The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1822 - Debunking The Most Absurd Anti-Alcohol Propaganda

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

The media exaggerates alcohol's dangers and advocates for complete abstinence. Here's what you'll lose if you listen to them. Ep. 1822 - - - Today's Sponsors: PureTalk - There’s a better wireless choice out there. And at just fifteen bucks a month for your first three months on ANY plan… now’s a great time to choose PureTalk. Simply go to https://PureTalk.com/WALSH to start saving today. Cardiff - If you've been in business for at least a year, and are pulling in $20,000 a month in revenue, apply now for up to $500,000 in same day business funding at https://Cardiff.co/WALSH. Real growth. Fast funding. Cardiff – Borrow better. Policygenius - There’s a better wireless choice out there. And at just fifteen bucks a month for your first three months on ANY plan… now’s a great time to choose PureTalk. Simply go to https://PureTalk.com/WALSH to start saving today. - - - DailyWire+ Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 📚👩🏼‍🏫 Back-to-School Sale - Get 3 months for $19 📝👨🏻‍🏫 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 🍿 Run Hide Fight: Infidels will premiere on The Daily Wire, Wednesday September 16th. 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Wayfair, every style, every home. For the first time since the temperance movement of the 19th century, which led to the catastrophe of prohibition, alcohol has once again become a very dirty word in the United States. And it happened pretty suddenly, too. No matter where you look from podcast to television, News to WebMD, you'll find the same message, which is genuinely insane. They'll tell you that any amount of alcohol, no matter how small, will poison you. They'll tell you that you'll get cancer

if you drink in addition to destroying your sleep cycle and your will to live. And this message is everywhere. Watch. But of course alcohol is worse than pot. Nothing's worse than pot. Everything, right? Yeah. Basically, it's not more worse than everything. Yeah. Zero alcohol is better than any. Right. Two drinks maximum for an adult non-alcoholic per week. It's kind of the upper threshold. Week. Per week.

Wait, what you can do without starting to increase your risk for cancer, increase your, you know, about 5% of all cancers. Business week. About 100,000 cases of cancer each year in the United States are due to alcohol consumption, and about 20,000 deaths. This isn't a small problem. Mayo clinics, Dr. Donald Hendrude says, alcohol is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the U.S. behind tobacco use and obesity.

The risk starts with actually relatively low intakes of alcohol over a long period of time. Assuming it once in a while probably isn't going to increase the risk that much, but there are many people who consume it regularly and there are many people who assume that there are health benefits on the heart and these benefits probably aren't as strong as what we used to believe. He says when drinking alcohol is combined with tobacco use, the risk of cancer increases significantly. Studies have suggested the optimal amount of alcohol for people less than 50 is zero. We need to dial back, I think, a little bit on our alcohol consumption.

It's one of those areas where you don't understand the hidden cost until you really give it up for a while. And I think about my own relationship with drinking and I stopped drinking at 30 years old, I'm not 33. And I had just drank because I just drank. I'd never ran the experiment of just giving it up for a while. And then like, I don't know, maybe I was at 31, I thought, do not I have a drink again? Because now I could really A-B test it. I had a year of not drinking, decided to have a drink again. It ruined three days of my life.

I had a couple of glasses of wine. Didn't get drunk. It ruined three days of my life because of the domino effect it caused. So it meant that I got worse sleep that night. And then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up. That's a resilience, yeah. And then I podcasted worse. I didn't go to the gym the day after, that day or the day after because of that, because I felt really bad.

Now, we played that last clip before a few months ago, but it truly never gets old. I mean, you'd have to waterboard me for like a month to get me to talk like that, and I still probably wouldn't. I mean, he says he podcasted worse and that three days of his life were ruined because he drank a couple glasses of wine. I mean, it couldn't have been anything else, like, maybe a virus. food poisoning. Couldn't be the fact that he's really a woman in disguise. No, no, it was definitely the two glasses of wine that somehow caused a debilitating three-day hangover

in this otherwise healthy young adult man. Then there's a claim on Bill Marshow and from the Mayo Clinic that alcohol causes cancer, which sounds scary until you realize that everything you consume, literally everything, including bacon, red meat, coffee, tea, Chinese food, so on. also increases your risk of cancer. There are studies on all of this.

