The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 351 - Thousands of Biologists Deliver Devastating Blow To Pro-Abortion Side

Episode Date: October 17, 2019

Someone interviewed 5,000 mostly pro-abortion liberal biologists about when life begins. Almost all of them confirm that life begins at conception. Also, yesterday was Pronouns Day. Did you celebrate? And climate protestors are turning the entire working class against them. Date: 10-17-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So Elijah Cummings unfortunately died today, and it's really, I have to say, it's pathetic and sad to see what the media has done with his death. Cummings had a long and storied career, but the media has eulogized him primarily as a Trump critic or target of Trump criticism, as if that, something that only came up, you know, for Elijah Cummings, this, this, only the last couple of years of his life had anything to do with Trump at all. But they've decided that's going to define him as if that's the most significant thing about him. So look at some of these headlines from the Washington Post. Representative Elijah Cummings, Democratic leader and regular Trump targets dies at 68.

CNN says, Representative Elijah Cummings, key figure in Trump investigations, dies at 68. The Independent says Elijah Cummings death. Senior Democrat at center of Trump impeachment probe dies. age 68. This is what their Trump obsession has wrought. They have, they have minimized him into Trump target figure in Trump impeachment. It all revolves around Trump for these people. Everything revolves around Trump. Even the, even the, the obituary now of Elijah Cummings, who had been in public life for, what, 40 years, his last couple of years going to head to head head to head with Donald Trump. For the media, that's all that matters. It all boils down to that.

Pretty outrageous and sad to see. Okay, so what I want to start with today, on this show today, we're going to take a step away from politics, sort of, and talk about a few things, a few interesting things that obviously have political implications because everything does, but are much deeper and more important, I think. And we're going to start with a fascinating article written by some who interviewed over 5,000 biologists and asked them, when does life begin? And there was a 96% consensus, almost unanimous. 96% of the biologists gave an answer, and 96% agreed. And we're going to look at what their answer is and what they agreed on in just a minute.

But first, a word from ancestry DNA. You know, I think it's not just a nice little bit of information or a bit of trivia to know where you're from, what your ancestry is. It is crucial to understanding yourself, understanding your family, where you come from, you know, what you're all about. It's just that's what ancestry DNA is all about. Ancestry DNA gives you so much more than just the places where you're from. Ancestry connects you to the places in the world where your story started using precise geographical detail. and clear-cut historical insights. So it gives you the whole story. It tells you sort of the story about yourself and about your family. You can even trace your ancestors' journeys

over time following how and why your family moved from place to place. It really is fascinating to think. Think about all of the things that had to happen throughout history in order for you to come into existence. Think about all, through all, through all all that time as your ancestors and your family have been moving from place to place and meeting different people and think about all those different movements and meetings that had to happen. What are the chances that all of that would happen to make you? You know, one in a trillion probably, yet it happened. And to amplify your results, you can start a free trial in ancestry and build a tree so your

ancestors become more than just a name. They've combined DNA results with over 100 million family trees and billions of records. to give you more insight into your genealogy and origins. I have my ancestry kit ready to go. I'm going to send it in. It doesn't take very long to get the results back. I'm looking forward to finding out. I'm hoping that I am a Viking.

I'm hoping I'm at least 15% Viking. That's what I, fingers crossed, that's what I'm rooting for. Go to ancestry.com slash mat today for 20% off your ancestry DNA kit. That's ancestry.com slash mat for 20% off your ancestry DNA kit. Ancestry.com slash Matt. Okay, so a guy named Steve Jacobs has an article on the site Quillette, hardly a bastion of right-wing propaganda, we should say. And the headline of the article is, I asked thousands of biologists when life begins.

The answer wasn't popular. And in the article, he talks about his dissertation for his PhD, which involved abortion. and as part of that research, he asked this question. He asked over five. There was 5,300-something biologists when life begins. There's more to his paper than that. There's more to the article. You go read the article.

It's interesting. It's worth to read. But I want to focus just on this element of it for a moment. This is pretty staggering. Quoting now from Jacobs, he says, I found that 500, 5,337 biologists, 96%, a firm, that a human's life begins at fertilization, with 240% rejecting that view. The majority of the sample identified as liberal, 89%, pro-choice, 85%, and non-religious, 63%.

