The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 859 - Wokeness Is America's Dominant Religion

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Today on the Matt Walsh Show, a new survey reveals that huge numbers of Americans have left religion in recent years, especially since COVID. But that’s not actually correct. Americans aren’t leaving religion. They’re going from one religion to a different one. I’ll explain. Also, Ron DeSantis continues to lead the charge against wokeness in the school system. And airline CEOs try to explain why it’s stupid to require masks on planes. Plus, a leading climate activist and “scientist” calls for more censorship of “climate denialism.” And in our Daily Cancellation, Kamala Harris is canceled, but perhaps not for the reasons you may think. Sign the petition to stop Biden’s vaccine mandate. Head to https://dailywire.com/donotcomply I am now a self-acclaimed beloved children’s author. Reserve your copy of my new book here: https://utm.io/ud1Cb  Sign The Petition To Keep Matt Walsh on Saint Louis University Campus: https://bit.ly/3Dzeu1f DW members get special product discounts up to 20% off PLUS access to exclusive Daily Wire merch. Grab your Daily Wire merch here: https://utm.io/udZpp You petitioned, and we heard you. Made for Sweet Babies everywhere: get the official Sweet Baby Gang t-shirt here: https://utm.io/udIX3 Andrew Klavan's latest novel When Christmas Comes is now available on Amazon. Order in time for Christmas: https://utm.io/udW6u Subscribe to Morning Wire, Daily Wire’s new morning news podcast, and get the facts first on the news you need to know: https://utm.io/udyIF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Matwals show, a new survey reveals that huge numbers of Americans have left religion in recent years, especially since COVID. But that's not actually correct. Americans aren't leaving religion. They're going from one religion to a different one. I'll explain. Also, Ron DeSantis continues to lead the charge against wokeness in the school system, and airline CEOs try to explain why it's stupid to require masks on planes. Plus, a leading climate activist and, quote-unquote, scientist calls for more censorship of climate denialism. Enter a daily cancellation. Camela Harris has canceled, but perhaps not for the reasons you may think. All of that. and more today on The Matt Wall Show. It's the holidays and you deserve a gift. How about a gift that keeps on giving you joy and comfort every day all year long? This is a gift for yourself, not for anybody else.

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And here's X-Chair's holiday gift for you. You can save $100 off your X-Chair just by purchasing it at X-Chairwalsh.com. That's the letter X-Chair, W-A-L-S-H.com. X-Chair has a 30-day guarantee of complete comfort, and you can finance your purchase for as little as 30 bucks a month. Go to X-Chairwalsh.com and save. That's X-chairwalsh.com. The media has been reporting this week with a certain amount of unsubtle glee that a huge chunk of Americans abandoned their religion over the last two years accelerating an already existing trend. This trend is certainly important.

It's one of the most important and consequential things happening in our world today. In fact, our society is being fundamentally reshaped as we speak. But as always, the media reports tend to miss the point while also misinterpreting the data. There is a great religious shift taking place. But I don't think it's accurate to say that all of these people are leaving religion necessarily. And I'll explain why. But first, let's take a look at the findings. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, it says, quote,

religious affiliation in the U.S. has continued to fall during the pandemic, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. The percentage of Americans who identify as Christians now stands at 63%. down from 65% of 2019 and from 78, 78% in 2007. Meanwhile, 29% of Americans now identify as having no religion, up from 26% in 2019 and 16% in 2007 when Pew began tracking religious identity. Many places of worship closed during the pandemic, some voluntarily, others as a result of state and local social distancing rules, and in-person church attendance is roughly 30 to 50% lower than it was before the pandemic. estimates

Barna Group, a research firm that studies faith in the U.S., millions of Americans move to worshiping online and questions linger about how many will come back to the in-person worshiping. So let's pause for a moment to consider two points. First of all, these numbers are indeed truly horrifying if you are a member of a traditional religion. And if you agree with John Adams,

who said that our political system was made only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. If you do, then this should trouble you greatly. Dropping from 78% Christian to 63% in less than 15 years is cataclysmic. Even more so, when you take a step back and consider the fuller picture, polls of this kind conducted back, say, in the 1950s, would have found that well over 90% of the country was Christian. Almost everybody.

And certainly, you know, 90% Christian and then the rest would be other religions. There'd be almost nobody who identified as non-religious. Now we're on track as Christians to be a minority. And that will happen far sooner than you think. I would give it maybe until the middle of this decade, another five years perhaps. Of course, we're already a minority and have been for some time if you take into account that not every self-identified Christian is really a Christian. that's the problem with a survey like this.

