The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1211 - We Need To Solve Our Violent Crime Epidemic The El Salvador Way

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the media has started another round of hit pieces against the president of El Salvador because of his very harsh way of rounding up and imprisoning violent gang members. They say that instilling law and order is inhumane and not worth the cost. But they never acknowledge the cost of not instilling law and order. Also, the first Republican primary debate is tonight. CNN hails Biden for his "empathetic" performance when visiting Maui after the wildfires, even though he was the exact opposite of empathetic. And are we experiencing an epidemic of people behaving rudely in public? If so, what's causing it?   Ep.1211   - - -    Click here to join the member exclusive portion of my show: https://utm.io/ueSEm    - - -    DailyWire+:   Want to work at The Daily Wire? For more information, click here and select “Careers”: https://bit.ly/3JR6n6d   Represent the Sweet Baby Gang by shopping my merch here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj    - - -    Today’s Sponsors:   Ruff Greens - Get a FREE Jumpstart Trial Bag http://www.RuffGreens.com/Matt Or call 844-RUFF-700   Renewal by Andersen - Get your FREE Consultation  Text WALSH to 200-300   PragerU - Have your donation TRIPLED at http://www.PragerU.com    - - -   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

Today on the Matt Wall Show, the media has started another round of hit pieces against the president of El Salvador because of his very harsh way of rounding up and imprisoning violent gang members. They say that instilling law and order is inhumane and not worth the cost, but they never acknowledge the cost of not instilling law and order. We'll talk about that today. Also, the first Republican primary debate is tonight and CNN hails Biden for his empathetic performance when visiting Maui after the wildfires, even though, of course, he was the exact opposite of empathetic. And are we experiencing an epidemic of people behaving rudely in public? If so, what's called? We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh. You know, before giving our dog Rough Greens, he was so sad and lazy, and now he actually enjoys his squeaky toys and playing fetch with his frisbee. Our pup's days are filled with laughter, exercise, and endless fun, and it's so important

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recent report from CNN on property crime in San Francisco stands out. We played part of this clip a couple of weeks ago on the show, but here it is in full context. Watch. San Francisco businesses fed up with crime. One sandwich shop owner is calling for action after he says he was attacked outside his store. He says he yelled at a man to stop urinating on his trash can and then sucker punched. His Instagram post about the incident has now gone viral. I'm f***ed up with this city. It's like I can't just be outside and just running a business without getting punched in the face. It shouldn't be this way at all.

Like, this isn't how our city should be. Now, it's not clear what was said before the altercation or whether there's even video of it. But San Francisco police have said they are investigating. It comes as some stores are locking up everything from coffee to frozen food to try to combat theft. Our Kyeong-law visited one Walgreens that's hit by shoplifters more than a dozen times a day.

It happened three times while she was inside. Richie Greenberg walked into a San Francisco Walgreens when he saw in the frozen food section this. Chains, heavy chains that went from padlock to padlock on both sides of the doors. And this was bizarre, something I'd never seen before. This is just more icing on the cake telling us that rampant crime has become a regular part of life. So typical that in the 30 minutes we were at this Walgreens, We watched three people, including this man, steal. Did that guy pay?

Over again? Did that guy pay? He didn't pay. So this Walgreens is supposedly hit by shoplifers more than any other Walgreens in the United States, which is really saying something. The bar is pretty high to achieve that record. People are walking in and out with merchandise at will without paying. Shoplifters robbed the store three times while CNN was in

inside reporting on shoplifting. As I said, you've seen portions of that clip when it went viral several weeks ago. We played it on the show. But we never played the end of that segment. And here it is. San Francisco City supervisor Matt Dorsey, former police spokesman and recovering drug addict, sees the rampant shoplifting as a systemic problem, from city leaders to an understaffed police force to the fentanyl crisis. When you're seeing that level of retail theft, that tends to be subsistence level retail theft. People who are hungry. People are hungry. There is a level of addiction playing out in many parts of our city. It's happening at levels we really haven't seen in

San Francisco. What I'm hearing from my residents and what I'm hearing from San Franciscans is it's time for tough love. We are not doing any addict in this city favors by enabling behavior that is potentially deadly in ways we have never seen. Now, in a statement to CNN, Walgreens says it is focused on safety and preventative measures, but that retail theft remains one of its top challenges. Here's some important context, though, on the city, Aaron. Property crime and violent crime at the end of last year was actually lower than it was before the pandemic. So what's going on here?

So first, CNN trots out a city supervisor to inform you that the causes of all this shoplifting are systemic, you know, sort of like racism in that way. he's applying that there's no way to solve it. But of course, you should pay a lot of, you know, consultants and government agencies a ton of money to try to solve it, even though it can't be solved because it's systemic. That's what every bureaucrat means when they talk about systemic problems. Systemic problems is really, that's just a jobs program for bureaucrats, in other words. And then the CNN reporter comes back and she says that she's providing some important context. And what is that context? Well, she says that property crime in San Francisco is lower than it was

before the pandemic. In other words, as bad as the footage you just saw might look overall, the city is doing fine. The ice cream sandwiches might be locked away with chains and people are so brazen about stealing that they're doing it in front of news cameras. Still, the city is on the right trajectory. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here. That's the message. Now, in the world of statistics, they have a few terms for this, and one of them is non-response bias. Another is measurement bias. So if you're looking at a chart of reported property, crimes and it goes up and then up and up and then suddenly it goes down out of nowhere, a couple of things are possible. The first possibility, the one that CNN implies is happening here,

is that people are committing fewer property crimes. Somehow the criminals have decided on their own to stop doing crime. Even though they know they can easily get away with it, they decided to just stop doing it. They've decided to become law-abiding citizens out of the goodness of their hearts. Their hearts have all grown three sizes like the Grinch when he visited Whoville. The other possibility, though, is that maybe people have simply stopped reporting property crimes because they know the police and the DA won't do anything about them. Could that be happening in San Francisco? Despite the city's property crime statistics, is it possible that property crime is actually increasing? Dick's sporting goods just provided another data point to

help us answer that question. Dix has locations all over the country, of course, and they just announced that property theft theft is costing them so much money that they're now laying off a mass number of employees. The company says that profits dropped 23% last quarter, which is a staggering amount, and they blame much of it on rampant shoplifting. So when you hear that property crime is going down and then you see stories like that, you have to wonder whether the statistics give you an accurate picture, especially when Dix is far from the only chain that has had to shutdown locations, lay off employees, because they keep losing so much merchandise to theft. It's kind of like when influenza cases started to, went down basically to zero during COVID.

