The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 123 - The Media's Most Dishonest Attack Yet

Episode Date: October 15, 2018

Today on the show we will discuss Elizabeth Warren's hilarious attempts to prove her Native American history, the media's incredibly dishonest attempt to (yet again) smear Trump as a Confederate sympathizer, and we'll talk about why people should stop trying to publicize and monetize their personal grievances. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

All right, hope you all had a great weekend. Now, here's a story that seems too hilarious to be true, but it is true. Elizabeth Warren has released, actually released DNA test results to prove that she is Native American. And here's the report from The Daily Beast. It says Senator Elizabeth Warren has taken the extraordinary step of releasing DNA test results that provide strong evidence, quote unquote, that she has Native American ancestry. The possible Democratic presidential contender from 2020 has been, mocked by Donald Trump and other Republicans of her ancestral claims. One of Trump's sick jokes is to call Warren Pocahontas.

I actually think that's maybe one of his best joke. I think it's by far his best nickname. Anyway, so let's get to the meat of this. The analysis of Warren's DNA was reportedly done by Carlos Bustamante, a Stanford University professor, and shows that she had a Native American in her family. Wait, wait for this, okay? Wait for this. Get ready. She had a Native American in her family tree dating back six to ten generations ago. Not six to ten years ago. Six to ten decades ago. Six to ten generations ago. That's the, and she's actually released this as, I mean, has this woman lost her mind? That's a serious question. Has she, I mean, is she, is she, I know she's getting up there in age. I'm just, wondering if there's some kind of senility setting in or something because all she's done here is confirm that her Native American claims were erroneous. This is, no, this is what her,

this is what her opponents should be releasing. We have information that, uh, that Native, that Elizabeth Warren's Native American ancestral claims, you know, date back 10 generations. That's what, that's what her opponents should be saying this. Not, not, not her. She's just having one Native American in your family tree sometime in the time frame of 180 to 300 years ago. Okay, that's what 10 generations. I think a generation is like 30 years, I think, is what. So if we're talking up to 10 generation, that's 300, we could be talking about 300 years ago. She had one Native American in her family 300 years ago.

And she thinks that confirms her Native American heritage. It does not. Elizabeth Warren, you are, I'm afraid to say, you are as white bread as ever, unfortunately, even more actually than a lot of people. I'm white bread, but, but I mean, I bet I could go back. If I, if I were to date, to look at my family tree, probably I wouldn't have to go back even six, ten generations to find a minority, which is, and that's, that's the thing here. what you see here is how identity politics defeats itself.

Because if the left accepts this, which it appears they are, which is pretty funny in and of itself. But if you go on Twitter and you read the thread under where Elizabeth Warren makes this announcement about her Native American ancestry, and you read what her followers, her supporters are saying, they're all celebrating it. They're saying, yeah, you really show them, Liz. So they're accepting it. But the problem is, if you accept this, then that means that pretty much everyone in America is a minority.

I mean, almost everybody is a minority by that definition, which is the end of identity politics, because the whole point of identity politics is to set up this dynamic where you've got the persecuted minorities and then the evil white people. And that's the dynamic of identity politics. But if you can escape the evil white people camp simply by showing that somewhere in the distant past in your bloodline, there was a minority, an ethnic minority. If that's enough to get you out of the, then there's not going to be anyone left. there are going to be no evil white people left because now we're all minorities, apparently.

It's just, it's pretty incredible. But I'm sure we'll continue to follow this breaking news story as it develops. In the meantime, two other things I wanted to talk about. First of all, over the weekend, the media launched what I think is one of the most dishonest attacks of President Trump that we've yet seen, which I know is saying quite a lot. But Trump was at a rally in Ohio, and he began, at this rally, he went off on this thing about Ulysses S. Grant, because Grant is a native of Ohio. So he was complimenting General Grant, which is a perfectly fine thing to do.

