Ep. 1543 - Incompetent Federal Employees PANIC When Asked What They Do All Day

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Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Today on Matt Walsh show, federal workers are in a state of panic after being subjected to the smallest amount of accountability and transparency.
I already had a pretty low opinion of many federal workers. Now I'm realizing that my opinion was, I guess, still too high.
Also, Joy Reid weeps on camera over her firing. Democrats in Maryland want to

put condoms in elementary school vending machines. And one of the worst movies I've seen in a long

time is in line to win a bunch of Oscars in a couple of weeks. We'll talk about all that

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There's an old line from one of Ronald Reagan's press conferences that you've probably heard before. He's talking about trade embargoes and inflation and how farmers in Illinois are being impacted by government policy.
And he begins with one of his trademark quotes by saying, the nine most terrifying words in English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. And the line obviously resonated and it's quite, quite well known and famous now.
And not just with the farmers who were watching that press conference in Chicago, anyone who's ever interacted with the government understood immediately what Reagan was getting at. Most of the time, when the government gets more involved in your life for whatever reason, it's a good indicator that things are about to get worse.
And normal people are frightened of that possibility for good reason. At the same time, Reagan's one-liner raised a question that until now has gone unanswered.
And that question is this, if everyday people are mortally terrified of government intervention in their lives, then what exactly do government bureaucrats fear above all else? What short, unassuming sentence could possibly terrorize the entire federal workforce in the same way that the government is capable of terrorizing everyday people and people in the private sector? Well, a couple of days ago, courtesy of Elon Musk and Doge, we learned the answer to those questions. We finally learned how to usher in a state of total panic in the federal government in just a few short words.
It turns out that all you need to do if you want federal bureaucrats to melt down in a very public and humiliating fashion is ask them what they did last week. That's it.
To bring the entire federal bureaucracy to its knees, you just need to pose a question that every single private sector worker on the planet is able to answer and knows they must be able to answer or they will be fired. As you may have seen by now, here's the email that I'm talking about.
It was sent by the Office of Personnel Management, which is essentially the HR department of the federal government. And it was clearly drafted by Elon Musk, who famously asked this same question to the old CEO of Twitter before Musk took over and fired him.
But here's what the email looked like. Very, very simple.
As you can see, it reads, please reply to this email with approximately five bullets of what you accomplished last week and CC your manager. Now, you will not find a less threatening, more straightforward question that an employer could possibly ask an employee.
I struggle to think of any remotely productive worker in any context who would have any difficulty answering this question. A janitor could say he mopped five

floors. A plumber could say he fixed five toilets.
A restaurant worker could say he served a certain

number of tables and so on. A lawyer or consultant or anyone else with an hourly rate could produce

a timesheet that outlines everything he did at every single moment of the day.

Okay, well, maybe a consultant couldn't do that, but most workers in the private sector,

both white collar and blue collar, can and often must answer questions like this.

But for many federal workers, this email is an existential threat.

That's because, unlike the overwhelming majority of workers in this country, in the private sector,

they, in many, though not all cases, don't do anything.

