The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 147 - We Treat Boyhood Like It's A Mental Disorder

Episode Date: November 20, 2018

We are hurting our boys by treating them like they're sick just because they act like boys. They do not need to be fixed. We are the ones with the problem. Date: 11-20-2018 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, have we medicalized boyhood? I think we have, and I want to talk about it. Also, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said something really, really stupid. I know that's not news, but this one is really, really stupid. So we'll talk about that. And also, the online outrage mob attacked an innocent woman, deprived her of her livelihood for no reason. What does that say about the people who join these mobs?

Nothing flattering, I know that. We'll talk about all this coming up on the Matt Wall Show. You know, I'm on the record saying that we on the right should probably layoff of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a little bit because this obsession with picking apart everything she says is kind of bizarre. And it seems almost like conservatives have a bit of a crush on her because they're just constantly talking about her all the time. But I mean, this thing where she doesn't know the branches of government, this is just, oh, this is just bad. This is, this is bad. And when I first heard about this, I thought, well, she must have, maybe she misspoke or, I mean, people are making too much of this.

But then I saw the video and it really is, let me, I'm sure you've seen this already, but here's what she said during a conference call. She said, if we work our butts off to make sure that we take back all three chambers of Congress, rather all three chambers of government, the presidency, the Senate, and the House. So what makes this so bad is that she said the wrong thing. she caught herself and then she corrected it to something that's even more wrong. So we have to take back all three chambers of Congress. Okay, well, that's wrong. There are only two chambers, not three, but there are chambers in Congress. And the Democrats want both of them.

So you hear that and you think, well, okay, she just misspoke. But then she plunges forward. She keeps going and she says, oh, no, no, no, the chambers of government. Oh, no. And then she lists them, the Senate, the presidency, and the House. Oh, Alexandria. Oh, Alexandria. That is not, that is just, there is nothing right about that at all.

That's just wrong in several different ways. And the problem is, she made it clear that she read, this is not her misspeaking, she really doesn't know. She really just simply does not know what the branches of government are, and she doesn't know that they're called branches. She thinks they're called chambers. So how does that happen? How do you get to the age of, what is she, 28, 29?

How do you get to the age of 28 and you don't know the branches of government? How have you gone through 12 years of schooling and then college and you've never encountered this information before? And then you run for Congress and you don't even know what Congress is or what it does. She can't possibly know what it is or what it does if she doesn't know that it's part of the legislative brand. Oh, goodness. What a, what a, what a sad statement. What a sad statement. All right.

I want to kind of follow up, I want to do a part two on the show from yesterday. If you watch that show or you listen to it, you heard about the, well, it started with the terrible, tragic, awful case of a nine-year-old child who killed herself weeks after starting a new ADHD drug. and the drug had suicidal thoughts as a listed side effect. Now, her parents say that she was also bullied in school. They think that the drugs, along with the bullying, were factors in propelling her towards this terrible tragedy. So we started with that terrible case and talked about psychiatric drugs and ADHD and the fact that 7 million kids are on psychiatric drugs, is that really a good thing? that is smart strategy to put so many kids on these drugs. And why you look at the drug companies and the doctors,

they seem to exercise basically no caution whatsoever. And that's how we end up with millions of kids on these drugs, despite the side effects, despite the long-term effects, and despite the lack of data, the lack of information that we actually have on how these drugs will affect kids in the long term. Now, here's what happens. Anytime I talk about this kind of subject, about ADHD, about the dangers of psychiatric drugs for children, and so on, I am going to be informed by people who disagree with my take that I can't possibly know what I'm talking about because my children

don't have the disorder. I've never been through it. I've never experienced it. So I need to shut up because I don't know what it's like. Now, I'm not sure why or how people feel comfortable making these kinds of declarations about a stranger? It's one of the weirdest things about the internet where if you give an opinion invariably a bunch of people are going to say, well, you don't know what you're talking about, you've never been through it, you've never experienced that, you need to shut up, you don't know what. How do you know what I've experienced? You know nothing about my kids or about my life or anything. How could you possibly know? How could anyone feel comfortable just saying that?

Well, you've never, you clearly have never been through this. Do you really just assume that everyone with experiences similar to your own must therefore have the same opinions as you? Is that really how you think the world works? That nobody who's gone through similar things as you could possibly have arrived at different conclusions? That's really the assumption underlying this is that people think that, well, they've been through this. And anyone who's been through it clearly must have come to the same conclusions as them. It's such a narrow-minded way of looking at the world. It's kind of mind-boggling.