You know, you're not going to find anyone who self-identifies as non-Christian and yet actually is Christian. That doesn't happen. The Christian religion is such that if you think you aren't in it, then you aren't. But just because you think you are in it doesn't mean you are. Case in point. Joe Biden, if he was contacted for this survey, he would have said, yeah, I'm Christian, but he rejects nearly every moral teaching of the Catholic Church and denies its moral authority

and yet would call himself Catholic and thus Christian. he's not. His claim is at best self-delusion, but probably more likely a conscious lie. All of that to say, let's not engage in self-delusion ourselves and pretend that these kinds of survey findings aren't important or that the situation isn't really as bad as this makes it seem. It is that bad, and in fact it's worse. We were once a Christian nation. We are no longer a Christian nation. Soon we won't even be a majority Christian nation. And as our founders knew, this doesn't work. It's not working.

The country doesn't work when it is not anchored in the Christian faith. Another point, church attendance is perhaps, as it says, 50% lower than it was two years ago. So church has lost half, half of their congregations in the span of two years. And they're not coming back, okay? And this squares with my own anecdotal experience, for what it's worth. Every church I've attended over the last year has been relatively sparse in attendance. I'm not sure I've seen a full church except on holidays since 2019. And even back then, it was somewhat rare to see a totally full church.

Now you just never see them. Why? I mean, why have people abandoned going to church? Part of it, of course, is the decline in traditional religiosity, the decline in Christian affiliation generally. But the drop-off for church attendance is far outpacing the drop in Christian affiliation. Why is that? A big part of the reason for that is that many churches, most, I'm guessing, closed their doors often for months at a time during the pandemic during a time when people most needed spiritual guidance and spiritual formation and leadership. The church wasn't there.

It had fled in the night, in fear. Now you might rationalize that churches were forced to do this. The government told them they had to close down. The problem is that many remained closed. even when they no longer had to be closed, and even during the time when they had to be closed, they can still be faulted for complying with these absurdly unconstitutional edicts. Closing down the right to the free exercise of religion is right there in the First Amendment.

Government's coming in and shutting down churches indefinitely certainly flies in the face of that. So the government had no moral authority to shut down any churches, which means the churches had the moral authority, to refuse and say, we're not shutting down. You can arrest us all. We're not shutting down. A few churches did that, heroically. Most did not. Most just shut their doors and said, okay, you let us know when we can go back to practicing our religion again. So through this

mixture of compliance and willful cooperation, churches sent a message to the public, and the message was, you don't need us. We aren't necessary. You can get along fine with. You can get along fine with without us. And great numbers of people heard that message and they took it to heart, and now here we are. But there's another very important point to make about all this, but first let's go back to the article for a minute. It says among the 29 percent who say they have no religion, four percent say they are theists and five percent agnostic. Most of those figures are unchanged since 2017. The percentage of Americans who identify as nothing in particular grew from 16 percent in 2017 to 20% this year.

Though some who identify as nothing in particular may believe in God, Mr. Smith said they are far less likely to pray or attend services than Americans who identify with a religious group. The share of Americans who pray daily fell to 45% of 2021 compared with 58% in 2007. It says the secularizing trends that have been evident for a long time show no signs of slowing and certainly no signs of reversing. Though Protestants remain the largest group, most of the drop in religious affiliation has come from their rank.

Some 40% of Americans now identify as Protestant compared with 43% of 2019 and 52% in 2007. Okay, now to the important point. What we're witnessing is not really a decline in religion per se. At least the decline is not nearly as steep as those numbers make it seem. Because many of the non-religious people have not given up on religion or left religion. They have just, in fact, changed religions. This is a religious shift, not a drop. And to understand this, we have to take a step back, I think, and consider what we even mean when we say the word religion.

What is a religion? Most dictionary definitions will tell you that a religion is, you know, a belief in some kind of supernatural entity with associated rituals and customs attached to that belief. And that is one form that religion takes, yes. Most of the ancient religions, the traditional religions, take exactly that form. but I think I prefer a broader definition that helps to make sense of what we're seeing in our culture today. I would say that religion can be defined as simply a shared sense of transcendent meaning. And it has to be shared because religion by definition cannot be a totally individualized pursuit. If it is, then it's just a belief, not a religion.

And then there has to be that sense of transcendence, or else it's not a religion, it's a social club. To be in a religion is to look towards something transcendent, something beyond ordinary physical experience. experience, and to be standing alongside others who are looking in the same direction as you. Now, this means, again, that some of those self-described Christians aren't really Christian at all, aren't really religious at all. Because when you go to some churches today, there is no sense of anything transcendent at all. Everything is earthbound. All of the focus is on earthly priorities and values. You can go to some so-called churches today and not even see a cross anywhere in the building, because the cross is transcendence.

And in these churches, they don't want you looking to anything transcendent. And the people in those churches, they're not attending a church. They're attending a motivational seminar. Or maybe a book club. In fact, many Christian churches have taken great pains over the decades to deliberately turn away from the transcendent and the mystical. And to make the church-going experience far more sterile and sanitized in that way. Which is another reason why fewer people are going to church, because you've removed the very thing that motivated them come in the first place. But what about all those self-described non-religious people?

