The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1540 - Girlbossing the Airline Industry… Straight Into the Ground

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, the airline that just flipped upside down on a runway in Toronto has been obsessed with DEI for many years. They seem to have been more focused on “girl power” than on keeping their planes in the sky. Also, the Trump administration might ban food stamp recipients from using taxpayer money to buy junk food. Why isn’t that already the policy? The mayor of Los Angeles says she needs to investigate to figure out why she decided to leave for Africa right before the wildfires broke out. And a new debate is raging on social media: is it sexist for a dad to take just his son on a guy’s trip? The internet says yes. And the internet is wrong again.   Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/4bEQDy6   Ep.1540   - - -   DailyWire+:   Don’t just watch CPAC—be part of it LIVE with Daily Wire Backstage TONIGHT, February 20, on DailyWire+!   Now is the time to join the fight. Watch the hit movies, documentaries, and series reshaping our culture. Go to https://dailywire.com/subscribe today.   Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj   - - -   Today's Sponsors:   Done With Debt - Start building the life you deserve! Visit https://donewithdebt.com or call 1 [phone] and talk with one of their strategists. It’s FREE!   PureTalk - Switch to Pure Talk and start saving today! Visit https://PureTalk.com/WALSH   - - -   Socials:    Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Rv1VeF   Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3KZC3oA   Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eBKjiA   Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RQp4rs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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leave for Africa right before the wildfires broke out. And a new debate is raging on social media. Is it sexist for a dad to take just his son on a guy's trip? The internet says yes, and the internet is, of course, wrong again. We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall show. Do you wish you could have invested in the stock market last year when investors scored the highest profits in decades? But between your mountain of bills and credit card debt, you had nothing left over. It's time to stop letting debt hold you back. Let me tell you, how done with debt can help. They have a brilliant new strategy designed to tackle your debt

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the early days of Barack Obama's presidency. Conservatives don't want to relive the whole nightmare for obvious reasons. And for their part, Democrats would rather move on too. They don't particularly want to dwell on Obama's Russian reset, for example, where he told us that Putin wasn't really a bad guy. That kind of thinking isn't exactly compatible with Democrats' current narrative, nor are Democrats interested in reminding everyone of Obama's promises to lower health care costs or his promise to close Guantanamo Bay or his promise to stop the weather from changing. None of that happened and so on.

So if there's bipartisan agreement on anything, it's that Obama's presidency isn't worth talking about anymore. But there is one moment from the early Obama years that has suddenly become relevant again. And I'm talking about the crash of a Colgan Air passenger plane, which was flying under the brand name of Continental Airlines. The crash occurred in February of 2009, just a month after Obama's inauguration. It was the fourth in a string of crashes involving regional airliners from 2005 to 2009. Fifty people died, including one person on the ground.

And an investigation revealed that the pilots, one man and one woman, were overworked and underpaid. They were also objectively bad pilots, at least on that particular night. They weren't paying attention to their instruments to the point that they stalled their plane while an approach for landing. And then when the aircraft warned them of the stall, they panicked and turned a bad situation into a catastrophe. In the wake of that crash,

the Obama administration mandated a series of changes that taken together amount to a major overhaul of the entire aviation industry. One of the big changes was that all pilots, whether they flew for a regional carrier or a major airline, needed to have hundreds of hours of additional training before they could be certified. The pilots were also entitled to more rest of,

breaks. And there were several other new regulations too. And for the most part, nobody objected. It was a pretty uncontroversial move. After all, when planes are crashing all over the place, it makes sense to require better training and more rest for the pilots. But all these new regulations created a new problem. Airlines that were already struggling with a pilot shortage began having even more difficulty finding enough pilots to fly their routes. In an industry that was concerned with safety, the solution to this problem is kind of obvious. You can either raise salaries to attract more pilots, or you can cut down on flights. But the aviation industry, with the encouragement of the Obama administration, decided on a different approach. They began,

they began to appeal to so-called diverse applicants and adopt a much more lax, carefree workplace culture, just like the FAA, which lowered standards to attract different demographics. Airlines created programs to attract women and racial minorities. And then, after the COVID mandates decimated the aviation industry, like so many others, these efforts went into overdrive. The defenders of these diversity initiatives insist that, well, they insisted, still do, I suppose, that standards weren't being compromised. They argued that the pool of applicants was just being expanded, but that all pilots

were still competent. They maintained that, you know, that line of argument, even after an Amazon cargo plane operated by Atlas Air crashed in 2019 while landing in Houston, when the pilot inexplicably steered the plane directly into the water. An investigation revealed that the pilot, a man from the Caribbean nation of Antigua, named Conrad Asca, had repeatedly failed flight training, but was promoted anyway. His family even sued Amazon, alleging that Conrad Asca never should have been allowed in the cockpit to begin with, based on his sheer incompetence. But both Amazon and Atlas Air, which repeatedly preached about the importance of diversity, had no problem handing Conrad

ASCA, the keys to a wide-body Boeing cargo plane. The defenders of diversity initiatives also downplayed the crash of Southwest Airlines Flight 345, which suffered a landing gear collapse while landing at LaGuardia in 2013. The whole plane was totaled. It was a $15 million loss. Several people were seriously injured. This is a crash you probably haven't heard much about, even though given recent events it's once again very relevant. And I'll show you this is footage taken by passenger on board Southwest Flight 345. It shows the moment that the front landing gear collapsed as soon as the plane touched the ground after a very rapid descent. Watch. This plane is not going to move unless they got a tow truck or something. Yeah, the wheel is gone.