Is that because, as the experts said, influenza simply just stopped spreading somehow during the pandemic? That's a comforting explanation. So it mainly went unchallenged. And most statistics from the government are like this. They're technically correct, but wildly misleading. However, one government statistic is very tough to fudge, no matter how hard politicians try, and it's the murder rate. The government can lie and say that shoplifting is down, but it's challenging for them to lie about murders because murders leave dead bodies. People talk about them. I mean, they usually get reported. Corners have to be dispatched to the scene and so on. Between 2019 and 2020, the homicide rate in the United States increased by more than it did at any other point in modern history.

went up by 30%. Following year, it increased again. Some of the country's most prominent tourist destinations have become too dangerous for many people to visit. Last year, for example, New Orleans became the murder capital of the United States, recording 52 homicides per 100,000 residents. Now, browse news reports on the violent crime wave in this country, and invariably, you'll hear the same excuses. They'll tell you that COVID is responsible for the murder rate.

They'll do what the San Francisco City supervisor did in blame systemic issues like policing. What they won't do is tell you that actually a real and immediate solution to this problem is available. In El Salvador, under the leadership of Nayyib Buckele, they have figured out a solution. In 2018, the year before Buckele took office,

El Salvador posted a murder rate of 51 per 100,000 people, which is the New Orleans rate. By 2022, the murder rate in the country had fallen to 7.8 per 100,000 people. That's 7.8, not 78. This chart, we have a chart here we can show you. This shows the magnitude of the decline. You can see that the murder rate was decreasing before Bekele took over, but he took it to an unprecedented low level. This is a homicide rate now in El Salvador that's significantly lower than what you'll find in several major American cities. And these are not cooked numbers, okay? You know that.

because Naid Buceli is overwhelmingly popular in El Salvador. People know that murders are down. They know that they are safer in their communities because they live in these communities. They don't need the government to tell them about it. El Salvador accomplished this massive reduction in homicides, if you can believe it, by doing something radical. They decided to start punishing criminals. Specifically, Buckelly implemented something called the Territorial Control Plan.

In phase one of that plan, involved flooding high crime areas with heavily. armed police officers. Many criminals with gang affiliations, often indicated by their tattoos, which are often on their face, easy to see, went to prison. Officials paraded them before cameras in a humiliation ritual. This has been an integral part of El Salvador's strategy for years. Just a few months ago, Bikeli uploaded a video which shows gang members in one of the super prisons he's constructed to house them, kind of showing you how it works in these prisons. And we'll play a quick clip of that. Here it is. The new elixir collection, featuring three perfume intense scents, inspired by a unique orchid accord, paired with vanilla, each with its own distinct attitude, each with its own universe, bold elixir, sensual, woody, addictive, magnetic elixir, sweet and romantic like a lingering touch.

Solar elixir, a radiant expression of joy, ultra-concentrated for amplified impact and lasting power. Find your euphoria. Discover the euphoria elixir collection by Calvin Klein. So it seems like an unpleasant place to be. And El Salvador's government has not relented in the past few years. In fact, this summer, El Salvador's Congress approved new rules allowing the trial of up to 900 gang members simultaneously to expedite the otherwise slow-moving judicial process. Now, in some publications, including the National Review and various left-wing outlets, you'll find alternative explanations for Hal Buceli lowered the murder rate so quickly.

And one popular theory is that all these. these harsh measures are not reducing crime. Instead, the theory goes, Buckelly struck a secret deal with the gangs that convinced them to stop committing crimes. And there's some truth of that. But Kelly did indeed try to negotiate a truce with MS-13 and other gangs. But as CNN reported last year, citing an expert in Central American affairs, quote, there are some concesses among security watchers that Bucle's truce with the gangs fell apart in late March, 2022, which prompted the MS-16 to do the killing spree to pressure the government to give concessions. So Bekele's latest crackdown followed the breakdown in negotiations, and still, violent crime remains low.

The crackdown has saved lives. There's no question about it. Other Central American leaders are now looking to model El Salvador's approach. There's no question about that either. The only remaining question is whether saving these lives and restoring order to society and making communities livable again, is worth a few sacrifices. Most notably, is it worth sacrificing some of what we in modern Western society considered to be humane standards for imprisonment? Is it worth sacrificing some of those standards? In response to that question, the media has answered unanimously in the negative. The Sun, for example, just published a lengthy piece lamenting the conditions in El Salvador's prisons. Inmates are crammed together like,

sardines, the sun says, quote, in each 100-square-meter cell, around 75 crammed inmates sleep on metal cabins and are forced to share just two toilets and two sinks. Several other outlets have run similar stories in recent days, talking about how terrible it is in these prisons in El Salvador. It's all a human rights violation. Here's the BBC, for example, watch. Relatives of those detained have been desperately trying to find out what's happened to them. I saw the video on Facebook and I was going through it, busing and winding. He was almost unrecognizable, so very thinned. I only knew it was him by his tattoos. Angelica says her husband has no links with gangs. She's heard nothing further about him since he

was arrested under emergency powers brought in March 2022 by President Buckele. Through satellite imagery, data released by the Salvadoran government and documents seen by Bibi Simundo, we've gathered information about the science. There are eight cell blocks monitored by 19 watch towers. Inside the cells, the beds are metal plates and there are two toilets open to the room. So far, the authorities say they have transferred 4,000 prisoners to the jail and that there is capacity for up to 40,000. The BBC has found that at full capacity, each person would have 0.58 square meters of space.

