The Matt Walsh Show - Matt Walsh's Rules of the Road

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Matt Walsh details his rules for how you should drive on the road. See all of our exciting content on DailyWire+ here: https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe-plus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bad boys, bad boys, what you're going to do? What you're going to do with me? Matt, you always talk about how shopping cart ditchers are psychopathic monsters, but what other small infractions indicate that someone is literally a Nazi? I have one, bumper riders. People who ride your bumper in traffic should be excommunicated from Earth. I could not disagree more with you, Candace, I'm afraid. In fact, you are the one who should be excommunicated and banned from the show, obviously. Because if you're, I don't have this problem of people riding my bumper. Do you know why? because I keep up with the speed of traffic. And I'm not going to be in the fast lane going, you know, 60 miles an hour.

I realize that if you're in the fast lane on the highway, you need to be going at least 25 miles over the limit, at least to justify being in the fast lane. So I don't have this issue. If you have this issue, it means that you are driving too slow. I'm an unapologetic bumper rider because it's just my way of communicating to you that you need to speed up or move over. how else am I going to communicate it? So yes, there are other seemingly small infractions that indicate that someone is literally a Nazi and driving too slow is one of those things. Unfortunately, Candace, you are a Nazi and ban from the show.

This is important that I talk to you about this. You guys know how I feel about cyclists. I am not a fan of cyclists at all. And here is, we have the tweet from, someone put out, okay here it is. Jeremy Vine, I don't know who that is exactly, but he's got a big following, so he's a well-known guy. He put out a tweet a couple of days ago with a video of cyclists on a backcountry road, and they're not lined up one-by-one and single-file line. There's four or five of them across, taking up the entire lane. And Jeremy Vine says, people who cycle in the country should be encouraged to ride two, three, and four of breast like this for the following reasons. One, it calms the traffic behind them and makes it less easy for bad drivers to attempt dangerous passes. Three, it's more pleasant and sociable for them. All right. Let me tell you, if you're a cyclist, as a motorist myself, let me give you the

scoop. It absolutely does not calm the traffic behind you when you're holding us all up. We are not calm behind you. You might be calm and having a nice time. We are not. We're very angry. And it doesn't make passing you easier or less dangerous when we can't see as well what's in front of you. And as far as it being more pleasant and sociable, it might be. But let me tell you something else.

We don't give a damn if your ride is pleasant and sociable. As I tweeted back to this guy, I said, nobody gives a damn if your ride is pleasant and sociable. You roadway parasite. get out of the way. I think I have a really gentle way of going about these things, don't I? You are, you're like a barnacle. You're something worse than that.

You're a parasitic infestation of the roadway. Oh, it's a pleasant and sociable ride. That's not what the road is for. It is there for cars to get from point A to point B. That's why it's there. You want pleasant and sociable? Go on a bike path in the woods. Okay?

Or go to the gym and get on a stationary bicycle and sit next to someone. You can have all the conversation be as pleasant and sociable as you want. There are places for that. The road is not a recreational place. There are places for recreation. The road is not one of them. It's like I said before. I see no difference between this and me like taking,

a game of taking a board game and just putting it in the middle of the road and sitting around with some people and playing a board game. It's pleasant, it's sociable. It's how I like to enjoy myself. It's a recreational activity. There's a time and place where the road is not that. It wasn't made for you. I got news for you. The road was made these paved roads, okay, that cars go on. They were made specifically for cars. That's why. They were made specifically for cars. why they're there. There are places made for you. It's not the road. And someone, I also wanted to show you this. Someone else, someone responded to me on Twitter, and I was just trying to make sense of this. This is someone who's a cyclist, and they were very upset at what I said calling, you know,

all I did was call cyclists roadway parasites. I don't see the big deal. But he said, eat crap and die, apiarist scum. I got to say, that is the first time I've ever heard that phrase. Apiarist. A. B. A. B. A. A. B. A. A. A. A. A. A. A. Keeperis is a beekeeper in spirit right now. Because when we moved, I had to give away all the bees, unfortunately. But in my heart, I'm still a beekeeper. Once a beekeeper, always a beekeeper. This is a level of hostility towards beekeepers that I have never seen before. Apierist scum. Was this guy like some supervillain from Captain Planet? He's got some sort of plot to destroy all the bees in the world for no reason. Very strange.

Lots of anger on Twitter. And again, I don't know what I did to provoke it. All I said was all I did was call people parasites. That's it. I'm going to be very petty. Granted, this segment is almost always petty. I really could call the segment five minutes of pettiness, and that would probably capture the spirit of what I'm doing here.