In the case of Americans who expressed party preference, the majority identified as Democrats, 92%. So, 96% of a mostly pro-abortion, non-religious, liberal, Democrat, biologist sampling say that life begins at fertilization. That is about as powerful of an answer on a question like this that you could possibly hope to expect. Because you have people saying life begins at conception, not for any ideological reason. In fact, the ideology cuts against them. Their ideology pushes them in the other direction. If they were to follow their ideology, they would say, oh, no, life doesn't begin at conception. The only reason they're saying

this. The only reason is because of what they know about science. They're biologists and they know that yeah, life begins at conception. It is, the science is clearly undeniable. When you, what occurs there at conception, once conception occurs, you have a distinct living biological entity. Now, I'm not a biologists, and I appreciate these biologists saying this, but I don't think you need to be a biologist to understand this or to know that. In fact, you don't really need to understand anything about biology at all. You could have no understanding of biology, and you should, because this is, more of a logical conclusion than anything else. We know that, just logically, we know that at conception, you've got something else that has now come into existence.

Despite how it's presented by the pro-abortion side, this is not an extension of the woman's body. It's not an organ or a limb or a tumor. It's just not that. It is something separate, something distinct. It is an entity of some kind. We know that. It is a biological entity.

I don't think anyone would deny that. Okay, well, now the question is, is it alive? Okay, well, again, without even getting into the biological specifics, it would seem to me that for any entity that exists, there are only three options. It's either going to be living, inanimate, or dead. Right? Those are the only, there's no, there's nothing in between there. Everything that exists, everything that's in this room right now that you can see is either

living, inanimate, or dead. Nothing in between. There are no in-between categories. And so we know that this desk that I'm sitting at, this is inanimate. It's a desk. It's only ever going to be this until it decays and rots away. I mean, you could chop it up and build it into something else, but it's never going to grow on its own into something else. It doesn't breathe. It doesn't consume food. It doesn't, it's not, it's not developing or, or maturing into a, you know, it's never going to, it's just, this is all it is. The entity in the womb, is it an inanimate object? No. Clearly not. Is it dead? Well, no. And if it were dead, then you wouldn't need the abortion in the first place. And so that leaves only living. So it is a living biological entity. And is it

human? Well, we know that because it was created by two human beings. And two human beings cannot mate and create anything but another human being. They can't create a duck or a, spider monkey. It's just, they're going to create another person. So that's how we know. It is a living biological human, though it's nice to have the biologists confirm this rather obvious fact. Jacobs then goes on to talk about the backlash from the anti-science abortion-enthusiast crowd. That's my term, not his, to be clear. And he shares some of the email he received from these Looney Tunes. Again, my term, not his.

So some of the things he quotes some of the emails to him, is this a study funded by Trump and the Ku Klux Klan? Someone else says, sure hope you aren't an effing Christian. Someone else says, this is some stupid right to life thing. Yuck. I believe in right to choice. These are brilliant people. Just a bunch of scholars, a bunch of gentlemen and scholars over there on the pro-abortion side.

Someone else says, the actual purpose of this, quote, survey became very clear. I will do my best to disseminate this info to make sure that none of my naive colleagues fall into this trap. Somebody else, sorry, this looks like it's more of a religious, survey to be used to misinterpret by radicals to advertise about the beginning of life and not a survey about what faculty know about biology. Your advisor can contact me. Someone else says, I did respond to and fill in the survey, but I'm concerned about the tenor of the questions. It seemed like a thinly disguised effort to make biologists take a stand on the issues that could be used to advocate for or against abortion. Someone else, the relevant biological issues are obvious and have nothing

to do with when life begins. This is a nonsense position created by the anti-abortion fanatics. You have accepted the premise of a fanatic group of lunatics. So this is interesting. So you've got obviously you've got a few emails here. This is just a sampling from it. But you've got a few emails from semi-literate morons. But then

it's clear that some of these messages are from biologists who answered the survey. And I'm assuming that they answered, no, life does not begin. And they're kind of revealing why they answered. They're making it clear that for them it was ideological. that they couldn't overcome their ideological biases. And so they were afraid about, well, I don't know how this is going to be used politically.