Those allegedly non-religious people? Well, a good portion of them are leftists, not all, but a good portion. And leftism is a religion in itself. It may not have all of the same structured customs and traditions. Part of what defines it is its hostility to customs and traditions. Its tradition is to destroy tradition. Religious people of the past, you know, built statues and monuments, members of the leftist religion tear down statues and monuments. But even so, it is a religion. And this becomes quite obvious when you consider critical race theory, the belief in inherited racial guilt, inherited racial persecution, gender theory, the belief that people can be born in the wrong bodies, the belief that a man can be a man

and yet somehow still in some way be a woman at the same time, all of the pronouns and the new gender labels and so on. None of this is scientific. It certainly isn't logical. There's no empirical basis to any of this. They cannot locate the source of white guilt or black victimization or a man's womanhood anywhere on earth. This is their version of grasping for transcendent meaning. There's a reason why they hold that prefix trans in such high regard. They put it all the way at the top of the pyramid. Because that's really what they mean when they call a man a trans woman. They mean that he is a transcendent woman. His womanhood transcends physical boundaries, making him in many ways a more spectacular specimen of womanhood than a biological woman. That's how a man won woman of the

year a few years ago. Their ideas about race, gender, victimhood, justice, fairness, equity, tolerance, all of these ideas have a religious supernatural transcendent quality to them. And to call it transcendent, by the way, is not an endorsement. Transcendent just means that something is beyond the range of normal human experience. Psychosis is a transcendent experience too in a certain way. There is transcendence that points you to truth and beauty, which is Christian transcendence. And then there is the religion of leftism, which is a religion, but one that directs you towards confusion and insanity. You know, the idea of Christian transcendence

is you're looking beyond the physical, you're looking beyond your immediate experiences, and then anchoring yourself to something beyond it, but something that's even more real, something sturdier. With the leftist transcendence, you're looking beyond physical experience and just going out there into space and floating around, not anchored to anything,

untethered, unmoored. that's what we're witnessing in our culture today. It's not the death of religion, but the birth of a new one. An anti-religion religion, but a religion all the same. One with its own supernatural beliefs, its own heresies, its own anti-tradition traditions, its own ideas about sin, its own inquisitions. Human beings, as we discover, are religious by nature. You're never going to have a totally non-religious society.

It can't happen. There will always be religion. The only question is if we choose a true religion or a false one. Now let's get to our five headlines. Well, I never had a garage until recently with our most recent house. And once you have one, then you discover that it is a frequently traversed area in your house. In fact, garages are the most frequently accessed entry point for most homes. Often overlooked the garage is where people come and go.

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the leftist religion, especially as it intrudes into the school system. You know, separation of church and state, the people who are bringing this wokeness into the school system, they're the ones who would say we have to separate church and state. But what they really mean, again, is that they don't mean that. What they mean is, No, we want our own church. We don't want religion out of the school system. What are you talking about? No, we want our religion in the school system, not yours.

Sanchez is just fighting back against that. Let's listen to him, explain the bill. So today, we are going to be introducing to the public, and we have legislators who are going to help us with this, a new piece of legislation for the upcoming legislative session called Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act, the Stop Woke Act. And it's something that, and this will do a number of things that are very important. One, it will put into statute the Department of Education's prohibition on CRT in K-12 schools.

No taxpayer dollars should be used to teach our kids to hate our country or to hate each other. So we're seeing from Ron DeSantis tonight, and I think finally more conservatives are waking up to this fact. that we can't sit back in a totally defensive posture. There needs to be an aggressive, offensive move to keep this stuff out of school systems, to protect our kids from it. And I don't think anyone's doing more than that from a political standpoint than Ron DeSantis.

But he made another really interesting point about this. There's one more clip I want to play from this press conference as he's talking about, you know, with leftism, what are their real priorities? What do they care about the most? They talk about taxes and tax policy, but is that what they actually care about the most? Here he is talking about that. And I think what you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really de-legitimize our history and to de-legitimize our institutions.

And I view the wokenness as a form of cultural. Marxism. They want to tear. They want to just, it's not just, you know, people say, oh, you know, their, their leftist or socialists, it's not just like taxes and all that. Yeah, they do want that, and that's not good, but they really want to tear at the fabric of our society and our culture and things that really we've taken for granted, like the ability of parents to direct the upbringing of their kids. Yeah. And the only thing I quibble with here is he's, says they're trying to delegitimize our institutions. They're trying to delegitimize our history. And he's right about that. But that's also, really, we should be talking in the past tense because

they've already done it. You know, they've already succeeded. They have taken over the institutions. They have delegitimized our history. They've gone through at will and torn down the statues and monuments. And more importantly, they've, they have managed to reshape the way that, especially our kids view their own history. And now many kids today see American history not as something to be proud of, but as something that's a source of great shame and guilt. Something that we cannot, it's offensive to celebrate it. So the point is, this has already happened. And it's important for us to realize that and acknowledge it, not so that we can fall into despair and say, oh, what was me? We're beat. But we have to understand that this is not. That's why I say we're going