The International Committee of the Red Cross recommends 3.4 square meters in a shared cell. Okay, so this prison does not live up to the standards of the Red Cross or the UN or any Western human rights watchdog group. It's very, very uncomfortable to be in prison in El Salvador right now. So uncomfortable in fact that it might even make you think twice about joining a gang in that country to begin with, which is obviously the point. Now, with that said, we hear from someone in the clip who claims that at least one of the inmates, her husband, has no connection to gangs. He's an innocent man caught up in the crackdown, caught up in the net. And we have no way of assessing whether that story is true, obviously.

We don't know. Is this person innocent or guilty? How do we know? But if we're being honest, we probably can assume that some nonviolent people, even some innocent people, have been caught unwittingly in this net. Some of them may be innocent. True. Anytime the government assumes emergency powers and arrests more than 70,000 people

without ensuring their due process rights, it's bound to happen. And yes, it's almost certainly true that many of these inmates live in conditions that would make amnesty international extremely squeamish. There's no reason to paper over that. But that's not where the discussion ends or where it should end. The question that follows is a simple one, though it's rarely discussed. And the question is this, would you rather have a safe society where a few innocent people are imprisoned? Or would you rather have a very dangerous society where only a few guilty people are. are imprisoned. Ben Franklin famously answered a version of the question. He said,

it's better for 100 guilty persons to escape than one innocent person to suffer. And we hear people repeat this mantra unthinkingly all the time. But Ben Franklin didn't address what happens when all those guilty people get out of prison and make it impossible for innocent people to live their lives. What happens when allowing guilty persons to escape means that innocent people can't start businesses or use the subway or go to the store, walk down the street, or guarantee the safety of their children. What happens when letting the guilty go free means letting them randomly assault elderly people or carjack women at the stoplight or execute gas station cashiers for the few dollars in the cash register?

That's unfolding now in major cities all across the country. It's happening so often that CNN is capturing it on camera, unintentionation. this is not the high trust society that existed in the 19th century. When Barack Obama was in office, he made a habit of calling difficult decisions, quote, false choices. He said that we should, for example, reject the, quote, false choice between our security and our ideals. But the truth is that there are hard choices to be made when weighing our security against our ideals. This is not a false choice. There are actual tradeoffs you have to make. and there's no sense in lying about it.

As Richard Hononea pointed out recently on a substack, sometimes a slavish devotion to ideals gets a lot of people killed, and it ruins livelihoods. Nobody wants to talk about that, but it's true. And as more criminals act with total impunity, it's getting hard to ignore. Besides, the other point here is that nobody can claim that they really have a zero tolerance for,

you know, for example, innocent people going to prison. We like to say that, well, we can't allow a single innocent person go to prison. Because the only way to bring that number down to zero is to have no prisons at all. If you have any kind of prison system, there's going to be that kind of unintended consequence regardless. It's going to happen. And we all accept that tacitly. We have to, or we cannot have a civilization. But we're currently in the process of losing our civilization, and it's in part because modern Western people have a totally upside-down view of these kinds of tradeoffs, or they're so naive that they think that we can have no tradeoffs. But that's

not the case. You can't get around it. Either you emphasize justice, social order, and punishing criminals, and you deal with the collateral damage that comes with this harsher and more brutal approach, or you emphasize tolerance and acceptance and rehabilitation and forgiveness, and you deal with the collateral damage that comes with that. You will get the collateral damage either way. There's no way around it. In the former case, it means that you'll always. You'll have a have a safer and more orderly society where people can live their lives and your children can walk outside without fear, but criminals will be made very uncomfortable and will be treated in ways that are sometimes quite ugly. And in the latter case, criminals will be more comfortable and prisons

will not be such an ugly place, but your communities will be unlivable cesspools. As I've said before, there will be ugliness in society no matter what. You can choose to contain it in prison or you can let it loose on the streets. You will have to. it, the ugliness, whether you like it or not. The question is, where do you want it? In prison or outside your front door? Al Salvador's solution is not ideal. I mean, you'd prefer if your country didn't need to have super prisons with tens of thousands of violent gangsters in them. Nobody would call that an ideal situation. Certainly not Naïbe Kelly. At a certain point, though, it becomes necessary because the alternative is even worse. If our leaders don't have the stomach to punish

criminals now, then down the line, they'll be replaced by people who do. That's the lesson of El Salvador. We can either learn from it or we can keep repeating the same mistakes. The choices are. Now let's get to our five headlines. For most homeowners, window replacements, it's not something that they've done before. And for many, something that they don't want to do, but rather something they have to do. Well, if you've put off replacing windows in your home because it's too expensive, I have great news. You can now get a free in-home window consultation and free price quote from Renewal by Anderson. Renewal by Anderson's signature service is committed to giving you the best customer experience possible through the perfect

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Message data rates may apply. Reply stop to opt out. Go to window appointment now.com for full offer details. So the first GOP primary debate is tonight as we officially get into my least favorite season as a conservative commentator. I'm something of an aberration in my community, as you probably know, if you listen to the show. Most of my peers, you know, they live for election seasons, debates, presidential elections. They're very excited about it, because that's the sweet spot, you know, in this world normally. I'm exactly the opposite. I find this stuff sort of boring, to be honest, analyzing debate performances and reading polling data. It's all tedious to me, but here we are anyway. And of course, the big controversy going

into the debates is that Trump won't be attending. We talked about this a few days ago, and I already made my point that I, well, I basically agree with both sides. So I'm, not to take the cop out approach, but I can see where both sides are coming from. And on the one hand, you know, there are those who say that Trump should debate, that it's, it's wimpish not to. You owe it to the voters to get up there and answer questions and and allow yourself to be scrutinized. That's just, you should. should do it. You should put yourself in that position. You owe it to the voters. The fact that Trump was already in office, that doesn't mean that he doesn't need to debate. That means all the more