He said that the general was, quote, incredible. And he pointed out how Grant beat Robert Lee, which Trump said, is, is, especially impressive because Lee himself was a great general. He was saying, I forget the exact quote, but Trump said that, you know, Lee was beating everybody. Lincoln was scared of him, couldn't figure out, and then Grant comes in and kicks his butt. So this is all in the context of trying to pump up Ulysses S. Grant. But the media had all it needed right there. As soon as, I think the media, they started licking their chops. As soon as they, as soon as they heard Trump start talking about Civil War generals, they were ready. They were ready to

copy and paste and do what they had to do because that was going to give them all the material that they needed. All they needed, what didn't matter the context, all they needed was for Trump to say something vaguely positive about a Confederate, about a, about a, you know, prominent Confederate figure. That's all they needed. And so they took that, they isolated the part where Trump called Robert Lee Great, and they took that, and they accused him of praising Robert Lee without mentioning that it was within the context of praising Grant. And so if you went online on Saturday, this is what you would have seen all over the place. And if you were watching CNN, this is what you would have seen. Trump was at a rally, and he just started praising Robert

Lee. In fact, NBC blatantly lied about what he said. They went beyond, they took them out of context, they did that also, but they went beyond simply taking him out of context, and they just lied about it. They said that they sent out a tweet reporting that Trump called Lee incredible, when in fact Trump called Grant incredible. He never used that word for generally. NBC did issue a correction, we should say, but they issued it two days later. In the meantime, which there's no reason why it should have taken two days. All you have had to do was actually watch the clip in question and you would have seen what he actually said. So are we to believe that NBC, it took NBC two days to actually watch the clip that they reported on?

And in the meantime, in between those two days, they, along with the rest of the leftist media, allowed this false narrative to seep in and fester. and then they came back and corrected it when everyone had already moved on and the narrative had metastasized in the subconscious of many people. And then at that point, they issued their little correction. This is the game that they always play. Now, this tactic by the media was dishonest and absurd, obviously. And the worst part is that they completely divorced Trump's comments about Lee from the overall context. They lied about it. But even aside from that context, what we also have here on display yet again is this idea that, I mean, even if, let's say that Trump was in Virginia doing a rally. And so he complimented Robert E. Lee, not even within the context of complimenting General Grant. well so what why would it even matter if he had done that i mean this idea is so silly that you

this idea that you must not ever say anything positive about historical figures who we have decided are villains it is a silly childish dim-witted way of looking at history and it makes any serious study of history any insightful or useful analysis of history impossible if that's the way you're looking at it you know i got into this argument on twitter on saturday it was a travel day for me i was on planes all day so i didn't have anything better to do but argue about the civil war on twitter so that's what i was doing and um when this controversy was going on i pointed out that well first of all trump was taking out of context but but secondly i said lee was a great general so so who cares it's true what he said lee was a great general

And a lot of people responded to that by saying, well, how could you say, how dare you say that? Lee supported slavery. He fought for slavery. He was pro slavery. He fought for slavery. How could you call him a great general? Now, this shows not only historical ignorance, but an attitude about history that makes it, as I said, impossible to actually analyze historical events and have a conversation. about history. First of all, the question of Robert Lee's feelings about slavery and his relationship

to slavery has nothing to do with the question about whether or not he was a great general. Those are two completely different questions. They are not related. To the first question, it's simply untrue. And this is where the historical ignorance comes in. It is untrue to say, It is not true to say that Lee was some big proponent of slavery and that he went toward a protect slavery. That's not true. Lee did not own slaves personally. His feelings about slavery were not enlightened by modern standards, but by the standards

of the time, they were relatively moderate. His stance on slavery was relatively moderate, even liberal by the standards of the time. Lee also would certainly have qualified as a, he would, if you were to take Robert Lee and put him into modern day society and, and put all of his views and everything, again, divorced from context in modern day society, he would definitely qualify as a, as a terrible racist. but but so would Abraham Lincoln Abraham Lincoln explicitly opposed equality of the races and he said so that he said that he does not in any way support the social political

or political equality of the black and white races Ulysses S. Grant also would qualify as a racist his wife owned slaves Grant himself for a time owned a slave but the bigger point here is that so you see i'm making this point all the time that you you have to analyze the views and opinions of historical figures within the context of the time and what you certainly can't do is select individual historical figures and hold them to a modern standard, but not anyone else from that time period. You know, you can't do that.