Now, an investigation revealed that the captain of this flight was a woman who had multiple complaints filed against her by her co-pilots. And in this instance, she allowed the plane to descend rapidly towards the ground without properly configuring the flaps for landing. And then when she knew the plane was going too fast, she did not abort the landing. Instead, she ordered the first officer to, quote, get down. And then she aggressively took control of the plane herself and flew it, nose first, into the runway. So how was a pilot this incompetent allowed to serve as a captain ferrying passengers around on a jetliner? Well, a few weeks ago, I received a tip from a pilot at Southwest who told me that this particular captain was

notorious for inappropriate and dangerous behavior in the cockpit, a lot of pilots didn't want to fly with her, and the captain for her part thought the complaints were really about her gender or her sexuality instead of her competence, and apparently Southwest agreed. This was not a widely reported episode for the simple reason that it's extremely inconvenient to the proponents of so-called diversity in aviation. We are required to believe that diversity improves the functioning of every organization, whether it's Harvard University or Southwest Airlines or anything else, so most media outlets buried the story. And they kept the identity of the woman pilot confidential.

Even after Southwest finally terminated her employment following the crash, very few news reports mentioned her gender at all or any other identifying information about her. They did the same thing with Conrad Aska and many other pilots. They just didn't talk about them. And for a while, this strategy worked. Diversity initiatives continued for many years without any interruption across all major airlines. But the problem, of course, is that you can't downplay airline crashes forever. Eventually, the crashes become more noticeable. Eventually, people start dying and not just in cargo planes.

And at that point, which is the point we've now reached, the toll of diversity becomes harder and harder to deny. And then people will do the rational thing. They'll start looking more closely at what exactly is going on in the aviation industry. And in particular, they'll start looking at who exactly is flying the aircraft that keep crashing. Now first, of course, there was the disastrous mid-air collision that was apparently caused, at least in part, by a female Blackhawk pilot near Washington's Reagan Airport. The pilot was clearly flying too high for reasons that are not clear. She also failed to see a jet that was directly in her path. And based on the most recent information we have from the NTSB, it's clear that about three minutes before the

collision, the Black Hawk pilot was warned by her instructor that she was flying 100 feet too high for the area that they were flying in. She was also warned about the passenger jet by air traffic control, which also provided the passenger jet's location well over a minute before impact, but she never took any evasive action whatsoever. And the pilots of the American Airlines plane put their plane into a maximum nose-up climb just one second before impact. So clearly, they eventually saw something, but it was too late. And the woman flying the Black Hawk apparently never did see anything somehow. Then earlier this week, we all witnessed the Endeavor Air Crash at Toronto's airport.

The plane clearly came in too quickly, just like the Southwest Airlines jet that I mentioned earlier. And then the landing gear collapsed, and the plane flipped over. And based on air traffic control audio, it appears that one pilot, the one who was presumably handling the radios, instead of flying the plane, was a male. but we still don't have the identity of the pilot who was actually flying the plane. We have not been officially told that information, interestingly enough. Reports from various sources online citing tips from airline pilots and firefighters at Toronto's airport

suggest that the pilot who was flying the plane was a woman. Now, this has not been officially confirmed, but this is what various reports are saying. We don't know for sure because no one in the government or at Delta Airlines will tell us. Now, if it's true that it was a woman flying the plane, that wouldn't exactly be a surprise. Endeavor Air and Delta have gone out of their way in recent years to advertise how many female pilots they have. They've also done a full court press to attract more female applicants. In fact, as you may have seen, Endeavor's official TikTok and X accounts are obsessed with the idea of so-called unmanned flights,

which means in their case that no men are in the crew. So they're not just pro-women, they are actively anti-man. Okay, imagine an airline advertising that it's an unwomaned flight. Imagine them advertising that, hey, this is a flight where there are no women involved. They would never do that. But here they're bragging about the fact that there are no men in the crew as if that's a good thing. And if I'm being honest, whoever is putting together Endeavor's social media posts seems to have a sense of humor about the situation.

Here, for example, is one recent tweet from Endeavor. And as you can see, it reads, buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, your flight is unmanned today. And then there's the picture of the all-female flight crew. And it also says hashtag girl power. Now, on the service, I guess this is supposed to be an empowering girl boss message. But if that's the case, then why does it begin with the warning buckle up? You know, it's like going to a restaurant where they tell you, enjoy your food presented by an all-female kitchen. Hope you brought a bucket. It's almost like whoever's writing this post knows something we don't.

And then there's this now infamous TikTok footage from Endeavor Air featuring a few more girl bosses. Some of these clips are so on the nose that it seems like they were prepared by a male intern somewhere who's tired of all the DEI initiatives. And he was trying to find some desperate way to communicate the message without losing his internship in the process. So I don't know how this came about, but let's go back and watch these again. Girls, come on. Leave the saving of the world to the men? I don't think so. I don't think so.

Lift that's guy, young bad girls, give it well. Lips ass guy. No, we ain't giving no hope. I ain't Romeo when I'm holding. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon.

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The click. Click or clique? Click. Let's do it. This is all stuff that you want to see from. your pilots before they take off. That's what you want. You want sassy. You want you want sassiness from your pilots, don't you? That's what we're looking for. When I get on a plane, the main thing I'm looking for, I'm looking for the sassiness. As the sassier, the better.

