The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 19 - We Have Nothing In Common Anymore

Episode Date: April 30, 2018

Americans hate each other because we don't have anything at all in common with one another. There is no single uniting value or principle in our culture. Nothing holding us together. No defining characteristic. We are the United States no longer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So I came across a few things in the last couple of days that I wanted to mention the fold-in to this topic here. One was a recent survey in Pew, which revealed that Americans are more divided now than ever before, according to the survey. And we're divided in terms of, you know, not just the number of issues that we disagree about, which is basically every issue, but also the severity, the depth of those divisions. And then second, there was an article in the Washington Post a few weeks ago, which cites a different survey and also argues that the so-called value divide between Republicans and Democrats is getting wider and wider. Now, I agree with those surveys. I think it's kind of self-evident that this is a situation. It appears to me that we have, as a country, we have nothing in common anymore. We have no shared value.

We have no shared goal. We have no shared sense of purpose. No shared sense of tradition or identity. Nothing. Nothing. I wrote about this a few months ago about our lack of shared values and our shared identity. And a lot of people, and I know as I say this now, you're probably thinking the same thing. A lot of people told me, they said, well, we do have shared values and those values are freedom and equality.

Americans love freedom and equality. What are you talking about? That's what we all have in common. We're a free country. Okay, first of all, we are not a free country. We're not. I hate to break it to you. And second, we are only united by freedom and equality

in the sense that we all like those words. Okay, we all like to use the words, freedom and equality, but we do not all actually value freedom and equality. Okay? if you look at what we consider those words to mean and how we think they should be applied, you'll find that I have, you know, my definition of freedom and equality is about as similar to my neighbors as it would be to someone in North Korea's. It's about the same. You're not going to find very many people on earth who profess to despise freedom and equality in principle, but you will

find a lot of people who despise it in practice, and a lot of those people live in this country, and some of them work for our government, unfortunately. Now, remember, our wonderful nation under God, our wonderful free nation, our nation of freedom legally exterminates a million children a year. We have killed 60 million human beings since Roe v. Wade. 60 million.

So that's freedom and equality, except for the 60 million we've killed. I know it upsets people when I say this, but no, we are not a free country. How dare you, how dare you say anything about a free country when we've killed 60 million babies? Honestly, how dare any of us babble on about our freedoms

in a situation like that? This is the worst human rights atrocity in the history of mankind. and we are responsible for it as Americans while we continue to babble about our freedom. I can just imagine two people in a car talking about, oh, it's so great to be free in America as they drive by an abortion clinic.

But it doesn't end there, of course. I mean, that's just one example. Our free and equal country also happens to be one where Christian business owners, as of right now, Supreme Court's going to rule on this, but as of right now, they can be forced to participate in gay wedding ceremonies against their will. 60% of Americans agree that they ought to be forced,

that they ought not to have freedom of religion. 60% of Americans support some version of socialized medicine. Over half of all Americans think that their fellow citizens should be forced to fund the abortion industry, and we are forced to fund it, all of us. A majority of Americans believe that businesses should be forced, to provide contraception to their employees. And the situation gets even worse when you look at the younger generations.

That is, the generation that's taking over the country. 40% of millennials think that we should limit speech that's offensive to minorities. Over half of adults in their 20s don't believe in free market capitalism. Over 30% are avowed socialist. 50% of millennials would give up their right to vote if only their student loans would be forgiven. So get 100 random Americans into a room, and you won't find that even half of them actually care about freedom. Or they care about a freedom that doesn't include the unborn Christians, business owners, taxpayers. So we don't share that principle, not in any meaningful way.

What do we share then? Americans used to be united by their common belief in a creator God from whom all rights originate. not anymore. America today is home to a record number of atheists, a record number of empty or emptying churches. Even Americans who call themselves Christians, which is a record low number, of course, can't come to an agreement about what being a Christian means. Many attend churches that have rainbow flags hanging from them, where they hear about a God who loves gay marriage and abortion. That is, many Christians are not actually Christian. So we don't have that. What else do we have? I've heard some people say, Americans value family. We all love

our families and we love family. We're all, you know, we're pro-family. The delusions of some people, it's pretty incredible. And I'm almost envious of it. How can we say that we all value family when we live in a country where the average family consists of three people? A record low number of women have have no kids at all, or a record number of women have no kids at all, I should say. Divorce is rampant. Fatherless homes are endemic. In some communities, the numbers as high as 70 or 80 percent. Record numbers of young people are putting off marriage or plan to never get married at all. Record numbers of young people say they never want to have kids at all. Most Americans are saving, you know, having kids for a point when they cannot physically even concede.

