The Matt Walsh Show - Interview With Gov. Scott Walker

Episode Date: May 1, 2021

Matt Walsh talks with the former governor of Wisconsin and current president of Young America's Foundation, Scott Walker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

joined now by Governor Scott Walker, of course, former Governor of Wisconsin, current president of Yaff and we're very good friends with Yaff. You know, first of all, Governor, thanks for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for him out. I was just at, I did a Yaff event at UT Austin last week, and it was really good turnout. Of course, we had a problem with the COVID restrictions where they were turning, you know, school was turning people away and they wouldn't let us have overflow rooms and all that kind of stuff.

Are you worried that, you know, with YAF, that maybe these schools have been given a tool to restrict and shut down events and they're going to be hesitant to give up that tool in the future? Well, we're going to have to watch to make sure that whatever policies each campus has are done uniformly. You know, a couple years ago, one of your colleagues was at UC Berkeley and through one of our YF events. And they tried to effectively stop us from happening. They didn't put an outright barrier, but they put a requirement. It couldn't be after three. It couldn't be advertised. And most ridiculously, they weren't to charge fees for us and the students there that were three times what they charged, the left-leaning group, to have a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

And so we won that case. They had to settle. So we're going to be watching. Right now, obviously, most left-winging groups are, you know, sitting in their basement still panicked. over something even a world filled with people are vaccinated. So it's more likely a burden on conservative voices. But we're going to make sure it's pushed uniformly. And if they don't, we're going to fight back just like we did at Berkeley.

I'm also curious, have you, do you think there's been, it's kind of hard to tell because of the COVID shutdown and everything and how that plays into this. But do you think the left-wing activists on campus have, are you noticing any kind of shift in tactics where they're, little bit less likely to, you know, have these huge protests and a huge reaction that used to have to conservative speakers and are maybe smartening up a little bit. And now they're realizing, well, that calls attention to it. So instead, we're going to try to distract people or shut down the voices another way. Well, smartening up and liberal activists are never worse I would use

together. But yeah, they're aggressive. I mean, they're not on campus with speakers in that regard right now. But clearly, you know, we've seen the hysteria that they generate towards, you know, a couple folks showing up an outdoor barbecue without a mask on, even when, you know, times have changed dramatically in the last few months. And yet, when they had these Black Life Matters, these other protests, universities, for that matter, municipalities and others kind of giving people a pass as though COVID only applies if you're right wing, but if you're out promoting some radical Marxist cause it doesn't. So I do think, though, they are still pushing,

and I would imagine there'll be future protest where the left will be hypocritical as well. One minute not wanting to be out and about without masks on, socially distance, hovering away from others, and the other moment out raising a fist and defiance to some other policy. So again, it's one of those where,

campus by campus, we're going to be monitoring that, pushing back and making sure they don't make us live up the standards then on applying to those on the left. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I wanted to, the main thing I wanted to talk to you about as a former governor yourself, it's been an interesting year for governors in general, Republican governors. Some of them with respect to the COVID lockdowns, I think have been quite impressive, obviously DeSantis in Florida, Nome and South Dakota and others pushing back against it. Other Republican governors not so willing to push back and have sort of gone along with the so-called experts and done whatever they were told.

And then that kind of gives way to this issue with gender. We've seen a push across the country on a state-wide level of trying to pass bills to kind of put a halt, if only temporarily, to the march of the left's gender madness in their states. And so there's been bills banning males from competing against females and female sports. And then in Arkansas, there was a bill that was supposed to stop children from having their genitals mutilated or being drugged, you know, because they're gender confused. But in both of those cases, we know Governor Nome in South Dakota and Governor Hutchinson in Arkansas rejected or vetoed those bills. And I'm, first of just broadly speaking, I'm interested to get your thoughts on that. Do you think there's, is there any defending this?

You know, they had their reasons. They thought it was government overstepping its bounds. And it was kind of a rejection of our limited government principles and so on. What's your take on that? No, I don't think so. I mean, I think the fundamentals, I tell kids on campus all the time beyond just this issue, the difference between the left and the right is the left wants the government to tell you what to do, when to do and how to do it in everything in every way. Our view, at least my view, as I articulate,

is as long as you don't hurt the health and safety of your neighbor, go out and do your own thing, live your own life, pursue your own dream in the larger context. But we're talking about minors. That's a whole different ballgame. There's the obvious reason why all throughout society we have protections for children, for those under the age of 18. And so it only makes sense. My kids are now 25 and 26. I got nieces who are 17 and 14. I think any of us who are parents know particularly in the teen years how our kids will change their mind 20 times a day, let alone, you know, over the period of a month or a year or, you know, early on in their lifetime. So I do think it makes sense that we're protecting particularly against these supposed woke, radical parents