Now, you may have caught the lyrics in one of the songs featured in those social media videos. The lyrics were, live fast, die young, bad girls do it well. That's what you hear after you read the caption, Leave the flying to the men? I don't think so. Again, this is the official messaging of an airline that's supposedly committed to safety and competence. They want you to know that you'll have an all-female flight crew

that loves to, quote, live fast and die young. That's about the worst possible mantra for an airline pilot. I can't think of anything I'd... I can't think of any mantra I'd... that I'd less like to hear from an airline pilot than live fast die young. Now, when I looked at the rest of Endeavors TikTok account, I found that these clips are not rare exceptions to the norm, quite the opposite. Pretty much every single post involves women dancing or miming the words to a song of some kind. It's like a sororities TikTok channel instead of the

official social media account of a company that's responsible for flying thousands of passengers across the sky at high speeds and aluminum tubes every single day. So here's just a small selection of what I'm talking about. To your God, can you imagine being on the plane before takeoff and looking out the window and seeing your flight crew running down the tarmac like a Disney princesses? Can you just imagine witnessing that? I mean, it's like they're running an adult daycare. You know, they're not even pretending to convey the idea that they're serious people who should be entrusted with your life. The description for Endeavor Air's account on TikTok reads, quote,

CR Slay Every Day. I just have to emphasize again, this is an airline. Slay every day is their mantra, which I assume is a reference to the CRJ aircraft that they fly. So it's not CRJ, it's CR Slay. There's that sassiness again. That's what you want. Now, this is how you would present your company if you wanted to attract the ditsiest, least responsible and least intelligent applicants imaginable.

And based on recent events, it seems like that's exactly what Endeavour got. But as easy as it would be to blame this on Endeavor, which is a relatively small subsidiary of Delta, the truth is that this is a much deeper problem. It goes to the top, and to illustrate that, here's footage from the pin tweet, of Delta Airlines' main account at the time of the Endeavour air crash. This is probably changed now, but at the time, and this is Delta now we're talking about, watch. Did somebody say, Slay?

So this whole Slay concept is apparently a big deal at both Endeavor and Delta. They're thinking it's a really important message to communicate, that there are girl bosses who slay. Now, of course, as you may know, slay means to kill. And that's what you can expect to happen now when you board these planes, evidently. They'll slay you with their flying skills. Now, as painful as this footage is, I will give Delta some credit. Yesterday, in an interview with CBS, Delta CEO was given an opportunity to blame Donald Trump for the crash in Toronto. Yes, the corporate press is going with the narrative that Donald Trump is responsible for a pilot's terrible crash landing in a foreign country.

And in response to this setup, the Delta CEO immediately shot the question down, which led to a pretty entertaining facial expression from the CBS anchor watch. You know, the Trump administration recently fired many employees of the FAA administration. Do those cuts worry you? And do you think that impacts the safety? I know you just said it's the safest way to travel. But after looking at all these mishaps, a lot of people are very nervous. Do these cuts affect you? The cuts do not affect us, Gail. I've been in close communication with the Secretary of Transportation. I understand that the cuts at this time are something that are raising questions, but the reality is there's over 50,000 people that work at the FAA and the cuts, I understand, were 300 people, and they were in non-critical safety functions. The Trump administration has committed to investing deeply in terms of improving the overall technologies that are used in the air traffic control system. systems and modernizing this guys. They've committed to hiring additional controllers and

investigators and safety investigators. So no, I'm not concerned with that at all. So she was quite confounded that he did not take the opportunity to blame Trump. I mean, because she's been, she has asked a version of this question on air, probably 50,000 times in various different contexts where she bring something bad is happening. She brings somebody on and says, say, don't you think this is really the fault of Donald Trump? And every single time for 50,000 times, the person always goes, well, yeah, of course. Who else would be at fault? This is the one time where someone's like, no, I don't think he had anything to do with it.

And she doesn't know how to respond. She's totally bewildered. But you notice there's no question from CBS about the identity of the pilot or her qualifications or whether Endeavor regrets posting nonstop music video TikToks for the past five years, where they advertise that they want to slay their passengers and die young. No question about that. Instead, the question is about how Donald Trump is to blame. This has been the approach of so many establishment interests ever since the aviation industry

began experiencing a series of crashes more than a decade ago. They deflect and they minimize responsibility, all while insisting that the underlying system is working fine. But with every major airline disaster, these deflections become less and less effective. The more they hide information about who's flying these planes, the more people will come to realize what's actually going on. And at a certain point, a point that is rapidly approaching, nobody will fly on a plane unless they know who's flying it. People are going to demand reviews of pilots, like they demand reviews of restaurants before making a reservation. Now, that probably won't be a sustainable model for most airlines. but for people who want to fly with some peace of mind,

free from the complete and total incompetence that Obama-era diversity initiatives have wrought so many years later, it'll be the only option worth considering. Now let's get to our five headlines. Freedom runs deep in our nation's DNA. It started when we stood up to unfair British taxes and their overpriced tea. They tried forcing us to pay. We threw that tea right into the Boston Harbor.

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Americans on food stamps may be banned from using them to buy sugary drinks and other junk food. Inautural Secretary Brooke Rawlins said on Friday, the newly appointed cabinet official said she'll work with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk's Department of Government of Government Efficiency to prioritize food stamp benefits for healthy food items. Raw and sole reporters, will we ever take food out of a hungry child's mouth? Of course not. This is the USA. Truly this program has grown so large, especially in the last administration. Under Biden, I think it grew almost 30% more than before. That's the SNAP program, food stamps. we really need to look at where the money is going and what it's being spent on. So there's been a lot of controversy over this, as you can imagine, this news that the Trump administration might look to narrow down the types of food items that you can use your food stamps or your SNAP benefits on.

But of course, this is exactly the right policy. Of course, people on food stamps should not be allowed to buy junk food with them. well, they can buy it. I mean, they can buy junk food if they want, but they could buy it with their own money. Taxpayers should not be funding someone's junk food addiction, which is incredibly obvious. There really is no credible argument to the contrary, except just like a logistical argument about how you enforce this. But I think it's certainly feasible to enforce. If you have the will to enforce it, you can enforce it.