And to this point, have not been expected to do anything. They just shuffle papers around and wait until their pensions vest.
This is something that's considered impolite to say out loud, I guess, but everybody knows it's true. In many cases, these federal jobs function like a kind of welfare that's designed specifically to provide fake jobs to certain demographics.
That's not some right-wing conspiracy theory, by the way. Spend five minutes reading left-wing media and you'll find this statement isn't even controversial.
I mean, they come out and admit it. For example, here's a report this week from NBC BLK, which is NBC News division that produces reports for black people, which is something that exists for some reason, I guess.
And we'll put it on screen. The headline reads, quote, Much of the black middle class was built by federal jobs.
That may change. For the last several decades, federal jobs help black workers find stable work with guardrails to prevent bias.
But mass cuts are threatening decades of upward mobility. In other words, yes, these federal jobs don't really benefit the taxpayers who are funding the salaries.
Instead, they benefit certain demographics that, without these fake jobs, would not make anywhere near as much money. In their panic over Elon Musk, Democrats in the corporate press are finally just coming out and admitting that.
And as you expect, they're going to fight like hell to keep that gravy train going. Some federal workers have just filed a lawsuit against the government because of the email asking them what they do all day.
Yes, rather than answer an extremely basic question that demands a bare minimum of accountability, federal workers would rather go to court. As Axios reports, quote, federal workers sue over what did you do last week email.
Only federal agencies have the ability to hire and fire their workers. The lawsuit says the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government statement that if workers don't answer the email, it'll be taken as a resignation.
They're arguing, in essence, that federal workers are entitled to ignore emails from their bosses, asking them what they do all day. That is the extent of entitlement that we're dealing with here.
And by the way, these workers are getting a second chance to answer the email. Now, Musk has clarified that, quote, subject to the discretion of the president, they will be given another chance.
Failure to respond a second time will result in termination. So they get another chance.
And it looks like if they want to keep their jobs, these workers should just take it. Already, several federal departments have told their employees that they need to reply to this email.
The Department of Transportation has instructed workers to reply. So has the Department of Health and Human Services, the Social Security Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and many others.
But there are signs that throughout the federal government, many workers will simply be incapable of answering this email. They legitimately cannot think of a single thing they did in the past week that was productive, apparently.
And that's probably terrible news for their careers. But it's good news for us, because if nothing else, their televised meltdowns have been pretty entertaining.
So we'll start with this indignant woman on CNN who works at some unnamed federal agency. And she's very upset about this.
Watch. First, just tell us about this email and what it was like receiving it and what you all have talked about after getting it.
Sure. I got this email Saturday afternoon about 3 p.m.
And I felt absolutely infuriated getting this email with a demand within 48 hours to provide a response on what I did within the last week or face termination. this is clearly an attempt from elon musk to harass and bully and intimidate the federal workforce which is part of his broader plan to gut the federal workforce and privatize public sector services to ensure that corporations like his own can get more profit and And that makes me really angry.
My coworkers as well. These spoiled brats.
I mean, it's amazing. They just can't help themselves.
Yeah, the plan is to gut the federal workforce. And this is, you are why, lady.
You're the reason why we want to gut the federal workforce. It's exactly because of you and people like you.
Infuriated. Infuriated that she's being asked to simply, what did you do last week? With the taxpayer money, we are paying you.
It's our money out of our pockets to do a job. Did you do the job? What is the job? What did you do? That's the question.
Now, evidently, this woman has a lot of time to appear on CNN and claim that she's being bullied and harassed, and she's absolutely infuriated. But even after talking through this whole segment, she still never explains what she does all day.
Instead, she attacks her supervisors, which is, again, it can't be emphasized enough, in the private sector, you would not get away with this. If your boss comes up to you at your job and says, hey, what did you do last week? And you said, well, I'm infuriated that you even asked me that question.
How dare you? How dare you expect me to explain what I'm doing with the money you're paying me to do the job that I'm, how dare you? If you responded that way, you would just be fired. And of course, this woman is just one of many examples.
On Reddit, federal workers are posting various plans for noncompliance and retaliation. They're talking about ways to spam the federal email system, for example.
One viral post, which was picked up by CNN, reports that some federal workers may be considering leaking top secret information to foreign adversaries. That's how committed they are to public service.
Rather than explain what they've done last week, they would rather commit treason. That's what they would prefer.
And what's especially funny about this whole meltdown is that a few years ago, documents obtained by the investigative reporter Patrick Hauf found that 25% of federal workers went a full month without even attempting to check their emails during the COVID lockdowns. So they just went dark.
A full month. So really, you can make the case, as Musk has, that these emails are necessary just to make sure these workers are still alive.
This is like proof of life. We just want to make, you know, just are you alive and opening your laptops at least every once in a while? But apparently, that's too much for these workers to deal with.
They're worried that if they have to answer the email honestly, they might lose their jobs. Thousands of probationary federal workers have already met that fate.
in particular terminated workers at the IRS are having some of the better meltdowns. Here's one of them, which was posted by NBC Philadelphia.
Watch. I mean, it was an illegal firing.
My performance was good. I was doing everything I was supposed to be doing.
I was even one of those government employees that went every day of the week. I had to report Monday through Friday, you know, 7 to 3.30.
That was my tour of duty, and that's what I served. And here I am.
Did you get, I was one of those government employees who went to work every day. One of those.
Yeah, but that's exactly the problem. Oh, you know, I was, I was even one of those federal workers who went to work every day.
But that shouldn't be one of those, that should just be all of them.

That's not, that should be one of those federal workers who went to work every day. But that shouldn't be one of those.
That should just be all of them. That shouldn't be like a type of federal worker.
That shouldn't be a special category. I was one of those special ones who actually went to work every day, Monday through Friday.
Yes, this IRS worker stated that he was shocked to be fired because he actually showed up to work five days a week. That was his tour of duty, as he put it.
These are people who legitimately think they're storming the beaches of Normandy just by going into an office building on a regular schedule. They cannot imagine a scenario in which normal people don't see them as war heroes because they leave home and commute to their job

and occasionally conduct audits

that make people's lives a living hell

and then punch out at 3.30 in the afternoon.

Okay, they have a schedule

about as grueling as a third grader.

That's when elementary schoolers get home is 3.30.

So this seems to be something of a trend at the IRS.