And I can sit here for the next hour, listing foods that might cause cancer, beef, pork chops, cereal, white bread, cookies, ice cream, and on and on. Do you enjoy barbecued chicken cooked over with charcoal? Well, I do too. Well, guess what? The high temperature and the smoke creates chemicals that stick to the surface of the chicken and might cause cancer. Have fun at the cookout. Like I said, we could be here all day. And it's not just stuff you eat, by the way.

Scented candles. household cleaners, plastic bottles, mattresses, furniture. Every day you are surrounded by seemingly innocuous objects that, according to research, can increase your risk of cancer to some degree. And that's to say nothing of the cell phone you're currently holding in your hand or in your pocket. Life itself increases your risk of developing cancer. Everybody will get cancer eventually if they live long enough, like Commissioner Gordon or whichever character said in the dark night.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself get cancer. to that effect. I don't really remember. I think it was something like that. Now, of course, amid all this fearmongering, nobody ever really explains, you know, when they tell us about increased cancer risk from alcohol or anything else. It really explained that they're talking about relative risk, not absolute risk. I explained this also on the show a few months ago, but it bears repeating. You know, when it's announced that, for example, moderate drinking increases a woman's risk of breast cancer by 23%, which is what they'll say, What they mean, though they rarely explain it, is that it increases her relative risk by 23%.

But what that means in real life depends on the absolute risk. So you have to know the baseline. And for women, the baseline chance of developing breast cancer is 13%, which is already way too high, but that's the baseline. Without drinking anything. Moderate drinking reportedly increases that 13% risk by 23%. So it's not 23% of 100%, it's 23% of 13%, which means that the actual risk increase is about 3%. For example, for another example, we're told that heavy drinking, which is obviously not healthy, increases your risk of esophical cancer by, I think they say 400%.

But the absolute risk of esophical cancer is less than 1%, which means that 400% increase brings you up to a risk of about 2.5 to about 3%. Now, you might feel that any increase in risk, even a percent, is too much for you. And certainly, as I said, heavy drinking is not a good idea. Consuming basically any substance immoderately is not a good idea. But it's important to put these things into perspective. And perspective has been entirely lost in this conversation. For the media and for the so-called public health experts, there is no value in perspective.

People will just get confused, they think. You know, you bog them down with too many details. It's much simpler to just tell people that alcohol is the main threat to their health. It's poison. Even one sip can cause cancer, which is what they actually say now. Even though in the entire history of the human race, there has never been a documented case of somebody getting cancer from one sip of alcohol or from one drink, or from two drinks, or from 50. But it's technically possible, I guess, maybe, so that's what they'll say. Then as an added benefit, they'll have a much easier time selling millions of Americans on other drugs that they can use to solve their problems.

From SSRIs to weed to mushrooms. Big Pharma would prefer you to take SSRIs. Podcasters would generally steer you towards the weed and the mushrooms. Even when it's not so heavy-handed, the full-on propaganda campaign is hard to miss. and it's hit a fever pitch lately, as evidenced by the following segment that just aired on ABC News, which claims to be a news network. Now, there was a time many years ago,

and if you're a younger person, like, say, under the age of 50, you're not going to remember this. I don't either. But there was a time when ABC News would cover stories of importance to the average American. And today, ABC's biggest story,

I hope you're sitting down for this, is the scandalous news that Brad Pitt the actor recently consumed an alcoholic beverage. Just one. Or maybe it was two. Yeah, if you can believe it, a famous Hollywood actor decided one day to drink a moderate amount of alcohol. This is a story that's so shocking in the minds of ABC producers that they included various self-help resources at the end of the segment,

just in case any of their viewers or, you know, thinking of following Brad Pitt's example. They're treating this news as if Brad Pitt just went on a rampage in Beverly Hills, leaving no survivors in his wake. So behold, the ABC News Report entitled, Brad Pitt says he drank again after seven years of sobriety. This is a full-length segment that was actually broadcast by a major news network in the United States. Watch. Brad Pitt is pulling back the curtain on his sobriety. He says he began drinking again after seven years of being sober. It's okay.

Come on. Just a bad dream. In a candid new interview with Esquire, discussing in part his upcoming movie, Heart of the Beast, the 62-year-old actor-producer saying, I was sober for seven years, and then I got back off the wagon, in a more restrained manner. In 2020, Brad Pitt gave credit to his friend Bradley Cooper for his sobriety. I got sober because of this guy, and every day has been happier ever since. The F-1 and Fight Club star.