And you should. And there needs to be a lot of reforms to these programs, obviously. I think something like 40 million people are on food stamps, and that is, to me, clearly way too many. It tells us that these benefits are being dulled out without enough vetting, and that food stamps and entitlements have become a lifestyle for millions of people rather than a temporary helping hand to get them through a tough time, which is how all of these programs were initially sold to the public. That's what they were supposed to be. but for a long time now, they've become a lifestyle. Do 40 million people need food stamps? And when I say need, I mean, if we got rid of food stamps, if we got rid of SNAP,

would 40 million people starve to death because of it? Are food stamps the thing preventing the mass starvation of 40 million people? Does anyone really believe that? Not if you have five brain cells, you don't believe that. So there are too many people on the program, and the program is not, nearly restrictive enough in terms of what you can use it to purchase. And in terms of food, it should provide for basic nutrition. It should not provide for any food that has zero nutritional value. Again, this is obvious. And there are a lot of those kinds of foods out there.

Which, speaking of which, and this is, I mean, this was all really just a setup for me to talk about this, which is that I needed some sort of segue because I've been very troubled by this. The other day I was at the store, I was at Walmart, actually, and I saw a woman buying something that I didn't know existed. It was my first, I had not, I had never become acquainted with this product, but there was a woman buying a bottle of Skittles juice. Okay. Now, I'm not saying she was using Snap to pay for it. Maybe she was. That wouldn't surprise me. But I don't know. That I don't know. I'm just saying, in terms of junk food, just to show you how bad it is out there, if you didn't already know, Skittles juice, that's a thing. Or I think, and I looked this up later because I

make sure my eyes weren't deceiving me. No, it's real. Yeah, this is a real thing. They just Skittles rolled it out very recently, actually. Just in 2024, they rolled out their line of Skittles drinks. And so it is technically Skittles drink, not Skittles juice, because it's not juice. I mean, they can't legally call it juice because there's, there were definitely no fruits involved in the making of this concoction. There was no fruit within a 50 mile radius of whatever factory they used to make this sludge. Like this stuff was, even just the color of it is not, it's like this neon. It looks like it was harvested from the chernon. Noble nuclear reactor core or something like that. I mean, it's the color of the liquid isn't

even on the color spectrum. There's nothing natural about any of it. It's not food. It's not even a real color. I don't know what that is. And yet people buy this stuff. They buy it on purpose in public where we can all see them doing it. And this woman had no shame about it either. She was actually talking to her. I mean, this makes it even worse. She had her, she was a, she had her kid with her. I think she was buying her for a kid. I don't know. But she was talking about, she was like talking about, oh, you get the Skittles drink. Openly discussing it. No shame. I don't know. I would rather drink from the punch bowl at the people's temple than drink, Skittles drink. I would rather drink nothing ever again. I would rather die of thirst. If I was dying of thirst in

the desert and somebody came up and said, I hadn't had a drink in a week and I'm on death's door and they offered me a bright neon red Skittles drink. I would not, I'd say, no, thank you. I'd rather die of thirst than die of diabetes. So I would rather drink straight from a river in Indonesia than drink Skittles drink. But this is what people are consuming. And then we wonder why there's an obesity epidemic. And we're told that it's a thyroid problems and hormonal problems. And that's all it is. Meanwhile, people are out here guzzling liquid skittles. There are people, there are people who have decided that regular candy skittles require too much effort to consume. They are, they're burning too many calories eating skittles because they have to chew them.

And that's too much exercise. And so they need, they need a more convenient, less, uh, a lower effort delivery mechanism for Skittles. That's why they're drinking it now. We are, and people joke about this, but we are seriously one step away from intravenous skittles. Okay, that's where this goes next. A Skittles-flavored IV drip

is where you're going to see people, morbidly obese people, on scooters with an IV drip of neon green skittles going right into their arm. That's what's happening next. And people are going to look at that and still say, oh, they must have a hormone problem.

Her thyroid. What, it's terrible. It's all the thyroid there. Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, yeah, food stamps. I don't know. Can you use food? Can you use Snap to buy a Skittles drink?

Probably, right? There are problems. This has already happened probably thousands of times. Should that be allowed? Clearly not. Clearly not. All right. We have another protest for you.

This one, this one, you know, I don't know. I keep saying this one might be the worst. This one might be the cringiest. But this one at least audibly. So if you're listening to the, so you're going to get a reprieve. If you're an audio podcast listener, this will be a reprieve for you. So you don't have to, don't worry, but you don't have to put this on mute. Like it's going to be fine.

The audio is okay. It's the visual. So these are leftists at the Kennedy senator protesting the leadership changes that have happened at the Kennedy Center. Most notably, the leadership change was that Trump put himself in charge of it, which is pretty funny. And so they are protesting this through the art of dance. This is a dance protest at the Kennedy Center. And as you know, as a renowned interpretive dancer myself and as a former contestant on Dancing with the Stars, I heard about this. I was very interested when I heard about it.

I wanted to see what kind of protest dance they came up with. I was a little offended that I wasn't invited. I don't know why they didn't reach out to me. I mean, I might be a Trump supporter, but if you're having a dance, you know, just for the art of it, I would have liked to come and participate just because I'm so,

just because dance is so important to me. But anyway, so this is what they came up with. Let's take a look. So that's it. And then they just repeat that move over and over again. That is the, the laziest dance I've ever seen. That was the laziest most lackadaisical, low energy dance routine of all time. That was like the Jeb Bush of dance routines. And that's supposed to be a protest dance.

I was expecting something with some vigor and aggression to it. That's what I was expecting. And instead, I mean, what is the music? Like, they're dancing to hold music. I don't know what that is. This is not protest dance music. That's elevator music. That's the music that you hear in the lobby at a swanky hotel. That's not a protest type music. And the choreography, I mean, what is that? Did anyone choreograph this? And these are professional dancers.

I don't know. I think they forgot to choreograph it or they thought they showed up that day and someone was supposed to have come up with the choreography and they said, what did you come up with? And the guy's like, oh, shoot, was I supposed to do that? And so it looks like the person in the front of the line is kind of making it up as she goes along and everyone's just imitating her. So I don't know. It looked, it looked, the choreography looked like the guy on the tarmac waving the planes in. That's what it.