So I'm just going to pretend that life does not begin at conception. So I think what we see here is 96% of biologists said life begins at conception. The other 4% they only said no because they were afraid of the political consequences of saying yes. So really, really in effect, it's 100%. with 96, it's more like this, 96% of biologists were willing to admit that life begins a conception. The other 4% weren't willing to admit it for the reasons they made clear here in these emails. As much as people throw around the term anti-science, what you find on the pro-abortion side is this is literally anti-science. They don't like what the science says, so they shout and scream and they stop their feet and they refuse to acknowledge it or admit it.

life begins a conception there's no way around it scientists know this it is it's really not even a controversial subject it just is the only controversy is in the political implications but that has nothing to do with science the science says what it says and there is no mystery here there really isn't you're not going to find biologists as this makes it clear you'll be hard pressed to find biologists who scratched their head and say, gee, I don't know. So then what happens next? Does the pro-abortion side, do they throw up their hands and say, oh, we've been beaten? No, if they were honest, they would, but they're not honest, so they don't. So instead, either they'll just continue to claim, despite all evidence, that no life doesn't begin a conception,

because I don't want it to, or more likely, they'll try for what appears to be or what pretends to be a more nuanced and intelligent, you know, a distinction where they'll say, okay, yeah, the being in the womb is a human being, no way around that, but it's not a person. And they'll draw this artificial distinction between person and human. I've dealt with that distinction so many times. I'm not going to go into it in great detail here. You can find any of the number of things I've written on the subject to see how I deal with that. What I will just briefly say is this. Two points. First of all, if there is a distinction between a person and a human being, can you, we put it this way. Can you identify, if you believe in this distinction, can you identify any other areas where you draw that distinction?

So you say that a, quote, fetus is a human being, not a person. Okay, well, do you do that anywhere else? In other words, is this a distinction you only specifically came up with in order to deal with fetuses? And that's because if that's the case, that's going to make it seem like an ad hoc kind of thing, where you just came up with this distinction in order to get around the obvious truth. there is no other area where we would draw this distinction. In any other context, right, we would say that the term human being and person is interchangeable. It means exactly the same thing in every other context, except in the womb where magically, mystically, you try to create this difference where it doesn't actually exist.

Now, second point, I say that in any other context, we would admit that a human being is a person, the two are interchangeable. That's true now today. But if we look back through history, that has not always been the case. Think about what we did with slaves in this country for hundreds of years. Where it would have to be admitted, yes, these are humans, but they're not exactly people. They're only partially people or sort of people, not quite as peoplely as the rest of us. My point here is that if you look back through history, there have always been groups of people trying to claim that other groups of people are not people.

And what we find is that in every case, that effort has led to horrific results. It has always been in the service of some evil institution that people draw this distinction. This effort to delineate between human being and person historically has always, always, always, always been in defense of evil institutions. Or evil acts. Slavery, genocide, the dehumanization of women. On and on. That's a historical fact. So if you're pro-abortion, maybe you look at that trend and you see, oh, gee, wow, it seems like there's a, yeah, every single time in history when our ancestors tried to say human, not person, it was because they were trying to justify some evil, terrible thing. Yet here I am saying human, not person, maybe I'm justifying an evil, terrible thing too. All right, speaking of anti-science, yesterday, October 16th was, I don't know if you were aware of this, it was a holy day of observation known as Pronoun's Day. Following in the sacred traditions of our ancestors, ProDown's Day provides the LGBT camp with yet another opportunity to lecture the world about what we're supposed to do and say and think.

because the thing is that the LGBT folks, they don't have enough opportunities to do that, right? They only have, this is why they needed to come up with Pronouns Day because they wanted to be able to lecture us. And they didn't get enough of a chance to lecture us on International Transgender Day of Visibility, March 31st, Lesbian Visibility Day, April 26th, International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, Bifobia, May 17th, Harvey Milk Day, May 22nd, Pansexual and Panromantic Visibility Day, May 24th. Pride Month, June, Bisexuality Day, September 23rd, Bisexual Awareness Week, September 23rd, September 20th, September 20th, National Coming Out Day, October 11th, National LGBT Center Awareness Day, October 19th, Spirit Day, October 20th, Intersex Awareness Day, October 26, Asexual Awareness Week, October 23rd, Transgender Day of Remembrance, November 20th, Pansexual slash Panromantic Pride Day, December 18th, transgender, transsexual, tricyclists on trampolines Awareness Day, December 19th.