that he should debate because he has a record that needs to be defended and he needs to answer questions about it, especially about what happened in the final year of his tenure when the country was handed over to Fauci and BLM. And so he needs to be there and needs to talk about it. So I get that and I understand that and I can see where that side's coming from. On the other hand, though, from a political perspective, the people on the other side of this will say that, well, Trump doesn't stand to gain much from debating. I mean, debating, it's a political decision. Debating is a political activity. It's all about politics, obviously. And so you're not going to put yourself in a position. And running a campaign is all about politics, obviously,

by definition. So you're not going to put yourself in a position if it's going to be politically not useful to you and potentially dangerous and harmful. And when you think about Trump, Trump being so far ahead in the polls already and being such a known entity, you put them up there on the stage, he probably potentially stands to lose more than he would gain. Now, sure, he dominated the primary debates in 2015, but that was as a newcomer and an outsider and kind of a novelty. It's nearly a decade later now, and it's just not going to be the same. so to stand up there and allow the other candidates to take shots at him or to use him to prop themselves up or whatever else they do while he's already so far ahead in the polls, I mean, that's like politically foolish. Why would you do it? And I get that. I think it's a solid argument. Of course, there's the downside. There's the political downside. Most of the people that are insisting that Trump should be there at the debate, they're making kind of a principle or argument that just forget about the politics. In principle, you should be there. It's the right thing to do. But that's just

that's not the reality. Okay. It's all about politics. It's not about principle. And that's just the fact of the matter. But there's also the political downside, as I mentioned a couple days ago, which is that potentially significant. It's not nothing that Biden in the general election will certainly want to skip the debates.

And if you've already skipped all of your primary debates, which is what Trump is implying he's going to do, then you just, you're not. not going to be a position to complain when your opponent does the same thing on the same pretense. You can complain, and the Trump camp obviously will. I mean, you're not going to just let Biden get away with skipping the debates. You're going to criticize them for it. And you're going to hope that most people don't remember the fact the recent history of you skipping all of your debates. So you're going to do it, but I think your arguments, your complaints will ring hollow in a lot of ways. That's the political downside. But ultimately, I think politically the right move is for him not to

debate. That's where I come down. I can see both sides. And here's the way you look at it. You know, and I'm a simple person. I look at these things very simply. You always have to ask yourself, what do your opponents want you to do? And then most of the time you should be doing the opposite of that. If you're doing something that your opponents want you to do,

if it's something that your opponents will look at and they'll be very happy that you're doing it, it's probably not a good idea. But I'm not saying that you make all of your political decisions in this reactive kind of way, but it could be illuminating to think of it in those terms. And I say the same thing. This is the case in political campaigns. It's the same thing on a broader cultural level, right versus left. You know, in our battle for the culture, we should always think about, you know,

if we're approaching something, if we're fighting an issue in a certain way, is this how the other side wants us to fight it? Are they happy that we're doing it this way and not some other way? And in this case, if the Trump camp is asking themselves this question, like, what do our opponents want us to do? Do they want us to be there? Or do they, or would they prefer for us to skip it? I think there's no question that Trump's opponents want him on the stage. They want him to be there. And if they all want you to be there, it's not because they are looking out for you in your best interest. It's because it's in their best interest for you to be there, which means that if you want to win, then the smart thing is to not be there. Because that's what they want. want. The only question now is without Trump at the debate, given that he's the frontrunner, and far far away the frontrunner, can any of the other debate participants, are they going to be able to do anything to separate themselves for the PAC? Can this have any real effect on the polls when the frontrunner isn't even there? And I'm very skeptical of that. Yesterday we talked about Biden visiting Maui and the fact that it was a disaster.

It's a disaster zone already. And then it's a disaster on top of disaster when Biden visits there and just makes an absolute fool of himself. I mean, to start with getting there two weeks late after saying almost nothing about this issue for two weeks, in fact saying no comment. He doesn't want to talk about, ask about the victims of the fire. He says, no comment. He's on vacation. He doesn't care. He finally moses over there two weeks later. And we played some of the clips yesterday that will live in infamy, or at least should. And in particular, the one where Biden compares this fire where more than a thousand people have likely died,

many of them children, to his small kitchen fire, you know, 20 years ago. So the whole thing, any objective observer who saw this, look at Biden. performance and say this is just horrendous. But that's not how CNN saw it, because these are not objective observers, obviously. Here's how they interpreted the events. Let's watch a little bit of this. President and Dr. Biden spent several hours both over Lahaina on the ground here and meeting with both first responders and victims of this tragedy at the big shelter, the War Memorial shelter in central Maui. And he said the right things in many cases when he came to the microphone to give his statements. He said the thing that a lot of folks I've been hearing from for two weeks

have been saying that he wants Maui, the people of Maui to help determine how this place is rebuilt. There is a question as to who will have the most influence in that conversation going forward. Locals here working class native Hawaiians and multi-generational locals are worried of disaster capitalism, people moving in to exploit this and buy up as much land as they can in this paradise and rebuild it for their interests as well. The president says promises that that won't happen. It remains to be seen. There's a lot of forces at play here right now.

He did serve as empathizer in chief after five days of being mostly silent on the issue publicly, but the governor said he was working behind the scenes to assure first responders that the feds had their back on this. He shared this. So I just wanted to get to that line at the at the end there. he says, Biden was the empathizer in chief. This is empathy. Is Biden comparing the worst wildfire in 100 years

and talking to the victims and the families and comparing it to his kitchen fire? That is empathy, they say. When, of course, it's obviously the exact opposite of empathy because Joe Biden is the exact opposite of an empathetic guy. He's only thinking about yourself, okay, being able to understand someone's suffering and let them know that you understand it and caring about it.

Like, that is empathy. Relating everything back to yourself is not empathy. At least if that's where it ends. Like in empathy, you can relate, but then it goes back to the person you're relating to. It's for their sake. It's to comfort them. Biden has one part of that process. He relates it back to himself, but then it stops there.

