The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 134 - Of Course We Should End Birthright Citizenship For Illegals

Episode Date: October 30, 2018

Today on the show, Trump wants to end birthright citizenship for illegals. We'll talk about why he's 100 percent right about the birthright issue. Also, I'll explain why I think we need to stop blaming mass shootings on mental illness. Date: 10-30-2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Matt Wall Show, President Trump wants to get rid of birthright citizenship for illegals. Is that a good idea? I say yes, absolutely. It's a no-brainer. I'll explain why. Also, should we blame mass shootings on mental illness? I think not, and we'll talk about why. All of that is coming up on the Matt Wall Show. Okay, so what's our controversy of the day? Spin the wheel of controversy to find out what subject we decided to fight about today. and, well, today it was birthright citizenship. President Trump said that he wants to abolish birthright citizenship for illegals. That is the law that automatically makes the citizen, the children of illegal immigrants, citizens, if they're born here. He wants to abolish that via executive.

What he's saying is that you shouldn't be able to, if you're, you know, an illegal immigrant shouldn't be able to just run across the border and then give birth. and all of the sudden her child is a citizen, and then by extension, she is as well, because, of course, we're not supposed to be breaking up the families. So that's his point. I think it's a rational one, a logical one. A lot to be said for it. But this set off the outrage machine. Of course, the outrage machine did what it always does, did what it does best, which is be

outraged. And it also prompted more reasonable responses from people who pointed out that, well, you can't amend the Constitution via executive order. That's not how it works. Here's what the Constitution currently says on the topic. 14th Amendment says all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. The jurisdiction thereof peace. That's the piece where it's kind of ambiguous and an argument can be made that the children of illegals are not actually protected by the 14th Amendment.

Now, obviously, this executive order is going to end up in the court, so we'll end up probably in the Supreme Court, and then finally maybe we'll get a reading on what exactly the 14th Amendment means and who it protects and all of that. I'll leave it to others to talk about the constitutional issues of this and to dissect all of that. I just want to make a couple of points in principle

about birthright citizenship and the idea is behind it. Really, I just want to make one point, I guess, And that is that it's funny to me that liberals constantly argue that the Constitution is this outmoded, outdated, archaic document written by people who had no idea what sort of country we would be centuries in the future, and therefore it's obsolete, and therefore there's no reason why we should take it seriously or listen to it. They say that, but then on something like birthright citizenship, something that where, you know, 19th century Americans came up with this thing way, before we had an influx of millions upon millions of immigrants flooding into the country. So on that issue, they say, no, it cannot be updated. It is sacrosanct. It is law.

It's sacred scripture. And it cannot be changed or amended. So it seems to me that we've really got this backwards. Because with something like free speech, religious liberty, the right to self-defense. These are basic fundamental human principles about your natural rights as human beings. And so those are going, that is, that is, that's timeless.

That's always going to be the case. So the fact that it was written down on paper, hundreds of years ago, that doesn't matter. Because it's just as relevant now as it was hundreds of years ago because these are timeless ideas. But when it comes to what makes someone a citizen, is someone a citizen if they just so happen to be born here, these are not timeless eternal concepts. And I think the context and the situation and all that, that all really matters, right? Now, I think there's plenty of ambiguity to justify excluding illegal immigrants from the birthright law.

but I would be in favor of abolishing birthright citizenship for the children of illegals outright. I think the Constitution should be amended accordingly, something that I know will never happen because that would require a significant number of Republicans and Democrats to vote in favor of it, which won't happen. But as a matter of principle, I think that the part of the amendment, which potentially allows this, has overstayed its usefulness and thus should be should be should be amended. The founders did not know and could not have known

that we would have this flood of illegals coming into a country, which, by the way, would already be inhabited by 300 million people. Do you think they had that in mind? No, they didn't. It is clearly madness, in my view, to allow for a situation where a person need only make it across the border have a baby and their baby as a citizen on technicality.

It imbues this kind of like weird, supernatural power on the physical land itself. It seems like something from ancient times. It seems like some ancient law where if you are born on this land, you are a part of the land. You belong to the land because you are born here. This is not, this is strikingly old-fashioned and impractical for us now.

And liberals are usually the ones complaining about old-fashioned impractical things. Well, here this really is. So it should be changed. There's a test that I like to apply. I call it the cave test, especially when we're evaluating laws and legal principles and those sorts of things.