And maybe that's how the plane ended up upside down. I don't know. But I just was expecting something more. I really was. And so that doesn't even, you know what, that doesn't even. rise to the level of being cringy. That would be a compliment. I'm offended that it wasn't more cringy. It was just boring. So that's a, I rate that a three out of ten. I mean, at most, that was just, that was a letdown. Karen Bass, the historically incompetent mayor of Los Angeles,

who was off in Ghana while the fires burned down her city, sat down with the LA Fox affiliate for her first interview since the fires. And she tried to explain why she decided to travel to another country thousands of miles away, even though she knew or should have known that there was a risk, a major risk of these fires happening. And the problem for her is that, you know, the answer, the real reason why she went to Africa is that she just doesn't care. She doesn't care about Los Angeles or the people who live there. And she didn't want to say that. I'd almost respect her if she would just say that. If she would have just said, hey, no, well, I mean, the reason I did it is just because I don't give a crap. That's why. I don't care about these people.

I mean, like, morally I would object to that, but that's the truth. So at least be honest. She don't want to say that. So here's how she handled it. I'm going to go to Ghana, which I know you've said was a mistake now. But I just am curious on the thought process behind it. Because we know that there was warnings about the weather before you went and you still went, what was the thought process behind going to Ghana? So let me just tell you a couple of things. First of all, when the White House called and asked me if I would represent the president, I said, yes, it was going to be a very, very short trip over a weekend and two business days. We need to look at everything about the preparation and

all of that for the fires, because I think when we evaluate that, we will, find that although there were warnings that I frankly wasn't aware of, although there were warnings, I think our preparation wasn't what it typically is, meaning that before there's a major weather event, for example, last week when we knew we were going to get into the rains, you saw us come together and us talk about, you know, get your sandbags, bring the K-rails out, that type of preparation didn't happen. If that had, I will tell you, Elex, I wouldn't have even gone to San Diego, let alone leave the country. But what do you mean there were warnings you weren't aware of?

Because I know we were talking about it on the news. A lot of people were talking about the problems, warning that this was going to be a huge deal. So when I talked about it with the fire chief, what she said is that we have warnings of Santa Anna Wins a lot. But predicting this, and you saw from the city, from the county, that level of preparation really didn't happen. So it didn't reach that level to me to say something terrible could happen and maybe you shouldn't have gone on a trip. But to me, I don't know.

I mean, I think that that's one of the things we need to look at. So two investigations are taking place. One internal to the city, and that's the fire commission because that's mandated by the city charter. So the commission will hire an outside entity to examine everything, the pre-deployment, you know, why were staffs, why were firefighters sent home? you know, all of that that should have taken place that didn't. And then also the governor has contracted with the Fire Safety Research Institute, which is a national institute that investigated what happened in the fires in Maui. So everything that happened, including that, needs to be examined.

But I will tell you that I felt absolutely terrible, not being here for my city and not being here for my family. So she needs to investigate. She's going to investigate why she went to Ghana. And, you know, now, we've heard politicians dodge responsibilities, responsibility many times by claiming that they're investigating something. But this is really on a different level. I mean, this is beyond what we normally hear. Because she's, in this case, she's investigating why she personally did something.

So the question is, Mayor Bass, why did you do this, thing. Well, we have to investigate to find out why I did that thing. Who can say? Who can say why I did something? Certainly, I can't. So we can investigate and within the next 36 months, we'll be able to convene, we'll have enough information to have a hearing that will then have a further investigation to figure out why I did that thing. Now, the truth, though, is that voters in Los Angeles have no right to be shocked and appalled by the fact that Karen Bass was overseas. This has been the thing that has defined her political career for as long as she has had a political career. When she was in Congress, she was constantly jet-setting around the globe,

constantly finding any excuse to be in any country but our own. So it was obvious that she preferred Africa to her own country. She was always in Africa, always off somewhere, always on the weakest, most dubious pretense. And they voted her into office anyway. I mean, we played on the show before. We played back when the fires first broke out, we played a montage of clips of Karen Bass when she was in Congress appearing on African media

because she was constantly in Africa doing interviews on African TV stations talking about African problems. Because that's what she cared about. She cared deeply about Africa and helping Africa and protecting Africa and advancing the interests of Africa. And so her obsession with never being in her own country was well known. Everybody knew this.

And it's why she felt the need to publicly pledge when she ran for mayor that she would not take any international trips. Like that's not a thing that a mayoral candidate usually has to even address because it's not a question. But in this case, she had to because she was constantly overseas. and so she did pledge. She said she wouldn't take any international trips. But then she was elected, and she proceeded to take five international trips in the span of like a year, all funded by taxpayers. Three of those trips were to Paris for the Olympics. She went three times for some reason.

She also went to attend the inauguration of the Mexican presidents. why does the mayor of Los Angeles need to be at the inauguration of Mexican president? Why does the mayor of Los Angeles need to go to the Olympics? Why does she need to go to Ghana? Well, she doesn't. But this, again, has been her defining thing. So when voters in Los Angeles claim that they've been let down or betrayed, I don't have a lot of sympathy.

Why did you vote for this person in the first place? Why did you put this person in office? It's the same story with Democrat voters in every major city in the country. They vote for these absolute clowns, these utterly useless, vacuous nothings. They vote for them. And then when the pathetic imbecile, they selected to run their city, runs it like a pathetic imbecile, they're surprised. Well, what did you think was going to happen?