on the offensive. It's too late to take a defensive posture. It's too late to say, oh, we have to we have to defend our institutions. It's too late for that. They have the institutions. We can't defend them. Now it's a matter of taking them back. So even if we want to, wanted to. I think conservatives for decades took a defensive posture while the left was on the offense and we saw what happened. They won. And now it's too late to be defensive. The fort has been taken. Now we're on the outside and we have to take it back. And so I see this not as a defensive move, but an offensive move. And that's exactly what we need. Okay, next from the Daily Wire, it says the CEOs of two of America's largest airlines said this week that they do not believe that the Biden

administration's continued mask mandate requiring travelers to wear masks while flying serves much benefit considering the fact that airplanes have advanced filtration systems that remove nearly all airborne contamination from the cabin. The comments from American Airlines CEO Doug Parker and Southwest Airlines CEO Greg Gary Kelly came on Wednesday during a Senate committee hearing on the financial support the industry received during the pandemic. CNN reported both Kelly and Parker, who each have announced plans to retire as CEOs in the coming months, mentioned that high-grade hepa air filters on planes capture virtually all airborne contamination, and air quality is helped by how frequently

cabin air is exchanged with fresh air from outside the cabin. Kelly said, quote, I think the case is very strong that masks don't add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment. It's very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting. Parker agreed saying, I concur in an aircraft is the safest place you can be. Parker added, it's true all of our aircraft. They all have the same HEPA filters and airflow. So what does that mean? It means that the, despite common misperceptions about airplanes, because you kind of think of it as you're stuck in this metal tube with a hundred other people in close proximity,

you're all packed in there like sardines, breathing each other's air, that's not the case at all because you're 35,000 feet in the air, and they're filtering and cleaning that air aggressively, much more than any other indoor environment. and then you've got the air from the outside that's filtered in, which is 35,000 feet in the air, so it's very clean. So you've got this really clean air on airplanes, actually. By putting the masks on, now you're breathing your own air back in. So you could argue that you're getting dirtier air than you would otherwise,

if you just didn't have the mask on. You could argue that. It would seem that these airline CEOs are arguing that. It would seem they're arguing. What they are saying, just to be clear to YouTube, what these airline CEOs are saying is that the masks are basically pointless on the airplane. But we are being conditioned to do things that don't make sense. As we know, as we've talked about for months, this is about power.

We are conditioned to do things that don't make sense for reasons that nobody can explain, simply because we're told to do them. And nowhere is that more obvious and pronounced than on an airplane. Where you're sitting there, and this is also, by the way, completely changed the employee customer relationship in a lot of different ways, and none of them good ways. Because now flight attendants, in the past, the flight attendant is there to, you're the customer, you're paying a lot of money to be on that plane, and in the past the flight attendant is there is there to serve you and to help you. It's a flight attendant. They are there to attend to you.

That's why they're there in the past. And now they've become these kind of hectoring, browbeating authority figures. If you've been on a plane at any point in the last two years, you know this. This is the main thing that flight attendants do now. This is their primary occupation is mask enforcement. And so they're walking through. And some flight attendants are more relaxed about it than others. In my experience, most are not relaxed, and they're just walking through and they're and they're yelling at you about masks. That's, that's primarily what they're doing. And they're even keeping track, you know, they're like, they have a stopwatch out basically. Because you can turn, you can pull the mask down to eat, but they want to make sure that it's not down for, I saw

someone get yelled at for that in my last flight. A guy pulled us mask down, was eating, but you're supposed to pull the mask back up in between bites. and he actually got yelled at about that. I've been yelled at because, you know, originally I had made the mistake, the awful transgression of when it was time to eat, you know, I would just take, I took the mask off completely

so that I could enjoy my meal without this chin, without a pointless chin strap on. And I was told, no, you can't take it off completely. You have to just pull it down. It has to be right over the chin that keep other people safe from your chin

fumes or something. I don't know. And that's what that's what flight attendants do now. They have become these authority figures. And so the whole experience now of flying is just you go through TSA, you're treated like a suspected criminal, like a terrorist, just because you want to get on a flight. They could pat you down, send you through, all this kind of, they're yelling at you through. And then you get on the plane and you're treated like a biological hazard. And this whole time, you are paying exorbitant amounts of money for this experience to get treated like dirt and filth. And all of this is in service, at least when it comes to the masks, it's in service of something that doesn't make really any sense, or at least nobody can explain. A big thing on the planes also is, and they're very strict about this, in my experience,

if you have your nose peeking out over the mask, that's inappropriate, that is not the appropriate way to wear a mask, and they'll let you know. I mean, why does it matter? Nobody can explain that. Like, at worst, if I have my mask on and my nose is peeking out so I can breathe, God forbid, at worst, I have, what, put myself in danger? Is there much of a risk that through the air I'm breathing out of my nose, I'm going to infect somebody else? Especially if they're wearing their mask properly.

