, to go to prison, to commit suicide, to end up homeless,
and on and on. The social experiment has given us our answer, time and time and time.
again. The answer is that kids who are conceived by one mom and one dad, which is all kids who have
ever lived in history, or will ever live, need a mom and a dad. It's no different than saying
that kids need shelter and clean water. Yes, some can survive without it. Many will not.
But many will. That doesn't change the need. You can deprive someone of what they need,
and they may press on and thrive in spite of that deprivation, but the need is still there.
This, again, is not the argument that the author is making, though. Continuing, a 2017 study,
however, looked at the long-term effects of single-parenthood on kids and found that it had nearly
no impact on their general life satisfaction. The authors found no evidence supporting the
widely held notion from popular science that boys are more affected than girls by the absence of
their fathers. What mattered most in terms of thriving, they concluded was the quality and strength
of the relationship between children and parents. A separate 10-year study on single parenting
that collected data from 40,000 households in the UK came to a similar conclusion last year.
Quote, there is no evidence of a negative impact of living in a single-parent household on children's
well-being with regard to self-reported life satisfaction, quality of peer relationships,
or positivity about family life, the report states. Children who are living or have lived in a single-parent
families score as highly or higher against each measure of well-being than those who have always
lived in two-parent families.
Ah, okay.
So every objectively measurable indicator, things like crime rates, drop-out rates, grades in schools,
you know, prison, a number of people in prison, suicides, homelessness, like, we can
objectively measure all of that without, and it doesn't involve a survey.
Okay, we don't have to set a survey out and ask, are you homeless?
Are you in prison? We can count that.
So by all of those measures, we clearly see that fathers are indispensable and kids who grow up without them generally fair worse.
But this is all a moot point somehow, because if you ask people about their general, quote, life satisfaction, most people, regardless of their upbringing, will say that they are satisfied.
But what is that supposed to prove?
All it proves is what people are likely to say when you ask them about their satisfaction.
The other thing is that people, just like the feelings of a person, and when someone says,
I feel like a woman, well, you've only ever had your own feelings.
You don't have anything compared it to.
So you've only ever lived your life.
You can't really compare it to some other hypothetical life you could have lived and then say,
which one is, are you more satisfied with?
So all we learn from these satisfaction surveys is that Americans are very likely to say that they're satisfied with the way they're living.
Which you could interpret that as complacency.
You know, people are, we're a complacent culture.
Or it's just an indication that people, you know, on a positive end of it, people try to be positive and optimistic and, you know, that's good.
Which is why I'm willing to bet that if you ask, let's say, child abuse survivors about the,
their life satisfaction. You know, you go to an adult who was abused as a child 25 years ago,
many of them will say that they're satisfied with their lives. Does that prove that child abuse
is the best way to achieve life satisfaction or that it doesn't matter whether a child is abused
or not? I recently watched a pretty remarkable video about a person who had been horrifically
burned over a third of his body and yet still seems to be happy and well adjusted. We see these
kind of stories all the time about people that suffered immensely and still have managed to keep a
positive outlook on life, which is great and admirable. Does that mean that the best way to
make someone happy is to throw them into a fire? No, obviously not. The question is what things are
likely to directly lead someone to happiness and what things can a person be happy in spite of?
So it's a because of, in spite of situation.
The answer to that latter question is almost anything.
People can be happy in spite of almost anything.
But almost anything is certainly not the answer to the first question.
What things are most likely to cause happiness or lead you directly to happiness?
The answer to that is not almost anything.
Now, you may be thinking there must be more to this article.
There must be more to the argument the article is supposed to present, but there isn't.
The author leaps from these statements to the conclusion that there are actual advantages to being raised by a single mom.
And we should especially celebrate single moms because of it.
He ends with this note, quote, let us now praise single mothers, all of them, the weird ones, the struggling ones, the driven ones who choose to parent alone, the widowed who didn't, the brave ones who divorced for their well-being of their kids and or themselves.
They're all raising about 19 million children right now, and they need all the support that they can get.
Well, the fact that they need all this support, you know, all the support they can get is actually pretty good evidence that single mom households are far less than ideal.
I can tell you that in my house, two parent household, six children, we need very little help from the outside world.
Okay, we don't need all the help we can get.
All we really need is for the outside world, the culture, to stop trying to actively sabotage.
us. That's all I'm asking for. Like, leave us alone and let us parent our own kids.
USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance.
With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a
quote at USAA.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. Single moms need much more support because they
aren't getting it from the fathers of their children, which is where the support is supposed to
come from, which isn't to say, by the way, that single moms are all, you know, the victims of
deadbeats who ran out on them. Far from it. In fact, one of the reasons why we should not be
throwing parades for single moms is that many of them choose to be this way. They choose to be
single moms. The majority of divorces are initiated by women, and the majority of divorces
cite things like money and irreconcilable differences, quote unquote, as the reason for the
split. So these are not all or even mostly women who had to flee from horribly abusive men.
In many cases, these are women who chose single motherhood as a lifestyle.
Believing that the father of their children is expendable. It's like an ego trip.