Here's what I'd like to know. This is what the investigation should look into. If you're in Los Angeles and you voted for Karen Bass, and obviously this was before the fires, so you could say, well, I didn't know that. But, but why? What was it about Karen Bass that made you say, wow, she needs to be in charge of the city that I live in? What was it? Like, what specifically? What is it about her that made you look at that and say, well, yeah, she's the one. We got to have her. She's got to be in charge. This is a woman who's great passion, in life, aside from her own political advancement, was Africa. Okay? Why would you think that

somebody like that would be a good mayor of an American city? If she was running for a mayor of an African city, then I could see it. But why would you vote her to run your city as an American? And yet they did. And so whose fault is that? And you know, the crazy thing is that Karen Bass is up for re-election, and she's already announced that she's running for re-election, there's no guarantee that she loses. I mean, she could still win re-election. Even after letting her city burn down, it's not outside of the realm of possibility that she could still win, which is why it's just really hard to feel sorry for the people who

live in these cities. It's just, it's like you have a death wish. you keep voting for people who like everybody else can look and see only bad things can happen when you put someone like that in charge and yet you keep doing it. Let's get to the comment section. I'm so thrilled to hear someone bringing up the issue of breaking blind

and therefore expanding the placebo effect and this is a particularly massive issue with a drug for a mental health condition. I've been trying to tell people about this issue with SSRIs for over a decade and I've been trying to explain why the six-week re-uptake window calling their efficacy into question as well. And I have to add this to what Matt talked about. The drug company's best data shows an 11% difference between placebo and the actual drug. Only 11%. Yeah, I think I alluded to that yesterday when we were talking about this, but it's important to emphasize as you do.

Many of the clinical studies of antidepressants are basically bunk because they weren't actually double-blind studies like we talked about. But even if we ignore that and we pretend that the methodology was sound, which it wasn't, we're still left with the fact that the difference between the placebo and the drug was negligible. So it's pretty clear that, at a minimum, if these drugs work at all, which is highly debatable, they mostly work through the power of suggestion. So it's not much different from, you know, a hypnotist. People are very suggestible. Everybody knows this.

They've been, speaking of studies, there have been a million studies that have showed this, and you don't even need studies. Your experience being a person and being around people tells you that people are highly suggestible. And so, and especially when you're dealing with emotions, you're dealing with feelings. Well, yeah, there's a certain number of things. people that if you give them a drug and you tell them this is going to make you feel better, they will feel better. Right?

We do this with children all the time. It's like, you know, my five-year-old daughter bumps her elbow and is crying. And so I'll give her a Band-Aid. Say, well, let's make you feel better. Even though the Band-Aid's not going to do anything, obviously, it doesn't actually make you feel better. but you give the Band-Aid to the little kid and they immediately feel better because they've been told that,

or at least they believe that this is kids love Band-Aids and so Band-Aids are, they see the Band-Aids as these magical, not just as great fashion accessories, which is how kids see them, but also as something that actually makes the thing feel better. So you give the Band-Aid and they feel better

because you told them that they would. And am I suggesting that adult medical patients are like children in this regard? Well, yeah. I mean, we all are to certain. We are all subject to suggestion. We are all subject to the placebo effects in many different areas of life. It's just, and it's not, it doesn't mean that you're a gullible idiot. It's just actually, it's kind of the opposite.

It's your mind, it just tells you. how powerful your mind is. So that is obviously going on with at least a certain number of these SSRI cases where someone says, well, I took it and I felt better. You know, you felt better because you were told that you would. And so you did. So how much of it? So then that's what you're left with.

You're left with, well, we've got these studies. they're only valid, they can only hope to be valid if they're double-blind studies, but they're actually not for the reasons we talked about yesterday. And so some of the results are because of the breaking blind. And then you also have the placebo effect kicking in. And so what percentage, when you do the study and someone actually takes the SSRI and feels better, what percent of them actually feel better and feel better because of what is happening chemically in their brain from the drug and not because of the placebo effect? Well, there's just no way to know. And yet they give these drugs out anyway. Let's see. By Matt's reasoning, any woman that ever miscarried where the woman's body automatically actively discards the embryo, that makes her a murderer because her body killed the embryo.

This, like, I'm sorry, this is the dumbest argument that I hear all the time. If we're talking about IVF or we're talking about abortion or anything like that, you always hear this. Like, well, aren't you saying miscarriage? It's kind of mind-blowing that this, it's not just one person who makes this dumb argument. I hear it all the time. So there's like a lot of people out there who think this is a compelling, you know, rebuttal. So there's an obvious difference with a miscarriage.

Miscarriage is not a choice. It's not the woman's fault. I mean, this is something that happens naturally. This is like if I said that it should be illegal to kill your four-year-old child, which it is, and then you said, well, that would mean that if a four-year-old child dies of cancer, we have to put the parents in jail. No, it doesn't mean that. Those are two entirely different things. So, I don't know, there's an obvious distinction there. I'm not sure why you struggle to see it. We intentionally breed, eat, and discard pigs, cows, chickens, etc. Your don't kill puppies argument doesn't really make sense. They're all living creatures, and this is coming from a meathead. IVF is definitely not the hill you want to die on. Yeah, you're talking about factory farming, which most people find ethically problematic. I mean, we do it, but a lot of people object to exactly the scenario you just laid out, even though it does happen all the time.

And yet, most of the people who object to something like factory farming have no issue with Ivy. which is a kind of factory farming of human embryos. I mean, that's the way that it works in the vast majority of cases. That's how the industry operates. And that's my whole point. And as for it not being the hill I want to die on, I think that maybe you've noticed at this point that I'll pick whatever hills I want, and I really don't care who else is on the hill with me.

So this is not a compelling. Here's another rebuttal that is just not compelling to me. That's not a compelling. You really want to die on this hill? most people don't agree with you. I get it, I know. We talked about IVF yesterday, and the vast majority of the comments were, the vast majority of the comments on the topic were disagreeing with me rather stridently. I know that. I knew that would happen. I'm not stupid, despite what you may think. I understand that my position on this puts me in a minority, and that's fine. It's my position. I'm going to tell you what it is.