What are the chances of that statistically? But I could infect somebody else with just through the air through my nostrils. Not saying it's impossible. What are the chances? So there's no one can explain that either. but this is part of the conditioning. Can't explain it. Doesn't make a lot of sense,

but do it anyway. And you see, this is the, this is not supposed to be the relationship between a customer and employee. This is also not supposed to be the relationship between a citizen and a government. You know what this is? This is the relationship between a young child

and his parents. That's the relationship. When you've got, with very young children, They don't understand anything. Nothing makes sense to them. You can try to explain why certain rules are put in place, but their ability to comprehend your reasons, the ability is very limited. So you could say to a two-year-old, for example, as we all have said to two-year-olds, don't run in the street. Why? Well, because a car will hit you. why don't I want a car to hit me? Well, because you could die. What does death mean? Well, a two-year-old doesn't even understand what death is. A two-year-old doesn't know that death is permanent. They think, well, do you die and you wake up tomorrow and everything's fine? So very young children have to be conditioned in a certain way to obey rules that they don't understand. And just to obey them based on the trust they have and the respect they have for the authority figures in their lives, their parents. But even even the, the parent-child relationship, even that relationship is supposed to evolve and mature over time

as the kids grow a little bit older and they can understand the reasons for these rules. And you start explaining it to them because it's important that they know the reasons. So it's not even that we are being treated like children generally. We're being treated like toddlers. Our relationship now with the employees on an airplane. or the government is that between, is like that between a parent and like a two-year-old. We're not going to explain it to you. Nobody can explain it, but do it anyway. All right.

Now we go to Michael Mann, who's a climate activist who pretends to be a scientist and who has blocked me on Twitter, by the way, I just discovered. And very torn up about that. He was on TV explaining why climate denialism is dangerous and must be censored. There's not enough censorship in the world today. And he wants more of it. Let's listen. Now it's time for you to remove climate denial videos. They pose an even greater threat to humanity in the long term.

Explain. Yeah, that's right. I mean, climate change, you know, here we saw nearly 100 people die from these unprecedented tornadoes. But if you look at the total impact of climate change around the world, wildfires, droughts, floods, heat waves, coastal inundation, Climate change is already costing far more lives than COVID-19. It is deadlier. And so the denial of climate change is deadlier even than the denial of the basic science behind COVID-19. But here's the difference.

There isn't a huge global lobby, the world's most powerful industry, wealthiest and most powerful industry, the fossil fuel industry that has a stake in the COVID-19 debate. So it's fairly easy for these big tech companies, these social media companies, to stop, you know, showing COVID denial for suppressing COVID denial videos and posts. There isn't a huge corporate interest that's going to get in their way. With climate change, it's a whole different story. We are talking about an effort by the world's largest, most powerful industry, the fossil fuel industry, to prevent any meaningful action. on climate and to accomplish that in part by using social media to promote denialism and dismissal. And here, the social media companies are being complicit.

Yeah, well, climate denialism is, I continue to agree that climate denialism is a big problem. If there are people out there who are denying climate, denying that the climate exists, well, that's, I'm not sure I see the, what sort of greater impact that can have on society, but I think it's hard to function as a person in the world if you deny that the climate exists. So that's, and even climate change denial. I don't agree with that either. If there's anyone out there denying that the climate changes, well, that person, I think

that person needs to, needs to wake up. I agree with that. The problem is, I don't know. don't think there is anyone in that category. I don't think anyone denies the climate. I don't think anyone denies that climate changes. I think everyone, all adults anyway, understand that there is a climate and it changes all the time. I mean, the climate is always changing. It changes over the course of a day. It changes drastically over the course of centuries and millennia. The question is, what is causing that change? And when we look at the causes,

each individual cause to what degree can we blame those causes. And the question is also whether this is, in fact, an apocalyptic scenario, and we're all going to be dead in 10 years or drowned because the polar ice caps melt or whatever. So that's the issue. He says that this is what we're experiencing now. The weather is unprecedented. Well, we've already talked about that. That's total nonsense.

That's a claim that you. that we actually know is not true. Take the tornado, for example. We know that 100 years ago, because there are records, we know that 100 years ago there were worse tornadoes, more people dying from tornadoes. Even though, again, there were fewer people. The population was less dense, in more ways than one, by the way.