I only made one of those up. The point is that LGBT folks apparently need a lot of days dedicated to themselves. They need a lot of days to raise awareness about themselves and give themselves a chance to lecture us. And that's why they had to do pronouns day. Now, at first blush, it may seem odd, right, that we have a day set aside for a grammatical construct. Why not a verb day or an adjective day or a preposition day? Well, I'm sure eventually we're headed in that direction as the English language becomes increasingly subjectivized and people are increasingly encouraged to make up their own rules as they go. So

maybe eventually we'll have days like that. But right now it's pronouns day. And there is one advantage of it is that it might take a whole day for you to learn all. all of the wild and wacky new pronouns that have been invented out of whole cloth in recent years. It's not just the normal ones. He, she, her, him. We're way beyond that. You're stuck in the past if you think those are all the pronouns. Or if it's just the traditional ones, no.

The ever-growing list of pronouns includes such gobbly gook as Z, Her, H-I-R, Z-Z-Z-S-self with an X, ver uh exerce k xy r s how do you even pronounce it exerce per self

fair self with an F but the F is in parentheses and none of the rest of the word word is Exem X-E-M X-E-M Ex-Z-X-X-E-X-X-E-X

and self-self. I made two of those up, but you can't tell which ones, and that's the point. You have no idea, because they're all made up. They're all nonsense. None of them have any meaning whatsoever. They are just random letters and sounds blended into a linguistic frape. We now live in a culture where a-we-now live in a culture where a sentence like this is supposed to mean something. This is a quote a real sentence now, supposedly.

V went to the store with Per and met Zem, and Z got into Zer car and drove home. What does that mean? There's a store, there's a car, there's going home, but who's going where, who's doing what, who's involved? You have no idea. I have no idea. And I'm the one who just came up with a sentence. Because it's gibberish. It doesn't mean anything.

And this is the problem with the whole idea of, of people claiming their own pronouns, a pronoun again is a grammatical construct. It must be deployed according to the laws of grammar, not the individual whims of the person to whom it refers. That's not how grammar works. So if I am, let's say that I got up and I was standing on this desk.

Could be dangerous. I could follow my head. Which maybe if I did follow my head, then all this stuff would start making sense to me. I don't know. If I got up and I was standing on this desk and you wanted to describe what I'm doing, you would say, he is standing on the desk. Now, you really have to say that because that accurately, objectively describes what's going on.

To say she is standing on the desk would be wrong because that would indicate that a biological female is standing on the desk, which is incorrect. If you were to say they are standing on the desk, that's wrong too because that indicates that more than one person is on the desk when that is not the case. If you were to say Z is standing on the table, that would be wrong too because that would make it seem like there's some sort of space aliens standing on the desk when no, that's not the case at all. So the whole point here is to convey objective reality. When you say something like, he is standing on the desk, this is not subjective. You're not to, you're not to, describing my feelings or my emotions. So if I'm standing on the desk while feeling like a woman, whatever that means, then you could say something like he is standing on a man who feels like a woman is standing on a desk or something like that would work. But my own personal feelings

doesn't affect how you grammatically convey what's happening. Now, in a similar way, if I I was standing on the desk and I were to tell you that my preferred preposition is off. If I were to tell you, I don't like the preposition on. I prefer off. That's my personal preposition. Okay, fine. I like the word on, not off. Whatever that means. But it still would be nonsensical for you to go and tell someone he's standing off the table. Because I'm not. I'm on it. not off of it. And that's what this comes down to. Prepositions, nouns, verbs, and pronouns are meant to convey objective facts and reality.

If they're not going to perform that function, then they no longer perform any function at all. And meaningful, useful words have been reduced to impotent nonsense. But shouldn't we just be polite and use somebody's preferred pronoun? just to make them feel better. Shouldn't we do that? The answer is no. Okay? No. We don't.