You can't take Abraham Lincoln and say, well, he was a great president, great man. Yeah, he was an avowed racist, but, but, you know, we got to see that within the context of the time. We can't do that with Lincoln if we're not going to do it with Robert E. Lee. So we have to decide, are we going to see historical figures within the context of their time or not? And if not, that we have to treat everybody in history in the same way, which means that everybody in history, we have to write them all off as just a bunch of racists and bigots and everything. Because if you go back 200 years or 150 years and then go back to any point in history,

you know, before that, everybody was bigoted to one degree or another. So clearly we have to see things within the context of the time. But the bigger point here is that Lee's opinions on racial issues had nothing to do with his decision to fight for the Confederacy. Lee was not even in favor of secession. He opposed secession. Now, whatever reason the southern politicians had for seceding and slavery was a significant part of their reasons for sure. But for Lee and for most Confederate officers and just soldiers, the problem was different.

And for Lee, you know, he knew that if he fought for the union, he would be marching against his own home, his own community, his own family, his own sons. You know, he would be fighting against them. He would be taking up arms against his family and his home and his country. And when I say country, we have to understand, again for the third time, understanding things within the historical context, if we do that, then we, then we, then we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we're in those days, especially in the South, when, when, when you talked about your country, you were talking about your state, that's what you considered your country to be.

Most people, especially in the South, they didn't feel this allegiance and this, they didn't really identify themselves with the country as a whole. they identified themselves with their communities and their states. And that's the way the country was originally set up. That we are a union of different states. But you cared first and foremost about your community and your state because that's your home. That's where you live. That's where your family is. And especially back then without modern technology, without the internet and phone and all that kind of stuff,

how could you identify with the entire country? It didn't really mean anything to you, the entire country. You know, you had really no concept of the whole country. You had no, what I should say is you had no real direct connection with it or to it, but you did to your land and your home and your family. And so that's just the way people saw it back then. So that was the decision he had to make. He could march against his country, his family, his home.

Or he could fight for the Confederate. and defend his family and his home and his country against those who were invading it. And he chose the latter. And that was by far and away his primary personal motivation. It was not because he wanted to go and defend slavery. It's just, that's just not the case. In terms of his generalship, there's no doubt that he was a great general. He was always outmaned, outgunned, lacking in basic resources like food and clothing and shoes.

He was facing an opponent with superior numbers, superior technology, superior resources, and yet Lee won battle after battle after battle against enormous odds. And that makes him a great general no matter how you feel about him personally. I actually think that Trump gave too much credit to General Grant. Yeah, Grant beat Lee, but Grant also faced Lee at a point when Lee was even more depleted. And this was after the failure at Gettysburg. So the writing was already on the wall at that point. And Lee knew it after he failed.

in Gettysburg and had to retreat. It was, I mean, it was pretty much over at that point. And this was also after Lee had lost Stonewall Jackson. So Grant was facing an already outmaned and outgunned opponent at a point when that opponent was even more weakened. And he won. Which, good for him, but I'm not sure that I just, I don't see why that's considered some sort of incredible accomplishment.

We only see it as an accomplishment. because up to that point, Lee had just been spanking every single Union General thrown his way. And so that was kind of where the bar was set. If you went up against General Lee, it was kind of expected that he would just spank you. But he didn't with Grant, so we consider it this huge achievement. But I still think you have to consider what Lee was up against. But wherever you fall on the question of who is the better general, it is silly to suggest that we have some sort of moral duty to immediately sign.

with Grant on that question of who was the better general, because you just can't do history that way. History, it doesn't work like that. That's like if I insisted that the only great musicians in history have been the ones who had personally great character and had an integrity and all of that. But if I insist on studying music that way and viewing musicians through that lens, I'm going to have to bypass like almost all of the great musicians of the last 200 years. So you just can't do that. Also, when it comes to analyzing the character of anyone, including historical figures, we can't look at them as cartoons, as caricatures.