Here's another recently terminated IRS worker with his sob story. I was just in training.
I was just in training. I waited four months to go to training just to be fired.
He's one of 6,000 plus federal employees who work for the Internal Revenue Service fired this week as part of mass layoffs happening under the Trump administration. The majority of those

workers, like Charles, were probationary workers employed for less than a year. Charles told us

more than two dozen employees were laid off from his office here off Gessner. He says it took over

a year to get his dream job as a tax-exempt officer dealing with non-profit organizations

and compliance. His pride and passion taken away.
Excited. I was so excited to learn the job.
I was telling my management I was going to be the best. They can count on me.
And it's not like I have, I have no say so. Like they just toss you away.
I thought corporate America was like this, not the government. I thought the government takes care of their people.
So as you catch his dream job, he was a tax exempt officer dealing with nonprofit organizations and compliance. That's what he's crying about on national television.
This was his dream that has been shattered. This was his pursuit of happiness kind of story.
And growing up, some people want to be astronauts. Some kids want to be race car drivers.
They want to be heroes. But not this guy.
He dreamt of becoming a tax-exempt officer dealing with nonprofit organizations and compliance. That's how he thought he would serve the American people as he sits there in sweatpants with his smoke detector beeping, which is so on the nose that I thought that that was a joke.
I had to look up to see if that beep was in the original video. It is.
I don't, you know, some stereotypes just are stereotypes for a reason. In fact, they almost all are.
And then, of course, there's the part where he explains that, in his understanding, the federal government took care of its people, unlike corporate America. In other words, he thought he'd score a permanent job with no accountability whatsoever.
That was actually his dream, right? He wasn't actually dreaming of enforcing compliance on nonprofits or whatever. He was dreaming about having a job where there was no accountability.
None of these people can hear themselves speaking. None of them understand what they're acknowledging.
And in reality, they're making the case for their terminations better than Elon or Donald Trump possibly could. They're more or less stating that they don't do anything.
But to be fair to the federal government, there are some exceptions. There are some employees, particularly employees in the federal intelligence agencies, who have been very busy in recent years.
And I'm talking specifically about the National Security Agency, or NSA. And we know they've been busy at the NSA because the City Journal just obtained chat logs from the agency's top secret internal messaging system.
As the City Journal has just reported, quote, these logs dating back two years are lurid, featuring wide-ranging discussions of sex, kink, polyamory, and castration. One popular chat topic was male-to-female transgender surgery, which involved surgically removing the penis and turning it into an artificial vagina.
Mine is everything, said one male who claimed to have had gender reconstruction surgery. Another intelligence official boasted that genital surgery allowed him to wear leggings or bikinis without having to wear a gaff under it.
These employees discussed hair removal, estrogen injections, and the experience of sexual pleasure post-castration.

It goes on from there.

So at least we know what the NSA has been up to.

So if you ask them what their five things were last week, it's a list that none of us would want to read, but they would be able to list it.

And if we're being honest, we all know that this kind of thing was going on at many other federal agencies.

If it was happening at the NSA, was going on at many other federal agencies.

If it was happening at the NSA, supposedly one of the more serious federal agencies, then it was happening all over. None of these federal workers ever thought they'd be held accountable for what they do all day.
And that's because for more than a century, thanks in part to various Supreme Court decisions, the idea of an ever-expanding, vast federal bureaucracy has been taken as a given in this country. Nobody thought it could ever be reined in.
The federal government assumed just more and more powers and, quote, civil service protections and so on, and no one ever did anything about it. But despite what you may have been told, the Constitution does not require any of this.
Instead, the Constitution empowers the executive to run the executive branch, which employs every single one of these perverts, narcissists, and incompetents. No judge, no lawsuit, no act of Congress, certainly no CNN appearance can circumvent the constitutional separation of powers that gives the executive branch that control.
What we're seeing now, which is something that we should have seen a long time ago, is an executive branch that's finally willing to exercise that control. Now let's get to our five headlines.
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helixsleep.com slash Walsh. Yesterday we talked about the tragic passing of Joy Reid's show on MSNBC, and I explained why I'm personally heartbroken by the news, mainly because we now lose all the content that her show provided to lazy right-wing podcasters like myself.
But we now have Joy's reaction to this news, which we didn't have yesterday when we talked about it. And it is everything that you would expect and hope for.
Minus the smoke detector beeping. Here it is.
My show had value. And that, I'm sorry, that what I was doing had value, had value.
And in the end, I'm sorry, I try not to cry on TV. And I say, this is kind of like being on TV, so I apologize.
And that it kind of, and that it mattered. I see Karen is there and she's been texting me as well.
And so what I will just say is that in the end, thank you, where I land is that the moment of guilt that I felt that I went hard on so many issues, whether it was the Black Lives Matter issues of a young baby or a mom or a dad that was killed or when we opened up people's eyes to the fact that Asian Americans were being targeted and not just black folks that or went hard for immigrants who've done nothing but come to this country like my parents did and try to make a life and defended them. Or whether we've talked about what the president is doing that is subversive to the Constitution that is injurious to our liberty, you know, defending books that people find inconvenient, you know, that Nicole Hannah Jones put into our spirit that we need to understand 1619 as the real founding of this country, whether it's talking about any of these issues.
And yes, that's enough. You know, she says, well, I talked about Black Lives Matter, the Black Lives Matter issue of a young baby or no, then she kind of, then she quickly moves on to, or, you know, a mother because that's actually the one you specifically don't talk about the fact that the life of a baby matters.
That's actually the one category of person, Joy, that you leave out is that. But anyway, she's devastated.
She's crying on camera. No dignity.
No sense of decorum or self-respect. And in case anyone out there would make the mistake of feeling any pity for this woman, remember that she mocked many times what she calls white tears.
You know, she has total contempt for white people, in particular white women who cry. She talks about white tears.
So I guess these are, I mean, using her sort of phrasing, her terminology, these are Joy Reid's black tears. Is that how we, can I say that I'm tired of Joy Reid's black tears? Am I allowed to say that? That only goes one way, of course, right? But even aside from Joy's racism and hypocrisy and the double standards and all that, it again, it's just gross and pathetic to cry like this.
I mean, it's one thing to cry publicly over some tragedy, some national tragedy that's befallen the nation, but to cry over your show getting canceled is disgusting. It's grotesque.
And speaking of grotesque and pathetic people, Rachel Maddow took to the air on Monday night on her own show to call out her network for racism, for firing Joy Reid. Listen.
An even bigger programming change is at 7 p.m. Eastern, where Joy Reid's show, The Readout, ended tonight.
And Joy is not taking a different job in the network. She is leaving the network altogether.
And that is very, very, very hard to take. I am 51 years old.
I have been gainfully employed since I was 12. And I have had so many different kinds of jobs, you wouldn't believe me if I told you.
But in all of the jobs I have had, in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid. I love everything about her.
I have learned so much from her. I have so much