And yet more people died. But it's also to make this kind of statement, to call it unprecedented. And he means it, he means in history. There's just no way to support that. We know it's not true because we have on record worse storms. But even if we didn't have that on record, the vast majority of, you know, of the Earth's history, we don't have reliable records for individual weather events. As I said a few days ago, who knows what?

what the tornado situation was in the continental U.S. 500 years ago. There was nobody around to keep records. There were people around, but they weren't keeping records. Not that we can rely on anyway. So you can't possibly say that. And then as far as, of course, more censorship, shutting down dissent, this is not science. And it can be hard to, you know, that's something we have to keep in mind. It can be easy to forget because we're so used to this now, especially over the last two years, people who pretend to be scientific authorities, treating those who disagree with them as terrorists, as a danger, a threat. But that's how you know someone's not a real scientist.

I don't know anything about this guy, but I feel comfortable putting sarcastic air quotes around scientist for him. Because scientists don't do that. Part of the scientific dissent, disagreement, is an essential part of the scientific process. So anyone who says, this is the official scientific stance on this particular issue, and you're not allowed to have a different position, anyone who says that by definition is not a scientist. All right, moving on, it may actually come as a surprise to some people to learn that members of Congress are not banned from trading stocks while they are in office. Now, it seems clear that they should be, given the power that they

have over the economy and over the stock market to be able to profit in that way just breeds corruption. But they're not banned. Is there any good reason why members of Congress should be allowed to trade stocks personally, individually, while they're in Congress? Well, Nancy Pelosi was asked about this yesterday from the only reporter who ever asks real questions. And let's find out if there is a good reason. Let's find out. Matt has been here. Insider just completed a five-month investigation, finding that 49 members of Congress and 182 senior congressional staffers have violated the stock act, the insider trading law. I'm wondering if you have any reaction to that. And secondly, should members of Congress have their spouses be banned from trading individual stocks while serving Congress?

No, I don't know to the second one. We have a responsibility to report on a stock, but I'm not familiar with that five-month review. but if people aren't reporting, they should be. Because this is a free market and people, we have a free market economy, they should be able to participate in that. Oh, now she cares about the free market. When's the last time you heard Nancy Pelosi even say the phrase,

free market? I think it's the first time I've heard. It sounds odd coming out of her mouth. Everything sounds odd coming out of her mouth. but especially that. Well, this is a free market. People should be free to participate. Oh, really, Nancy?

Interesting that you feel that way now. When it comes to politicians profiting, that's when we care about the free market, not for any other reason. Great, makes a lot of sense. Okay, let's get now to the comment section. If you own a home and have not refinanced, what in the world are you waiting for?

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So you're getting a custom loan that achieves your goals as well. From lower rates to shorter terms, even the ability to access cash from your equity, they're ready to find you the best deal. possible. You could save up to $1,000 a month. You may even be able to skip two mortgage payments, so there's a lot of upfront savings there as well. And you can pre-qualify for free by calling 866-56-569 47-11. That's 866-569 4711. Again, 866-569 4711. You want to do this now, or visit Americanfinancing.net. American financing, NMLS-182334 NMLS Consumer Access.org. Ozzie says, I love that although Matt hated Amazon for taking his book off the he still defended Amazon against ignorance.

Yeah, that's not because of any virtue on my part. I just, I hate stupidity even more than I hate Amazon, I guess. And so when I hear people saying that Amazon, when there was a tornado warning and funnel clouds have been spotted, that Amazon should have sent their employees out to the parking lot to get in cars and drive away. That's stupidity, and I do hate that. I also hate that I have to defend Amazon, so then I hate the stupidity even more for what it has forced me to do. Trust me says Matt Walsh's many split personalities. Badass ornery person, gun toter, cardigan wearing children's book author, aerophobe, Theocratic Fascist Dictator, gay straight guy, Thanksgiving Day fat guy that fat shames other fat people,

badass canceler that decrys cancel culture, makeup wearing skinny gene guy, cult leader. This dude's all over the board, but the SBG just blindly follows him. I can't, I can't disagree with that assessment either. But that's part of the cult thing, right? Like we talked about, just following blindly. You don't understand the reason for anything, but you follow. I'm learning. You know, as an aspiring cult leader, this has been a very fruitful time the last couple of years because I can look at other cult leaders like Anthony Fauci, for example. And I'm taking notes. I've picked up a lot of tips. M.W. Diverr says, Matt, the person you heard clapping for the male swimmer in the female race was actually just his bhapp-clapping against his leg. Probably can't even air that.

But you mean her b-b-s, sir. Please be respectful. Todd says, hey, Matt, where's the Johnny the Walrus merch? We need plushes, t-shirts, and official wooden spoons. I love the wooden spoon. idea, so we do need to sell some wood spoons. But you can. We do have Johnny the Walrus merchandise. Thank you for bringing this up. You can go to dailywire.com slash shop and then go to the Matt Walsh store there and you'll find all kinds of great merchandise. Johnny the walrus, swag, as well as all the other ridiculous memes from the show. We are greedily profiting from all of it because we are, we can participate in the free market in that way. Kayla says, were the producers messing with Matt with closing the show with that song, or was he in on it?