Well, I can do both. Wow, we don't need you. Our kids don't need you. And this is a message that society
seeks to reinforce. That's why they really want us to celebrate single motherhood. The left sees stable two-parent
households as an existential threat to their agenda, which they are. Children from those kinds of
households are going to be less vulnerable, less susceptible to the push and pull of the greater
culture, not immune from it, obviously, but less susceptible. And that's the problem the left has
with two parent households. They don't want us raising and caring for our own kids. They don't
want the home to be a fortress protecting against insidious societal influences. They want
our kids vulnerable, exposed. And that's why they present single motherhood as an ideal. It is ideal
to them and their agenda. But just forget to mention that part. Now let's get to our five
headlines. You've seen the CEO of Innovation Refunds and GetRFunds.com on TV explaining how they've
helped so many small businesses with their ERC tax refunds. They've completed thousands of returns
for different kinds of businesses. Innovation Refunds has hundreds of five-star trust pilot and Google
reviews and is certified with the Better Business Bureau. In around eight minutes, you can easily
start the process on getrefonds.com, and you could be on your way to receiving up to $26,000
per employee. The ERC tax credit is a refund of your already paid taxes. It's not a loan.
It's designed to let the business owners direct the refund money into anything the business needs
to grow. That's the money that you can use to improve your business, however you see fit.
But you've got to go to getrefonds.com to start the process.
There's no upfront charge.
They don't get paid unless you get paid.
Innovation refunds.
It's already helped clients claim over $5 billion in payroll tax refunds through the ERC,
and they may be able to help your business also.
Go to getrefonds.com or download the app from the app store today.
That's getrefunds.com today.
Beginning with this report from the Daily Wire, it says,
illegal defense fundraiser for Marine veteran Daniel Penny continues to skyrocket,
hitting the million dollar mark on Saturday.
And now it's, of course, over a million dollars.
Penny 24 was charged on Friday with manslaughter
and the death of the 30-year-old Jordan Neely
by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Video footage showed the Marine veteran putting Jordan Neely
in a fatal choke hold after witnesses say Neely
was threatening passengers on a New York City subway.
Penny's attorney started a give-Sengo fundraiser
to help him with his legal defense
and has nearly 25,000 donations
totaling over a million dollars
as of Saturday afternoon.
Many of the donations come from anonymous donors, giving small amounts, comments,
praising the Marine for his actions on the subway and expressing disbelief that he was charged
with the crime, flooded the fundraising platform.
One of the comments says, I'm a 76-year-old male, a wounded combat veteran of Vietnam War,
also retired sergeant from the NYPD, I just can't believe how this country has become.
Another one says, when somebody steps in a defense against a terrifying, ranting bully,
that somebody should be applauded and not persecuted.
We need more Daniel Pennies in this world.
So a million dollars they've raised for Daniel Penny,
and he's going to need all that and more to defend him
against this outrageous persecution.
I'm not going to call it a prosecution because this is persecution.
He's being singled out, made an example of,
for political reasons, for ideological reasons,
and because the DA is
coutowing to public pressure.
But keep in mind that when this incident first happened,
the police did an investigation,
they talked to witnesses,
they reviewed footage and camera footage
and all the rest of it,
they interrogated Daniel Pennyby,
and then they left, let him go without pressing charges.
And by all indications, that's what it was going to be.
until this became a viral thing and the protest started and you had high-ranking Democrats,
very prominent people like Alexander Caso-Cortez, demanding his head on a platter.
And so that's what they're going to get.
This is, it's saying quite a lot because we get examples of this.
We get new examples every year, but this is one of the most outrageous miscarriages of justice
I've ever seen.
to my mind this is worse than the written house and him being prosecuted which he never should have been
this is worse than chauvin who also never should have been prosecuted as bad as those are
this one is even worse when you look at the basic facts of the case like there is there is no
gray area here at all okay you can't even try to hang your hat on something like
with Writtenhouse and well, you shouldn't have been there to begin with.
You know, he drove in, he drove in from another county or another state.
He crossed state lines.
Not that that matters or that made a difference.
Although we can say that, you know, kids shouldn't have gone to a, if it was my own kid,
it was my own son, I would say, you're not going there.
That doesn't mean that he sacrificed and forfeited his right to self-defense when he's being
pursued by a violent gun-toating mob as he was.
But my point is that in this case, you don't even have that.
Daniel Penny was just on the subway with all the other riders.
He was going to work or doing it.
He's commuting.
It was Jordan Neely who decided to get onto the subway train and instigate this incident.
And we know from witness reports that he absolutely was making physical threats.
Like, we know two things about him.
We know that he was making physical threats saying that he was going to hurt people on
the train and that he's willing to go to jail.
So without, although he did say reportedly, I'm going to hurt, you know, he did explicitly
threaten physical harm, even if he didn't, when you've got someone ranting that they're
ready to go to jail, there's really only one way to interpret that.
You interpret that as, oh, they're about to do something that would get a person sent to
jail.
That alone is a physical threat.
It's just icing on the cake that he also explicitly threatened physical harm.
So we know that fact.
We know that he threatened physical harm.
We also know from his history that he followed through many times in the past.
So when he threatens physical harm, there is very good reason to believe that he means it.
This is someone who assaulted old ladies.
He tried to kidnap a seven or eight-year-old child, along with 40.
plus other offenses that he was arrested for and then let back out.
Oh, but Daniel Penny wouldn't have known about those other cases.
Well, how do you know that?
First of all.
How do you know he didn't know about any of this?
This person was well known on the subway system.
That's why there are Reddit posts going back a decade about this guy.
So we know that he's a known entity and has been on the subway system for years.
And yet you hear people on the left simply assume.
He didn't know any of that.
No, the safest assumption is that he probably did know some of that
because apparently most people, or rather many people
who take the New York City subway system knew about this guy
and the kinds of things that he did in the past.
If Daniel Penny didn't know it, still doesn't matter.