Welcome to Fight Club. Like so many non-celebrities is among a growing number of people who've been public about being cut up in the pattern of alcohol abuse and recovery in Hollywood. And if you or anyone you know needs help with substance abuse, call 800662 help or visit findtreatment.gov. So it's quite a scoop. Brad Pitt gave up drinking for a while and now he's drinking again. Okay. Did he get a DUI? Did he read? run a family of four off the road? Did he vomit all over a clerk at the cracker barrel? As far as I know, no, Brad Pitt didn't do any of that. He just had a couple of drinks in moderation. What a horrifying prospect. It's only a matter of time before he gets cancer. In perhaps the least

surprising development of all time, this anti-alcohol panic originated, or at least has been heavily pushed by the World Health Organization or WHO. Now, the WHO, as we all know, assisted the Chinese government in covering up the fact that their lab, which was funded by Tony Fauci and the U.S. government, had created COVID in the first place. And additionally, the who pushed the COVID lockdowns, which ruined tens of millions of lives and served no legitimate purpose. This is easily the least reputable, least ethical public health organization on the planet, which is saying something. But after COVID hysteria died down, they didn't miss a beat. They went right back out there, issuing new commandments that they expected everybody to follow without question.

So in particular, in 2023, Who published a statement declaring with absolute certainty that, quote, no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health. No level. One sip, even, is not safe. Here's how one who official named Carina Ferreira Borges delivered the news. Quote, we cannot talk about a so-called safe level of alcohol use. Doesn't matter how much you drink. The risk to the drinker's health starts from the first drop of any alcohol. alcoholic beverage. The only thing we can say for sure is that the more you drink, the more harmful it is, or in other words, the less you drink, the safer it is. We need cancer-related health information messages on labels of alcoholic beverages following the example of tobacco

products. We need empowered and trained health professionals who would feel comfortable to inform their patients about alcohol and cancer risk, and we need overall wide awareness of this topic in countries and communities. The first drop. Even one drop is not safe. This is what the global health organizations are saying, and the media repeats it uncritically, and pretty soon the podcasters repeat it, and pretty soon the mass of people are also repeating it uncritically. Never mind the fact that it is not true. Okay. It's not true. This is obviously a totally irrational, indefensible claim that simply is not true. But we're supposed to accept it anyway and offer no protest or correction because although they're lying, it's all supposedly for a good cause. But I don't

really believe in lying for a good cause, and I don't actually agree that this is a good cause. So I must remind you again that aside from maybe the extremely rare case of somebody having like an ethanol allergy or something, there are no documented cases anywhere at all of anyone ever suffering measurable harms to their health from a sip of alcohol. Telling everyone that no amount is safe and the harms begin at the first sip obviously implies that drinking alcohol is like drinking gasoline or sipping a nice glass of battery acid. When they say that one sip is not safe and there is no safe amount of alcohol, they are defining safe in the strictest way imaginable. Indeed, they are defining it in the way that like a paranoid obsessive compulsive who washes his hands

a thousand times a day until they bleed might define it. They are not. not defining safe in the way that you define it, in the way that normal human beings who desire to live functional lives and don't want to be paranoid obsessive compulsive, describe it. So you can only make the claim that no amount of alcohol is safe if you are defining safe as the total absence of risk. That is for certain the only definition of safe that would make no amount of alcohol is safe, a true statement. But the problem is that this definition of safe, if applied to your daily life, would utterly incapacitate you.

It would render you unable to do basically anything or eat basically anything or perform any of the functions necessary to be a human being in a human society. Because virtually everything you do carries some kind of risk. By this definition, there's no safe level for sun exposure either. There's no safe level for breathing the air outside, particularly if you live anywhere near a major city. There's no safe level of cake to eat on your birthday. There's no safe level of working out you can do at the gym. There's no safe level of any recreational activity or anything you do for fun. There's no safe level of exposure to whatever device you're using right now to listen to this podcast. By this definition of safe, you certainly can never drive. a car. I mean, in a world where no, you know, where no amount of alcohol is safe, driving a car is like it's tantamount to skydiving without a parachute. Driving a car then is like suicide. And yet we all consider driving to be relatively safe as long as we are attentive and obey the rules of the road. Right? If somebody came to you and said, hey, don't go driving

today. It's not safe. You would assume they mean that there's something really bad happening out there, like there's a tornado tearing the road apart, or it's a middle of a hurricane, or a blizzard. Right? You would assume that there's something else happening. There's some other huge factor that would make it unsafe to go drive right now. And that's because as functional and mentally stable humans, we define a safe thing, not as a thing carrying no risk at all, because all things carry risk, but rather we define it as a thing

which carries a reasonable amount of risk. And if that is how you define safe, then actually, in fact, there is a safe amount of alcohol, okay? Having a beer with dinner or a glass of wine or a pour of whiskey, God forbid, is by this definition, which is the only sane definition, safe. It is safe. You can go have a drink. It is actually safe.