And anyway, I'm not sure what my personal experiences had to do with anything. So this, well, you can't talk about that topic unless you've been personally affected by it argument, is one of the most cowardly forms of emotional blackmail. It's just a way of shutting down discussion. it's a way of a person trying to win an argument by claiming this emotional Trump card. The assumption that people who have been personally affected by a certain thing must therefore be more knowledgeable about it and more credible when discussing it is obviously ridiculous. Just because you have card trouble doesn't make you a mechanic, right? And if it did, we wouldn't need mechanics.

So just because you've been through something doesn't mean that your opinions about it, whatever it is, are necessarily more true or more grounded in facts than someone on the outside. The fact that you've been through something does not make you an expert, and the fact that someone else has not been through it doesn't mean that they can't know anything about it. In fact, your personal experiences could hamper your judgment and could make your insights, could kind of compromise your judgment in a way, because they create an obvious bias. So yes, if your kids are on ADHD medication, then hopefully you've learned a thing or two about the medication because your kids are on it. So you do have that knowledge.

But at the same time, you also have a clear incentive to defend the medication no matter what and to ignore the arguments against it because you want to justify the decision that you've already made. So I just don't think that this strategy, this, well, my personal experience trumps your logical arguments thing works. I don't think it works in any case, in any situation. Now, I'm not saying that your personal experiences are worthless. I'm not saying that. I think that they're valuable to the conversation. I think they can add color. They can add perspective and so on. But they don't supersede facts and they don't supersede logic and they don't give you an exclusive right to have an opinion about a subject. Okay, that's my point. But as it happens, I do have experience. I've already shared several times my own personal struggles with getting through public schools. as a kid with this disorder. I was never diagnosed with the with the disorder officially because that was not a direction that my parents were going to go. They were not looking to medicalize my academic problems. But I am familiar with ADHD. I have read the descriptions. I know what the symptoms are and I see myself in pretty much every symptom described. Then and now. I have a lot of

trouble focusing. I can't keep my mind going on one track for very long. If you listen to this podcast, you probably already noticed that because I'll branch off in a million directions and depart from the point that I was making and then circle back to it. That's just how my mind works. I can't sit still. I have trouble going to bed at night because I can't turn my mind off on and on and on. I've been there. I am there. So I do know. And so you can't hold it against me that I've never got an official diagnosis. I am opposed to the diagnosis. That's why I am not going to go and seek one out because of my own personal opinion about this whole thing. I've also been through it as a parent. I'm going through it right now. So I have two emotional trump cards. I guess that means I win,

right? I guess that means my, according to the rules, according to the rules of modern debate, I win because I've got two trump cards. My five-year-old son fits the eight-old. I mean. My five-year-old son fits the ADHD label by any measure, as many five-year-old boys do, and that's the point. But what I can tell you about my five-year-old son is that to just call him energetic would be a huge understatement. I mentioned this on the show yesterday, but I want to elaborate here. My son is, imagine a squirrel that got into a can of coffee beans and ate all the coffee beans. Okay. That's my, that's my son. He runs through the house at a million miles an hour. He's running around. He's fighting off imaginary pirates and dragons. Um, he pull vaults over

banisters and jumps over couches and literally bounces off the walls. He climbs everything. He swings on anything that is remotely swingable. Um, the, the kid, he cannot sit still. He cannot stop talking. He won't even stop talk. You can't stop him from talking. by leaving the room because he'll continue the conversation, even if you're not there. He reminds me a lot of McCauley Culkin and Home Alone, just kind of walking around the house narrating himself, narrating what he's doing, that's what he does. And he does have trouble learning in a formal setting. He does struggle to learn academically.

Now he's only five years old, but he does have that problem. And we do have a comparison here because he has a twin sister. and his twin sister is significantly more advanced when it comes to the ABCs and the one, two, three's, and spelling and all that kind of stuff. And she is also, and I think this is the reason why she's more advanced in these areas, she can sit still for several minutes at a time. She can sit, she'll color, she'll draw pictures, she'll look at a book, she'll brush her doll's hair, so she can do that.

She likes to clean for some reason, if you can believe it. She actually likes to clean, and she's better at it than I am. Like she'll fold laundry and she'll make her bed, make it all nice and nice and pretty and neat. And she does it better. It looks better at the end than it would have looked if I had done it. She pays attention pretty well. She remembers things.