Because then all he would know is that there's this crazy guy on the subway
and he's ranting and raving and he's threatening people.
and it is not our legal responsibility or our moral responsibility to just sit there and wait for someone to make good on the threat.
Like if somebody comes up to you on the street and says, I'm going to shoot you in the head, you have every legal and moral right to pull out your gun if you have one and shoot him first.
Because he just said he was going to do it. He made a physical threat against your life.
and to say that you wouldn't have the right to react that way
is to say that your responsibility
is to wait until you're actually shot in the head
before you respond. But by then, of course, it's too late.
So what you're really saying is that
we have a responsibility to lay down
and allow ourselves to be assaulted and killed.
Which is actually the position that many on the left are taking
in response. In fact, I had someone tweet at me yesterday
I was talking about the explicit threats that Neely was making.
And somebody said, well, they're just words.
Just words.
And this is coming from the kind of person that I guarantee you would just words.
Yeah, but if this was someone on somebody train misgendering someone,
saying things that are considered transphobic, quote unquote,
well, I guarantee you this guy, this guy on Twitter or any left.
this, they would not be waving it away by saying, it's just words. These are the people who accuse
us of being terrorists because of the words that we say. These are the people that accuse us of
committing genocide by saying words. They tell us that simply by saying words, you can actively
kill people. You can commit genocide with language. And that very same crowd is now saying,
about Jordan Neely.
Oh, they're just words.
To be expected, of course.
These people have no integrity.
And this has nothing to do with the facts of the case.
They don't care about the facts of the case.
All they care about is that Jordan Ely was black and Daniel Penny is white.
That's the only detail that matters to them.
That's it.
Nothing else matters.
And so they want his head.
They want him, as an example, another trophy of racial justice.
This is a, this is, they want a trophy for racial justice.
Another head they can mount on the wall.
And they've chosen Daniel Penny.
And at the same time, in the process, they have only further demoralized the public and made people all, even more hesitant to step up and do the right thing and defend themselves and defend their community, defend innocent people.
This Daniel, already most people had gotten to the point where they're not going to step in no matter what, because it's not,
worth the risk, and they know that if it comes to violence, that they're going to get thrown
to the bus immediately. So it was already the case. And now you've got some of the stragglers who
remained, some of the holdouts who still may have been willing to step in and do the right
thing in a situation like this. Many of those people are now going to throw up their hands and
say, never mind. I don't want to be the next Daniel Penny. And that's part of the point as well,
obviously. It's about demoralizing people.
Jordan Ely's family, of course, they've been all over the news and cameras and they have lawyers and everything else.
Here's the family lawyer of Jordan Ely's family saying what he thinks and what the family thinks ought to have happened that day.
No one on that train asked Jordan, what's wrong?
How can I help you?
He was choked to death instead.
So for everybody saying, I've been on the train and I've been afraid before.
and I can't tell you what I would have done in that situation,
I'm going to tell you, ask how you can help.
Please, don't attack, don't choke, don't kill,
don't take someone's life,
don't take someone's loved one from them
because they're in a bad place.
No one on that train said,
you started out by saying I'm hungry.
I need food.
I'm done with it.
I don't know where to get food.
I don't care if I die.
I don't care if I go to jail.
I'm just done.
No one said, here you are, sir.
Let me meet your need or help you in a situation or give a word of encouragement.
That's not what happened on that train.
Oh, yeah, he's just hungry.
He needed food, that's all.
Was that the idea when he was punching old ladies, assaulting random people, trying to kidnap a child?
Was that he was looking for food?
Is that it?
And another point about that, by the way, before we get to this, but just emphasize once more,
the reason to bring up this guy's rap sheet is because, as we covered, there's a very good chance that the people that were on that subway
and the multiple people that were involved, it wasn't just Daniel Penny, there were three men were involved in restraining him,
very good chance that they knew something about that history because this guy was a known entity.
But the other point, too, is that the over-the-top mourning,
like even if his death was completely unjustifiable,
if it was an unjustified, if he was straight up murdered in an unjustified way,
which isn't what happened, but if it was,
the over-the-top mourning and crying about it still wouldn't make any sense
because this guy is a scumbach.
He tried to kidnap a child.
I'll tell you right now, people who assault old ladies and try to kidnap children,
I don't care if you live or die.
I don't.
I'm not going to cry over that.
No, like, if, if video exists of him dragging a seven-year-old girl down the,
down the street trying to kidnap her, and, and then you, all you had was that video.
You had no other context.
And I told, you saw that video.
And then I told you afterwards, oh, yeah, you know, that guy was, was killed on a subway train a few years later.
How would you react?
He would say, okay, it was a guy's absolute scum.
What do you want me to fall down in tears over it?
If there was a video of him punching a 67-year-old woman in the head, sending her to the hospital, you had no other context.
And then I told you that, you know, shortly after this video was taken, this guy died.
He went on a train, started threatening people, and he ended up dying.
Would anyone break down?
Oh, no, him?
Not him.
No, everyone would say, well, it's unfortunate he chose to live his life that way, but this is a terrible person.
And the community's better off without him.
Like, everyone is safer without him.
Let me tell you something.
The community, this community pretending to mourn, you are better off without this guy.
You're all safer now because he's gone.
That's the fact.
That alone, on its own, does not justify anything, any kind of violence somebody might have perpetrated against him,
which is why we don't need those facts in order to justify the way people responded on the train.
They were just responding in the moment, and that's all we need to justify it.