who are allowing kids to go to great extremes to try and show how accepting they are, not understanding that when you're talking about physical changes, When you're talking about things involving medical procedures, medications, other things, those are things that are almost irreversible. And again, kids are going to change their minds on any number of things. Let's be careful what happens there. And on the larger context on what happened in South Dakota and what's being proposed and advocated for in other states, I think anyone who's ever watched high school and junior high and even earlier sports know

there's a reason why boys and girls don't compete against each other. It wouldn't be fair. There's other levels where young women are actually far ahead, their male counterparts when it comes to their development intellectually in the classroom, other areas that boys will take some time to catch up on. But physically, it makes no sense for boys and girls to be competing against each other. And no matter what you think about the larger issue of transgenderism, the bottom line is There's no way that someone who is physically born a young man should be competing against a girl. And I think governors of any party, but particularly Republican governors, should recognize that and stand up for that. Yeah, on the sports part of it, you know, one thing we're hearing from the left now is that, well, and they're trotting out their experts and they're pulling out various studies and saying, oh, it says here that actually testosterone doesn't give you any real advantage in sports.

And that, this is a perfect example of how the left, of their tactic, how they get their agenda through because, you know, they're making a claim that is number one false. Of course, obviously testosterone gives you an advantage, but also basically irrelevant because testosterone is only one and one of the less significant advantages that boys have. I mean, this goes all the way down to bone structure, muscle mass, every, you know, every part of us. is, if you're a man, every part of you is a man. And so there are dozens of biological advantages. And what they're trying to do is make it only about this one thing, testosterone. And then they start trying to confuse the matter by saying, oh, well, actually testosterone doesn't always give you an advantage. Now, on the, on the issue of our- Well, the logical pushback on, that, to me, it's a simple question back in return, saying, so are they advocating to end women's

sports because that's the logical conclusion to that sort of science, not unscientific argument that they're making is they're saying, well, then they're making the case for not having women and men's sports. I think most of us, regardless of political or ideological belief, would say, well, that's ridiculous. Well, then they've kind of made our point. Right, exactly. Well, how about why have a WMBA and an NBA, just get rid of the WMBA,

invite the women to come try out for the NBA teams, and if they can make it, then, you know, we can all. be together and be one big happy family. Specifically in Arkansas. So there's the sports part of it, which is important. But I think you'd probably agree. I know I certainly feel that the drugging and mutilation of children even more important than the sports.

So I'm curious, I know you can't read anybody's mind, but it's so clear and so obvious. Like, of course you're going to pass a bill protecting kids from this. And yet you have a Republican governor in the south who says that's a bridge too far and is now coming out effectively in favor of mutilating and drugging kids. Do you have any theory on why he or any other Republican would come to that conclusion? No, I know, he's a good man overall. I worked with him.

Other things when I was a governor. And I like Governor Nome as well, who's obviously a different issue just on the sports side of it, things. But I think this is a classic example. In fact, our mutual friend, Michael Knowles and I were just talking about this in preparation. I read in advance his new book, and one of the problems he outlines is it's not just that conservatives aren't fighting, is that we cede the ground. We cede ground. We don't just not engage in the fight. We cede ground with language and theory.

And I think this is a prime example where people like Governor Aza Hutchinson and others ceding ground, not wanting to be discriminatory or whatever phrase they might use. No, that's not the case at all. Again, if someone is an adult, I may not necessarily like it or agree with it, but someone wants to be transgender. There's nothing that people are advocating that as an adult that they can't do that. Obviously, debates about where and how are certainly valid. But this idea that with children, I go back to the point I was making before, that any of us

who are parents particularly if we've had kids go through their teenage years, know how frequently they change their minds on issues here. And I think having a certain level of protection for the same reasons why there's all sorts of other protections written as state laws all across the country to protect the interests of minors. It's why even at its core is a debate we have about protecting the unborn because an unborn baby is a human being who cannot survive on its own without protection. And so that's why in society we protect what the unborn or it's at any age of, particularly up until 18, and then obviously there's protections even for adults from violence and threats from others. But we particularly look at minors in a unique way, and I think it's only makes sense that the lawmakers in Arkansas sought to do that as well.

