The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 81 - Why My Generation Loves Socialism

Episode Date: August 10, 2018

It's not hard to figure out why young people today are attracted to socialism. The equation is pretty simple. Bad parenting + bad education = socialists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Well, I'm sure you've heard quite a bit about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently, probably more than, probably more than you should. Probably way too much. You've heard way too much about her. And she's right now riding a wave of, well, she's riding two waves. The first wave is a wave of attention from conservatives, like myself, like the attention that I'm giving her right now as we speak. And that's the way, you'll notice that it goes like this a lot. Like the two sides, conservatives, liberals, they kind of pick out stars for a year. each other because the star on one side is going to be the person that the other side has decided

to pay a lot of attention to. So conservatives did that with David Hogg. Now they're doing that with Alexandria or KZo-Cartez. It's, you know, I'd say 95% easily of the coverage that I've heard about this woman has come from conservatives. The same thing with David Hogg. And, you know, and you can make the argument that Donald Trump is a, is probably the prime example of that on.

on the right side of the spectrum. But anyway, so she's got that wave, and then she's also got the wave of socialist enthusiasm among the younger generations. And that's why she's caught on because she's a democratic socialist. The fact that young people are so attracted to socialism is, I think, a topic worth inspecting, especially because many people have inspected it and talked about it, analyzed it. And I just, I think that the analysis and the conclusion, that are drawn are often very, very wrong. Now, different surveys give you different figures, but they all seem to agree that around half of all millennials at this point

find socialism appealing on some level, which is really concerning. I mean, that's a lot. Half is a lot, okay? And according to a recent survey that I read, one in ten millennials believe that Joseph Stalin, who killed 20 million people as a conservative estimate, was a hero. One in ten. Again, that is, that's, that's an enormous figure for people to admire Joseph Stalin and then much higher numbers admire other characters like the killer and terrorist

Che Guevara and others. So how do we explain this affinity for socialism among, uh, and communism among America's youth? Well, I don't think it's that hard to understand, really. I think, think the explanation is is is really pretty simple it's it's kind of a matter of arithmetic it's it's sort of a a mathematical equation and the equation goes like this okay it's failed parenting plus fail plus failed education system equals socialist that's how you make socialists and so let's talk about parents first of it's the it's the job of a parent to raise their children into independent and self-sufficient adults. And so a newly minted adult,

someone who's just become an adult, they should want nothing more than to break out of the protective cocoon of childhood and go out into the world, untethered, free, able to do whatever they want. Energy, ambition, boldness, vision, these are the things. These are the marks of youth,

or at least they used to be. They used to be the primary characteristics of youth. But what we find today is that many young people are, they have no desire to leave the cocoon at all. Or else they desire to leave one cocoon and then promptly enter into another one. So they want to leave the cocoon of the home and their parents, and then they want to go into the cocoon of the welfare state, the nanny state. They want daddy in Washington to supplant death. at home. That's what they're looking for. And it cannot be overstated just how unnatural this is. And you see it reflected in a lot of ways. I think one symptom of this is you read these reports now

about how young people, teenagers, are getting their driver's licenses at later and later ages. They're waiting. I think on average now, what I read is that, well, I don't know if it's on average, But there's a great many of teenagers who now they don't get their driver's license until after they turn 18 until after they graduate high school. And there are several reasons for that. One is just kids are at home on the Internet all the time or playing video games. So they feel like there's no need to drive. But that's related to this lack of this lack of energy and boldness. and one, I remember when I was a kid, I wanted nothing more than to get my driver's license,

just so I could leave and I didn't even care where I went to. I remember the first, when I got my driver's license, the first place I went to, I went to, I went to Rite Aid pharmacy, and I got like a pack of gum or something. But it didn't matter because I was able to go myself. It's one of the great moments of my life is that I was able to go myself to a store and get something. And that was amazing. And that, again, used to be a common thing among young people, that you wanted the license, you could get out on the highway, be on your own, have freedom. And it seems like kids increasingly don't really desire that. They're fine being at home with their parents and having no freedom. And depending on, I guess they have developed this. They've gotten used to dependence. And they have no desire to break free from it. And that is a very concerning sign, I think. And this is what lies at the root of the socialist inclination in the younger generations.