So that's not my point.
my point is the over-the-top weeping and wailing not jordan nearly no what are we going to do without
this guy who kidnaps children and assaults old ladies thousands of people die every single day and we don't
talk about almost any of them you can see little blurbs little news reports that come up here and there
if someone dies this or that and we all continue living our lives because it's sad it's always
death is sad but it's just like part of life but then we choose
then we choose specific people of all the death and suffering in the world.
We single out certain people and we choose them.
And we say, these are the ones we are going to especially mourn.
How does Jordan Neely make the cut for that?
Now, to the lawyer's claim that we should,
they should, someone should have gone up to him and offered to help him.
No, no.
When you've got someone, a man making threats of violence, no, the last thing that you want to do is go up and, let's talk through this together.
That'd be a very stupid thing to do.
You shouldn't do that.
And it's not your responsibility.
You know who had a responsibility to help Jordan Neely?
And I wish that he did get the help that he needed.
I wish you got it years ago before he became a, you know, a serial criminal.
But do you know who should have helped?
helped him, his family. And I am really sick and tired of these families coming out after the fact.
Like you left your loved one to live on the street, this psychotic, violent criminal.
You just left him on the street for a decade. And now you want to come back around and pretend that
you're upset and tell the rest of us that we should have helped him. He's your family member.
Where the hell were you?
That's what I'm asked the family of Jordan Neely now with your lawyer at the press conference.
Where were you for the last 10 years?
He's your loved one.
What the hell did you do for him?
You didn't do anything.
You did nothing.
That's the case for almost all these BLM martyrs that we get.
The families come out afterwards.
Oh, my dear Lord, my dear sweet boy.
Where were you?
You were nowhere.
You didn't care about him.
And now because you see the dollar signs, you want to cash in on his death, that's all this.
is. I know, I know that we're supposed to speak and hushed in reverent tones about the families.
Oh, the poor families. How about holding families accountable? Take care of your own.
It's your responsibility, family, your responsibility. Take care of your own. It's not up to the
rest of us. You put the rest of us in impossible situation. By not taking care of your own,
you put the rest of us. You inflict this person on the rest of us. And then you
dare to question after the fact? When we are forced to do things, we don't want to do.
Daniel Penny didn't go to work that day or get on the train that day, wanting to get into a
physical altercation. He's not the one who instigated it. He's just sitting there. He wants to
get from point A to point B. It's the only reason he's there. Jordan Neely put him in a situation
where he had to make a choice. And you, as the family, put Daniel Penny in the same situation
by not taking care of your own. Didn't take care of him. Now you want to cash in and make tens of
millions of dollars, and it will probably work too, won't it?
that will heal. That's the only way to heal now. Completely abandon your own family members,
and then, and then, well, I need, I need to heal. It's disgusting. It really disgust me.
All right. Anyway, here's one from Yahoo News. Oh, one a second. Actually, I'm skipping ahead.
We need to get to that one yet. Starting with the Daily Wire report. President Joe Biden ginned up
racial tensions at the graduate, because we need more of those, at the graduation ceremony for
Harvard University on Saturday, claiming that America's greatest threat comes in the form of
white supremacy. Biden gave the commencement an address for the historically black college
and university at Capitol One Arena in Washington, D.C. And we have a nice little clip of that.
Let's check it out.
Stand up against the poison of white supremacy as I did my inaugural address to a single out
as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland is white supremacy.
And I'm not saying this because I'm at a black HPCU.
I say wherever I go.
Greatest threat to the homeland is white supremacy, he says.
Greatest threat.
It's not guys like Jordan Ely that are walking around in our cities and randomly assaulting and killing people.
I mean, that's happening every single day.
Every single day in this country.
there are people being randomly killed and assaulted and accosted as they're walking down the street or sitting on trains or doing anything else.
Every single day, every day there are gas station clerks that end up trembling on their knees on the ground begging for their lives when a gun-toting criminal comes in to rob them.
That happens every day also.
Every day there are people sitting at stoplights.
they look over, they got a gun stuffed in their face,
and they're getting dragged by their own car
and possibly killed in the process.
By some nihilistic, empty person,
no regard for human life at all,
and will happily kill you over a few dollars
or a car or something,
that's happening every single day.
And in almost none of those cases,
are they white supremacists
who are perpetrating these crimes?
almost none of them.
I mean, it's so rare that a white supremacist does something like this,
that any time every single day, if you hear a story about someone being randomly shot or killed,
you could just immediately assume.
You can make some assumptions about the perpetrator,
and none of them should be that he's a white supremacist.
But Biden says they're the greatest threat.
DHS Secretary Mayorkas was interviewed shortly after the speech,
and he concurred.
The president yesterday at his commencement address for the Howard University graduates called white supremacy the major domestic terror threat in this country.
Is that correct?
It tragically is, you know, in the terrorism context, domestic violent extremism is our greatest threat right now.
individuals are driven to violence because of ideologies of hate,
anti-government sentiments, false narratives, personal grievances, and like.
And regrettably, we have seen a rise in white supremacy.
Anti-government sentiments, yeah, those, because that's, that's the thing that they're really worried about.
That's the kind of quiet part out loud aspect of this, where they're really worried about,
are those anti-government sentiments, and they want to tie quote-to-quote anti-government sentiment
to white supremacy. So if you have anti-wide, if you have anti-government sentiments, then you're a
white supremacist, which makes most of us white supremacists, because there are a lot of reasons
to have anti-government sentiments about this particular government. And when I say this
government, I mean the one that we've had for a long time. A lot of reasons to have a negative
sentiments about the powers that be, which makes you a white supremacist.
Unless, of course, your anti-government sentiment is focused entirely on local police departments
who you say should be defunded and wiped out so that you can carry on committing all the crimes
you want.