It's safe. you'll be okay. But when who puts out a statement and they don't provide this context at all, you know, they don't attempt to explain what they mean by words like safe and words like risk. You know, this is what they do. And the experts demonstrate no interest in educating you or informing you. They only want you to panic.

And that's by design. This is a corrupt institution that specializes in creating mass hysteria. They're not actually concerned about public health. They are European globalists who want power over other countries, especially the United States, and they see public health hysteria as a way to gain that power. And in this case, they want to push Americans away from alcohol and towards SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs. So they release these marching orders, which decree that no amount of alcohol, not even a single drop, is safe. Major hospitals, the media, various podcasters, then immediately begin parroting whose message,

just as they did during COVID. Something called the Canadian Center on Substance Use and Addiction issued guidance stating that if you consume just two drinks a week, you are endangering your health. If you have a glass of wine after dinner or with dinner on Saturday and then again on Sunday, you are endangering. It is dangerous. By the way, not safe means dangerous.

Does anyone really believe that it's dangerous to have two glasses of wine in a week, would any sane person describe that behavior as dangerous? If I came up to you as a normal person, I said, oh, this person has a dangerous drinking habit. What would you assume I mean? Oh, be careful, watch out for that person. They've got a dangerous drinking habit.

Yeah, I wouldn't spend a lot of time around them. I wouldn't, you know, certainly never get in a car with them or let them around your kids. They have a dangerous drinking habit. If I said that and then you said, oh, wow, man, that's pretty bad. Like, what's going on? And then I said, oh, they, get this, they drink two glasses of wine a week. Who would you think is dangerous in that case, the person drinking the wine or me as a total nutcase?

Are there any documented cases of any human anywhere ever in history being measurably harmed by two drinks in a week? I'm not aware of any. But don't ask questions. Yeah, they're fearmongering, but it's for your own good. Only an alcoholic would dare question any of this. And then in January of 2025, just before the Trump administration took over, Biden's outgoing surgeon general, Vivek Murthy,

issued an advisory demanding cancer warning labels on alcoholic beverages. He said alcohol is linked to various cancers, including breast, colorectal, esophageal, liver, mouth, throat, and others. and described alcohol as a leading preventable cause of cancer, third after tobacco and obesity. Now, what was amusing about all these claims is that not too long ago, every major medical association was saying the exact opposite. So here's a paper I pulled from 1999 from a doctor at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, for example.

This was published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. So this is not just some random guy rambling, like me, He says, quote, moderate drinkers are at a lower risk of the most common form of heart disease, coronary artery disease, than either heavier drinkers or abstainers. Evidence supports a direct protective effect of alcohol. This association has been demonstrated in large-scale studies from many countries. All alcoholic beverages protect against coronary artery disease. Alcohol's protective effect may result from favorable alterations in blood chemistry and the prevention of clot formation in arteries that deliver blood to the heart muscle because coronary artery disease accounts for a large proportion

of total mortality, the risk of death from all causes is slightly lower among moderate drinkers than among abstainers. Now, that was the dominant way of thinking for many years up until about 15 minutes ago when the global health organizations decided to weigh in. Moderate drinking, we were told, was clearly good for you as demonstrated by multiple peer-reviewed independent studies. and now we're told that any amount of drinking, even one drop, is dangerous. Now, of course, if all of the health experts were wrong for decades, dangerously wrong, apparently, when they said that moderate drinking was safe, even healthy, then why should we believe they aren't also wrong now when they say that no amount is safe at all?

I mean, if you were totally wrong completely in your peer-reviewed studies and these long-range studies, global studies, with all this data, and you were totally wrong, and you said for decades that not only is it safe to drink alcohol, but it actually will lower your risk of mortality up to a point. And then it turns out that literally one sip is dangerous. Well, if that's true, then we can't trust anything you say. If that's true, then like whatever you're saying right now, 10 years from now, you could just say the opposite again. There's no reason to trust anything you say. And the so-called health experts do this a lot, you'll notice. They declare something with utter certainty. And then they declare the opposite with equal certainty.