And I'm going to tell you why I have it. And there it is. If you were with us for election night or the inauguration, you already know the Daily Wire doesn't just show up. We take over. And now we're headed back to D.C. To do just that at CPAC, join me along with Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, Andrew Claven, and Jeremy Boring, all on stage live tonight, February 20th. No scripted talking points, no corporate approved narratives, just real conversations that actually matter, streaming live on DailyWire Plus. And we're also taking your questions.

So don't just watch CPAC and be a part of it live tonight on DailyWire Plus. Now let's get to our daily cancellation. Sometimes on our YouTube channel, I will go to the M-I-the-A-Hole forum on Reddit to answer questions posed by people who want to know if they are the A-Hole in a particular situation. Today we're going to bring that fun tradition into the main show because there's an M-I-The-A-Hole post making the rounds on X at the moment. And most of the commentary, both on X and on the original Reddit thread, are, as usual, wrong, which is why I feel the need to step in.

So a woman says that her husband has planned a guy's trip with their 13-year-old son, John, and his nephew Michael, whose mother, the husband's sister, is a single mom. And their 11-year-old daughter, Kelsey, is upset about being excluded. The wife seems to be even more upset about it. Here's some of what she wrote, quote, my husband has been talking about planning a guy's trip this summer with him, Michael, and John. While my husband was discussing with John, I could see Kelsey looking visibly sad. because she wasn't included. Later, I told my husband that Kelsey should go to and that there's no reason to exclude her. He said he just wants some guy time with him, his son and nephew, and that men need to, quote, have their time away from women. I took offense to that comment, which led to

an argument. I told him that Kelsey needs to go. Otherwise, I will not approve of the money being taken out of our family vacation budget to exclude some of our family. Now, on a follow-up post, she said that she relented and granted her husband permission to go on the trip, because apparently this is the kind of family where the husband needs permission from his wife to take his son on a trip. But she has given her blessing begrudgingly. And now the daughter, Kelsey, is very upset, has withdrawn from her dad and doesn't want to be around him. The husband offered to take Kelsey on a separate trip, just the two of them. That's not good enough for Kelsey.

The wife, the one who brought this quandary to Reddit, looking for guidance, has refused to help the husband repair the situation with the daughter. She says it's his fault for hurting her so badly by excluding her from the guys. trip, she writes, quote, my husband tried to cheer her up by telling her he would plan something really cool, just the two of them, but our daughter told him that she didn't want to do anything. A couple days later, my daughter needed to be picked up early from school for a dentist appointment. My husband said he would pick her up, but she texted me asking, please, mom, can you pick me up and bring me? My daughter also has been getting the school bus in the morning instead of catching a ride

with my husband and son, which she typically does. Now my husband's been complaining to me about our daughter saying he's done everything to make it up to her and that I need to step in. I told him she would be hurt by excluding her from the trip, and it's entirely his fault that she's icing him out. He says we should work together and fix this because we're a team, but he's the one who caused this hurt. So it shouldn't be on me to fix it, starting to affect our relationship now too. And now she wants to know if she is the A-hole. Now, the answer, as I'll explain, is definitely 100% yes.

But most of the feedback is telling her what she wants to hear, which is that she's right. And that is, after all, the only reason why people bring their personal problems to the internet. They don't want to know if they're right or wrong. They want to be told they're right so that they can convince themselves that they're right. The only reason they need to convince themselves is that they recognize deep down that they're wrong. But that's not what the feminists on X are saying. The Reddit post was shared to the platform by a somewhat large feminist account with the caption, quote, there's no backtracking now.

He's already shown his daughter what he thinks of her. And a whole bunch of comments, almost all of them from women are piling on saying the dad is sexist and selfish and cruel and has irreparably broken his relationship with his daughter and so on. This is all totally wrong. And although this is just a dumb post on Reddit, the post, along with the reaction to it, reveals in microcosm, why so many marriages fail in our culture. The husband, though I'm sure he has made his share of mistakes in his life and in their marriage, does not appear to have done anything wrong in this situation.

Indeed, the wife is presenting a version of events that is as favorable as possible to herself, and yet she is still clearly in the wrong, which tells me that if we got the husband's side of the story, we discover that she's even more wrong than she appears. So the full severity and depth of her wrongness, we don't really know and we'll probably never know, but we do know that she's wrong for at least two reasons. And these are things that lots of married couples get wrong these days, which is why it's worth talking about. And the first is this, that she's not.

on her husband's side. She's not presenting a united front to her children. She's doing the opposite. I mean, it's pretty clear that the daughter's anger at her dad is being fueled by her mom. It's normal for an 11-year-old girl to be disappointed that she can't go on a trip. It's not normal for this disappointment to turn into a festering resentment that lasts for days or weeks. That is not normal. Kids at that age get over stuff pretty quickly. And if they aren't getting over it, it's because somebody, the mom in this case, doesn't want them to. She's very very very much. She's very very, are clearly using her child as a cudgel to punish her husband. This is one of the hallmarks of an unhealthy marriage. In a healthy marriage, husband and wife will disagree about plenty of things, but the children

shouldn't know that they disagree. And they certainly shouldn't be in the middle of it. A wife should never want her husband to look bad in front of the kids and vice versa for the husband. It is absolutely her job as the wife to defend her husband to the daughter and to do her best to help heal that relationship. That is absolutely your job as the wife. You should want everyone to have a high opinion of your spouse, especially your kids. You should be defending them always and on their side always, even when you actually aren't on their side. So here's how this should work, work, right? If the wife thinks that the husband should take the daughter on the trip, she should make her case to the husband. But then when the daughter comes and complains to her about it,

she should say, well, listen, honey, your father wants to do a boy's trip. I know you're disappointed, but we're not going to let you ruin their time or make this about you. And I'll take you to do something fun while they're on their trip. So she may disagree in private, but to her daughter, she should be on her husband's side. She should have his back, be a team player, that's how it should work. If you want your marriage to last anyway, that's how it should work. And second, it is important for fathers to have time with just their sons without any girls around. Okay.