They're not worried about that kind of anti-government sentiment.
So the anti-government sentiment that drives mobs of people to invade a police station in
Minneapolis, for example, and burn it to the ground, okay?
Or drives people to set federal courthouses on fire?
They're not worried about those anti-government sentiments.
Those are okay.
Those are understandable.
Those are just people who are hungry and want some bread, and this is the only way they know how to do it.
If your anti-government, it's really, if your anti-government sentiments are more intelligent
than that and more well considered and thought out than it's white supremacy, according to them.
There's no, you know, there's no factual basis to any of this, of course.
There's no way to justify any of it.
The claim that white supremacy is the thing that we're...
Like, it is...
For anyone who is worried about this, you're worried about the rise of white supremacy.
I can tell you right now, you are eventually going to die.
And depending on where you live, there's a not insignificant chance that you will be killed one of these days.
But fear not.
It is not going to be a white supremacist who does it.
And I could just say that to you right now.
Anyone who happens to be listening to me saying these words right now,
it is nearly certain that you will never be physically attacked by a white supremacist.
It is not nearly certain that you'll never be physically attacked or killed at all.
But it won't be a white supremacist.
All right, one other, we're going to skip ahead a little bit.
Went slightly long on the first story, I think.
So I did want to mention this, though.
It would behoove me to mention it.
I think that I should because I give Pope Francis a hard time, rightly so.
But this I did appreciate this from the BBC.
Pope Francis has suggested that people who choose to have pets over children are acting selfishly.
The Pope's comments came as he was discussing parenthood during a general audience at the Vatican in Rome.
Today we see a form of selfishness, he told the audience.
We see that some people do not want to have a child.
Sometimes they have one and that's it.
but they have dogs and cats to take the place of children.
This may make people laugh, but it is the reality.
The practice is a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and diminishes us,
takes away our humanity.
It is not often that I get to agree with Pope Francis when he is pontificating about this and that subject.
On this one thing, though, I certainly do agree.
And it's not, because, as you know, and I'm not claiming the Pope listens to my podcast,
Maybe he does.
But I've been on this theme for a long time.
And it's not that there's anything wrong with getting a pet, having a cat or dog in the house.
It's that prioritizing being a pet owner over having children.
That's the problem.
Or seeing pet ownership as a form of parenthood in and of itself when it certainly is not is the problem.
And that is selfishness.
So the drive to try to replace kind of the parental instinct, the desire to have kids,
trying to replace that with pet ownership,
trying to fill that void with pet ownership,
is driven by selfishness.
And the reason is that having a pet is, it's easier.
It doesn't demand nearly as much of you.
And pet ownership can become this very, like, self-centered relationship.
where you like having the pet around because of how the pet makes you feel, right?
Like you, it's a cute little pet and you get to pet the dog when you come home from work
and the dog's always excited to see you and animals are like a lot more predictable in that way.
And it becomes, and their needs are much more simple.
And they're, especially if you have a dog, they're like obsessed with you
and they're always there to make you feel better all the time.
human beings are not quite like that because human beings are much more complicated and and require
much more of us having raising a child requires much more of us your child is not a little panting dog
who who's you know as long as you keep them fed they're happy now there's there's much more
greater joy to be found in parenthood but you do you have to find it you know you have to work for
it and you have to earn it in a lot of ways. And that's why people don't like it. So put one in the
wind column for Pope Francis there. That's pretty big news there. Let's get to the comment section.
When you're out there looking for a job, one of the hardest things to do is to figure out how to
stand out in a positive way too, because you can stand out in ways that would not be so great.
Standing out could be tough, especially when you're looking for a job or when you're hiring,
looking to find that application that really stands out. And that's why, you're you're
you need to check out ZipRecruiter.
ZipRecruiter helps you find the most qualified people
for your roles fast.
Right now, you can try ZipRecruiter for free
at ZipRecruiter.com slash Walsh.
ZipRecruiter's matching technology helps you find
the most qualified candidates
for a wide range of roles.
See a candidate you like.
You can easily send them a personal invite
so they're more likely to apply.
Their user-friendly dashboard
makes it easy to filter, review,
and rate your candidates all from one place.
Let ZipRecruiter help you find the best people
for all of your roles.
Four to five employers,
employers who post on ZipRecruter
get a quality candidate
within the first day.
You could be one of them.
You can see for yourself,
go to ziprecruiter.com slash Walsh to try ZipRecruiter for free.
Again, that's ZipRecruiter.
That's ZipRecruiter.
The smartest way to hire.
By the way, a fun little tidbit for my own life,
a big moment for me, actually.
I officially entered middle age over the weekend
by throwing out my back,
completely through my back out.
First real experience with this.
So I could hardly breathe or,
like walk over the weekend. I can do those things a little bit better now because they put me on
a bunch of drugs. And I usually don't like taking medicine at all. Like I won't even take Tylenol
most of the time. And it drives my wife crazy because anytime, like I, she just, I'm like a little
kid. She'll give me, I'll say I have a headache and she'll hand me some Tylenol and I just,
I'll hide it. Like I won't even put in my pocket. I won't take it. But I've made two exceptions
to the don't, don't take medicine rule my own life. One is when I blew up my Achilles and then the
other one is right now. And the worst thing is that is the way that it happened was a combination of
both stupid on my part and also being lame on my part. I woke up early Saturday morning with my back
feeling very sore. I guess I pulled something while I was sleeping because, you know, kids,
this is one thing to look forward to kids as you get older that you can, you can injure yourself
while sleeping. Like sleeping becomes a dangerous time. And it's not, it's not sleep walking. It's not
like I got up and I was running a marathon in my sleep. I was just laying there on, just laying there
asleep. And I managed to injure myself. But then I wasn't, I wasn't completely crippled.