Yeah, you talk about kids not being able to make choices. What I always say is if you don't understand this concept of kids not being able to, you know, we shouldn't entrust kids with these kind of choices. Like, try taking a six-year-old to Baskin-Robbins and telling him that he can get any flavor ice cream he wants and see how long it takes him to, because he's going to give you 14 different answers and then collapse on the ground in tears because he can't finally decide. That's kids. They're indecisive. And we don't have, you know, your prefrontal cortex, which controls discernment, long-term planning and all that. That isn't fully online until 25. So, you know, what hope does a six- or seven-year-old have?

I'm wondering one thing that was mentioned by these, not just the Republican governors, but oftentimes conservatives when they're taking the other side of this issue and saying, well, we don't want laws banning men from women's sports or we don't, we want laws dealing with transgender, quote unquote, medical care. They cite limited government and they say, you know, our fundamental principles is conservatives, is limited government. and so that means the government shouldn't get involved. This may be, this may seem like a heterodox opinion among a lot of conservatives, but I'm increasingly starting to think that maybe we need a better slogan than limited government. Not because I favor big out of control government,

but limited government is such an ambiguous and vague sort of term. And I'm not really sure that the problem is that government is too big necessarily. I think it's that oftentimes government is doing the wrong thing, and it's directing its power in the wrong direction. What do you think? Am I off on the wrong path here, or what do you think? No, I think you're right. I've said for some time, you know, the people absolutely love everything by the government

and their people hate the government. My view is somewhere in between in the sense I think government by and large has gotten too big, too expansive, too much part of our life, too much is pushed up to the federal government, whereas the founders intended it to be closer to the states and to the people. But that doesn't mean there isn't a role to play in government. I hate government that's too big and ineffective and inefficient. What it should do is focused on the things that it should be responsible for doing and then do it well, which government historically has not done.

And again, protecting the difference between what's right and what's wrong, I mean, this is a very clear case. We know what's right and we know what is wrong. It's worth protecting. And again, when you're talking about a minor, I don't think it's an overreach. If not, I mean, to me, again, I go back to one of the great things to do in debate, like this is ask people questions, just as we ask, should women's sports be gone and the question of the athletic issue? Similarly, here, the question should be, well, if you think, you know, this is too much government.

So they advocate. We get rid of all laws and rules regarding children that just let them decide if they want to go to school or not. Let them decide, you know, what else they want to do with their life? No, there's certain protections that are put in place here. and if the people around these kids aren't smart enough to say, you know, you shouldn't be making these sorts of decisions until you're an adult and then you can decide on your own, then I think it's only right that the government play a role in that regard. For the same reason, we have all sorts of other protections. And these are, and as you point out, kids are not able to advocate for themselves. So someone has to step up or protect them. There's a great video that went viral last week of a mother at, I think it was a Georgia school board meeting. and she was speaking out against the mask mandates

and little kids at school six or seven hours a day have to wear masks no matter how young they are even though they're obviously we know a very low risk group and she said you know I have to be here advocating for my child because he can't do it himself and so that that's that is a role where government should step in if you've got a kid whose parents are bringing him in to be mutilated or drugged

well he who's who's gonna step the government doesn't step in on his behalf, then who will? That's the question. Exactly right. And we have a, I mean, just remember, this is part of a bigger agenda by the left out there. We have a tip line at our website, yaf.org, yaf.org slash tips. People can see our campus tip line. Most of our tips, as you can imagine, are things about wild left-wing professors and sadly increasingly stories of segregation on campus, not what we thought of in the 60s and the 50s before that, but these weird sorts of segregated things on training or graduation or other issues. But one of the tips came from Iowa State, not from the coast, but from the middle of the

country where they gave us a tip not about their campus in college, but the local school district at Ames, Iowa, who partnered with BLM for a week of action during February for Black History Month, had literally nothing to do with Black History. And instead, was this radical indoctrination curriculum that started from preschool to 12th grade, where preschoolers and kindergartners were actually giving coloring pages with transgender figures and told that they could decide whether they wanted to pick to be a boy or girl or somewhere in between. This is just wrong. This is just fundamentally wrong, not only in the premise itself, but the idea that they're introducing this at that young of an age, but that should be an eye opener to everyone listening

and watching that this is how far the left is seeking to go. We have to expose that, push back on that because if they can be doing it in Ames, Iowa, they can be pushing this. anywhere in America. Right. That's the thing. I think still a lot of conservatives like to think that this is regulated to the crazy coastlines, but no, this stuff is everywhere, both gender and race. It's the left agenda in both of those areas.

It's everywhere. Now, I did want to ask you about a new YAF campaign called The Long Game, and this sounds exactly in line with what I'm always preaching about, so I'm happy to hear about it. But could you explain what it is exactly and what the purpose is? Yeah, it fits in actually very well what we were just talking about, seeing just how far the left is gone. This didn't happen overnight.