kids anymore because they care more about amassing physical wealth and going on vacations and everything. So family, no, that's, for a great many Americans, family is not even the top three of their list of priorities. So what else do we have them? Language? We don't even have language anymore. We don't even share a language. So what's left? Nothing of substance. I mean, we have physical proximity. We all share, you know, we share zip codes with each other. We share area codes with each other. Beyond that, we have our, I'll tell you that the one thing that we really do all have in common, the one thing that binds us is our vices. We all love to buy things. We all love to go out on Black Friday and just accumulate a bunch of sex.

stuff that we don't need and bring it back to our houses that are filled with more stuff that we don't need. So we all like to do that. We're all consumerists. We watch too much TV. We spend a lot of time on the internet. We love porn. When I say we, I'm talking about general, you know, the general American, the average American, describes that person. Is that enough to make a country? No, that's enough to make a Reddit community. Okay. That's enough. to make a club. It's not enough to make a nation, especially not a nation that was originally built upon ideals. America is unique or used to be because it has a creed. It has an almost religious creed. Most countries don't have creeds. We do. Most countries aren't founded that way.

They're not founded with this declaration of what we believe. That's how religions are founded. our country was founded like a religion. And what is our creed? We all should know the creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal, endowed by their creator, with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. And that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just power from the consent of the governed.

This is our creed. And it says that Americans believe first in self-evident objective truth. Americans believe in a creator. Americans believe in the inherent dignity of human beings. Americans believe in the right to life and the right to liberty. Americans believe in the consent of the governed. Those are the six things, the six doctrinal points that are supposed to hold all Americans together. Now I ask you, how many Americans believe at all six anymore?

How many believe in even one of them? And what happens to a nation founded on a creed when half the country no longer believes in the creed? What happens? You know, I'm not imagining things, and neither are you. If you ever get the feeling that you no longer even live in the same country. country as your fellow Americans. And when I look at it, I see that many Americans exist in a place where there is no God. There is no such thing as man or woman. There is no truth. There is no objective morality. Babies aren't people. Marriage is nothing but a societal construct. The whole

point of life is to make money and to buy things and to go on nice vacations. And the government's job is to take care of us. That's the country that a lot of Americans live in. And I don't relate to that country or to those people, they're foreign to me. I share nothing at all in common with them. Forget about shared ideals. We don't even share a universe anymore. We don't even share a reality anymore. We cannot agree on even the most fundamental definition of what reality is. Okay? That's how bad the division is. We can't even all agree that there is such a thing as reality. There are a lot of us who think that we can just make up reality as we go along.

And that's why we're more divided now than we were during the Civil War, more divided. I've been studying the Civil War for a long time. It's been an interest of mine. And when you read about the Civil War, the thing that jumps out at you is that, yeah, Americans were obviously deeply divided, not just over slavery, but culturally. There was a deep cultural division. yet they still shared an essential belief in God and in truth and in virtue. They still had that.

They applied those beliefs differently, and they didn't include everyone in that belief. Both sides were filled with racist, let's be honest. But they still had the belief. And that's why when you read about these stories from the Civil War that seems so strange, so bizarre to us, nowadays, but you read about these incidents where, and it happened more than once, where the night before a big battle, you'd have the two sides on either end of a battlefield, and the night before, they would meet in the middle and exchange, you know, they'd trade tobacco and they'd talk, and they'd maybe share food, sometimes there'd be dancing and all this kind of stuff.

and then they'd go back to their sides and kill each other a few hours later. And that's what makes the Civil War such a sad story, aside from the 600,000 people that died. What makes it so sad is that these were really brothers. These were brothers. It really was brother against brother, literally in some cases, but also in the sense that these were countrymen. They were brothers. They had this, there were certain ties that still bound them together. and so you found there was this mutual respect.

