The Matt Walsh Show - Matt Walsh vs Annoying Social Behaviors

Episode Date: September 10, 2022

Matt tackles two of the biggest social annoyances of our time: pay it forward lines and bicyclists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For our daily cancellation, we are canceling the dreaded, the stupid, the pointless, pay-it-forward drive-thru chains. Now, if you aren't familiar with this thoroughly first-world phenomenon, here's a story about the latest one to pop up from CNN. A bunch of stories about this yesterday, but CNN says, what started as a random act of kindness from one man paying for the car behind him in a Dairy Queen drive-thru resulted in over 900 cars also taking part in the pay-it-forward chain. At a drive-thru in Brainer in Minnesota, over 100 miles north of Minneapolis,

people stepped up in a small way to show one another that they care. Tina Jensen, the store manager at one of the two Derry, Queens and town, told CNN, a man came by the drive-thru window on Thursday and asked if he could pay for his meal and for the car behind him. Jensen told her cashier, this tends to happen once in a while, but at most it lasts for 15 or 20 cars and fizzles out. This time, the chain continued for two and a half days with over 900 cars participating raking in $10,000 in sales. When the next customer came to the fast food chain's window,

Jensen explained what the man in front of them had done, and the act of kindness continued to multiply. Jensen said there's all different types of ways to help people. I think this touched a lot of people that we didn't even know it touched deeper than we know, and you don't know what's going on in a person's life. When the chain closed for the night on Thursday, one car left $10 to begin the chain back up on Friday morning, and then the same thing happened on Friday night, and it began on Saturday morning.

Okay. So that's how it works. Somebody pays for the meal of the person behind them in line, then that person pays for the person behind them, and on and on it goes. But do you know who the real hero in this story is? Not the first person to pay for the next person. No, the real hero is whoever broke the chain and simply accepted the charity from the person in front and drove away, leaving the person behind them to pay for their own damned Fudge Sunday. All of the people in between the first guy who may have been well-intentioned but should have thought more about the

consequences of his actions, and the last guy who had the courage to end the whole charade, everybody else, these were just sheep. They weren't performing acts of kindness. This wasn't charity. They did it because they were too embarrassed and felt too much social pressure, not to do it. If it's charity at all, it's coerced charity, and not for a meaningful cause either. The people in the drive-thru line have disposable income that they were already planning to spend on the same kind of junk that you're buying. They don't need your money. really this kind of charity, if it is charity at all, again, is similar to the sort of charity that you perform when you're checking out of the grocery store and the cashier asks if you want to round up

and donate your change to, you know, orphaned sea otters or whatever. The only reason you say yes is because you'd feel like a cheap ass refusing to give your 27 cents to the sea otters. It's not something that comes from the kindness of your heart. If you wanted to help the sea otters on your own time, you would. right now all you want to do is pay for your carton of eggs and your packets of paper towels and leave the grocery store is taking advantage of your sense of shame to bilk another few cents out of you another few cents of which they will surely take a cut by the way but while the grocery store charity gambit is a calculated ploy to take advantage of people who don't have the spine to say no

the pay it forward chain is more of a case of collective insanity everyone is doing it but nobody knows why. If you want to understand how crazy it is, imagine how it would come across if you took, you know, take the fast food and the cars out of the equation. Okay. Now imagine you're standing in a long line of people waiting for something and the guy in front turns to you, gives you $5 out of his wallet, and then suggests that you turn around and give the person behind you some money out of your wallet and on and on and on. Now you're all just passing money backwards for absolutely no reason. Nobody wants to be doing it or knows why they're doing it, but it continues until some free thinker accepts the cash from the person in front and says,

hey, thanks for the money, puts it in their pocket and gives nothing to the person behind. That person, again, is the admirable character in this strange saga. Now, if I sound like I'm speaking from a place of personal trauma when I talk about this, that's because I am. I used to live near a Starbucks where this would happen frequently. I was duped by it. I'm ashamed to admit one time and one time only. I pulled up to the window to pay for my one single coffee for $2.65. And the girl at the window told me that the bill had been paid by the guy in front.

Then she informed me that they were doing this pay it forward thing where each person pays for the one behind. And she asked me if I wanted to participate and told me that, you know, they kept the chain going for 50 cars so far, however many it was. So I said, yeah, okay. sure? And then she said, okay, that'll be 4350. I had just traded in my $2 coffee for a whole SUV load of lattes and frappuccinos and God only knows what else. It was the worst deal in history, as Trump might have said if you had saw it. So I drove away, broken, confused, my coffee now tinged with a taste of betrayal. And I resolve then to never allow myself to be shamed and to to empty gestures of pointless charity.

And from then on, whenever someone in front paid for my drink, I said, oh, great, I accepted the free coffee, drove away with no remorse. In fact, proud that I had saved others from this farce. And even, you know, when the cashier asks me now about the sea otters, I say, no, thank you. I don't want to help them. In fact, the sea otters can go to hell. And I walk away feeling fine, though wondering if I was a little harser towards the sea otters than necessary.