It's more than anything, it's a failure of, it is a failure of personal formation, of moral formation. And I don't think it's fair to blame this entirely on parents. I mean, it is theoretically possible that you could have a kid who turns into a socialist, even though he had great parents. Seems unlikely it could happen. But there is a link that's obviously hard to ignore. That's parenting. Then you have the education system.

And the education system has contributed enormously to this problem because you only need to have a really basic knowledge of recent world history. We're not even going back. We're not talking about ancient Rome, okay? We're not going back hundreds of years. We're not going back centuries. You simply need to have an understanding of what has happened in the world over the last century. If you have that understanding, then there is no way that socialism and communism would seem appealing to you. These regimes murdered 100 million people, if not more, over the course of a century, leaving many millions more starving, destitute.

The 20th century was the deadliest and most miserable 10 decades in human history, by far, without any competition for the title, by the way. And this is not exclusively, but largely thanks to the systems of government that now half of my generation want to establish here. And so that is an incredible amount of ignorance that you must place at the feet of the school system. Do you think the average socialist millennial even realizes that when he says Nazi, he's referring to the national socialist German Workers Party? Do you think you understand that Nazis are national socialists? I assume he doesn't know. But how could that be possible? How could you make it through 13 years of formal schooling or 17 years, including college,

or even more than that, and then come away still ignorant of the fundamental facts of recent history? How is that possible? It's almost impressive. You almost have to be impressed with how in a. effective our school system is because you would think that all you have to do is just throw kids into an environment and have a few books around. And if they're in that environment for 13 to 17 years, they're inevitably going to absorb some information. You think you wouldn't even be able to stop them. But our school system has somehow managed to prevent kids from developing even the basic

fundamental understandings of history. It is an incredible thing. And again, we're not talking about events from ancient times. We're talking about events that many people walking the earth now today actually lived through and are still living through in places like Venezuela. Yet the Democrat Party has managed to tap into this very large supply of supposedly educated people who possess almost no functional knowledge whatsoever. At least they possess no functional knowledge when it comes to history. And I would submit when it comes to many other subjects as well. So with that in mind, how can we call our education system anything other than a cataclysmic disaster? That it has produced ignorance and intellectual laziness and idiocy on an

unprecedented scale. And it has somehow managed this feat at precisely the moment when knowledge and information have never been more readily available. This is what's happened. I know people don't like it when I blame the education system, and I always hear from teachers who say, I care about my kids, I'm educating my kids. I know that there are good teachers out there. I don't deny that.

And if you're a good teacher, then good for you, because you are working against the tide. You've got everything stacked against you. And at the end of the day, even if you're the best teacher in the world, in most high school environments, you're only going to have your kid for the kids, any particular kid,

you're only going to have for 45 minutes a day, if not like 45 minutes a week or every couple of, or every, you know, a couple of times every week. And there's only so much you can do in that time. But I think even if you're in the system and you work for the system, you can't deny. I mean, look around you at the incredible ignorance, that people are displaying.

And remember, we are, this is ignorance in a time when there is no excuse for it at all. Because as I pointed out many times before, we all carry around in our pockets all of the knowledge that you could possibly need. It's all here. And then in school,

it's supposed to be presented to you in a kind of systematic way that you can absorb and understand. So the rise of socialism is an enormous failure on the part of schools and the part of parents. The crop of the young crop has been, I guess you could say, fertilized by bad education, bad parenting.

And now it's really no trouble for socialist to just kind of come along and pick the fruits. And there's no real way to stop them either, unless we make drastic changes to our homes, and to our schools. So if you're wondering why people are socialist, that's why. It's not because the socialist program is really that appealing. It's only a peat, well, I should say, it is appealing to ignorant people who have not been

properly formed personally and morally. That's who it's appealing to. But to rational, intelligent people who have been educated and who have been properly formed as human beings, it is the most unappealing thing in the world, especially at this point. Now that we have 100 years of history, we can look back and see all the bloodshed, misery, and death and say, wow, yeah, no thanks. Alexandria is having a wonderful time tapping into that. All right, we're going to cut it off there, but thanks for watching. Thanks for listening.

Everybody, have a great weekend, and I'll talk to you next week.