And the only consistent message between all of this wild careening back and forth is that we, the rube's and the general public, are supposed to fight. whatever they say blindly without asking any questions. So now alcohol is poison. It's just too risky. It'll ruin your entire week. You won't be able to podcast. In short, anti-alcohol hysteria has entered the domain of self-parity. It is reminiscent of the worst of the anti-smoking campaigns from the 90s, except somehow this is even more shameless. But I have to admit, when you zoom out and look at how most Americans are responding to the propaganda campaign, it has been very effective, just like the anti-smoking propaganda was very effective. Many of us who are millennials and grew up in the 90s, went to public school in the 90s, we remember this very well. I mean, the amount of fearmongering they did about smoking was insane. They would drill this into our heads from like kindergarten.

And they had, I can remember being in third grade and thinking that, you know, smoking one cigarette could get you addicted right away like heroin. I mean, we were told this in school. Even casual secondhand smoke exposure can kill you, which isn't true, by the way. But this is what they told kids. It was terrifying. But it also worked. And now there are many fewer people smoking cigarettes. And so if you're of the opinion that public health experts can just lie and scare the hell out of you with stuff that is only partially true or not true at all and that like it's okay for them to do it for good cause, then I guess you have no problem with this.

You're also just, you know, a total puppet in that case, a sheep. As recently as 2018, just 28% of Americans told Gallup that in their view, consuming one or two drinks a day is bad for your health. The vast majority of Americans saw no problem with having a couple of beers every single day. Okay, that was in 2018, right? By 2025, just seven years later, that number had increased to 53% of Americans. Two-thirds of Americans, under the age of 35, 66% of them now believe that consuming just one drink a day will harm their health. For comparison, in 2018, only 34% of young adults held that view. Now, these attitudes, as you expect, are affecting behavior. Gallup has found that the U.S. drinking rate is at its

lowest level in recorded history. They've been tracking it since 1939. Quote, the percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol is fallen to 54%, the lowest in Gallup's nearly 90-year trend. This coincides with a growing belief among Americans that moderate alcohol consumption is bad for one's health. Now the majority view for the first time, from 97 to 2023, at least 60% of Americans reported drinking alcohol. That figure fell to 62% in 2023, 58% of 2024 before reaching 54% today. Drinking has also declined 11 points among non-Hispanic white adults, while it has been fairly steady at around 50% among people of color. Young adults have already become less likely to report drinking alcohol a decade ago, but that trend has only accelerated with the rate falling from

59% in 2023 to 50% today. This puts their drinking rate below that of middle-aged and older adults. There's also been a sharp drop in reported drinking among Republicans following 19 points to 46%, but not Democrats, holding fairly steady at 61%. Now, on the surface, these numbers might appear to be a victory for society at large. After all, even if the negative effects of alcohol are being overstated, and they are vastly so, it's still, sounds like a good thing for Americans to consume less alcohol. That means you would think less domestic abuse, less drunk driving, and so on. But the problem is I have a major problem with the idea that fear tactics and dishonesty and manipulation from the media and health organizations can be a good thing if it scares the public into acting in an arguably healthier way.

This line of thinking has gotten us into a lot of trouble, especially recently. This is how they lock down the whole world during COVID. But the real point here is that the fear tactics and manipulation actually aren't causing the public to behave in a healthier way. People are simply migrating to other substances. Alcohol is being replaced with psych meds and weed and other psychoactive substances. And people who are taking these drugs are in general, much less sociable and pleasant than people who are drinking alcohol. So take a look at this chart, showing how many Americans are drinking alcohol as well as smoking cigarettes and marijuana. The data is from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

There's been a massive increase in marijuana use, huge increase, which has corresponded with a decline in cigarette smoking and alcohol consumption. Marijuana went from being a drug that only around 5 to 8 million Americans were using, and now it's well over 20 million Americans who are smoking it. Weed, weed, which is obviously a carcinogen in its own right, is now more popular than that. and alcohol or cigarettes. It's not even getting into the explosive increase in SSRI prescriptions, which we discussed yesterday. More than a third of mothers in this country are taking some kind of psychoactive medication. These are drugs that have dramatic effects on the brain that no one even really totally understands. Pretty much every school shooter has been taking one of these drugs.