His face was priceless. No, I could tell you I was not in on it. I'm pretty sure that was McKenna who did that. And I've already talked to Jeremy about her, and her last day will be tomorrow. Sorry, you had to find out this way, McKinna. David says, is it bad to wish that bad things happen to an evil person? That man swimming in a women's race is evil. No, I actually don't think that it is.

I know for a lot of Christians, it's going to sound scandalous to them that I said that. But to wish that bad things happen to a bad person, I don't think that that is bad. I don't think it's unchristian either. Because you know what? That's a desire for justice. Now, if somebody cuts you off in traffic and now you are hoping that they get hit by a Mack truck and everybody in the car dies, Well, that's a problem because that's not justice. That would be a very disproportionate, you know, punishment for cutting somebody off in traffic.

But if you are desiring a proportionate, proportional, I should say, punishment for evil acts that are done, then I think not only is that not non-Christian, not only is it not bad, but it's good. I think that if you don't wish for bad things to happen to bad people in that way, for them to suffer proportional punishments for the wrongs that they've committed, if you don't wish that, then I think that's not charity. That's indifference. That I think is apathy. And that's another problem that we have, I think, in the church, is that very often apathy and indifference are confused with tolerance and kindness and charity. So a desire for justice is a very good thing. And if you don't believe me, then go to the Bible, always a good source for these things, an even better source than the Matt Wall Show. Go to the Bible, especially the Old Testament, and especially the Psalms. And you're going to find one Psalm after another dedicated to wishing that ill befalls evildoers. There are many, many beautiful Psalms and other portions of the Bible,

dedicated exactly to that. So not only can you wish it, but you could pray for it. You can pray for evildoers to be punished, and you should. The Daily Wire was first in the nation to sue the Biden administration for their unconstitutional mandate, and we're getting closer to a million signatures on our do not comply petition every single day. Why? Well, because people are realizing that if you don't actively fight back against this and fight for our freedom, the government will take it. We have a goal of reaching one million signatures, which would provide a major boost to our legal challenge. We're almost there. We're at over 875,000 signatures right now. So go to dailywire.com slash do not comply and get your name on that petition. Also, I'm very excited to announce a new series exclusive

to Daily Wire. If you've ever wanted to be a fly on the wall for some of Ben Shapiro behind the scenes, then you're going to love this. In the premiere episode, Jordan Peterson joins Ben for coffee while he's visiting Nashville and they catch up on their private lives and trade big ideas, great conversation. And the cameras are rolling the entire time. Here's a quick teaser. All righty, so I'm here in Nashville with Jordan Peterson. Jordan's spending a lot of time in Nashville. In fact, I think Jordan may know Nashville better than I do. Last night, you dragged me to Robert's Western World, and you were like, you were like the guy of the house. Like they all knew you. No, no, Luke McCrory was the guy of the house, the guitarist. Playing the guitar at the tea?

He's deadly man, yeah. Kelly's heroes, they're a deadly band. I will say I feel like I was a little more dressed for it. Like I was wearing a t-shirt and a leather jacket, and you were wearing this. Yeah, yeah. I didn't have my COVID boots. I haven't bought them yet. I'll get a cowboy hat. Co-bo boots for my show. We're going to get in Nashville up, exactly. It was really fun being there with you. Oh, yeah, no, that was awesome. You're a classically trained violinist.

I am. And you like the music? Oh, yeah, I love that stuff. I mean, if you're a good musician, you're a good musician. Yeah, no kidding. They really know how to play. Sunday special is a lot more formal. I mean, I'm coming in with questions, and it's much less of kind of a discussion between the two of us, and it's much more of kind of

just me probing and Jordan's ideas, but this is much more like how we talk normally. I mean, Jordan, you called me, we talked on the phone like a month ago and this was basically the same conversation, right? This is how we talk. Different topics, but yeah, different topics, but I mean, like this is, this is how we talk when the cameras aren't on us. People really love being in on those conversations. Yeah, no, I think that the fact that people are going to kind of get the, the, the, kind of the fly on the wall view of these kind of conversations, pretty awesome. So you'll be able to see clips of my conversation with Jordan here at the coffee shop on YouTube, but if you want to see the whole conversation,

really is the way you should see it. You need to head on over to dailywire.com or check us out on the DailyWire app. You'll be able to see the whole thing there, and it's pretty fantastic. Well, Ben's conversation with Jordan Peterson drops tomorrow, and we'll be available only at dailywire.com. So if you're not a member yet, now is the perfect time to sign up. Head to dailywire.com slash subscribe to sign up today. Again, that's dailywire.com slash subscribe to sign up today. So you can watch this show and many other great pieces of content as well. Now let's get to our daily cancellation. So today I'm afraid that we must cancel Vice President Kamala Harris for, I am told, the third time. I confess that I am reluctant to issue

this cancellation today, especially after Jen Pasaki just yesterday raised the issue of greedy meat conglomerates. As she explained, big meat is responsible for much of the inflation that we're seeing at the grocery store. And Joe Biden fortunately has Kamala Harris to tackle that problem, which is good because we know that she can handle big meat. But even so, despite how useful she might be, I have to cancel her. And I'm canceling her for this speech, which she gave during a holiday fundraiser for the DNC. It's extremely shocking, objectionable. But take a listen. We must make it clear. Democrats stand for workers' rights. We stand for women's rights, and we believe that the right of a woman to make a decision about her own body is non-negotiable.