But in any case, I'm feeling especially petty today after driving into work this morning. And the problem with driving to work every morning is that I live in Nashville. And though the people of Nashville are wonderful in many ways, They are not wonderful on the road. This town is populated by all of the world's worst drivers. I don't know if bad drivers come here so that they can be with their own kind. Maybe Nashville has become something of a mecca for incompetent motorists. They come here on pilgrimages. Many die along the way. Or maybe after coming here, good drivers become bad. Is there something in the water? Is there something in the Tennessee whiskey? I mean, I suppose there probably definitely is something in the whiskey that would make you a bad driver.

maybe I've just solved the riddle. I don't know. This is a question for psychiatrists and anthropologists to study. All I know is that as I drive it to Nashville, I get a literal front row seat to witness every bad driving habit, every single morning, ramped up by a factor of 10. So just to give you an example of the kind of thing you might encounter as you travel the highways and byways of our lovely town. I have on multiple occasions witness people screech to a halt on the highway. I mean a dead stop from 70 to zero so they don't miss their exit. I saw a guy once blow past his exit, screeched to a stop, drive onto the shoulder, and reverse on the shoulder back to his exit. I witnessed this because I was the guy right behind him. The guy who, if not for my own incredible skill, I'm the only skill driver in the entire state, by the way, if not for that, I would have rammed right into him, killing him and far more tragically,

myself. But he didn't believe that I existed. Now, for him, the other drivers are mere phantoms, they're aberrations. We exist only in the theoretical. He is the only corporeal life form on the road, which is why he can do whatever he wants and be as reckless as he wants without fear of colliding with another solid object. That's how he views it anyway, unless until he learns otherwise and learns it the hard way. And lots of people in Nashville learn that lesson the hard way every day. I drive about 10 miles to work, and in that 10 miles every day, I pass three or four accidents. Every day. And that's if the weather is good. If it's bad or even just mildly unpleasant, the highways look like the walking dead cars and bodies littered all over the place a truck flipped upside down

someone's jeep is stuck up in a tree somehow a guy in a motorcycle is like dangling over the overpass it would appear that as soon as the first raindrop hits the windshield people panic and just drive directly into the nearest object and this is all very distressing for me because then i am in the unfortunate psychological position of feeling annoyed at all of these people even though half of them may well be dead i don't want to be annoyed at your pain and suffering. I don't like that, but you're making me late for work, and you should have learned to drive before you got on the road. Yes, you know, yet this is, this is all really, I think, a preamble to my main point. I could continue complaining about Nashville drivers for another 35 minutes, but I'm not sure how relevant that kind of content would be to

the average non-Nashville citizen. My main point is this. I could run all of the worst driving habits on my local roads, but none of it is unique to Nashville. The volume and frequency is unique, but bad drivers are everywhere all over this nation of ours. And I have, you know, I have to navigate around them everywhere I go. And the number one habit of bad drivers everywhere, at least on the highway, is that they don't know how to merge. I was almost killed yet again this morning by a bad merger, which is why it's top of my mind. And I'll tell you what happened.

I was driving along on the highway, preparing to get off on my exit. See, I had already positioned myself in the rightmost lane because my exit was a mile ahead, and I wanted to be ready to take it when the time came. I didn't stay in the left lane until my exit was 25 feet away and then attempt to cut across four lanes of traffic. I didn't do that. You see, I was already in the right lane before the exit comes. But as I was driving in that right lane, anticipating my exit, somebody in the merge lane entering the highway from the entrance ramp just before my exit, suddenly jerked onto the highway into my lane going about 15 miles an hour. I had to once again slam on my brakes, saving my life and undeservedly his.

I then hit my horn in retribution and shouted, you know, you dumbass learned the driver or whatever, but he couldn't hear me. No doubt, he went on his merry way oblivious to the fact that he just had a near-death experience. For this guy, this probably happens every day. His life is saved every day, and he doesn't even know it. Now, this idiot made the same mistake that the majority of drivers, who are also idiots, seem to make. Somehow, you know, we require that new drivers go through a driving test, but merging doesn't make it into the exam. and the result is that the highway is filled with suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots who plunge into traffic taking their lives into their hands every time they do it. Merging is an art almost entirely lost in our world today.

So let me give you the tutorial. When you're entering the highway, you will notice that the other cars on the highway, they're all going fast. And this, it would seem, frightens the average driver. and so they come to a dead stop in the middle of the merge lane waiting for a hole in the traffic, not realizing that the hole in traffic, this is physics, moves with the traffic. And they then insert themselves into that gap

at a speed about 90% slower than the rest of the cars on the road. Then comes the accident and people die, and worst of all, I am inconvenienced. Here's the way it's supposed to work. When merging into traffic, you increase your speed. Go faster. Get up to the speed of the traffic on the road. You have a whole lane, remember, usually a merge lane will extend for dozens of feet or more.

So make use of that lane that's been given to you for that purpose. Speed up, pick your spot, seamlessly merge into that spot while going the same speed as the cars in front and behind you. If you do it correctly, nobody should have to hit their brakes at all to accommodate you. If you're waiting for someone to let you in thinking that, you know, they'll slam on their brakes, bringing traffic to a standstill and roll out the red carpet for you, you're not approaching the situation the right way. It is your job to assimilate yourself into traffic, to become one with the flow of traffic, to take your place on that great dance floor that is the highway without anyone else having to break their rhythm. That is your solemn and sacred responsibility.

It's why there's a yield sign in the merge lane, not a stop sign. Learn the difference. You suicidal maniac. Now, if all of this is too complicated for you, and it is for some people, or if you find highways too intimidating, then stay home. Save us all the trouble. Save our lives and your own. Otherwise, I have no choice but to say, you're canceled. And we'll leave it there for today.