more to learn from her. I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at MSNBC.
And personally,

I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call, and I understand that,

but that's what I think. I will tell you,

it is also unnerving to see that on a network where we've got two, count them, two non-white

hosts in primetime, both of our non-white hosts in primetime are losing their shows,

as is Katie Fang on the weekend. And that feels worse than bad, no matter who replaces them.
That feels indefensible, and I do not defend it. Well, it's unnerving, she says, unnerving.
It's unnerving and indefensible to fire a non-white host. I guess if you have a non-white host, you just are obligated to keep them on the air indefinitely, no matter how far their ratings sink, which of course is,

so all you're doing is hurting the cause of non-white TV hosts, because then the lesson you learn from that if your TV network is like, well, we better not hire any non-white people to host any shows because we're not allowed to fire them ever. And when it comes to ratings, by the way, Joy's ratings were really bad.
I mean, like just in the key demographic, which is all that really matters to the cable news shows, 25 to 54, the key demo. Guess how many people in like the last week of her show, how many people on average tuned in, in that demo? 60,000.

60,000 people in a key demo. That's like nobody.
I mean, if we put up just a YouTube video and it gets 60,000 views, we're like, well, that didn't really work. And that's just for a YouTube video.
This is a prime time cable show, 60,000.

And that, you for a YouTube video. This is a prime time cable show, 60,000.

And that, you want to talk about indefensible, that is indefensible.

Those are indefensible ratings if you want to keep your job.

But Maddo says that they're morally compelled to keep the show on the air, I guess.

Even if it gets zero viewers, it should still stay on as, again, a kind of like welfare system, I guess. Never mind the fact, and the thing that makes, of course, making this about race is so absurd for every imaginable reason, but the show is being replaced, apparently, by another show that is hosted by three people.
Two of them are black. So Joy Rhee is being replaced, not just with one black person, but two.
And yet it's still somehow racist to fire her. And also, when Maddow says that, well, we only had two, count them, just two non-white hosts in primetime.

Well, primetime is four hours.

So that's 50% of the slots go to non-white people.

That means that non-white hosts are overrepresented on MSNBC.

You know, per capita, if you're judging by population metrics, there are too many non-white hosts on MSNBC, not too few. Not that I'm looking to defend MSNBC, of course.
I'm perfectly happy to see the network get eaten alive from within. It's a lot of fun to see that, as always.
But it just goes to show that the left is not free of and will never be free of this kind of racial insanity that has defined it for so long. I know we talked about wokeness being dead, and it is certainly on the run.
It's backed into a corner. It has been losing battle after battle, but it's not actually dead because, look, if Joy Reed could be fired for having abysmal ratings and nobody on the left, nobody prominent on the left made it about race, then that would be a pretty clear sign that wokeness is basically dead.
That didn't happen. Instead, they all did exactly what you knew they would do, which is make it about race right away.
No hesitation. So this is who they are.

It's how their minds work.

It'll never change.

Okay, well, we've lost Joy Reid for now and all the content she brings.

But fortunately, we still have The View.

So we still have them.

And here they are yesterday claiming that it is unchristian to criticize wokeness.

Listen.