We should try to think of it, try to imagine that we've just emerged from a cave and we've never heard of this idea before. Totally foreign to us. and then someone suggests it or asks us about, like, hey, what do you think about this? What would our reaction be? Now, I know that this test doesn't always work, but the point is that there are a lot of things in the country, a lot of laws, a lot of policies that we kind of accept because it's always been that way and it's just how it is and we were born into that system

and so we don't really question it. So I think it helps sometimes to just imagine. how we would react if we had never heard of it before and someone and someone brought it up. I always do this with Social Security. Imagine, imagine you never heard of, imagine, forget about the cave. Imagine that no, Social Security did not exist. The system didn't exist. There was no thought of the system. And then one day a politician got up there and suggested it and said, hey, I've got an idea.

Here's an idea. How about the government takes money from your paycheck every single week? keeps it and holds onto it for decades and will actually use it. I say hold on to it. Actually does not hold onto it at all, but takes it and uses it for other things. And then once you get older, they'll start paying it back to you in small chunks without interest.

Now, if someone suggested that system to you, and we had never heard of it, I think almost everyone in the country would say, no, that's crazy. What do you mean? What? No. I don't want that. Why in the world would I? No, no, no, thank you. I'll just take my money and put it in a savings account and keep interest. And then I'll take it out when I want. Thank you very much. That's a crazy system that makes no sense. But we only tolerate it because it's all, because in, from our perspective, it's always been that way. I think birthright citizenship is kind of the same thing. We're just, we're used to the idea of anchor babies. But, but imagine that this concept didn't exist. And then someone suggested it. They said, I have.

got an idea. How about this? If you are a citizen of any other country on the globe and you're pregnant, all you have to do is get across the border somehow. Illegally works, okay? You can do it illegally, sneak across, have the baby, and your whole family gets to stay. I think if someone suggested that policy and it never existed before, almost everyone would say, yeah, you know, I don't know about that. There's some problems there. Not to mention, let's think about this. What happens when immigrants from another, you know, when someone comes from another country and they have a child here, what often happens?

Are they told by their parents, you're an American, you're part of this culture, this people, this is your identity? Is that what they're told? No. I think, or it's not always, but often it's not. So often it seems like immigrant families, they come here, they retain their own culture, their own national identity and loyalty. They speak their own languages at home. They even set up their own communities where they kind of rebuild the home country in these little small microcosms. And that's what they do. My point is that they want their children to be conferred the benefits of citizenship, but they don't want their children to really actually identify as or see themselves as Americans. Now, I know that's a

generality, like that's not the case in every case, but it is often the case. So that's why I don't like birthright citizenship. I think it's impractical, it's arbitrary. It's not accompanied by assimilation, which I think is a really important point here. And this is the problem with immigration in general these days, legal and illegal. It has become, it seems like immigration has become a very one-sided thing, it seems like. The immigrant gets the benefits of citizenship, but does not necessarily make any effort to assimilate, any effort to be a part of the country. And what's more, he's coming into a country that's already been established, already been built. And that's the difference between the new immigrants and the immigrants of the 19th century

and even the early 20th century. And that's why these comparisons don't. And that's why these comparisons don't hold up. When people try to draw these comparisons and say, well, you know, how dare you be, have this feeling of immigration, your family came here at some point as well. Your family was immigrants. Well, that's true. But it was a very different thing. Immigrants back in the old days, they were coming here and they were taking part in the project of building and establishing this country. They came to a work in progress as the point. The mom. modern immigrant does not. He comes into an already built structure hoping to benefit from the shelter that it provides him, which if that's done legally, that's fine. It's understandable. I would

want to do that too if I didn't live here. But it's also why I think we need to take a different approach to modern immigration and think of it differently because it's just an entirely different situation, in my opinion. All right. One other thing I wanted to talk about. after the events of last week with a mass shooting, two mass shootings actually, and the pipe bomb attempts as well, there's been all of the usual discussions that come up around these kinds of events have come up again. And there have been people saying, as usual,

that we need to have a conversation about mental illness. You know, we need to talk about mental illness. mental illness is one of the things that we normally blame these acts of evil on along with guns and policies and politics and so on. Now, I don't think that guns, policies, politics can at all cause a person to go out and slaughter 11 people at a synagogue. I do think that mental illness can at least be a factor. It plays a part. It would be absurd to deny the involvement of mental illness and to say that it plays no part whatsoever. So it doesn't make sense to talk about mental illness. But I don't think that mental illness is the main thing. And I get nervous about these discussions. I get nervous about pinning evil on mental illness. And I get nervous when that is the takeaway that people take from this. When they see this kind of stuff, they're, oh, that's a crazy person. That's a mentally ill person. They should have been on medication. So that's what we need to do. We need to have better mental health. When that's the primary