SSRIs have been shown to increase violent behavior and control groups that have no diagnosed mental illness, which means the overprescription of these drugs is a major problem. and some of the most common side effects of SSRIs includes a flat effect, as well as a general loss of passion and excitement. You lose your ability to care about anything, including sometimes members of your own family. In some cases, people report losing the ability to feel any emotions at all. They become kind of zombies,

which needless to say is probably the exact opposite of what happens when you have a couple of beers. So our public health experts, have an obligation to answer the following question, why is it healthy to use powerful and unpredictable psychotropic drugs to help you function, but it's not healthy to drink a beer to calm your nerves at the end of the day? Can anyone explain that?

Has anyone ever bothered to explain that? As a country, we've traded one drug for many others, including drugs that happen to line the pockets of big pharma. Has there ever been a third? thorough explanation of whether this trade was worth it? Are we a better and stronger country now that everyone's high all the time and incapable of feeling pleasure? Was the booze really that bad? And if part of the trade is that people will drink less, but also be much less social, not hanging out with friends, not sitting at the pub, not going to parties, rather isolated in

their homes, interacting with people if they interact at all through a screen, is that worth it? I mean, there's no question that we had become a much, much less social society over the past several years. The research on that is unanimous. And as we've become less social, we've also migrated away from social substances like alcohol and towards substances that are more isolated and isolating like weed and psychiatric drugs. Is that actually a good thing? Is it worth having a society where people drink a little more if it means that? people will spend more time around other people? I would say the answer to that question is a resounding, unquestionable yes. Take a look at your phone bill. Not because it's interesting. It obviously isn't. Look at it because there's a decent chance you've been paying the same company every month for years without asking, am I paying too much? Pure Talk is currently making that question very easy to answer for your first three months. Any Pure Talk plan is only $15 a month. not their cheapest plan.

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but what about the societal, even civilizational scale? Is there reason to believe that a society will function better, be more productive by ditching alcohol? And that becomes a hard case to make when you look at the history of basically every successful country in the world, starting, of course, with our own. As it happens, there's a very well-researched book on this topic. It's called The Alcoholic Republic,

and it was written by a historian named W.J. Oraba in the 1970s, And what you learn when you read this book is that America would not exist, as we know it today, without the significant and widespread consumption of alcohol. So from 1790 to 1830, obviously a pivotal period in the history of the United States, Americans drank more alcoholic beverages per capita than at any other point in history, before or since. The average adult male was drinking roughly a half pint per day, which, if you're keeping track, qualifies as heavy drinking that could cause cancer under today's guidelines. And in particular, men were drinking much more than women.

Half of all adult males in the country were drinking two-thirds of the total amount of distilled spirits that were consumed. In 1829, Roerbaugh writes, the Secretary of War estimated that three-quarters of the nation's laborers drank daily at least four ounces of distilled spirits. And meanwhile, the Surgeon General warned that if the army wanted to ban drunkards, then there'd be no army left. Now, from our perspective, the amount of booze our ancestors were putting away every day seems scandalous. One wonders how they even managed to do any podcasting with all the alcohol they consumed. But from the perspective of the early American colonists and our founding fathers, alcohol had obvious benefits. For one thing, it was a currency. We were sending much more gold and silver out of the country than we were taking in due to a trade imbalance with England.

So in the absence of hard currency, American merchants turned to rum and later whiskey, to trade with each other and the Indians and foreign nations. The importance of the rum trade can't be overstated. It created vast wealth in the colonies, wealth that was used to pay for the rebellion. And when the British tried to tax the ingredients to make rum, thus threatening the American economy, we revolted. Alcohol also helped the colonists bond along before the United States existed. It also allowed politicians to run successful campaigns. In 1755, when George Washington was running for a seat in the Virginia House as part of the colonial government,

he refused to buy alcohol for voters at the polls, which was a custom that was known as treating. So he lost in a landslide, and three years later, in 1758, Washington pulled out all the stops. He ordered his campaign manager to buy 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 38 gallons of wine, 46 gallons of beer, and two gallons of hard cider, coming out to around a half gallon of alcohol per voter. They rolled the barrels of alcohol to the polling place, and what do you know, Washington received 307 votes out of 400. So he won decisively. Now, all this drinking and generosity and hospitality brought the colonists together, which would obviously be important in the rebellion against Britain. And it would give them the courage to carry out some very daring acts of insurrection, including the Boston Tea Party, which was conceived, planned, and organized at a tavern in Boston by the Sons of Liberty.