I thought about the conversations you and I have had, whoopies, so many times about the co-opting of the word woke. And the fact that the right somehow has made it a dirty word.
To be woke is a word that came out of the African-American community, and it was about being, acknowledging social justice inequities, acknowledging people's suffering. It is not a bad thing to care about other people, to care about the sufferings of others, and to act upon it.
And so Whoopi will often tell me, well, I've never been asleep. And that's how I feel.
My parents, they grew up in the civil rights movement. I grew up in the late 60s, 70s.
I was always a part of it. And so I've never been asleep.
And so it angers me when people are like, this woke stuff has got to go. That's telling me that you don't care about my lived experience.
You don't care about the oppression of the LGBTQ community. You don't care about the oppression of the disabled.
You don't care about the oppression of immigrants. You don't care about your fellow neighbor.
And that is ungodly. That is not Christian.
Well, that's true. I don't care about the oppression of LGBT people or disabled people or minorities in this country because it's not happening.
So it's hard to care about something that isn't actually occurring. You's hard for me to care about a thing that is fictional unless it's in a movie or something.
The word oppression has a meaning. And the meaning of oppression is that this is cruel or unjust treatment being inflicted on a person or a group by somebody in power.
It's an unjust, cruel use of power against a person or group. That's what oppression is.
So in what way are LGBT people or black people or even disabled people, since they got wrapped into this somehow, in what way are they being unjustly and cruelly treated and abused by people in power? And I know when you say that, people on the left are like, what do you mean? There are a million ways. It's the easiest question.
Okay, well, go ahead. Easy question, right? Give me one example.
Just one clear example. You can't do it.
So that's our problem with wokeness. One of the problems anyway, as a woke person, you expect us to have sympathy for the entirely invented plight of people who are not only not being persecuted, but are often the recipients of unfairly advantageous treatment.
And that's because in your woke mind, oppression and persecution are not words with any objective meaning. These are not things that actually happen.
Or at least it doesn't matter if they happen or not. What matters is that you feel like they're happening.
So to be woke is to believe that your lived experience, a phrase that only a woke person would ever be vapid enough to actually say out loud, your lived experience, quote unquote, which is to say your own personal perception, your feelings about your experiences, more than the experiences themselves, outweigh the facts on the ground. And that, by the way, so many people, I mean, I've always complained about this phrase lived experience because it appears to be redundant.
I mean, of course, if you had an experience, of course, you lived it. You can't have an unlived experience, can you? And it is redundant when taken literally, but you can't take anything that woke people say literally because, again, nothing has any objective literal meaning in their minds.
So what they actually mean when they say lived experience, what they mean is felt experience. To live and to feel to them are the same thing.
These are words that are interchangeable. And so what they're saying is felt experience.
And there is a distinction between your felt experience and an actual experience. There's what's actually happening, and then there's how you feel about what's happening.
And so when they say, well, my lived experience is that I've been oppressed, what they mean is I feel like it. My experience is that I feel like I'm being oppressed.
And then when a rational person responds and says, well, yeah, but you weren't actually oppressed. Like that didn't happen.
Well, but I feel like it did. So I feel like it did.
So then it basically did.

That's what it means to be woke.

And so, yes, our lack of compassion and concern and empathy is for that you're feeling. Like we don't, if you feel a certain way and the way you feel totally contradicts the reality on the ground, then yeah, we don't care about your feeling.
We can't do anything about that. That is your problem.
That's the very definition of a you thing. There's nothing we can do about that.
And so that's the difference. The Post Millennial reports this.
The Maryland House of Delegates passed legislation on Friday that would repeal a prohibition on selling condoms and vending machines within public schools. House Bill 380, sponsored by Democrat delegate Nicole Williams, would allow contraceptives to be sold in vending machines in nursery schools, preschools, elementary schools, and high schools, according to the Baltimore Sun.
The bill also eliminates the current misdemeanor criminal penalty, which carries a $1,000 fine. Williams explained, quote, it's a really simple bill.
All it does is remove a criminal penalty. It's not setting policy.
It's not dictating to anyone what they should or should not do. All we're doing is removing a misdemeanor from our criminal law article.
The bill, however, has drawn criticism from Republican lawmakers. Republican Delegate Kathy Zaliga referred to it as condoms for kiddies, saying the bill goes too far.
Hartford County Republican Delegate Lauren Arikan also opposed the measure, questioning the necessity of condom sales in places for education. I actually agree that they should remove the misdemeanor penalty for giving condoms to elementary school students.
They should get rid of the misdemeanor penalty and make it a felony. That's to get rid of the misdemeanor and replace it with a felony.
It should not be a misdemeanor with a thousand dollar fine to give condoms to elementary school students. It should be a felony with prison time.
So if you're going to make a change to that law, that's what the change should be. And this is obviously perverse and totally insane.
Anyone who supports putting condoms in a public school vending machine is a dangerous pervert who should not be allowed around children, much less teaching them or setting public policy that affects them. But when I read these kinds of articles, what I want to focus on is the statement from the lawmaker who opposes this measure.
So we're told that this Republican delegate says she's against it. And it's good that she's against it.
You should be against it. But then she says the phrase that I hate the most from Republicans.
I hate this phrase from Republicans. I want all Republicans and conservatives to take this phrase just out of their, remove this phrase from their vocabulary entirely.
This is a phrase that will be on the tombstone of the Democrat Party, or rather the Republican Party. This is the tombstone of the Republican Party is this phrase, this goes too far.
This is like the mantra of the Republican Party. As the Democrat Party has run roughshod over American culture, ransacking and pillaging and taking whatever they want, Republicans have stood by for decades and impotently shouted, this goes too far.
Now, granted, in recent times, and by that, I mean like the last month or so, Republicans under Trump have actually been effectively for the, you know, have been operating effectively and enacting an agenda for the first time like in my. But historically, usually, this is what we get.
We get these shouts of, that goes too far. And I don't want to give Kathy a hard time.
I don't know anything about her. Maybe she's a very solid right-wing conservative.
I truly don't know. It's possible that she is.
I just don't know. I'm only saying that it goes too far is the wrong response to this kind of thing.
Putting condoms in public school vending machines doesn't go too far. It is an outrageous and depraved act of sexual predation against children.
It's a thing that no degree of this thing should be happening. It's not that we went too far in the direction of giving birth control to kids in school.
It's a thing that we should not have gone one inch in that direction. So goes too far means or implies that there's a form of giving birth control to kids in public school that would be acceptable, but that putting them in vending machines or maybe putting them in elementary school goes too far.
So goes too far is what Republicans have historically said when the left tries to enact some crazy far left policy, but Republicans would prefer a slightly less crazy far-left policy. It's like if somebody robbed you and stole $300 out of your wallet, and then you shouted, well, this is ridiculous.
You've taken too much. You stole too much from me.
You wouldn't say that because obviously you're