take away. I get nervous about that and I tell you why. Two reasons. First, when we say that a person did something like this because of mental illness, we are removing agency, removing free will from the perpetrator, which means, for one thing, we're going far too easy on him. And in the process, we're being, I think, unfair to his victims. After all, who can the families really be angry at if the killer was simply ill? was sick and was driven to this by his sickness, which he had no control over. I don't think that's really fair to the families to say that. Now, it may not help the families to be told that, well, this was a man who chose to do this. It wasn't because he was sick. It's because he chose

to do it. It may not help them to know that or be told that, but I do think they should know that. They deserve to know that. They deserve to be angry at this individual person for choosing to do what he did, choosing it. This is not just another victim who is. Who is, who is, was a victim of some kind of illness. No, this was a person who chose to be a predator and should be blamed for it 100%. The implication when we blame mental illness for the synagogue shooting or for any other shooting or attack or whatever kind of other atrocity, the implication obviously is that mental illness caused the event to occur. And if the illness caused it, then we cannot say that the individual person himself, the killer, caused it by his choice. And I just think that that's the problem. That's

simply false. I think it is a choice. I do not think that any mass shooting has ever occurred, which was carried out by someone who had no choice. I do not think that there has ever been. In fact, I don't think that there's, this may be, maybe this is too extreme of a statement, but I don't think that there has ever been a crime committed by someone who had no control over their actions. And so I don't think there's ever been a crime that could be completely blamed on mental illness. And I know that we have the insanity defense. And it rarely works. Sometimes it does. I don't think it should ever work. Because even in the case of a really crazy, someone who's clearly delusional and someone who would appear to us to be, for lack of a better

term, crazy, I don't think you can prove. And I don't think there's any reason to believe that a person like that has no consciousness, no awareness of what they're doing, has no free will whatsoever. I don't think you can prove that. And I think any person who's walking around talking, you know, doing things, anyone like that. At some level, they have consciousness. At some level, as a human being, they're making choices. And so they should be held accountable for them. Now, if you want to, which is, which is why, by the way, looking to see what's happening around your home, Rings battery doorbell helps you track packages and see who's at your door in real time.

The outdoor cam plus protects your yard at night with a wide field of view and clearer retinal 2K video. Or upgrade to 4K cameras and doorbells with retinal vision for ultra-clear zoom in detail. Your door, your yard, your home. With Ring, it's protected. Shop cameras, doorbells, and more at ring.com now. Which is why in the cases of, I'm trying to think of a, let's think of a mass shooting that was committed by someone who, now this synagogue shooter, I don't think there's any reason at all to assume that he was crazy. This was someone overcome by bigotry and hate. But let's take the theater shooting in Colorado a few years ago.

Now, there was someone obviously, obviously very troubled. Again, lack of a better term, let's call him crazy. But this was not someone who was walking around casually for days and weeks leading up to it, just telling people that he's going to be going and shooting up a movie theater. He may have written it in notebooks or confided with a therapist or something like that. But if this is someone who really doesn't know right from wrong, there's no idea, right from wrong, is no idea what they're doing, then they shouldn't be making any effort whatsoever

to conceal their plans or to get away with it. If there's any effort taken to conceal, to get away with it, anything like that, that's clearly an indication that this person knows they shouldn't be doing it. So the only time, I think, that you could maybe blame a crime on mental illness is if this is someone who really had no idea

that what they were doing was even wrong. But in these mass shootings, that's just never the case. There's always some element of planning going into it, always some element of secrecy and all that kind of stuff. So, if you want to tell me that mental illness is partly why a person would want to do something like this in the first place, then I would agree with you. Because it certainly is a disordered, abnormal, sick thing to want to do. It is a, it is not only a destructive choice, it's a, self-destructive choice. Because the person carrying out the attack stands to gain nothing, at least gain nothing that a sane person would want to gain. They're going to be killed, or they're going to end up in jail for the rest of life. Maybe that's part of what they want, part of why they're doing it, which again is a disordered, crazy thing to desire. But the act is still

a choice. The act is something they choose to do. Even a mentally ill person has that choice. so a mentally ill person may discover within themselves this depraved dark desire to go and hurt someone and maybe we can pin that on mental illness but they still have to choose to go and really do it and in that sense if they if they do make that choice and they go and they actually do it then mental illness was basically irrelevant you can't say well as mentally ill i wanted to do it i don't care what you wanted to do you still did it it doesn't matter to me it all what kind of desires were in your head? Why does that matter?