I'll tell you why. First, because you don't generally call somebody a pronoun when you're speaking to them. So this whole thing about how it's about being polite and respected, it's irrelevant most of the time anyway because you're not, if I'm in the room and you're talking to me, you're not going to say he or him. You're going to talk directly to me. You're going to use my name. And my name can be whatever I want it to be.

So if you, yes, your name is totally subjective. It's arbitrary. Your name can be anything. So whatever you say your name is, I'll call you that. It's your name. It can be anything. So if you're a man and you say you want your name to be Sally, then I'll call you Sally.

If you're a woman, you want your name to be Fred, you say your name is Fred. I'll call you Fred. Whatever you say your name is, you say your name is Higley Boo. I'll call you Higley Boo. I mean, it doesn't matter. It's your name. can be anything. But pronouns are more objective than that, and they're also more distant. So you're usually called by a pronoun when you're not physically present for the discussion.

So when someone insists on a preferred pronoun, what he's trying to do is he's trying to prevent you from using proper grammar in relation to him when he's not even in the room with you. So he's essentially saying, whenever you refer to me, even if I'm 10,000 miles away, you must abandon the rules of grammar and parrot whatever nonsensical gibberish I assign to you. That's not only arrogant. It's not only absurd, it's arrogant. Arrogant and absurd. Absurd and arrogant. That's what it is. How are you, why would you even attempt to control the language used when you're not even there? How could it possibly affect you? And the second point, of course, is that using an incorrect pronoun is a lie. It's dishonest.

You know, if I say she in reference to a man, I am conveying an untruth, and I am doing so deliberately. And so that is a lie. It might be a lie with good intentions. It might be a lie meant to avoid conflict or whatever, but it's still a lie. And I think it's wrong to lie. But then, okay, but doesn't grammar evolve over time? Maybe this is just the evolution of grammar. Well, yeah, grammar and language does evolve over time. But it evolved. according to a coherent set of rules and standards. In fact, that is what evolves, is the rules and standards can evolve, but the point is that they remain rules and standards, which means that they have to remain objective, not objective in the sense of being immutable and unchangeable, but objective in that they're the same for everybody. And that's not what we're talking about here.

about people making up their own rules individually according to their own feelings and desires. That's not evolution. That's devolution. That's collapse. That is the collapse of language. Language is being destroyed here. It's not changing. It's not being modified or evolved. It is being destroyed. Because if we don't have that agreed set of standards and rules that are the same for everybody when it comes to language, then we can't communicate anymore. Besides, and here's really the main thing. We aren't talking merely about changes in language. That's not what we're talking about.

Now, if we all decided to start using the word zem, xem, however it's pronounced, let's just say zem. I don't know how it's pronounced. It can be pronounced any way you want, I guess, that's the point. So this Zem is a made-up pronoun. Well, if we all decided that, you know what, we're going to start using the word Zem instead of him. Okay, we can do that. I think it's a little weird.

It's kind of Dr. Sussi, in my opinion. But the word him doesn't always have to be him. If you go somewhere else in the world, they don't have the word him. They have a different word for it. Different languages have their own word. for him. And sometimes those words change. Okay, fine. But the LGBT lobby, they aren't asking us to exchange one word for another. Rather, the lobby is asking, demanding, actually, that we pretend to believe

in an entire new category of human existence. Zem is not a new word for him. Zem is supposed to be a completely separate sort of person, neither or her nor a him. But nobody can even begin to explain what a Zem is exactly and how it differs from a her or a hymn. They only say, well, some people identify a Zem. Okay, identify as what? What is that? What does it mean to be a Zem? How did you first discover that you were a Zem? What is it, what is it, what is it, what's the process that you went through to, to, to discover the, the, that you are a Zem? Describe the experience of discovering that you're a Zem. What does a Zem do differently? What are the biological markers of a Zem? And how does them differ from a zir or a zir or a sir or a vim or a dabba dabbedoodle fim or whatever how does any

distinguish between all these different things but nobody can um no one can provide any coherent answer for any of this just just as i have pointed out many many many times and i'll continue to point out that uh nobody can even explain or describe what it actually means for a man to identify as a woman man says i identify as a woman what do you mean what exactly do you mean by that? Can't explain it. What is a woman? Can't explain it. I've been asking that question for eight months. No one has offered an answer. Not one person. I mean, not one leftist, I should say. So this is all nonsense. It doesn't mean anything. And yet we are supposed to timidly cooperate as they mutilate our language and make nonsense out of everything. And I'm just not going to do that.