He just brings it always back to himself. Not in a way that comforts those who are suffering, not in a way that helps them to understand, that he understands what they're going through. Not at all. Again, it's the exact opposite. When you relate it back to yourself and you say, you know, I'm looking at the devastation here.

It reminds me at the time when there was a brief kitchen fire. I had a grease fire in my kitchen once. You know, we were cooking up some, some bacon and there was a little grease fire threw a wet rag on it, went out. It was a little scary for a second. That's what I think of when I see billions of dollars of damage and a thousand people

lost. When you say that, what that conveys is that you don't understand their suffering at all because you're making that kind of comparison and you bring it always back to yourself. Speaking of not being empathetic, there's a video that's circulating of Biden appearing to fall asleep during a ceremony to honor the victims of the wildfire. He's sitting there. And the funny thing is that that was the video that went viral. He seems to be sitting there kind of falling asleep, nodding off. He's, there's someone

talking about losing, you can hear in the audio, someone's talking about losing their home, everything's burned up and destroyed, someone talking about the terrible misfortunes that they've suffered through. And you see Biden just kind of staring down at his desk and breathing heavy, and it looks very much like you sleep. Now, some media came along, NBC News, for example, had a clip that they put out. They said, no, we can prove he's not actually falling asleep. And they had a high-res, high-resolution video where you can see,

look, you can see the whites of his eyes. His eyes are still open. He's not actually sleeping. See, we debunk that. But, of course, these people don't understand that doesn't make it any better. The fact that you can't tell if Biden is awake or asleep?

That's not a good thing. That doesn't make it look better. You need to bring out a high-resolution video to detect the whites in his eyes in order to know whether he's asleep or not. The fact that you can't, him being awake looks identical to him being asleep, aside from eyes being open or close.

That's not a good thing. Hey, he might not have been technically asleep, but that's because he's just always asleep. brain is in permanent sleep mode. And I don't consider that a positive necessarily. All right, let's see. This is from the daily wire. A federal district court sided with a Michigan farmer on Monday ruling that he is free to participate in a city-run farmer's market after he was booted over his Catholic views on marriage. Steve Tennis, who owns country mill farms, was banned in 2017 from East Lansing Farmers Market by city officials after he posted on

Facebook, then he follows the Catholic Church's teachings on marriage, which includes opposing same-sex weddings at his family's orchard. East Lansing officials reacted by using a discretionary system of individual assessments to ban tennis and his farm from participating in the seasonal market, despite tennis never receiving any complaints from customers, his legal team said. Tennis and his farm sued the city of East Lansing in 2017. On Monday, U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney ruled that the city's ban on tennis constitute a burden on plaintiff's religious beliefs. Tennis and his farm were forced to choose between following their religious beliefs and a government benefit for which they were otherwise qualified. And it took all of these years, but they have finally got the correct ruling on that that this was a discrimination.

I think this is a, in fact, this case is instructive and it gives us a handy contrast. Because this is what actual discrimination looks like. We hear this phrase discrimination all the time. many people are always claiming to be discriminated against. And it makes you wonder, what is it actually? Is everyone really just being discriminated against all the time? Or do we have a, do we need to adjust our view of what discrimination is? And what we find is that this actual illegal discrimination, this is the kind that Christians face in the real world in this country all the time.

It's not the kind that LGBT people face. That's almost always fake discrimination. And here's the contrast. So let's take, you know, LGBT people claim one of the most famous cases, recent cases, modern cases of an LGBT, of a gay man claiming to discriminate against is, of course, the masterpiece cake shop case where they wanted the cake made for their wedding and they were turned down. And then you have that, and let's compare that to this case, where the Christian is banned from the farmer's market. on the one hand, you have a Catholic farmer banned by the local government from a farmer's market, as opposed to a gay couple who are told that they're not going to get a custom cake. A couple of differences.

First, government entity versus a private entity. So this is the local government in Michigan. saying that you're not allowed to attend the farmer's market because we don't agree with your views. Versus a private entity, a cake shop saying we don't want to serve you this particular cake. Second, you have someone who's banned from participating in something based on their beliefs. It banned completely. Say you're not allowed here. Go away. Versus in the case of Massprey's cake shop and many other similar cases, the gay couple, they weren't banned from the store.

They were never told, get out of the store, we don't serve your kind here. You're not allowed to be in the store. We won't serve you anything. No, they were told, you can be in the store, you can shop around. In fact, we will sell you anything in this store right now. Look around the store. There's pre-made cakes and everything. You look around.

You can have any of it. You can buy all of it if you want, if you have the money. We just can't custom make a cake for. for this particular purpose of a gay wedding. There's a very obvious distinction there. Which goes to the third difference, which is, on one hand, you have discrimination against a belief system.

Again, it's the local government saying, you believe these things, we find those beliefs abhorrent, and therefore you're not allowed here. Pretty clear-cut discrimination. Shouldn't have taken six years to get the correct ruling on that case. That should be a case that lasts about 30 minutes. Because if that's not discriminated, if that's not illegal discrimination, then the concept means nothing.

On the other hand, you have, if there's any kind of discrimination, it is discrimination against inactivity. So it's not the gay men themselves who were discriminated against because they were never told you're gay, you're not allowed here. Instead, you had the private, the owner of this private company saying, we don't agree with that activity, with that particular event. and we don't want to be involved in that event, in that activity, which is a gay wedding. Very clear differences there that I think any reasonable person could see. All right, finally, before we get to the comment section, Bud Light is still trying to salvage its brand, trying to move on.

And they have their latest attempt here, and every attempt is very funny because they put out a new ad, a new campaign. And they always put it, I don't even know why they bother putting the stuff on social media anymore, but they do. and I'm glad that they do because then it's always a lot of fun to read the comments and they're just getting ripped apart for it. So they've teamed up with the Washington Redskins, who are still the Washington Redskins as far as I'm concerned. And they've made this very fun commercial to try to reset the brand. And here it is. Let's watch. All right. So there it is, there it is.