And I wasn't satisfied with that. So that afternoon, I took my kids out to the garden center,
the nursery down the streets. We're getting some Mother's Day gifts for my wife. And one of the
things we got her was the 70-pound statue of St. Francis of Assisi to put in the garden. And she loves,
My wife loves like these little statues.
And so we got out of this thing,
six or 70 pounds.
And I knew it was a bad idea,
given the back issues,
to lift it.
And I was about to lift it.
You know,
because I had to lift it,
put it on the cart,
bring it out to the car,
lifted in the car,
lift it out of the car,
we got home.
My nine-year-old daughter is there.
And she's got,
already has maternal instincts.
And so she's kind of,
she's telling me,
no, daddy,
get one of the workers here.
Why don't you get one of the workers here?
to lift the statue up for you and bring it to the car.
She's being the sensible one.
And I said, no, I'm fine.
You know, you think I can't lift a statue?
Come on.
You think your dad can't lift a statue?
It'll be fine.
And I did.
And then shortly after that, I was almost entirely disabled.
And I required all the drugs just to function.
So that's the story.
I guess I'm in that difficult period of a man's life where your body is getting older,
but your mind hasn't caught up to that reality yet.
and that's that's kind of where I'm living right now.
All right.
Bubba says, I haven't seen the Lion King remake, but the technology they used is at least interesting
because they created the virtual environments and were able to physically move virtual
cameras within the space.
That tech led to the void used in the Mandalorian.
On the same topic, Josiah says, man, I never thought about how awkward and dull and uncanny,
uncanny valley-ish that those Disney remakes might be with the lousy live-action animation.
the clip of that of the Little Mermaid remake looks just god-awful and unwatchable.
Yeah, it is.
And I was thinking about this too as well, talking about these live-action remakes of Disney's cartoons
and how terrible they are.
One of the things that makes them so awful, and this was especially the case with the Lion King,
quote-unquote, live-action remake.
That was not live-action because they were still talking lions.
And those don't exist in real life, so it was still animation.
It was just a different kind of animation.
But you don't even, you can't really quite follow a lot of these live-action Disney remakes unless you've seen the original.
You don't actually know exactly what's going on unless you've seen the first one to give you context.
Because with the live-action thing, you don't get, especially from the non-human characters, you don't get the emotion, the facial expressions or any of that.
So there are so many scenes where you wouldn't even, unless you had the context of the older film, you don't really know exactly what they're trying to do here.
You're not sure what emotion they're trying to capture because you can't see it with the way they've done the animation.
So you need that.
All these adults that go and watch these films because it reminds them, oh, it's my childhood all over again.
Reminds me of my childhood.
And so many millennials are pathetic and that's all they want from their art.
All they want from their art is to be reminded of things that existed before.
Never mind the fact that you can just go back and watch those things if you really want to.
They still exist.
You can watch them.
But I think they don't even really, so they go into it with that framework in mind, and then they watch these scenes.
And they know what it's supposed to be trying to do because they've seen the original.
Kids who see the live action stuff without seeing the original, they might still enjoy it because kids enjoy watching anything.
But they're not getting anything close to like the full experience of what these stories really are.
Read his Kit Kat, Kit Kat says, I had a team lead at Walmart, come to the register to ring me out,
and he said, be sure to press the five star on your keypad for me, just told me to give him five stars.
As an ex-Walmart employee, the store is awful, and I was happy to quit.
So they want you to, I don't think I've ever had that at a Walmart register.
They're asking you to give a rating like they do with Uber Eats.
I'm not even sure I remember that.
And then Moose Vector says,
it terrifies my wife and I with making a family.
Will our future kids be coerced and groomed outside our purview
to mutilate themselves like this?
Yeah, I hear this so often from young parents
or people that, young couples that are considering having kids.
And so often I hear, well, I'm afraid to do it
because of how we live in a fallen, broken world
and all the rest of it.
And that is, it can be a scary thing when you have kids.
but like the worst decision you could make in response to that
is to decide not to have kids at all,
to give up on that experience.
And to give up on your own legacy and bloodline
because you're afraid of the effect the culture will have on your kids.
And that's when the insidious powers
that have made things this way in our culture,
they win. That's what they want.
I always talk all the time about demoralization.
They're trying to demoralize us.
And when you give up and you throw up your hands and say, never mind, I'm just going to give up on my bloodline, my legacy.
I'm going to end it here because it's not worth it. That's when they really win.
So that can't be our response. The response is have kids, love your kids, be attentive, raise them.
And even in our awful satanic culture, they'll still have a very good chance of being good people and living good.
lives as long as you hold up your end of the market. That's all. A popular professor has been on the job
for 30 plus years was put on leave for the crime of passing out Jeremy's he, him and she, her
chocolate bars, just giving people chocolate, you know, free chocolate, somehow gets them suspended.
Well, Jeremy believes that every free American should have the right to hand out chocolate. That is
why Jeremy has taken his delicious, he him, and she her chocolate bars and reduced them down to a
tasty little microaggression side size.
You can head over to jeremy's chocolate.com.
That's jeremy's chocolate.com.
You can get your microaggression size.
Jeremy's chocolate bars conveniently available for Halloween,
which is a ways away, but still you can stock up now.
Go to jeremy's chocolate.com and pre-order today.
Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
Well, I don't consider the American Psychological Association
to be an authority on very many things,
but I do think that the organization's website
provides a simple yet accurate definition of trauma.
It says that trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event and mentions, as examples,
accidents, natural disasters, and rape.
So if your house was hit with a tornado while you were huddled in your basement with your children,
or if you were involved in a high-speed collision on the highway and you nearly died,
or if, God forbid, you were sexually abused in the past,
then there's a good chance that they experience will have a psychological and emotional impact
that will stay with you for a very long time or possibly forever.
And the APA says that a traumatized person will typically experience shock and then denial in the short term
and long term, they may find that their relationships become strained, they may have flashbacks,
trouble sleeping, you know, migraines, insomnia, all of these are symptoms of experiencing that trauma.
It's very real, you know. You can go through things in life that will have this kind of effect.
But the good news is that for most of us, these sorts of events will be rare. Life is difficult
because we are conscious agents living in a fallen world full of pain and suffering. And there's a
certain amount of existential anxiety that comes with that, and is always at least bubbling
under the surface of our everyday life, but everyday discomfort is not traumatic, or at least it
shouldn't be. Which means that if you find yourself frequently describing your everyday experiences
as traumatic, and if you can do an assessment and see that things other people cope with relatively
easily are somehow sources of trauma for you, then that's a good indication that you are the
problem. If you're constantly talking about your trauma and finding new things to be traumatized by,
that means either that you're being whiny and hysterical because you want attention,
or you really do feel traumatized by everything, which means that you're, you are emotionally
fragile to an extreme degree. Either way, the problem is you. And that sets us up for this story,
published on Friday by Rolling Stone. They tweeted the story with this caption, exclusive,
current and former staffers to tell Rolling Stone that the Kelly Clarkson show is toxic behind the scenes.
They say Clarkson is fantastic, but allege that they are underpaid, verbally abused, traumatized, and put in uncomfortable positions.
Yes, we have yet another tale of a hostile work environment. A story of trauma and emotional abuse and other things like that.
It was only a couple weeks ago that we heard about the alleged hostile work environment over on the now defunct Tucker Carlson show in Fox News.
In the past, we've heard tales of hostile work environments on shows like Ellen DeGeneres and Dr. Phil and others.
Now, this could be a sign that people working in television are slaves suffering horrific abuses.
It could mean that being a 27-year-old PA for Kelly Clarkson is more grueling and taxing than being a 14-year-old in the coal mines in 1873.
It could mean that.
Or it could mean that the media business is fast-paced and high pressure and resolve.
oriented, and it attracts a lot of young adults. And this is a bad combination because many young
adults these days are too weak and too timid and too incompetent to keep up in that kind of environment.
So it could go either way. Let's investigate and find out. Reading from Rolling Stone,
it says, quote, when the Kelly Clarkson show debuted on NBC in the fall of 2019, the talk show
immediately became a beloved fresh addition to the traditional daytime lineup with a built-in fan base
from Kelly Clark's in singing career, who have been rooting for her since she first won the American Idol competition 2002, the show captivates audiences.
Over the past four seasons, the pop singer has interviewed guests like Hillary Clinton and Dolly Parton.
She's performed Kelly Oke segments where she sings covers of other people's popular songs like Whitney Houston's Queen of the Night and Adele's Rolling in the Deep and has maintained a level of candor relatability with viewers at home.
But behind the scenes, employees say they were overworked, underpaid.
And that working at the show was traumatizing to their mental health.
A former employee adds, quote,
I remember going up to the roof of the stage to cry and being like, oh my gosh, what am I doing?
Why am I putting myself through this?
Wow, I mean, what was she put through?
I say she, because I'm assuming this is a woman, though, unfortunately, that may not even be a safe assumption anymore.
But what happened?
What would cause a grown adult to take time out of her day while she's still on the clock
to cry like a baby?
Do they keep her in chains in the basement
and force her to do her job
while, you know, against her will
while her manager comes by
with a whip and beats anyone who isn't keeping up?
Is working the Kelly Clarkson show
kind of like being a galley slave
on a Roman ship in the first century?
Is that how bad it is?
Well, we'll have to keep reading and find out.
Former employees say the toxic behavior
behind the scene starts with executive producer
Alex Duda,
who shields Clarkson from what staffers say
they're enduring because of the clark.
climate Duda created. I think Alex Duda is a monster, former employee says. I have a friend who's an
executive producer who warned me about taking this job because apparently she has done this on every
show she's worked on. As for Clarkson, their current employees, as well as 10 former employees,
are under the impression she isn't aware of how bad things are for lower level staffers,
some of whom say they've taken on other jobs as babysitters, dog walkers, and Uber Eats drivers
to pay their bills. Now notice how we've made it several paragraphs into this epic tale of woe,
and we've yet to hear any specific examples of trauma being inflicted on the staff,
the only specific detail we get so far is that low-level staffers have to take on second jobs.
My God, the humanity.
You mean to tell me that when you're just starting out in an industry and you're a low-level
employee, you might not make a lot of money, and so you have to do other things to pay the bills?
How terrible!
I mean, that's only been the experience of literally millions of people.
since jobs have existed, I had to do the same thing when I was in my early 20s.
I've worked two jobs at various points. I've worked three jobs. I've had times when I worked
multiple jobs and one of the jobs was an overnight shift. So imagine getting off of work at like
10.30 p.m. And instead of going home to go to bed, you have to start a whole new job at midnight.
Well, many of you can imagine something like that because you've done something similar.