I'm not going to cooperate with that. Because why should I? No. No. I'm not good. No. That's my answer. No.

Okay. One other thing before we get to emails, heartwarming video to play for you today. Things have been a little too serious. So let's lighten the move. Those extinction rebellion idiots, the climate activists who have been stopping traffic all over the Western world, they've especially been wreaking havoc over in the UK.

And here's a video from, based on the accents, it looks like this is in London. It's Extinction Rebellion, climate activist, climate alarmists, who are standing on the top of a train preventing a whole group of people from getting to their job so they can feed their family. And here's how that went. Okay, so he's dragged off the train there and beaten by a crime. crowd. I would never condone violence. However, actually, there's not a however. Period. End of a sentence. Next sentence. When you prevent an entire crowd of people from getting to their jobs to feed their families, you are going to make them angry, and justifiably so. And so whatever happens

next is your fault. So I am going to have zero sympathy for you. Zero. That is 100% your fault. It's all on you totally. You have no right to be doing that. And it just boggles my mind that these people, these climate alarmists, are allowed to continue doing this. How are the police not showing up immediately with buses and just arresting all of these idiots? You can't do this. You can't just stop traffic. Stop people. You have. You have. have no, that's not First Amendment rights there. You have no right to do that. No right.

And if the police aren't going to step in immediately and just arrest everybody doing it, which is what they should be doing, then the crowd might get very angry and might take matters into their own hands. And that's on you. I mean, no sane person is going to feel remotely sorry for you. And by the way, they're taking public transportation, you moron. These are a whole group of people trying to get on the same mode of transportation. Isn't that what you want?

Isn't that the whole thing? Isn't that the most environmentally friendly way of traveling and commuting? That's what they're trying to do when you're stopping them. Okay. That was supposed to be a pick-me-up. But it got a little, these people just, the arrogance of it. The arrogance of it. And it makes it even worse that all of these climate alarmists who are doing these protests,

if we can even call it protests, you know none of them have jobs. It's easy for them because they're living off their, they're either living off the government or they're living off of their parents or both. So it's very easy for them to step in and prevent other people from getting to their jobs. And they could say, oh, there's more important things than getting to your job. Well, easy for you to say, you unemployed, non-contributing zero, it's easy for you to say you're going home to sit on your beanbag chair while your mom makes you hot pockets. That's easy for you to say.

The rest of us have families that we have to take care of. I know that concept is foreign to you. Okay, let's go to emails. Matt Walshow at gmail.com says from Kelly, says, I know how much the left speaks of men and women being the same, and there should never be an excuse for men to try to differentiate between this two. So I ask, should women be able to use PMSing as an excuse for being in a bad mood? I feel like this is a great argument that clearly women are different than men.

I tried to tell my wife this, and she almost strangled me at the dinner table. You said it at the dinner table. Now that is bold. Just want to know your thoughts. Thanks for being a great voice of my generation. Keep up the excellent work. Kelly, you call me a great voice of our generation, and then you try to get me killed. So there seems to be a contradiction there.

I am not going to fall into that trap. And besides, as we have already been through today, this is the year 2019, there's no reason why a man can't PMS. Okay, so your entire premise is transphobic. This is from Steve says, hi, Matt, thanks for the great show. Truly appreciate the humor, insight, and intellectual honesty. you bring to the table. During your email segment, yesterday's show, I was, I was startled when I heard you mention your daughter's name, your new daughter's name. My wife and I have seven kids and our only daughter. Oh, you have six boys, huh? I don't know how you do it. We got two boys. And honestly, when I hear people that have four, five, six boys, how is your house still standing? Is it? Or at this point, if you just given up and you're living out, you're just living in the woods somewhere under the open sky? Because, I don't, honestly, how does your house survive? How does anything survive with that many boys running

