The Matt Walsh Show - Is This Story Real or Fake?

Episode Date: April 13, 2024

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Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com slash Spotify. Terms apply. Today we cancel Amanda Marcotte, feminist writer for Salon, and I'll admit canceling Amanda Marcotte is perhaps a little cheap. It's like canceling stubbed toes or indigestion or head lice. A little too obvious. In any case, Marquette has earned her spot. in this segment today by publishing an article for Salon that is so crushingly stupid, so fantastically

ridiculous and dishonest that it's somehow against all odds, manages to lower the bar for feminist writers and Salon, a bar that was already sitting approximately 10,000 feet below sea level. Here's the headline. Men punching random women in NYC, a desperate last gasp of the male rage fueling MAGA. You are fake news. This is another one of those headlines that I saw circulating on social media and I had to stop to verify that it was real. At first, I honestly thought that it It's the kind of thing that a right-wing meme account might create as a joke. And if they had, it wouldn't have even been very funny. But this is not a meme. It's an actual article, written and published without a hint of irony. Quote, men are punching random women on the

streets of New York City. As usual, with these kinds of diffuse and chaotic stories, there's much that is unknown, including how often this is happening, how many people are involved, or whether it's at all coordinated. Women report being assaulted by men of different races and ages. Well, actually, no, there's not a lot of racial diversity in the men who are committing these assaults. We'll return to that in a moment. Still across the different stories, a couple of similarities pop out. The alleged victims are mostly young and pretty, and most of them say they were minding their own business when they were attacked. Some were on their phones or reading on tablets. Others were speaking to friends or daydreaming. Whatever they were doing, they were just living

their lives, and that, it seems, is what enraged their assailants. While it rarely turns to violence, most women who spend much time walking around in public have experience with men who berate them for paying attention to something other than the man who is now, often out of nowhere, spewing invectives. in our modern era that often manifests with men who are infuriated at women for looking at their phones. But I'm old enough to remember when I would get yelled at for reading books in public. A quick aside here, that didn't happen. Nobody yelled at her for reading a book in public. Much of what she said in that paragraph is exaggerated or entirely invented.

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You can download the app for free at hallow.com slash walsh, set prayer reminders and track your progress along the way Hallow is truly transformative and will help you connect with your faith on a deeper level. So what are you waiting for? Download the Hallow app today at hallow.com slash Walsh for an exclusive three-month trial. Let's get to the crux of the issue from Amanda's hallucinatory perspective. Quote, whatever the excuse the angry man concox, the impetus is always the same. The eyes of a woman are directed at someone or something that is not him and he is indignant over it. These stories resonate as well because they, The nation is having a moment of increasingly unhinged male fury at women for daring to have lives that are centered around something other than catering to a man's every whim. Unleashed by Donald Trump in the MAGA movement, there's an upswell of loud male entitlement shouting at us from every corner. We see it in the male fans of Jordan Peterson who clamored to his events to hear him croak out a just-so story about how lobsters justify their faith in male dominance. Or the rise of trad wives online who make a living pretending they're unemployed and housebound.

Or Ben Shapiro setting fire to a Barbie doll because he can't stand. that a blockbuster comedy starring a woman is about anything but her quest for male affection. The rise of Maga is fueled by misogyny, but it's less a backlash than a tantrum, a rage explosion by men who want to restore their dominance but fear that this time women won't buckle to their bullying. This rash of men punching women in New York City captures this moment in a dark way. Oh, that's just lazy writing. Now before we get to the content of this screed such as it is, the first thing we notice is just how tired and lame and dull the writing is. Amanda Marcotte has been writing essentially the same article over and over again for 20 years. Now, of course,

20 years ago, she wasn't talking about Donald Trump or MAGA, but the basic themes and concepts are the same. And there really is only one theme and one concept, which is that men are misogynists and various bad things are happening because of our misogyny. And this is my biggest problem with people like Amanda Marcotte. It's not that everything they say is wrong, and that's a given, is that they can't even manage to be vaguely interesting while being wrong. I'm so bored. And as for the claim that she's making, obviously, violent crime in New York City has nothing to do with Trump or MAGA. The men assaulting random, you know, committing random assaults in Manhattan. These are not Trump voters. These are not Jordan Peterson Acolytes.

They're not listening to Ben Shapiro's podcast. They've never heard the term trad wife, most likely. And these are almost exclusively black men. Oh, hell no. Oh, hell no. Oh, hell no. And Democrat voters, if they vote at all, which they probably don't. They are repeat violent offenders, career criminals who are on the street, able to attack and victimize random women because of policies that Amanda Marcotte supports. In fact, not only is this not a MAGA phenomenon, but if you go somewhere that is really MAGA country, a predominantly conservative place where you're likely to see American flags and red hats and all the rest of it, in those places women aren't getting brutalized as they walk down the street. These attacks on women are supposedly the result of right-wing

male rage, and yet they're only happening in blue cities. Go to pretty much any neighborhood with a majority of Trump voters, and any woman will be perfectly safe walking down the street at any time of day or night. Amanda hates white Republican males more than anything. She blames us for all the violence against women. And yet, you never hear about a rash of violent attacks on women in white Republican areas. So she's obviously wrong about who is responsible for this violence. She's also wrong about the why. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why would they do this? These attackers aren't going after these women because they feel entitled to their time, or they're mad at the women for looking at their phones,

or because they're filled with some kind of patriarchal sense of entitlement. They do it because they can. And they'll keep doing it for as long as they can until we make it so that they can't. And we don't do that by printing, you know, scolding lectures in salon. Now, what you do is you do that by locking them in prison forever. But Amanda Marcotte doesn't want that. She's an advocate for criminal justice reform, quote unquote, which means putting these violent predators back on the street and keeping them there.

You've got to be fucking kidding. She doesn't care if the violent attacks continue. At least it gives her something to write about, even if she's writing the same article over and over and over again, and somehow still missing the point every single time. And that is why she is today, I must say, cancel.