I think the truth is when you study history, you'll see that there have been relatively few straightforward villains in history. Okay. That is, there are relatively few people who are just plain evil with no shades of gray, nothing, just straightforward evil, and that's it. I think there are very few historical figures who fit that mold. There are some. Obviously, Hitler falls into that category. Nero, Caligula, Stalin, Pol Pot, Attila the Hun. But, and there's a reason why we remember all those names because these were just down to their core evil people who were, you know, but that's unusual. Most historical figures are complex, layered, multifaceted. There are shades of black, shades of white. They may have fought on the wrong side of an issue yet been personally heroic. They may have

fought on the right side, yet been personally debauched, all kinds of different combinations. And what makes history so fascinating is precisely this dynamic because it reveals the hidden complexities of our past and of past, you know, historical figures of the past. That's what makes it interesting to study history. Yet it seems we're just too dumb, too ignorant, too childish to study history in this way anymore, which means that we cannot study it at all. So if we're going to look at the civil war and we're going to say, well, everyone who fought for the South, they're all a bunch of scumbags, evil, terrible, nothing good can be said about them. If that's the kind of attitude that we bring to historical analysis of something as complex and complicated as the Civil War, then it's just we're not going to be able to learn anything about history.

We're going to be children who know nothing about history, and that's the kind of country that we're living in now. All right. One other thing I wanted to talk about, stepping aside from anything politically, political or related to politics for a moment. On Facebook over the weekend, I shared a story that has been getting some attention after going viral. And I'll just give you the brief synopsis of this story. As the story goes, an elderly man, cancer survivor, tragically disfigured from a life. saving surgery, which left him without a nose, without, with an empty eye socket. So he's, you know, so he's been tragically disfigured.

And this man sat down to eat at a convenience store and was asked by the owner of the store to cover up so that he didn't upset her other customers. And he left the store, obviously very upset himself. And he went home and he talked to his daughter about it. his daughter then put this story out on Facebook, giving the store owner's name, her business, and a picture of her. And then the post went viral. And the woman, the daughter, immediately started a GoFundMe account, of course, and began sharing that all over Facebook as well. Interestingly, the go fund me account doesn't actually say what the money is being raised for.

I guess you would think, well, maybe the money is for reconstructive surgery for the father. which will be a great cause. But the GoFundMe account doesn't say that. It doesn't say what the money is going towards. It doesn't even say who's going to get the money. It's just this woman started the GoFundMe account, and it's already raised like $70,000 or something like that in a couple of days. Meanwhile, the owner of the store is getting blasted by everyone across the country,

and you can imagine she's getting a ton of hate mail, probably a significant amount of death threats as well. I don't know if that's the case or not. We haven't really heard much from her, which is part of the point here. But that's the way these things always go. Anyone who's familiar with internet outrage, you know that there's always death threats involved. So I would say it's almost 100% certain that she's gotten death threats, which would be concerning because not only her name, but her picture was put out there as well.

Now, the owner of the store did try to defend herself, apparently. She left a comment on the original post by the daughter. saying that she, the store owner, didn't mean to upset the man or hurt his feelings. She said that he comes in every day and eats, you know, at the store. And according to her, it was driving customers away. And so she says that finally, after however many days of this, she pulled the man aside privately and talked to him about it. And she insists that she handled it the best way that she knows how.

now but obviously that did nothing to quell any of the outrage that's coming her way now now here's the thing i obviously feel very bad for this man it's a terrible thing that he's going through and i won't defend the store owner's behavior i think that she did the wrong thing we're really only getting one side of the story but based on what we know i'd say that she did the wrong thing i there's really no scenario where it would be appropriate to say that to a cancer survivor. But I don't want to spend time analyzing the particulars of this story. What I do want to say is this. We really need to stop turning personal grievances into fodder for public consumption.

I'm really uncomfortable with that. I'm really uncomfortable with the way that people will now take a personal sloth. or insult that they suffered or someone that they loved suffered, and then they put it out there for the entire world, stirring up a mob and trying to get revenge that way. I think it's, even if there really was a slight or an insult, even if something bad really did happen, even if the person being singled out really did do something wrong. The point is, I just, whatever happened to handling personal disputes, privately. Whatever happened to personal disputes is like nothing is personal anymore. Everything is,

you have a problem with someone in your community. You just put it out there for everyone so that people that are a thousand miles away can chime in. People have no idea about the situation. Don't know anyone involved. Don't know anything about the context. Don't know anything at all about the situation. And yet they can come in and their outrage can be heard as well. Why does the whole world, need to know about it. Why does the whole world need to know about this situation between a woman, her father, and the owner of a rest stop convenience store? I think the internet has given everyone the ability to use public outrage as a weapon, not only as a weapon, but to monetize public outrage as well. Now, we all have that ability, and I'm really uncomfortable with it for a number of reasons.