around? God bless you. Anyway, our daughter shares the same name, Emma Grace, although it sounds like you decided to separate the two and go with Emma Grace. So he's got Emma Grace as one word. We had similar discussions and concerns as you and opted for the spelling here. We knew we wanted to be one word and chose to capitalize the G, even though it's in the middle of the name. Otherwise, when looked at, you might try to pronounce it as imagrassi or something like that. And yes, when we would say her name to someone, we would always follow up by saying capital G, no space. So a little extra work, but never a big issue. We always thought it was a beautiful sounding name and still due to this day. Although in an odd footnote, our daughter 22 now has recently dropped the grace part and

just goes by Emma. Thanks and best wishes to you and your family. Well, your odd footnote at the end, that's the whole point. That makes my entire point. You go through all of this work for 20 years to explain her name to people. You put in all that blood, sweat, and tears, clarifying her name constantly. And then the moment she gets a chance, she just cuts her name at half and throws out all the work you did.

It's a tragedy. And that was one of my concerns with my wife that I raised in an argument that I ended up being right about. I don't know if you caught that part. I was right. My wife was wrong. I was right. But that was one of my concerns.

I figured people are just going to call her Emma anyway, and that's probably what she's going to do for the sake of being, just because it's easier, and all of our work will be for nothing. So that's a tragedy. My condolence is to you. From Adam says, well, let's see. This is from, I'll do that one tomorrow.

This one's from Aaron says, earlier this week, you attempted to place Columbus in historical context in which he lived by claiming that by our modern standards, everyone born before 1970 would be morally unacceptable to us. Specifically, the ideas that land conquest through violence and racism are immoral are very modern notions. Even if that's true, how can you claim to believe in the objective truth of Christianity while still maintaining the historical figures aren't responsible for the evils they've committed if those evils were universally accepted back then? Christ revealed the fullness of truth in 33 AD. The Bible canon was complete in the 5th century.

So Columbus and all of the European conquerors would have had full access to the Gospels before they set sail. They had the same gospel we do. They had no excuse for taking land by force or for treating those with different skin as subhuman. Matt, without even realizing it by attempting to contextualize their actions, you are becoming an apologist for moral relativism. Okay, a few things here. First of all, you bring up the Bible. the Bible does not explicitly condemn invasion and conquest or racism. In fact, in the Old Testament, well, you can make an argument for racism.

There are some lines, especially in epistles. There is no Jew or Greek, man or woman in Christ, that sort of thing, which is a condemnation of racism. But here's my point. you take in the Old Testament, in fact, it would seem to explicitly condone invasion and conquest, even command it at various different points. Now, I'm not saying that invasion and conquest is actually consistent with biblical teaching. I'm not saying that slavery and racism is consistent with biblical teaching. I'm just saying that on first reading, it may not have been immediately obvious to people a long time ago

that the Bible forbids it, because it doesn't explicitly forbid it. It doesn't come out at any point and say, in very clear terms, stop doing this stuff. Now, we get to those prohibitions in a more roundabout way, for example, that verse from Paul that I just paraphrased, we today now see that as a something that speaks very much to the issues of slavery and racism. And I think it does, but my point is just that for a long time, that's not how people read it. And that's just the reality. So the fact that the Bible canon was complete has, I think, little bearing on this discussion, considering it just because it doesn't speak very directly to these issues,

it took people a while to see it for what I believe it is. Second, moral relativism would be if I said that it actually wasn't wrong for our ancestors to go and enslave and kill and do all that kind of stuff. I specifically did not say that. In fact, I said the opposite. I said that it is objective. I'm pretty sure I said multiple times. It obviously was objectively wrong for them to do those things.

just as wrong then as it is now. The question, though, is not one of the objective moral rightness or wrongness of the act. The question is one of moral culpability. And this distinction between the objective moral rightness or wrongness of an act and the moral culpability of the person who performs the act is very, very important for us to understand. Not just for the context of this discussion, but in any discussion. we need to be able to understand this. And I find that a lot of people, for some reason,

this is a distinction that is lost on a lot of people. I'm not sure why. So for example, if a crazy person murders somebody, obviously murder was wrong. Murder wasn't suddenly okay because a crazy person did it. The act was just as wrong for him as it would be for me. But he was less personally culpable than I would be because of his mental state, you see.