She remembers where things are. Her mind is organized in that way. This is how bad it is. When her mom is not around and I'm looking for something around the. the house because I'm totally a stereotypical husband who can't find anything in the house. I'm always asking my wife where it is. But the problem is if I'm looking for something and my wife isn't there, and of course the first thing I do is I text my wife, but if she doesn't answer,

then what am I going to do? So I ask my five-year-old daughter where the thing is, and I do that all the time, and she'll find it for me. Now, she's no angel, believe me. She can be a challenge in her own way. Unfortunately, her brother inherited my ADHD, and she inherited my stubbornness, so we've got both of that going on. But she doesn't have, she's not the same as her brother. And that's not unusual, because boys are much more likely to have ADHD than girls, which is a fact that people who believe in ADHD as a medical diagnosis, they never really grapple with this fact.

Why is it? Have you ever thought about why is it more common in boys? Isn't that a weird coincidence that boys just so happen to be more rambunctious and energetic and more likely to run around and all that kind of stuff? And they also are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. Isn't that a weird? Have you ever stopped to think about that? Does that not, doesn't that shake your faith in ADHD as a medical diagnosis a little bit that it just so happens to be so much more common in the types of people who are predisposed anyway to be energetic and less. focused. Now, so that's my, you know, my son, unlike his sister, can't find anything. He probably

couldn't find his own feet if I asked him to. He loses everything, which is bad because he's also in the habit of taking off his shoes. As soon as he enters into a building of any kind, he's going to have his shoes off. Within about two and a half seconds, the shoes are off, and they're also lost. So he loses stuff all the time. He doesn't like anything. He doesn't like anything. that involves sitting and drawing or writing or counting. He cleans by picking up all the items that were on the floor, throwing them into a pile on the nearest piece of furniture, and then sometimes he'll even jump into the pile like it's a pile of leaves out in the yard or something. The point is he could easily earn the label ADHD if we went, if we sought out

that diagnosis, I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that my son could, could, get that diagnosis. But we're not going to seek that diagnosis because the boy is not sick. He's not disordered. The boy is just a boy. He's more of a handful than some boys. He's less of a handful than other boys. He has his own personality. And I cannot imagine treating it like the manifestation of a mental disease. Besides, like almost every kid with an actual ADHD diagnosis, he can learn, he can focus. He just doesn't always learn the things we want him to learn in the ways we want him to learn them. So he can't remember how to spell simple words, but he remembers songs. He sings all the time. He's constantly singing. He'll wake up the whole house at 6 a.m. singing to

himself as loudly as he can. Sometimes he makes up songs on the spot. He freestyles. Sometimes it's songs that he heard at church or on the radio. So he remembers that. He knows his superheroes backwards and forwards. He can name all the superheroes for you. That might not be useful information, but it is, it is information anyway that he's remembered. He knows other. He knows about pilgrims and Indians, because that's a story that really fascinates him right now. So he's fixated on that. He knows about ants and bugs. And just yesterday, he randomly started telling me all these facts about George Washington. And he was recalling details from our family trip to Mount Vernon last year.

We went a year ago. And randomly, he's talking about this trip and what he remembered about George Washington. He was the first president and so on. So we took the kids to see some old warships at the harbor last week. And he remembers the ships. And he's always talking about the ship. He wants to go back and take a more extensive, totals. of the ships.

So if my son was in public school, I have no doubt that they would probably tell us he has a learning disability. But he doesn't. He learns all the time. He loves to learn. He just likes to learn in his own way and about topics that interest him. And he likes to learn in a way that's more hands-on. but the fact that he can that he is fascinated he likes to learn about topics that interest him

and he doesn't like learning about topics that don't interest him well what's is that is that really is that really the symptom of a disability i'm the same way i think i think most people are now yes you do you have to be able to even if he's not interested in math and spell he still is going to have to learn the basics there at some point um but the problem is we we look at these boys and we say, well, they can't learn anything, they can't pay attention, they can't, they can't, they can't focus. Well, in almost every case, that's not true. They can focus on some things, just not the things we might want. And yeah, that can be a challenge. And the fact that he's so rambunctious can also be a challenge. It does wear you down

sometimes. I shared this story on Facebook a couple days ago, shared again here, a couple nights ago. I've had this on my mind because a couple of nights ago, I was maybe an hour before the kids were supposed to go to bed. And I was feeling especially not in the mood for his anthics that night. I just was kind of in a bad mood. I was annoyed. I was put off. I just wanted peace and quiet, but my son is running around and doing his whole thing. And so I told him very sternly to calm down and be quiet.