We're under siege in America in our schools and our college campuses, heck in our culture, even in our communications with the censorship we increasingly see from big tech. All these things didn't happen yesterday. They've been at this for decades. You go back to Saul Lynchke's work in writings back in the 1960s. They have systematically. tried to take over our colleges and universities. They've seeped into our schools. We see this all throughout the curriculum. And so my argument is not that we see the battles of today, we've got

to be involved in every one of those for sure, but that we have to have a long game approach to retake major parts of our culture, our schools, our colleges, our universities, our communications. And so we spell out, in fact, if people want a free copy, we'll send it to you, Yaf.org slash long game. It's a 12-point action plan. Not only expand our scope and our reach and our college campuses, to get to every campus and every student across America to step up our free speech efforts for what we were just talking about in terms of college administrators and student government officials

trying to block conservative thought through cancel culture on campus, but also to go younger ages, to not only go into high school, now to aggressively go into junior high and where necessary, like that example I gave in Ames, Iowa, to go out and support the parents of even elementary school students to give them a counter not just to that radical transgender coloring pages we just talked about, but increasingly this whole 1619 project and all these programs and curriculum that are teaching our children to hate America. We need to counter that. The good news is our data, our research shows that as liberal or progressive as students are today, particularly in high school and college, if we just give them access to basic facts,

to basic information that's counter to what they've been hearing, they dramatically shift our direction. And so that's why the left's pushing cancel culture. That's why we've got to have a long game to push back. So I know you describe all this on the website, but when we talk about the education system specifically, and especially in the younger ages, K through 12, I tend to take a more doomsaying approach on this and really all issues, but especially in the education system, I tend to think there is, I don't know if there's any way to take it back. It's just so fundamentally, you know, the left-wing agenda is so fundamentally ingrained in the public school system. I don't know if there's a way to do it. Do you think there is a way

to actually, even from a long term, obviously it's not something we can do overnight, but do you think there's actually a way to take that education system back? Well, I do, and I think it's in stages. I'm obviously an optimist, but I'm realist as well, so I'm not naive to what we're facing. It's a huge block out there. More than just the entrenched indoctrination we see in colleges and now increasingly in our government-run schools for sure. But the bigger concern I have immediately is literally this cancel culture.

It's not just liberal bias. It's not just political correctness. It's wiping out not only amongst professors and educators, but even amongst fellow students, the ability to even speak out and have a counter opinion to this radical woke agenda that's out there. So first and foremost, it's why a big part of our long game plan is to aggressively step up our efforts, work with partners like Alliance Defending Freedom, to push and advocate for free service. speech to win cases like we did at UC Berkeley and elsewhere, but to even go not just on college campuses, but into our schools so that conservative voices, whether it's speakers, students,

parents, and others don't get shut down. That's the first step, because, again, the data we've shown, we just released a poll about a week ago that showed in a number of key issues, that when we introduce facts, when people start to hear, when young people, students particularly start to hear the facts, there's a dramatic shift out there. So that's the first step. The other part of it is, again, getting to every campus in high school, it's being able to organize and get information out. It's even simple things like stepping up our YouTube efforts, because our data overwhelmingly

shows the number one way young people get their information isn't the way the media, in any cases, think with Twitter. I mean, there's some of that, but it's overwhelmingly YouTube. And so whether it's you, it's Shapiro, it's Knowles, it's. Alicia Krauss, it's Rachel Campbell's Duffy or Katie Pablitch, or whoever we have speaking on campus, is getting that content up on our YouTube page, promoting that, growing from about a half a million

subscribers we have now at over 5 million is our goal with 1 billion views of our content. We know there's ways of getting around the indoctrination that people are getting in their schools. And then another interesting point that we include is not only a student focused, but providing a network for educators, for teachers and professors, not only conservative ones, but there's a really significant number

of educators who just want to teach the facts, but they're so overwhelmed by their colleagues. They're so overwhelmed by the bias they see in their curriculum guidelines and their textbooks that we need to provide assistance to correct that as well. So it'll happen, but not overnight. Yeah, well, I think this is the right approach. I'm happy that you're focusing on the long haul. I think oftentimes as conservatives were long. looking for, you know, the quick win. We're looking for that, at most, a one, two, three-step plan,

do that, that, that, that, and everything's better. And it's just not going to work that way. But this is a fight. We have to be willing to fight over the course of, you know, generations, really. So I appreciate your efforts. And thanks for joining us today, Governor Walker. My pleasure. Good to be with you. Thanks. Thank you.