implying that there's a certain amount of money that you would be okay with them stealing.

And your issue is not that you got robbed per se, it's that they took more money than you would

have preferred for them to take when they did rob you. No, in reality, 10 cents is too much when you're getting robbed.
There's no amount that is the inappropriate amount. And it's the same thing here.
So I'm not trying to be pedantic, but I've been following politics for long enough to know what these phrases mean. And the point here is important.
We should not merely object to public schools going too far in their efforts to sexualize children. We should object wholly to the sexualization of children in every form and to any degree whatsoever.
Another way of putting it is that we need to object in principle to these kinds of things, not just to the kind of crazier manifestations of it, but to the thing itself is what we should object to. All right, let's get to the comment section.
If you're a man, it's required that you grow a bit. Hey, we're the sweet baby gang.
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April 15th is just around the corner, so act now before the IRS acts first. Okay, a lot of comments on the beard subject, so these are all beard comments we're going to do today.
Matt, during the beard segment, you said beards are one of three things you agree with the Taliban on. Can you please list the other two for historical record? That feels like a trap feels like you trying to trap me.
You're not going to trick me into singing the praises of the Taliban again. Not again.
Not for two shows in a row. Only one.
That's a once a week thing. We don't do that every day.
So check back next week and maybe we'll revisit the topic. Worse with a beard, David Letterman.
No, that, you know, a lot of people have tried. I said I defy anyone to come up with an example of a man who looked worse after growing a beard.
And there have been many attempts, all of them unsuccessful. David Letterman is not, is also a failed attempt to come up with an example.
And by the way, I said every man looks better with a beard. I didn't say that every man necessarily looks better with a beard grown down to his ankles.
I respect those kinds of beards. I respect the effort, but you can't have too much beard.
I will say that. I mean, it's possible.
It could get to a point. It's like if I said, every man looks better if he builds muscle.
That's definitely true. Every man would look better if he built muscle.
It could go too far. I mean, you could be just a roided up lunatic, one of these over-the-top bodybuilder types where you've got biceps five times bigger than your head kind of thing where you don't it doesn't look like your body matches anymore.
You look like you took the head from another person and put on your body. Then it starts and it's the muscles aren't even functional anymore.
Like you wouldn't even you can't it's it's there's there's no function. It's all just there for show.
So it can get to that level where it's like, it's too much. Okay.
You've gone too far. But that doesn't disprove the statement that every man looks better if he builds muscle and same for beards.
Every man looks better if he grows a beard. Ben Shapiro, Michael Knowles, both need, need beards, LOL.
Well, they do. And I've talked to both of them about this privately and publicly.
I've called them both out for their, I think, outrageous refusal to grow a beard. And the crazy thing is that Ben, for a short period of time, looked like he was threatening to grow a beard.
And it was a good look. I tried to encourage him.
He kind of had the beard thing going slightly in the last year or two. And I can remember even privately giving some encouragement, like, keep it going.
And then he just gave up. And this is the thing.
A lot of guys will do this they'll they'll start to grow the beard and then they get to a point where they become frightened and they turn back and often I'll hear the guys will say to me well yeah I tried to grow it and then it got itchy okay well that's you got to push through that it's not going to be itchy forever again I'm not sitting here every second of the day just feeling like I have poison ivy rash all over my face because I have a beard. But you have to get through it.
You have to push through it. Okay? It takes a certain commitment.
So you're getting, if you get to the itchy phase, you're getting right to the precipice of being a legitimate bearded man, of being a beardsman. Being a real beardsman is on the other side of the itchiness, but you have to push through it.
This is literally what separates the men from the boys. Did Matt just declare that Michael, Ben, and Andrew are all shriveled, leprous little weaklings? I did not declare that.
That's not me saying that. That's science.
This is basic biology that makes these determinations.