All I'm going to say is that first of all, if you're trying to be seen, if you're trying not to be seen as the gay beer, then that's not the way to do it. That's the opposite of what you want to do. We want to see football players like, you know, we want to see hard hits, tackling, giving each other concussions. Like that's what if you really want to reset the brand, if you want to have any hope of it, then that's what it would be. Instead, you've got football players. Okay, that part's fine, but they're all just dancing.

It really doesn't matter because it's hopeless for Bud Light. It just is. Their brand is forever tarnished. You know what it's like for the, you know what Bud Light is? this point, I think the best analogy is Bud Light is basically like the kid in middle school who peas his pants in class. And that's what they are, because there's no coming back from it, right? The kid who pees his pants in class is always going to be that kid. There's just nothing you can't, you will always be seen that way. There's nothing you can do. You can move schools or

something and change your name, but that's the only way. And it's kind of like that for Bud Light. They're just the kid who peed his pants in classes. Anytime anyone sees a Bud Light, they just can't help it laugh anymore. It's an automatic, instinctive reaction that people have because your brand has been that tarnished. So what's the equivalent for Bud Light? I mean, at least if you're in that position, you can change schools. How does Bud Light change schools, as it were?

I don't know. They really can't. I mean, honestly, just rename, that's one thing they could do, is rename the beer. It's exact same beer, exact same company. Give it a different name. honestly God, that's their one hope, their one chance. That's not going to fool me. I'm not going to buy Bud Lights.

I never would have bought them anyway, but I'm still not going to. But I think, you know, fast forward another year or something, I think that's what we'll be looking at. That's their only hope is just give it a different name. And then most people, then maybe it won't have that. At least give your customers a chance. Like, there are people out there that for whatever reason enjoy Bud Light. and and and but they're not going to buy it and walk around holding it because they know they're going to everyone's going to make fun of them and so there's just no they're not going to do it if you want

to have any chance and you have to allow whoever your potential customers would be to like purchase it and not be mocked ruthlessly for it which probably means you just need to change your name. All right let's get to the comment section. Who's to play baby game? A majority of Gen Z supports left-wing policies like open borders and socialism. If we don't reach them and change their minds, the country we know and love will be lost forever. Those are the stakes. Prager You is the leading nonprofit when it comes to influencing young people.

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Giggly says, how this decaying hollow shell of a human being is allowed to get in front of cameras and speak publicly anymore is beyond me. Are you talking about me or Biden? I'm going to assume you're talking about Biden. Well, that was a comment under the Biden video, so we'll go with that.

Julie says, the lack of empathy disgust me. No wonder residents are angry, shouting profan. at elected officials. That was the one encouraging thing about that video we played yesterday. The mayor, I believe it was the mayor in Maui County said, was refusing to answer questions about how many people had been lost, how many children are lost. And that is all very terrible. The one encouraging thing to me is just the utter disrespect that the people were,

including the media, heeping on this elected official. the total contempt for him, which I think is exactly the right attitude to have to politicians, towards politicians like that. And really probably all politicians. I think it would be a good thing if we felt that way about all politicians. If that was our instinct, if we had an instinctive disgust for all politicians, I think that we'd be in a much better spot. Another comment says, dude, I live on Big Island, and I swear to God, this is one of the worst things I've ever seen. I'm not a big Matt Walsh fan, but everything he said was wildly accurate. The mismanagement, the deflection, the lack of care, the lack of attention paid to survivors,

the lack of attention and care paid to the people who lost their loved ones and children. Everything about it is atrocious. My friend told me that she was trying to get out days later and they wouldn't let her. The local government trapped her in a town with no water or food, and even now it's difficult for residents to access, but there are subjective reports of homeless encampments and looters taking advantage of the empty homes. the whole thing is egregious and terrifying and sincerely makes me want to leave my home. It's one of these things that can't be forgiven or forgotten. I just pray that people see the reconstruction of their town in a way that feels good for them.

Don't donate to the Red Cross or FEMA, although I'm sure people on here know that already. I've heard many, many stories like this from people who actually live and have seen the devastation firsthand. A lot of this is certainly not just the case in Hawaii, but so much of this is that we are not electing serious and competent people. Putting aside on political bias and everything else, we're just not electing serious, competent people. And then the problem with that is that when something serious inevitably happens, because we live in the real world and terrible things happen, well, now you have these unserious

morons who are tasked with dealing with it. The perfect example is that the water official, the guy in charge of the water, talking about an interview before the fires happened, talking about, you know, the importance of water and ancestral traditions and dispensing water in an equitable way. The thing with that is, you know, again, there's been this connection people have drawn. We know that water was held up. People needed water to fight the fires and it was held up. and a lot of people online are kind of making the connection that they held it up because of some sort of equity concern because we heard this from this water official before. And I think that's a fair theory. We don't know for sure.

We actually don't know exactly why the water was held up. But that's almost this, that's a secondary point almost. The first point is whatever the reasons were, this was just an unserious person put in a position to be in charge of, you know, dispensing this necessary, you know, this necessity, which is water. And so a lot of this just felt inevitable. Let's see, J-Man says, Matt, you don't get to tell me what I mean by my own words. Also, Matt, I've decided that my interpretation of a small part of the lyrics means that the entire song is about a nanny sexually molesting Freddie as an infant. I love you, Matt, but even you are dense at times.

I hate to say this, Jayman, but this is what you've said here is pretty much the definition of being dense. And intentionally so. Like, let's just go. So I know maybe you're a queen fan. Maybe you like the song, Fat Bottom Girls. Maybe you've already been on, I don't know, maybe you've already been on social media posting about how they've been canceled. And this is so terrible because you saw the rage bait on Fox News. And so now you're a little bit embarrassed because, as I pointed out in the show yesterday,

the whole story about Queen getting canceled was fake. And so maybe you're embarrassed by that, so you feel like you have to, you know, grasp for some sort of way out. But you don't have to do that. You really don't. You can just admit, like a lot of people, including people I respect on the right,

they got this story wrong. They heard from Fox News and some of these outlets that Queen's been canceled. It's political correctness overboard. And they didn't look into it. They didn't look into what the story actually was. They didn't realize that, no, they haven't been canceled at all.