Non-negotiable. Democrats stand for voting rights. And we are fighting, and we will continue to fight, to pass the Freedom to Vote Act. And the John Lewis. voting rights advancement act. We stand for dreamers. We stand for farm workers. We stand for our LGBTQ plus brothers and sisters. We stand for people with disabilities. We stand for our children and the planet they will inherit.

Now, you might listen to that and think that we accidentally elected a liberal fortune cookie as vice president. Indeed, you might say that Kamala Harris is speaking in the ancient and sacred language of the bumper sticker. But there is something far more sinister going on. here, I think. First of all, let's go through this. Quite shockingly, Kamala Harris twice mentions workers. She says, we stand for workers, workers' rights, farm workers' rights. This is elitism and classism, as it excludes those Americans who do not work and have never worked and do not plan on

ever working. This is the Democrat Party's most loyal and important constituency, and Kamala Harris has simply erased them from existence in this speech. She didn't even bother to mention the rights of non-workers, she's pretending they don't exist, even though they are the ones who put the Democrats in power to begin with. As if that was not bad enough, next the vice president says that we stand for women's rights and the rights of women to make decisions about their own bodies. But obviously, what about the millions of men who become pregnant every year? Do they not have rights over their bodies? Should we force all of these distinguished pregnant gentlemen in the country to remain pregnant against their will? Apparently a man's uterus is public property, according to the

vice president. So make matters worse, Camilla Harris talks about our LGBTQ plus brothers and sisters. Now, we're going to try to leave aside the fact that the full initialism is LGBTQIP2SAA. Now, I know that may sound like the kind of random assortment of letters and numbers that you might use as a password for your Gmail account and then immediately forget the next time you have to sign in, but it's not. That is indeed the full acronym. And yet Harris, Waves away the QIP-2 SAA members of the community and expects them to make do with, oh, you're the plus. All of those unique and distinct and vibrant identities have been reduced to a mere plus sign by Kamala Harris. The P's, pansexuals, the two S's, two spirits, the AAs, Alcoholics Anonymous, all of these marginalized people have been further marginalized by this exclusion.

Remember something. Silence is violence. And if that was not bad enough, she actually has a lot. the gall to speak of LGBTQ brothers and sisters? This kind of gendered language has no place in a progressive society. Sure, some members of the community may identify with the binary concepts of brother and sister, but many exist outside of that framework entirely. The more gender neutral and thus inclusive phrase would have been LGBTQIP2SAA siblings. Or even better, LGBTQIP2SAA individuals of indeterminate gender with whom we share a common affection traditionally associated with the sibling relationship. Is that so hard to say?

Well, yeah, it was a little bit hard to say, actually. Finally, in her most appalling act of rhetorical brutality, she actually says, she actually says, we stand for people with disabilities. We stand? There are some members of the disabled community who cannot stand. In fact, we stand is ablest and exclusionary language.

We do not all stand. We cannot all stand. And there are those who can theoretically stand and even walk but rarely choose to, like Brian Stelter, for example. All of these people are valid and their experiences are valid. Yet Kamel Harris deliberately chooses language which fails to legitimize their lived experiences. She may have thought she was being inspiring in her speech, but she used words that were heteronormative, abelist, racist, sexist, transphobic, homophobic, elitist, classes, discriminatory, prejudice, bigoted, hateful and traumatizing. And I didn't even mention the fact that the word dreamers was used and has the effect of otherizing those who identify as insomniacs. Literally every phrase she uttered was problematic.

It's difficult to describe the full emotional toll that her words have taken on the most marginalized and vulnerable members of our society. I don't know if they'll ever recover. Camela Harris should be ashamed. And that is why today she has canceled for the third time. that'll do it for us today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Have a great day. Godspeed. Well, if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe. And if you want to help spread the word, please give us a five-star review. Also, tell your friends to subscribe as well. We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, we're there. Also, be sure to check out the

other Daily Wire podcasts, including the Ben Shapiro show, Michael Knowles Show, the Andrew Claven Show. Thanks for listening. The Matt Wall Show is produced by Sean Hampton, executive producer Jeremy Boring. Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, Our technical director is Austin Stevens, production manager Pavel Vodoski. The show is edited by Ali Hinkle. Our audio is mixed by Mike Coramina. Hair makeup is done by Cherokee Heart, and our production coordinator is McKenna Waters. The Matt Wall Show is a Daily Wire production, copyright DailyWire 2021.

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