Matt, I'm one quarter Native American Indian.

If I try to grow a beard, it comes in patchy and uneven.

I would grow one if it didn't make me look like a homeless psychopath.

You know, there were a lot of comments like this.

A lot of people claiming their ethnicity gives them an excuse to not grow a beard.

I heard a lot of, oh, I'm Native American.

Oh, I'm Asian.

You know, that's not an excuse.

Okay?

You're the one who decided to be Native American.

So don't come to me with that excuse.

Don't use that as an excuse now.

Whatever the beard.

I mean, everyone is capable of growing some kind of beard. Whatever it is, that's your beard.
Let's see. Says the guy who can grow a nice beard, my patchy as hell.
Well, again, here we go with the patchy beard thing again. Patchy beards are all, those are, look, this might be controversial.
Those are a fine look, I think. I think those are fine.
That's like, that's a, they call it hobo chic, I think is what they call it. That's, so you got, it's a little, the hobo look is a look.
That's fine too. So I would rather look like a hobo than look like a baby faced freak.
Okay. So those are your two options, I'm afraid.
Those are the two options that you have. And I'd take the hobo look in that case.
You look like a hobo doesn't mean you actually have to beat one. I didn't say you have to actually go get a box and lay on a street corner.
Matt, why don't you have a beard? Are you stupid? Matt, half a second later,

buy these Jeremy's razor blades. That's fair.
That's fair. Actually, that's not fair because

you know what? This is another misconception. I hear this a lot.
Well, what are you selling

Jeremy's razors if you're such a fan of beards? Well, first of all, I don't sell them. This is not, it wouldn't be my choice.
This is not a product that I would choose to sell. It's not my product.
But second, just because you have a beard doesn't mean you don't use a razor. If I didn't use any kind of razor at all, I would be like a werewolf.
So you do, it know, it's a little bit of maintenance. That's what the razor's for.
These two things do not contradict. So nice try.
This is one you don't want to miss. On Tuesday, March 4th, President Donald Trump is addressing a joint session of Congress at 9 p.m.
Eastern, laying out his America First vision, tackling immigration reform, economic revival, and national security. And you know, we're not sitting this one out.
Join us for Backstage Live at 8.30 p.m. Eastern, our pre-show breakdown with me, Ben, Michael, Andrew, and Jeremy.
And then we'll watch the entire speech together live on Daily Wire Plus. When Trump's done, we're back with unfiltered, no BS reactions.
You won't get anywhere else. This is the event shaping America's future.
So make sure you're there. Watch it all live on Daily Wire.
Plus this Tuesday night, subscribe now at dailywire.com. Now let's get to our daily cancel.
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All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. This cancellation segment today exists mainly so that I can justify three and a half hours that I wasted this weekend.
But it also, I hope, serves as a warning that will save many of you from suffering the same fate. There's also a lesson to be learned here, I think, or relearned about Hollywood and movie critics and the kinds of films that earn all the praise and accolades these days.
So my wife and I just watched a critically acclaimed new film called The Brutalist. And this is a movie that, when the Oscars roll around in a couple of weeks, is likely set to take home several awards.
It has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It already took home the Golden Globes for Best Drama, Best Director, and Best Actor, along with a slate of other smaller awards throughout this award season.
Critics have hailed the film as a work of genius, a masterpiece. Its critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes sits at 93%.
And if you scroll down the poll quotes on the Rotten Tomatoes website, you'll find critics saying stuff like, quote, it is quite easily one of the greatest films of the 21st century, and quote, a monumental work of cinema, and quote, it's not a film to devour, but to be devoured by. There's such a weight to it that it creates its own field of gravity.
Now, these are ringing endorsements. Well, the first two quotes are.
I'm not exactly sure what the hell the third one is even supposed to be trying to say. But this is what happens when film critics are really taken by a film.
They get so caught up in the experience that they start babbling incoherently. All told, suffice it to say, this film is a critical darling.
And it's not just the critics singing its praises. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a very respectable 80%.
And I have personally heard from multiple people that it's a good film, even a great film. And it was this last piece, the endorsements of actual humans as opposed to movie critics, that convinced me to sit down with my wife and watch this thing.
And that is a decision that I very much regret. I am sad to report that The Brutalist is not good.
It is very bad. In fact, it is all told one of the most unpleasant film experiences I have ever had.
Indeed, I find it very hard to believe that most of the people who claim to like this film actually did like it. When someone tells me, I like the film, I think you're lying.
I think you're a liar. I'm calling you a liar.
I don't believe you liked it. Because every year it seems there is one especially artsy and self-indulgent film that everybody pretends to like because they think they're supposed to.
They're convinced that the film is some sort of IQ test and the score is pass fail and the way to pass it, they think, is to think the movie is a masterpiece. Even if in reality they spend at least half the runtime praying for the damn thing to be over.
The movie becomes a kind of psyop that critics run on the public, and then the public runs on itself. Everyone goes around speaking in hushed and reverent tones about the monumental artistic achievement of a film that almost all of them actually hated.
Every year gives us at least one of those kinds of movies. And The Brutalist is this year's addition to that pantheon of films that people hate but pretend to like.
And I'm here to tell you, do not fall for the psyop. Do not waste your time on this movie.
And if you don't believe me, I will describe the film to you, and there will be spoilers. This is your warning.
If you don't want the plot spoiled, don't listen to this review. Although the good news is that the plot really can't be spoiled because there isn't much of a plot to spoil.
The Brutalist is a slow, meandering slog to nowhere. It is a long, dreary, monotonous journey into the void.
And when I say long, I mean long. I mean three and a half hours long.
You could watch two and a half other movies in the time it takes to watch this one movie. There is no valid excuse for a movie to be three and a half hours long.
Anyone who's ever made a film knows that editing is a crucial process of the filmmaking