And then I had to stop. and I realized that I was being selfish. You know, there wasn't anything wrong with how he was acting. I just didn't feel like dealing with it, right? And I think so often that's why boys are drugged and punished and scolded in our society because we just don't feel like dealing with them. They present challenges that we lack the patients to meet, especially in a school setting.

And I'm as guilty of this. attitude as anyone. Even as a man myself. I was a young boy once. I was a boy just like him. But I can very easily lapse into this thing where it's like I don't even remember what it was like to be a five-year-old boy. And I expect him to not act like a five-year-old boy. I want him to act like a, I want him to act like a world-weary 32-year-old man sometimes just because I don't feel like listening to it. But I caught myself on this particular night. and I realized how ridiculous that is, and I realized that I was angry at my son

for the crime of being happy and exuberant. How absurd is that? Why should that annoy me? Maybe he's got the right idea. Maybe we should all be running around the house. Why not? It's better than sitting on the couch sulking like I was doing. So that's what I did.

I got up and, you know, if you can't beat him, join them sometimes as a parent. I ran around the house with them and we wrestled. We had a pillow fight. We did piggyback rides. We played his favorite game, which involves him standing on the coffee table and then jumping onto my chest, nearly cracking my ribs and puncturing my lungs in the process. And then we got two other kids. So then his younger brother and his sister, they also wanted to join in.

So they were taking turns, just jumping, pile driving me, basically. And I barely survived, but they had fun. And they went to bed tired. actually fell asleep relatively quickly, at least by their standards. Now, obviously we need to teach our boys to be obedient and respectful. And they really do need to calm down and be quiet sometimes. But little boys also need to be little boys. They need to be able to run around and be crazy and make noise and be rambunctious. That's an actual. physical need that they have. It's not just it would be nice if they could act that way. They need

to act that way. They need that. And I'm afraid that they are rarely given that opportunity these days, especially if you, I mean, the very idea that we take five, six, seven-year-old boys and we put them down in a classroom and we say, you need to spend the next seven hours doing busy work. And then when they struggle mightily to perform that task, we drug them. I mean, just think about that. Just stop and think about what we're doing. Who ever said that a seven-year-old boy is supposed to be able to do that? Did we ever stop to think that boy, that a kid like that just isn't supposed to be doing that? Now, I know well, but if he does, doesn't do that. We need him to do that because he needs to learn this very quickly so we can

go to college and he can get a job at a nine to five and it's a cubicle and, you know, have a, you know, so we have his whole life planned out for him. We've got his life planned out for him. We know what the schedule needs to be. So you've got to learn this now, then learn that, then learn that, then do that. And we've got it all mapped out. Do we ever stop to think that our map is wrong? Do we ever stop to think that our map is self-serving? That this is what we want, to do and how we want them to act? You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft.

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Com slash Spotify. Terms apply. Little boys are always being told, no, stop, calm down, be quiet, sit still. We treat boyhood like something that needs to be medicated or fixed, like this malignant growth that we have to extract and discard. We have literally made boyhood into a mental illness. And why? Because we need them to fit into the systems that we have in place. We need them to go with the flow at our pace on our schedule. I think we are ruining our sons.

I think we are robbing them of so much of themselves. I think that we are the ones who need to change. If there is no room in our schools, in our homes, in our culture, for boys who act like boys, then our schools and our homes and our culture, not our boys, are sick. there is a balance. I'm not saying there is it. We can't let them always do what they want. We do have to teach them the guidelines and the rules and how to follow them. But I also think that sometimes rather than making them fit in with us and go at our pace, maybe we should try to fit in

with them and go at their pace. And then they'll burn off a little energy that way. And also, you know, everybody has a little bit of fun. I think we could learn, you know, we could learn, you know, could learn from our, from our sons, how to have some fun in life at the very least. I just think it's, and that's why I just find it so unconvincing from my own experience, from what I've read, from everything, and then now with my own son, when somebody tells me, look, my eight-year-old boy, you don't understand, he just can't sit still at the desk, he just can't do it. Yeah, I know he can't. Maybe he's not supposed to be doing that. Maybe that is a completely unnaturally. and ridiculous thing to require a young boy to do.

Maybe he would learn better hands-on. Maybe he would learn better going out on field trips and seeing things and, you know, actually pouring, it's like my son. If I tried to sit down and say, son, let me read you some facts about old battleships from, you know, from 100 years ago. It wouldn't work. But I take him to the harbor. Look at the ships.

We take a tour. We do all that. And he learns and he remembers. If I tried to sit him down and just give him a bunch of facts about George Washington and then tell them to write down those facts and repeat them to me, it's not going to work. I take him to Mount Vernon. We go on a tour. We see the house.