They just didn't put this one particular song on an audio platform for three-year-olds. And they also didn't look into see what the song actually is, what it's about. And so many people made that mistake. I think it's better just to admit it. I told you what the lyrics are. I mean, again, the lyrics, I was just a skinny lad, never knew no good from bad, but I knew life before I left my nursery, left alone with big fat fanny.

She was such a naughty nanny. He big woman, you made a bad boy out of me. What is your interpretation of that? How do you interpret it? To me, it seems very clear that is about a overweight nanny molesting a child in the nursery. It's like, that's what it is. That's what he's talking about. Okay?

I don't know what to tell you. I wish that wasn't the case. I wish that's not what the song was about, but it's what it's about. It's right there. I didn't make those lyrics up. I didn't make them up. Queen made them up. They're right there.

So what is your, what, just tell me, how do you interpret that? Okay, I don't need to read between the lines or turn the thing upside down and read it backwards to get this interpretation. You have to do that to not get this interpretation. So what are you going to do? It's a metaphor. It's a poetic license. It's a metaphor. You see, the nursery is not literally a nursery.

It's a metaphor for, I don't know, big fat fanny that's the nanny. Well, she's not really the nanny. It's a metaphorical nanny. Come on. And once you understand something, like, So much of the music that is considered, oh, the classics, these are the classics from the 60s and 70s. There's a lot of this kind of stuff. As I said yesterday, so much of it is just degenerate garbage.

It just is. And it has the reputation of a classic now simply because it's been around a long time. This is not a great song. It just was happening to be made 50 years ago. It doesn't make it good now. Finally, Emily says, cancel culture is something that you take. part in Matt Walsh. Think Target, Budley, slavery,

rainbows, books, etc. slavery. I mean, sure, I cancel slavery, yeah, but I don't know why you would. Anyway, you're saying it's not canceled because you would be the one canceling. I think you're mistaken, Emily, that, well, I mean, you're not mistaken.

You're right, I do cancel all those things. I want all those things to be canceled. And, well, not books in general, but you've got to mention, I'm not, I'm not in favor of canceling books in general, but in particular gay pornography books in schools is what we've talked about canceling. So you need to be more specific there. But I have never said that there's anything wrong with canceling something.

A whole segment called the Daily Cancelation. Something wrong with that. It's what you're canceling. It's what you're going after. trying to shut something down, impose some sort of social penalty on it, publicly shame something or someone. I'm not opposed to any of that. I never said I was. What I'm opposed to is picking the wrong people and targets for that kind of treatment.

That's my issue. So should we cancel people? Should we cancel things? Yes, if they actually deserve it? Sure, why not? Of course we should. Seems pretty simple to me. Despite the lackluster economy, the Daily Wire is thriving.

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The website Vox has an urgent report this week. The headline from writer Alex Abbott Santos tells us, quote, people forgot how to act in public, which of course raises the question, when did people ever know how to act in public? What do you mean they forgot? Did they ever know? But we'll get back to that in a moment. Here's how the piece begins. Some people shouldn't be out in public right now. Movie theaters have become a lawless land where some moviegoers have no reservations about using their phones after films have started. Sometimes it's not just a glance at the time, but full-on social media scrolls and posting. In New York City, Broadway audiences are drunk, rowdy and apparently leaving feces in the aisles of theaters. This summer at various concert, Albanian pop star Bebe Rexa.

Bebe Rexa, is that what it is? Was Bean in the Face. A fellow pop princess Ava Max was slapped by a stage. rusher and aerial enthusiast pink was handed someone's mother's ashes, fans interrupted country singer Miranda Lambert's intimate show with an imprompto photo shoot, and a fan threw water on rapper Cardi B. Cardi B responded by chucking her microphone at her water flinger. Large scale in-person events are down bad. We should also note that journalism is down bad when the phrase down bad is appearing in articles. As for the rest of it, I haven't been to a concert in probably 13 or 14 years.

I've never been to a Broadway show. And with six kids, I go to movies maybe twice a year at this point, which actually has less to do with the six kids and more to do with the fact that there are only two movies a year at most that are worth watching in the theater. My point is that I can't attest to the epidemic of bad public behavior at these venues. Personally, I haven't been around, I haven't been in these venues very often, but I don't doubt the claim. And I'll also say that obviously, this should go without saying, anyone who scrolls social media in a movie theater during a movie, should be arrested on the spot and publicly flogged. If I were theocratic, fascist dictator of America, is one of the very first policies I would instate.

There would be public flogging stations set up directly outside of movie theaters so that those who misbehaved can be dealt with quickly and efficiently. We would also have guillotine on spot for repeat offenders. And just to clarify for our big tech overlords who are listening to this episode, I am not advocating violence against those who talk text or use social media at the movies.

I'm not advocating it. I'm simply suggesting a legal, that we might want to explore. It would be at least one way to curb the behavior that Vox is reporting on. It's not just Vox. On the same day, the BBC published an article on what it calls, quote, the summer of bad tourists. And it begins, quote, this summer every day seems to bring another headline of tourists around the world behaving badly. Last week, it was two drunk Americans sneaking into a closed section of the Eiffel Tower and sleeping off their bender high above Paris.

the previous week, a French woman was arrested for carving a heart and her initials into Italy's iconic leaning tower of Pisa. A Canadian team defaced a 1,200-year-old Japanese temple last month, just after a Bristol-based man etched two names into Rome's Coliseum and told authorities he was unaware of the arena's age. And who could forget, the German tourists who crashed the performance inside a sacred Bali temple and stripped naked after having previously run out of the bill, run out on the bill at several local hotels. feels like the whole world has forgotten how to act in other people's homes. So people are acting up in movies, at concerts, on vacation, at tourist destinations. Where else? Well, of course, we can't forget airplanes, which have seen over the past few years a stark rise in incidents involving rowdy and unruly passengers. 2021 was a very bad year for that kind of thing. And it looks like 2022 was even worse.