number one it's dangerous you know again even if you suffered even if you really have a legitimate grievance which I think that certainly this man does even though he's not the one who put this on Facebook his daughter did he is a legitimate grievance

even if you have a legitimate grievance even if someone really did do something wrong which I think this owner did it's it's a dangerous game to play when you put someone's name out there, you put their face out there, and you send the mob after them, you have no control over what happens next. And let me tell you something.

If you send the mob after somebody with their picture and their name attached, even if they did something wrong again, and then something happens to that person, which you haven't, which could happen. But if that were to occur, it would be partly your fault. Not just partly, actually. It would be, I mean, it would be pretty much 100% your fault. it's just it is very dangerous and i think that um maybe if you've never been the target of overwhelming internet outrage maybe you just don't understand what it's like okay if you've never been in a situation where you're getting death threats from all over the country left

and right all you know and and and you know or people are showing up at your business or your house and threatening if you've never been in that situation maybe you don't understand what it's like but it's a very terrifying thing and when you're in that situation you're in that situation you're You know that you're, I mean, your life's in jeopardy. It only takes one crazy person who's really upset to show up and do something terrible. So it's a dangerous game. Number two, what good can really come of it? What's the point?

What does it accomplish? Where is, there's like no sense of, of proportion anymore. Where's the proportionality of this? So this woman did a really rude thing. It's a terrible thing. So that means what? We got to destroy our life. destroy her business, put her life in jeopardy.

Like, really? That, that, we immediately jumped to that. And this is what you see, with the, with this example, we're not given any indication at all that the daughter attempted to reach out to the owner herself privately first. So she jumped right to, I'm going to the public, I'm getting the amount, the mob whipped up, I'm going to have the GoFundMe account ready to go. She went right to that. She didn't even try anything else.

So it's a dangerous game. It can't really accomplish anything positive. Yeah, you could make some money off of it. You could destroy the person's life and business, but I don't really consider that a positive outcome. And so those two problems. And it's just not human. You know, it's like we've lost the ability to live personal lives

and deal with things on a personal level. We've lost that ability. And I say this. This is just one example. You see this all the time. I can tell you that every day, or at least I'll say multiple times a week, I get emails from people asking me to share something that they wrote on Facebook about an injustice that they supposedly suffered at the hands of a business owner or a school faculty member or a community member or whatever. I mean, I get this all the time because, because of course, people like to air their grievances publicly, but that doesn't mean it's going to go viral. So sometimes you need that added accelerant.

And so people will come to me hoping that I'll be the accelerant. Of course, I never do it. But it just shows that this attitude that we have. That if we have a problem with someone personally, what we're going to do, you know, we're not going to try to settle it with them. We're not going to go talk to them. We're just going to go right to the mob and look for revenge. And maybe a little bit of cash as well on top of it.

And I really don't like that. I don't think it's the right approach. Now there are, look, there are, there are circumstances where maybe that is appropriate. So if you, if you're being persecuted in some way by some much more powerful institution, especially a government institution, then I think to get people involved to come to your aid, I think that could be the right approach. I still don't think it should be your first step, but eventually maybe you do that. Maybe, maybe, and this is where the internet can come in handy because it levels the playing field a little bit.

But a gripe that you have with the owner of a rest stop down the street. Okay, that is not a much more powerful person who you're being persecuted by. That's just another normal person who's, you know. And I think so much, so much of the time, that's what it ends up being. It's not that people are going up against the more powerful figure, more powerful institution. It's more just they're looking to settle a score with some other average person that they know. And I think we need to be very careful about that. And we need to think about potentially maybe trying to live our lives personally and privately a little bit and solving our problems that way,

at least trying to do that before we jump immediately to whipping up the mob. We'll leave it there. Have a great day, everyone. Talk to tomorrow. Godspeed.