It's not unusual. It's not harrowing. It's certainly not traumatic.
It's just work, and you'll be fine.
So where is the real trauma here?
Well, let's keep reading.
One former employee says that they recently quit working at the show because a producer who reports to Duda yelled and cursed at them multiple times on stage.
They say they developed so much anxiety from the way they were treated at work that they would regularly vomit and exhibit physical signs of sickness.
This job deteriorated by mental health, they say.
The second former employee says that they took a leave of absence because their mental health was,
also suffering. They say they were bullied and intimidated by producers who went out of their way to
make staffers feel scared to ask questions and get their work done. According to the staffer,
this prompted them to take a month away from the job and see a psychiatrist for the first time in
their life because they truly couldn't handle it mentally. The former staffers say they've worked
in the entertainment industry for years on different sets, but the Kelly Clarkson show is by far the
worst experience I've ever had in my entire life. It deterred me from wanting to work in daytime
ever again, they say. When I say I was traumatized, I was.
was really traumatized. Oh, you were really traumatized, were you? Really, really traumatized.
When other people talk about traumas they've suffered in life, they're referring to things like
watching a parent die of cancer, watching a friend get blown up on the battlefield. And, you know,
those are trying experiences. You feel comfortable using that same language to describe your
experience of getting yelled at by your boss. There's no reason to keep reading, by the way.
This is it. This is the one single scandalous detail we're given. Some people yell sometimes.
Traumatic. You know, I once had a boss years ago in a meeting cuss me out at the top of his lungs
and throw a book across the room in a fit of rage. I wasn't traumatized. I didn't lay awake that
night trembling with tears in my eyes. I never sought therapy to help me recover or cope.
I think later on I told one of my coworkers about it and we laughed because the guy's a psycho.
And I think that's the last time I ever brought it up to anyone until this very moment.
Now, should your boss scream and use foul language in the workplace? No. Is it inappropriate?
Yes. Should it be a crisis in your life and a source of deep emotional trauma? Should you be
crying and vomiting because of it? No, absolutely not. People, people are.
People lose their tempers sometimes. It happens. It'll happen at work. If you're working with
other human beings like yourself, if you're working in a high pressure competitive business like media,
it's even more certain to happen. Temperance, you know, emotions run high sometimes. You don't need to
alert the media about it. We already know and we don't care. At the beginning, I said that we
can interpret all this whining over insignificant things as either disingenuous and performative
or a sincere expression of extreme emotional fragility. But I think the second option is the more
concerning one, and unfortunately, I think also the correct one. We have bred a generation of Americans
to collapse under the slightest pressure, to recoil in horror at any amount of discomfort and difficulty.
And at the root of this disease is their belief that they have the right to a life free from
discomfort and difficulty. They haven't been raised to understand that hardship is an absolutely
inseparable part of life, of the human experience. They truly believe that a life of
total ease and luxury is available is possible, that anything that interferes with that pursuit of
this fantasy is therefore a violation of their human rights. People in the past didn't complain
nearly as much about their toil and suffering, even though they experienced both to an infinitely
greater degree than we do, because they recognized that this is the price of admission for
conscious beings in a physical world. That's why even if you've suffered actual trauma, real trauma,
from a truly traumatic experience,
it's still not a good idea to harp over it,
the way these people harp over every stubbed toe and paper cut.
You know, one of my favorite scenes
and one of my favorite stories ever put to screen,
the Western miniseries Lonesome Dove,
happens right after Diane Lane's character
as a prostitute named Lori is kidnapped
and then terribly abused by an outlaw named Blue Duck.
Robert Duvall's character, Gus,
found this grizzled old Western guy,
rescues her. And later that night, when they're sitting together, lawyer breaks down in tears and says,
they shouldn't have done that to me, Gus, they shouldn't have taken me. And Gus gives her a hug
and pats her shoulder and says, I know, honey, but they did. I know they shouldn't have, but they did.
They did. Dumb modern audiences may watch that scene and interpret it as Gus being uncaring or
dismissive. But it was the opposite. His point was that you won't gain anything by dwelling on the fact
that your past sufferings shouldn't have happened. Yes, it shouldn't have happened, but it did happen.
And the point Gus was making is that you'll never be able to function in the world and truly heal unless you
accept reality for what it is. It shouldn't have happened, but it did. Now what?
If Gus would say that to a woman who'd just been kidnapped by outlaws in the Old West,
what would he say to a grown woman crying on the roof at work because her boss was kind of mean to her?
She shouldn't have yelled at me at me for being seven minutes late to our production meeting, Gus.
She shouldn't have done that.
Maybe if he was in a kind mood, he would pat her softly on the shoulder and deliver the same message.
I know, honey.
She shouldn't have, but she did.
But if he did that, he'd probably end up getting fired and then sued for sexual harassment because he touched her shoulder and called her honey.
I think the better response in the latter case would be something like, yes, honey, she yelled at you.
People yell sometimes.
That's life.
What did you expect?
Did you expect that nobody would ever lose their temper at you ever in your life?
Even when you're doing annoying things like showing up late to a meeting that everybody else managed to get there on time for?
So you want everyone else to exercise total and perfect emotional restraint, but you're the one up here on the roof crying like a toddler in the middle of the workday?
At least the mean people are productive.
You're useless.
Look at you.
Now get back to work or you're fired.
That's what I would say anyway, which probably is why I'm not in management.
But at least I can still say to literally everyone who has ever complained about a hostile work environment, you're canceled.
That'll do it for us today.
Have a great day everyone talk to you tomorrow.
Godspeed.