Even while they were shooting at each other and stabbing each other to death with bayonets and blowing each other apart with cannonballs, even in the midst of that, there was still this respect between the two sides. There was more respect, I think, on a Civil War battlefield than there is now. on Twitter. Because now we don't have anything at all in common. We don't even have that

essential belief in God, truth, morality, virtue, dignity. We don't even have that. Now, we aren't shooting at each other. There's no civil war breaking out, and I think part of the reason for that is that the divide is not exactly geographic, and so it's hard for there to be a civil war

when everyone's kind of intermingled with each other. But second, I think people are also too lazy for a civil war. We wouldn't want to do anything that would jeopardize our ability to go home and watch Netflix at night. And that's the main thing that we care about. So really, we're not shooting each other because we're too lazy for that. And we'd rather watch TV. And maybe that will be our saving grace. And that'll be the thing that saves us from another gruesome war, like the Civil War. But still, the division is there. And listen, I know people will say, oh, you're such a

pessimist. It isn't that bad. Get out of your bubble. Go into the real world. Get off the internet. Go meet people. People are fine in the real world. They get along fine. You're basing all this on the internet. Well, let me say two things in response to that. Number one, I live in the real world. Okay. I'm not in a bubble. And I travel the country and I meet thousands of people every year. I've probably been to probably about 30 or 35 different states in the last two years for speaking events. And yes, people are basically polite to one another. We basically get along okay for the most part. There isn't chaos in the streets most of the time, although sometimes there is.

But the problem is I could travel anywhere in the world and it would be the same. I might avoid a place like Syria, but if I went to France or China or Thailand or Australia or Mexico. I could walk by people on the street and say hello and they would say hello and we'd be friendly to each other. I could make pleasant small talk if I knew the language anyway. And people would be basically, you know, nice to each other. But that's not enough to make us countrymen. To be my countryman, there needs to be something deeper holding us together than just mere niceties and small talk and pleasantries. And I wouldn't have that deeper thing. And I wouldn't have that deeper tying me to somebody in China or France,

and I don't have it here anymore. The second thing, just quickly, the Internet is the real world, okay? I hate this thing that people do where they say, oh, you know, people are nasty to each other on the Internet, but not in the real world. What do you think the Internet is? Do you think this is a dream?

You think this is a hallucination? No, this is real. This is a real tool whereby real humans communicate with other real humans. So if you're a terrible monstrous jerk on the Internet, that means that you're a terrible monstrous jerk in general. That's the kind of person you are. And if it seems like there are a lot of bad people on the Internet, that's because there are a lot of bad people in the world. The fact that they're, you know, that they save all their badness for the Internet, and then they go out and they act nice in the real world.

that just proves that they're cowards. It doesn't prove anything else other than that. So, yes, I think I think that even the Internet is indicative of the divisions that exist in our country. And now is the part I know where I'm supposed to offer an answer. People get angry when we talk about these things and they say, oh, you know, what are your solutions? Don't just point out the bad things. Offer solutions. Well, I'm sorry. I don't have a five-step. solution. I don't have a five-step plan for how to solve our societal implosion. Okay, I don't have that. Is it even possible for a civilization to pull itself back from the brink? Is it possible for it to go right up to the edge of destruction and then pull a U-turn and go back the other way? Has any civilization in history ever done that before? The Romans couldn't pull it off. The Mayans couldn't, the Mesopotamians.

I mean, could we be the first ones ever to do that? We can hope so. But that certainly won't happen if we refuse to face the reality of our current situation. The more that we cling to these silly slogans that nobody really believes, Americans love freedom. Americans love equality. As long as we cling to that, there's no hope for us. Because that means we're just going to skip, you know,

we're just going to hold hands and skip right into oblivion. if there is any way to stop this, it has to start with accepting the reality of the situation. Acceptance is the first step, right? And then once we've accepted it, what's next? Pray. The next step is to pray. If there's any chance at a national revival, it's only going to happen with God's blessing. God will decide. And if God looks at our country and says, nope, you guys have to be.

had your chance, you screwed it up, and now you're going to reap what you sow. If he says that, then that's it. It's over. The judgment has been made. But we could pray to God and beg for another chance, beg for him to allow us to turn things around. I don't think we deserve that. We deserve to fall apart. We do. But we can beg for what we don't deserve. So do that. And tend to your family. Hold your children close. I don't know if we can save the entire country from collapse, but I do know we can save our own families. And we have to focus on that now. We have to focus on shielding our children from the debris if everything does start falling apart. And beyond that, be vigilant. Because I do believe that there are tough times ahead.

I don't know what those tough times will look like exactly, but I do believe they're coming. So be vigilant. And sure, pray for a miracle because a miracle is what it's going to take. But while you're praying for the miracle and hoping for the miracle, maybe in the meantime, buy yourself a gun just in case. All right. That's it for me. Have a great day, everyone. Godspeed.