And that was my point about slavery. Not that slave owners 500 years ago were crazy, but that they had less moral culpability all that time ago than I would have today if I went and bought a slave. The act itself is just as wrong in both cases, but our ancestors for thousands of years lived in a world where slavery was an accepted institution everywhere across the planet. It's just what people did.

It's how the world works. For the 15th time, that doesn't mean that it was actually right. It just is relevant. It bears on their personal culpability for doing it. It just really didn't occur to a lot of people for a long time that there was anything in principle wrong with slavery. In the 15th century, there weren't a lot of abolitionists. running around. And there especially weren't a lot in the year 500 BC. And further in time that you go, you're going to find that even less and less. So why didn't it, why didn't it occur to that many

people that slavery was wrong? Well, because apparently the wrongness of slavery is not an innate moral insight. It's not something that just comes naturally to people, apparently. It feels innate for us because we were raised in a society that completely condemns it, and rightfully so. But clearly, if you look at this from an anthropological perspective, it's clear that this is not innate insight. This is more of something that came about through progress, through moral progress. We haven't morally progressed in every area in recent times, but we have morally progressed in some areas, especially where it pertains to slavery, racism, and that kind of thing. humanity had to over thousands of years progressed to a point where the wrongness of slavery became clear

and there were philosophical developments that had to happen to make that possible such as the formulation of the doctrine of universal human rights like i said a long time ago nobody thought of that it's just it's not something that people thought of it's not a concept that was really available to them. And there was scientific advancement, such as the revelation that we are all one species with only very small biological variances between us. That also was not obvious to people a long time ago. 2,000 years ago, the idea that you live in your tribe or in your province, your town with your people,

the idea that people a thousand miles away are exactly equal to you in every respect that just that would have seemed nonsensical to everybody back then so again all this stuff is obvious to us now thank god but it wasn't obvious to our ancestors these are inside And this is another thing that our ancestors had to, we didn't earn these insights. We didn't come up with any of this. You know, we're not the abolitionists. We came along after the abolitionists.

And we're not the civil rights activists. We came along, most of us watching this, came along, I know I did, after all of that. And so we inherited. a society where certain moral truths seemed to us to be self-evident. But that society was built over a long period of time. And a lot went into building that. And there was a lot of literal blood, sweat, and tears that went into it. And I think it is the height of snobbery for us to come along and treat all of this like it's so perfectly obvious and to look down our nose on all of our

ancestors who hadn't quite figured it out when we didn't figure it out either. And so that's my only point. It is a mitigating circumstance. And so yes, I would say that something like slavery, always evil, but the people who engaged in it 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago, they simply do not have the same moral guilt that you and I would for all the reasons that I've tried to explain. Okay. And last thing I'll say is, like I said, when we talked about this, you either have to agree with me on this

or what's the implication of disagreeing with me, the implication, because what's the only other option? Either I'm right about this, and the moral guilt is mitigated, or almost everybody who existed throughout history, up until very recently, they were all about just utter complete scumbags with almost no redeeming moral qualities.

And that, you talk about a simplistic way of looking at the world, not only that, but a very reductive, insulting way of looking at the world. No, I'm not willing to look at the world like that or to look at our ancestors like that. and I also think it's just factually incorrect. Okay, we'll leave it there. Thanks everybody for watching. Godspeed.

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Michael Null's show, and the Andrew Claven Show. Thanks for listening. The Matt Wall Show is produced by Robert Sterling, Associate producer Alexia Garcia-Del Rio, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by Donovan Fowler. Audio is mixed by Mike Coramina.

The Matt Wall Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2019. Hey, everybody, it's Andrew Claven, host of the Andrew Claven Show. You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon is turned to blood. But on the Andrew Claven Show, that's where the American. The fun just gets started. So come on over to the Andrew Claiband Show and laugh your way through the apocalypse with me, Andrew Claiborne.