This past June, the International Air Transport Association released its official report on the subject. Reading out says, quote, The International Air Transport Association released a new analysis showing that reported unruly passenger incidents increased in 2022 compared to 2021. Latest figures show that there was one unruly incident reported for every 568 flights in 2022,

which is up from one per 835 in 2021. The most common categorizations of incidents in 2022 were noncompliance, verbal abuse, and intoxication. Physical abuse incidents remained very rare, but these had an alarming increase of 61% over 2021. Now, one incident every 568 flights doesn't sound too bad on the surface, but when you consider the increase, and also just how many flights take off around the world every day,

thus just how many episodes of drunkenness and physical abuse in the sky this translates to, you start to see the scope of the problem. And it's a problem that extends beyond airplanes and beyond tourist destinations and theaters and concerts in many ways, this is part and parcel with the epidemic of violent crime we talked about in the opening, looting, shoplifting, it's all part of the same picture. And we haven't even mentioned the most dire and urgent indicator of social chaos, which is the fact that, as I talk about often,

nearly everyone these days seems to have no problem ditching their shopping carts in parking lots. I actually looked for some hard data on the rate of shopping cart ditching to see how it's increased over time. I spent like way too much time this morning looking for that. somehow it seems like this issue has never been formally studied, and I don't know how that could be the case. All we can say, then, is that there are a lot of people doing it, and everyone who has ever done it for any reason is a psychopath who should be in solitary confinement. But the real question is why? Like, why is all this happening? Why are people acting this way? If outrageous, offensive, antisocial behavior is becoming more common than what explains the increase? while that Vox article has an answer, and it's exactly the answer that you would expect. It's the answer they give for everything.

They say it's all because of COVID. Reading, quote, according to experts I spoke to, this rash of bad behavior can probably be traced to the pandemic shutdowns of 2020. During the lockdowns, we didn't have large-scale social events, and no doubt some people have sort of forgotten how to act now that they're back. Since humans thrive on collective effervescence, it was a complete shock to our systems in 2020 when the pandemic seemed we overnight obliterated those. social, large social gatherings, finding that in-person effervescence became impossible. The pendulum swing from gathering in real life to being relegated to social media to now in 2023, coming back to real-life events may explain why some people are being disruptive and not fully comprehending the impact they're having on their fellow audience members.

They're using the modes of social connection they got accustomed to, posting a video from a movie theater, scrolling through a social media during a Broadway play, or treating a concert like a performance they're watching from home in a setting that's inappropriate. Now, to be clear, I don't dismiss this explanation out of hand. There's no doubt some truth to it. When you lock people in their homes and you shut down all social gatherings, you force people to wear muzzles, depriving them of the ability to see each other's faces and fully connect, even on the rare occasions when they're out in public, when you do all that, there are going to be social consequences. And none of those consequences will be good. But this doesn't come close to explaining the a-hole epidemic or accounting for the entire scope of the problem.

The lockdowns may have exacerbated some of this stuff, but it was there all along. The real source of the problem, the thing that you probably aren't going to hear anyone talk about on Vox, is that we live in a culture that fundamentally encourages this kind of self-centered behavior. There has been a deliberate effort going back in decades to underwent. undermine and ultimately destroy all of the basic standards of etiquette that nearly everyone once recognized. Like, they used to teach etiquette as a subject in school, but those days are long gone. Etiquette has become such a dirty word that Vox wrote an entire article about etiquette and

never used the word etiquette in the article. They never acknowledged that that's what they were talking about. What they're discussing is not just people being, quote, down bad, whatever that means. they're talking about a loss of etiquette in social situations. The problem for our culture and those in charge of it is that etiquette, both as a term and a concept, first of all, has the vibe of something old-fashioned, like our grandparents cared about etiquette, which makes it automatically archaic and inherently bigoted in the modern mind. Etiquette by definition is a customary code of polite behavior among members of a social group,

but customary means old. It means traditional. It means something that has existed prior to yesterday. We, and by we, I mean the universal we, not you or me specifically, hopefully. We've decided that we have no use for tradition, which is why tradition has also become a dirty word right alongside etiquette. And that's what a lot of this stuff links back to. Second and more, and most importantly, etiquette is a code of conduct that you as an individual are expected to abide by, whether you want to or not, whether it feels good or not, whether it infringes on your personal expression or not. It is something that is often supposed to supersede the desires of the individual. It comes before living your truth, whatever that means. But as a society, we've entirely lost

the ability to convey that kind of message. We don't even have the language for it anymore. The feelings of the individual have long since taken center stage. And they now come before any notion of the common good or the needs of society. In other words, people look at their phones in the movie theater because they want to look at their phones in the movie theater. It's what they desire to do in that moment. It's what will make them happiest right then and there they think. And so why shouldn't they simply do what makes them happy? Why should they care if it makes you less happy? Why should they concern themselves with your truth when they're so busy living theirs? The writers at Vox have no answer for that.

They can't really deal with this dilemma because they don't understand what the dilemma is. We can complain impotently about people being jerks, but when it comes to explaining why exactly people should not be jerks, it all breaks down. The only real solution here is to restore some sense of order, of traditional etiquette, of social custom. it's to reestablish a hierarchy where the momentary impulses and desires of the individual are not sitting at the very top in the place of utmost importance. In other words, it means defeating leftism. That's the only actual solution. And we can be pretty sure that Vox will not be up for that. Which is why all the people acting like jerks in public and also Vox are all today canceled.

And I'll do it for this portion of shows. We'll move over to the members block. Become a member today by using Code Wall to check out for two months. months for you on all annual plans. Hope to see you there. If not, talk to you tomorrow. Godspeed.