And there are some women that get offended by this, but it's like you can be offended. But yes, it is important for men and for boys to have time without any girls around. That's actually important. The husband tried to explain this. to the wife, but it apparently offended her feminist sensibilities. And she said that, well, I was offended by that comment. So she just refused to listen. Now, as a woman, she may not fully understand why guys need guy time. She doesn't need to understand it. She's like, she's making this about herself. She's saying, well, I was offended,

but that you said that. It doesn't matter if you're offended. This isn't not about you, okay? This is your husband explaining to you something that that men need and that boys need. And so your responsibility is just to listen because you don't understand. You're not a guy. And since you're not a guy and you don't understand it, you should be humble and just take your husband's word for it. He's more of an authority on what boys need than you are. Now instead, she became indignant and declared that because she doesn't personally see why male bonding is so important. They shouldn't get any male bonding time. This is the exact mentality, which is why annoys me so much is the exact mentality

that has destroyed most opportunities for male bonding in our culture and eradicated nearly every all-male space because women like this wife show up and declare, well, I don't see why this should only be a place for men, so therefore it will not be a place

for men. Actually, this thing that used to be for men and about men should be about me. That's what I've decided. Now, I have the good fortune to not be married to a woman like that. So my wife never objects when I take my sons on our annual boys trip, which is a tradition that we've had going for a few years now. And in fact, she encourages it.

And because my wife is understanding, so are my daughters. I have an 11-year-old daughter. This is a very similar family. Well, just in the fact that I have 11-year-old daughter. I have more kids than that. So I have an 11-year-old daughter, too. And I've never had her. She's not in a snit for days because we're going on a trip.

I take my boys somewhere for a few days and we fish and we cook meat over a fire and we stay up late watching Westerns and then my wife will take the girls to do something girly and there's no family crisis about it. Everyone just has a good time and it's fine. It is crucial for boys to have time with just their dads. It is a critical part of a boys' formation. And you might not, you might be in a situation financially where you can't afford to go on a whole trip and all that. And if you can't, that's fine. But you still, as a father, need to find time with just your sons. It is a critical part, again, of a boy's formation.

It's how a boy will grow in his masculinity. The other thing is that guys also relate to each other differently when there are no girls around. Right? The energy is different. The conversation is different. Our annual boys trip usually lasts just like three or four days. and I find that by the second day, my boys will start to open up

and they'll talk about things that they wouldn't normally talk about it. It doesn't have to be anything serious. For example, during the last two trips, we've discussed at some length what the boys want to be when they grow up. And those are conversations that we can obviously have at the house

and we have had them many times. But on the boys trip, when it's just the guys, right, they tend to talk much longer and they go into more detail. They reveal kind of what their real dreams and aspirations. are, and they love their sisters, but when their sisters are around, they feel much more kind of

embarrassed displaying that kind of vulnerability. Again, if you are a woman, you may not understand this. Women like my wife do understand it, so hopefully, even as a woman, you would understand this concept that guys need guide time and all that kind of stuff. But maybe you don't. Maybe you know. There are obviously women who don't understand it. That's fine. You're not a man. So all you can do then is listen to men when they tell you what men is. need and want, and especially what boys need so they can grow into strong masculine men. This is another big problem in our culture. This is one of the reasons why so many boys are lost, is that you have women like this wife and so many feminists who think they know everything

and they think they know. They think they're the authorities on how to raise boys and what boys need, and they refuse to just listen even one time to men when men tell them, no, this is what boy. I was a boy growing up. I know what a boy needs. So you should defer to men on this topic. For a feminist, I know how, I know how offensive and outrageous that is. To ever be told that, you know what, this is actually a topic where you don't know as much as men do. So maybe you should just listen to them.

I know they'll never, they never want to hear that. It's very offensive. Well, how could you ever say that there are things I don't? Yeah, well, you know what? You're only proving the point, right? This is exactly why. When women react this way, it's like, and, Men see this. They're like, well, yeah, this is exactly why we need the guy's time. It's for this reason.

And by the way, men will defer to women about womanly things, which also, by the way, is why nobody ever objects to girls having a girls' night or a girl's trip. It would not be controversial for a mom to take her daughter out to the salon and exclude her sons from the outing. Which is something that my wife does with the girl sometimes. Even when we're on the boys trip, she will, but sometimes she'll, they went out recently. They went to tea time somewhere. They went out for tea. And it's like, it didn't even need to be a whole, like family discussion where we prepared the boys for it and all this kind of stuff.

It's just like, yeah, it's a girl thing. They're going out to do a girl thing. And that's it. And it's fine. It's fine. It's good. I want the girls to have that time with their mom. And women are allowed.

to have that kind of time. They're allowed to have their outings, their excursions, their spaces. Now, sure, men in our society now might try to intrude in women's spaces by pretending to be women, and that's bad. Fortunately, we're having a lot of success pushing back against that kind of insanity. Aside from the trans stuff, everybody acknowledges the need for female spaces. It only becomes controversial when men want the same, which is why, as someone pointed out on X, the Boy Scouts no longer exist. It's now scouting America. The Girl Scouts do still exist.

And that tells you everything you need to know about the gender dynamics in our culture. The girls can have their time and their stuff and their events and all that. The boys can't. And that's obviously not fair. And more importantly, it's harmful to boys. They need their time and they need their space to. and if you are the mother of sons, you need to acknowledge that and respect it.

And if you don't, then you are today, I'm afraid to say, canceled. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you Marr. Have a great day.

Godspeed.