It was one of those historical facts they don't really emphasize, but the Sons of Liberty, were hammered out of their minds when they came up with the idea of throwing the tea in the harbor and it turned out to be a very effective idea. Might be something to the fact that like a population where people are more likely to drink

tends to be less docile. Now, if all those people were sitting around smoking weed, is it likely they would have conceived of this idea and then gone and done it? As we discussed before, the founders were also drunk while they were drafting our Constitution, or at least immediately before signing it. They went on a bender at the end of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as they were finishing the document.

For 55 men, they consumed more than 45 gallons of alcohol plus food. That means each man consumed around three bottles of wine, beer, or cider in addition to some punch from the bowls over a six to ten hour period. and this was the atmosphere that led to the formation of our government. To the modern public health experts, this would be a super spreader event. Everybody's vastly increasing their risk of developing cancer. So it's a good thing that no public health experts existed at the time. We might not have our constitution otherwise.

After the colonies became the United States, Warbaugh notes that alcohol directly contributed to the industrialization and economic advancement of the United States, as well as many other countries. We had more grain than we knew what to do with. And the most efficient use of this grain, because it could be done quickly without the need to transport it too far, was to convert it into whiskey. And because whiskey became so plentiful, the labor force began to change. So it is true to say that alcohol helped to build the country. Now, that alone doesn't prove that alcohol is healthy or that you should drink.

I'm not saying you should drink. I don't really care if you do or not. The point simply is that basically every flourishing civilization you can name, very much including our own, has been a civilization where people drink alcohol. That doesn't mean that you need alcohol to flourish, but it does seem to strongly indicate that alcohol collectively on a societal scale does not prevent flourishing.

And that is the weakest framing. I think you could probably frame it even stronger than that. You know, when you have a large family, as I do, you become very aware of just how many people are counting on you. I have a wife and a lot of kids six the last time I checked, which means there are a lot of people whose lives would be dramatically affected if something happened to me. It's not exactly a pleasant thing to think about,

but it is part of being a husband and a father. My job isn't just to provide for my family today. It's also to make reasonable preparations for the possibility that I won't always be here to do it. That's one reason life insurance makes sense for me. And PolicyGenius makes it pretty easy to figure out what kind of coverage I actually need. PolicyGenius is a free online marketplace

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prevent it. So they looked at a global sample of 186 societies, mostly non-industrial ones, including the Kazakhs and the Japanese. They ranked all these societies based on the number of distinct jurisdictional levels recognizable in the society, meaning they checked if the society had any kind of centralized political authority, and if so, how developed it was. They also built a data set tracking the presence or absence of indigenous low-alcohol-fermented beverages, like early beers and meads in those same societies. And then they looked at particular at societies that weren't heavily dependent on farming so they could be sure that the alcohol was shaping their political development,

not just the agricultural industry in general. And here's what they determined. Quote, we find a positive relationship between the presence of indigenous alcoholic beverages and higher levels of political complexity measured by the number of administrative levels. The effect holds even after controlling for several potential confounding variables, including common ancestry, spatial proximity, environmental productivity, and agricultural intensity. Our results support the idea that the group-level social benefits of traditional non-distilled fermented beverages may outweigh their disruptive effects and that alcohol may have facilitated the evolution of human society. Now obviously we should be skeptical of any finding in any academic publication, but this one makes sense based on everything we know about the development of our own country. Alcohol in many different ways enabled the creation of the United States.

By contrast, no civilization has ever been founded because everybody was smoking weed or taking SSRIs. So we know that great societies can be formed and built up and flourish as the booze flows freely. Can any great society exist where the substance of choice is weed or psychoactive drugs? I mean, there are no examples anybody can name. And the early returns on our own society, as we've recently made that switch, are, to say the least, not encouraging. Now, those are drugs that affect the mind in ways we don't fully understand. They suppress creativity and passion. They promote isolation rather than social bonding.