Anyway, this is why the pay-it-forward drive-through lines are canceled, forever and always. By the way, I must also acknowledge my own debt for the cancellation today. This was inspired by Amanda Presta-Jocamo, a writer for the Daily Wire, who spoke out against this yesterday, the pay-it-forward lines on Twitter, got me thinking about this. So she is the opposite of canceled. But everybody else in that 900-person chain in Minnesota is, unfortunately, canceled. Have you noticed that big tech companies today are masquerading as privacy companies? Big Tech literally feeds on your information like parasites.

Sure, maybe they'll release a feature now and then that does some good. But collecting and selling off your data is Big Tech's. That's their MO. It's in their nature. They can't stop themselves from looking at what you do online to protect myself then against Big Tech's prying eyes. I use ExpressVPN. When you use ExpressVPN on your computer or phone, you're hiding your unique IP address. websites can't use that address to find out your real location or track what you do online.

ExpressVPN encrypts and rerouts 100% of your online activities, so your internet provider, Wi-Fi administrator, and hackers can't see it at all. And ExpressVPN is incredibly easy to use. It takes just one click to protect all of your devices. One ExpressVPN subscription covers up up to five devices at the same time so you can protect your entire family at the same time. That's why ExpressVPN is rated number one by CNET, Wired, Tech Radar, and countless other. get the VPN that I trust to protect my online privacy from big bad tech.

Visit expressvpn.com slash walsh, and you can get an extra three months free on a one-year package. That's EXP, R-E-SS-V-S-V-N.com slash Walsh, ExpressVPN.com slash Walsh to learn more. So today we're going to cancel this man, Ryan Dorsey, and all his kind, all his ilk. He's a Baltimore City Council Mayor, a member, I should say. And I don't mean that kind. That's not the kind I'm referring to. though sure we can cancel the Baltimore City Council I guess why not they really haven't been doing much good recently

and by recently I mean for the past I don't know five decades or so but that's not the point today the point is this tweet from Dorsey and there's a picture there of a FedEx truck and a bike lane in the city and it says quote hey FedEx I told your driver here to get out of the bike lane he was obstructing which I happen to be biking in his response was get a car now needless to say this FedEx driver is Awesome. Ryan Dorsey, on the other hand, is the lamest dork this side of Justin Trudeau. Not only is he riding a bike and bitching at a delivery guy, but after the delivery guy verbally backhands him, he posts his own humiliation on social media thinking he'll get sympathy from the public rather than the relentless mockery and scorn he deserves.

Quick tip here, even for people who aren't lame dorks, when the internet has to choose between sympathy or scorn, it will always choose scorn. Always. So keep that in mind, or learn it the hard way, as Ryan Dorsey has. But this behavior is what I would expect from Dorsey, given that he is a cyclist. Cyclists, and I mean those who ride bikes on the street, and you know, streets, those things where cars go, those kinds of cyclists are a cursed breed. They are among the worst people on earth, the absolute dregs of humanity. No offense intended. Every time I'm driving down a busy street and traffic is backed up for miles because everyone has to navigate around some weirdo on a bike, I am perplexed anew.

How is this even legal? I think to myself, why are we allowing people to ride their bikes on roads where cars are supposed to go. Now, I get that you want to exercise. That's fine. But why are you exercising in the damned street during rush hour? I like to exercise too. I'm not going to set up a bench press on the freeway. I'm not going to take an ab roller down to the nearest intersection. Hey, give me in there. I got three more sets. All right? Hold on. Why won't I do that? Because I'm not a lunatic. And I care about other people. Sort of. At least I'm not going to go. I'm not going to go out of my way to make their commute longer and more stressful than it already is. I'm not going to do that. Cyclists do that. Now, what gets me about the bike riders is their sense of entitlement.

It's not just that they have the audacity to play with their toy in the street. It's that they get angry at you for being there. They act like you are inconveniencing them. They act like you just jumped on the same elliptical that they were using at the gym. But the street is not your elliptical. It's a street. If you want an elliptical, go use an elliptical. Go use an And if you want to play with your bike, go to a park or a bike trail in the woods. Or maybe Daddy can take you down to the tennis courts near the playground so you can ride your big wheel around, maybe that. Or better yet, ditch the bike and be an adult.

Find a hobby that isn't as likely to make you a victim of vehicular manslaughter. Just a thought. Now, I know I'll be told that some people use bikes as transportation, not as toys or exercise equipment. Fine. but the street is for a certain type of transportation, vehicle transportation. If you can use your bike as transportation on the street, then why can't I use a pogo stick? Why can't I pogo down to work? Maybe the city can build me a pogo lane, just for me.

You know, why can't I take this office chair right here? It's got wheels. I just roll it down the highway. Why can't I go out to 10th Avenue and do cartwheels for five blocks? It's just transportation. Hey, this is how I get to work, all right? I cartwheel to work. We all have our methods.

Why not? Because, again, that would be insane. And the road isn't made for it. The road, in fact, is made so that 5,000 pounds, hunk of metal can fly down them at high speeds. That's what it's there for. It's not made so that middle-aged vegetarians and spandex shorts can burn off some calories on the way to work. Commuting is not a time for burning calories anyway. That's the other annoying thing.

The rest of us are jamming donuts into our fat faces while we sit in traffic and stew in our own body fat and misery. And you're riding by all brisk and healthy and happy. It's irritating. Especially around Thanksgiving. And it's grotesque. And it's dangerous. And it's an inconvenience to me. So, cyclists are canceled.

Take an Uber next time.