We do all that. And he learns. And he remembers. Now, I know that we can't always teach our kids that way. So I realize that. But we've gone way in the other direction. and we try, their entire educational experience almost involves them sitting at a desk, being told information, and then having to repeat it.

And my point is, there are some people who just don't operate that way, unless you drug them. But that's the wrong approach because the fact that they don't operate that way isn't wrong. It's not disordered. That's just how they are. And that's okay. All right. Let's see where we are. I briefly wanted to mention one other thing.

There was a video that went viral on, do I want to do this today? Yeah, I'll just mention it now. A video went viral on Friday showing a Chipotle employee, a woman, telling a group of customers, black men, that they had to prove that they had money before she started preparing the food for them. And they cried racism and the video went on went up on Twitter and everyone on the internet cried racism and the employee was was was fired almost immediately. And then a couple of days later, it turns out that these guys most likely stole food from that very restaurant earlier in the week. and they had previously posted on Twitter openly bragging about dining and dashing, that is leaving without paying for the food.

So these guys, they were literally on the internet bragging about stealing food. And so that's why the Chipotle employee wouldn't make them food because they're thieves. And she recognized them as thieves because they'd stolen from that very store, and they've admitted to being thieves. Now, so the video comes out. out of context. Everyone assumes she's racist, goes viral, she loses her job, her face and her name's out there for everybody to see.

And then a couple of days later, we get the update of, oh, well, these guys are just thieves, and that's why she didn't want to give them food. Now, I didn't see the video or hear about it until yesterday. But if I had seen it on Friday, I would have said the same thing that I've said in similar situations. which is it is insane to jump to the conclusion that the girl is racist. I mean, to all the people who called her racist,

who called a racist right away, demanded that she be fired based on the video they saw on the internet. I have this question. What did you think? Did you think this person had never served a black person before? Do you think, or did you think that she had some kind of policy for all black people? where they all had to show their money ahead of time because they're black, and that somehow we're just now hearing about it, and somehow she was never fired for it before.

No, obviously, that doesn't make sense. Obviously, if you see this interaction, and then you think, oh, she's just doing that because they're black, then your first question, as a logical person should be, well, wait a minute, if she's just doing that because they're black, I mean, she's presumably served hundreds of other black people, and apparently she's never done this before. So what? Did she just suddenly become racist overnight? Did she wake up racist? She woke up as a KKK, slobbering, drooling, crazy racist all of a sudden? Did she fall and hit her head and become racist?

Or does she have a specific issue with these specific people for a specific reason? common sense should tell you that there's probably more to the story. So all the people who saw this video and said, she's racist. I can only come to one of two conclusions about them. Either they are incredibly stupid that they never made this common sense calculation that any intelligent and rational person would make. or they are liars.

And they knew that there's probably more to the story. They knew that it's very likely that there's a good reason why these guys were treated this way. Yet they decided to call her racist and put her name out there and put her face out there, take her job away from her. I mean, honestly, put her life in jeopardy. When you put someone's face in their name out for the entire world to see and you say this person is a racist, you have put their life in jeopardy. Because you don't know.

Somebody recognizes them in public and loses their temper. You don't know what's going to happen. So it's either that all the people that jumped on the outrage bandwagon, they're a bunch of idiots, or they knew what they were doing. And they were willing to destroy this innocent woman's life for no reason, just because. And honestly, I don't know what's worse. I mean, do I want to believe that the society is really filled with people who are that incredibly

stupid or with people who are that evil. It's kind of like those are the two options. When you see something like this and you jump to conclusions, when there are very clearly other logical explanations that could explain what happened, it's, I mean, it's either you're just a bad person or you're really stupid. I don't know, is there a third option? I don't think there is. And I'm just so tired of this. and I'm so tired of people not this is someone's life we're talking about this woman who's been unfairly slandered it's her life this is her livelihood this is this is this is a human being what is wrong with you people doing this to it what did she do to you and for all you know she could be i don't know anything about it she could be on your side with all this maybe for all we know

she's a she's a liberal person she's on your she's one of she's she's on your team And you just rip her apart for no reason? You know, we like to think that we have kind of graduated beyond the days of the the days of the Colosseum in Rome when innocent people would be fed to the lions while all the spectators cheered. But we have not really graduated from that at all. We've just taken that philosophy and we have put it online. and we do the cyber version of it. It's a very sad statement.

All right, we'll leave it there. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Godspeed.