That's precisely the reason why every mainstream media outlet is running scary segments about alcohol while they ignore SSRIs, which are created by Big Pharma, their biggest advertiser by far. Here's one more of those segments, which was actually pretty entertaining because at the end of it, after the spiel from the health reporter about how alcohol will kill you in, you know, 5,000 different ways, George Stephanopoulos brings up the fact that these new recommendations contradict the old ones. And listen carefully to how that goes. Back now with our GMA cover story, which is giving us, making them have a big discussion here on the couch,

a lot to say about the new research that's out this morning that suggests even small amounts of alcohol may increase the risk of developing several types of cancer. And they found it is a complex relationship. But one key finding is that alcohol was absolutely associated with an increased risk of cancer and chronic liver disease. And that was for any level of alcohol that we're talking about. They also found that the alcohol was associated with 10 types of cancers in terms of increasing risk. And those things range from pharyngeal cancer, larynx, lip and oral, esophageal, stomach, pancreas, liver, prostate, breast, and colorectal cancer.

So the risk did seem to increase with the more alcohol you consumed. However, many of these cancers were even associated with risk when you were talking about less than one standard drink per day, so not a lot of alcohol. They found that alcohol was associated with chronic liver disease, pancreatitis, lower respiratory tract infections, tuberculosis, and arrhythmias like atrial fib and atrial flutter. Now, where it becomes a little bit complicated is when they looked at the link between alcohol and cardiometabolic diseases. So with low to moderate drinking, there did seem to be a little bit of a risk.

reduction in type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's and other dementias, and cardiovascular disease like heart attack and stroke. However, if you drank heavily, that risk then increased. So that's the old study, one glass of red wine a day is healthy for your heart. Is that out the window now? I think that when you're talking about the fact that alcohol is a known carcinogen, right? There's an increased risk of cancer. How can you possibly say that any alcohol is healthy? You're always going to be weighing that risk with maybe the little bit of the cardiovascular benefit. So no one's going to say you should drink in terms of improving your health. In fact, we would discourage heavy drinking. And if you are going to make that decision to drink, you should be aware of the risks, especially if you have

underlying risk factors for these certain types of cancers and also drink, you know, in the least amount you can. I mean, clearly some people are going to continue to drink, but we just want them to be aware of the risk. What do you do? I forget. It's like literally every word is sitting here going. I'm going. Should I not? So you don't too many segments like that where the couch erupts in laughter after the expert is done talking. None of them are taking her seriously. Half of them are probably drunk during the segment. So if you're following along, she says alcohol can potentially cause all kinds of serious problems.

But at the same time, alcohol can also reduce your risk of dementia, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease. And then when she's asked about the previous recommendation from the experts, which is that people should drink some wine because of the benefit, she stammeres a bit and implies that those benefits are minor compared to the cancer risks. So we have a total reversal on a core piece of medical guidance, which has been issued for more than a decade, and they can't offer a convincing response as to why they change their minds. There's actually no scientific basis for her response. Cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's are two of the most common ways to die, and cancer in general,

tends to be more treatable than Alzheimer's, which has no cure. So cancer has no cure either, but it's more treatable generally. So who's to say that we shouldn't stick with the old recommendation, where we drink wine every night? I mean, there's a trade-off here. Which way is better? Who knows? These people are kind of just making it up as they go along.

Now, what they can't fabricate, at least not a fact, effectively, is the historical record, our own experience as a society. That's not to say that alcohol can't be abused. Obviously, it can be, and often is. It's not to say there are no risks. It's not to say there are no downsides or tradeoffs. It's simply to say that the ancient Greeks, also big fans of booze, by the way, got it right, as they often did. Nothing in excess. was the ancient Greek motto, all things in moderation, as we say today. And that really is the answer here. If you drink in moderation, you'll probably be fine.

If a society drinks in moderation, or frankly even sometimes not in moderation, it can thrive. In fact, the alcohol may even help it thrive in some ways. So tune out the public health experts who've done more than enough damage to last a lifetime, And take it easy. Be reasonable. Be moderate. It will probably be okay. Until one day you die of cancer or something else. But that's going to happen anyway. So relax and have a drink. Or don't. I mean, it's really up to you. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday. Have a great day. Godspeed.

Your country is beneath contempt. We who love and serve Allah fought back against the Americans and the Zionists from the scourge of secularism and the lands of unbelief. You're going to listen to Captain Saunders tomorrow? The retired Delta Force soldier with a new book out. He's the polar opposite of those brain-dead protesters. Given the current climate, should police Saunders to even be allowed on campus. Mr. Saunders is a close personal friend of Chancellor Friedman.

This is a decision I can't offer. There are three ways Islam will conquer the West. Through immigration, through the wombs of our women, and by using our nation's freedoms against us. Are you paying attention? Honoloktu. Listen carefully. The great Satan America will fall.

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