Fact is, this was a horrible, evil thing, and you chose to do it. That's all. But I think there's another problem with blaming mental illness. And that is that it paints a rather disturbing picture of human beings, I think. This idea that a person can go crazy and then go kill a bunch of people, I think if that's true, if we are nothing but material, if our consciousness is just a product of chemistry and nothing more, and if these evil actions are then the result of bad chemistry or chemistry going awry or things, how they're not supposed to fire and chemicals doing things chemicals aren't supposed to do, well, if that's the case and there's no will, there's no choice in it, then how can we ever try. trust anyone ever again. How can we trust ourselves? How can we ever be around anyone ever again?

How do you know that your spouse or your child or your best friend won't contract this illness? And then one day through no fault of his own, go out and do something terrible or kill you or whatever. Now, clearly people's spouses, friends, children do make these decisions. And usually when they make these decisions, the family will claim that, oh, we didn't see this coming. We had no idea. But I think in most of those cases, when you find out about this person and you find out the background, even though the family and the friends may be claiming that this came out of the blue and they had no idea, if they really had no idea,

it's because obviously they weren't paying attention and they didn't know this person as well as they thought they did. But my point is that it is possible to know a person. It is possible to say of a person, well, they wouldn't make that choice. I trust that that's something they wouldn't do because that's an evil choice and they simply wouldn't do that because I know them. Now, you could say that and be wrong.

You could think you know someone and you don't, but the point is it is possible to be sure, at least reasonably sure, that a person will not become a serial killer because you know that they simply wouldn't make that choice, because you understand them on some deeper level. That goes beyond just the chemicals in their brain. But again, this is all chemicals,

if it's all mental illness that causes these things, then you can never really be sure of anyone or be safe around anyone. In that case, I can't say that I trust that my wife won't murder me in my sleep. Because to say that would be like saying, well, I trust that she'll never get cancer, which is nonsense. I hope my wife doesn't get cancer. I pray she doesn't. But statistically, there is a whatever percent chance that my wife will get cancer.

You look at her demographics, you look at different family history, age, all that. You can put a percentage on it and say there's this percent chance of her getting cancer. and as she gets older, that percentage goes up. Right? So there's no whatever I hope there is no trust involved here because she has no control over that. And that's the same for everyone. If these evil actions are simply symptoms of disease, then we would have to say the same in that case. I would have to say, well, I hope my wife doesn't kill me in my sleep.

I hope she doesn't become a serial killer, but there is a whatever percent chance that she will. and there's just simply no way to, you know, so you could, you could look at the statistics and look at probabilities and, you know, that's the percentage. But if I said, even if I said, well, there's a 0.01% chance that my wife will become a serial killer. Even that, I wouldn't, I wouldn't feel safe going to sleep around her, to be honest. Even more so, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be able to trust myself around anyone because I have to say the same about myself. Because how do I know I won't get this sickness? How do I know that chemicals and things won't

start doing weird things in my head and force me to do things outside of my, outside of my choice, outside of my agency. Then in that case, I must look at myself and say, there is a certain percent chance that I'm the next Charles Manson. And I don't think we could talk about people that way because people do have free will and choice. And they decide to do evil things. And so that's the conversation. That is the first primary, most important conversation that we should be having, around these kinds of events. Rather than talking about mental illness, we talk about, and I mentioned this yesterday,

but we talk about evil. This is a person who chose to do an evil thing. And then the other thing, too, is, and I've mentioned this before, but, and I'm, you know, I'm the last one to complain about stigmas and that kind of thing. I think that the term stigma is way overused. But when you blame stuff like this on mental illness all the time,

it does create a stigma around mental illness. Because what we're saying then about, actually mentally ill people is, hey, they could, I mean, they could go off anytime and kill somebody. Which is not the case. Because they'd still have to choose it. So we can't lose, we can't lose sight of choice when talking about this. All right, we'll leave it there. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening, everybody. Godspeed.