process. Okay, you also know that if you're not getting rid of scenes you like when you're editing,

not just scenes you don't like, but even some of the moments you do like, then you're not editing

it enough. Editing and cutting down a film should hurt.
It should be painful. And if it doesn't hurt,

you have not cut nearly enough from the film. And it's clear that the director, Brady Corbett, took apparently very much the opposite approach.
So he put the film together, came up with his V1, looked at it, and said, this is absolutely perfect. We will cut not one single thing.
In fact, let's add some more random stuff. The movie is only three hours long.
Let's add about 15 more shots of people staring forlorn into the distance. Oh, and we already have nine scenes of the protagonist shooting heroin.
Let's add five or six more. Because you can never have too much heroin in a movie, I say.
That was apparently the conversation that happened in the editing bay while this film was being put together. And the end product is an endurance test that the vast majority of the audience will probably fail.
So what is the movie about? Well, The Brutalist is a story of a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect named Laszlo Toth, played by Adrian Brody, who flees war-torn Europe and immigrates to the United States, where he is eventually reunited with his now-disabled wife and niece. They're initially split up, and then they reunite a little bit later in the film.
And he faces a lot of hardship. He befriends a homeless black man, one of the only virtuous characters in the whole film, of course, develops a heroin addiction, and is eventually taken in by a wealthy American business magnate played by Guy Pearce.
And Pearce's character, Harrison Van Buren, enlists Toth to build a giant community center in Pennsylvania, which as far, you know, if you can call that a plot, that's basically the plot of the film. Now, the theme of this movie is that immigrants have a hard time in America and are underappreciated and often abused.
And this theme, which is not exactly a unique or revolutionary theme, but it's a theme that approximately 90% of all Oscar bait movies explore. And the theme is explored in relatively subtle ways for the first about half of the film.
In fact, if the movie had only consisted of its first half, if it had ended around its midpoint, it might have been a decent, though not great film. But unfortunately, it continues.
And then it continues, and it continues, and it continues. And finally, just in case the audience has not quite gotten the message that Americans are cruel to immigrants, there's a scene towards the end where, again, spoiler, Van Buren finds an intoxicated Toth laying in a back alley and proceeds to rape him while telling him how disgusting and useless he is.
Yes, the white Christian American businessman makes anti-immigrant comments while raping the Jewish immigrant in a back alley. And that's an actual scene in this movie.
All right. And Toth, for some reason, goes back to work for Van Buren even after this episode.
But now he's an even more morose character, understandably. And this leads to the climactic moment in the third act where Toth's disabled wife wakes up screaming from pain in the middle of the night because she's disabled.
She has osteoporosis. And so we also, this is also a scene, by the way, that we see like 10 times of her waking in the middle of the night, you know, screaming in pain.
Because we got to get the point. She's disabled and in pain.
They say that's, we can't have one scene that tells you that. We need 15 scenes so that you understand that this woman is disabled and in pain.
And finally, there's this scene and Toth decides, because he's such a good husband, that the way to make her, his wife, his wife feel better is to give her intravenous heroin, which he does, and then has sex with his overdosing wife, who almost dies. And when she wakes up in the hospital, she tells her husband that she wants to move back to Israel or move to Israel because America is rotten.
Quote, the whole country is rotten, she says. And then she leaves.
She goes home. Well, before going back to Israel, she then goes to the home of Van Buren to confront him for raping her husband.
And Van Buren runs away and kills himself. At least that's implied.
They never actually show it. But he goes and kills himself.
And the end. That's the end of the movie.
There a totally unnecessary epilogue scene because unnecessary scenes could be the actual name of this movie, but the movie essentially ends with the homosexual Christian rapist millionaire committing suicide after he's confronted by the strong feminist wife of the Jewish heroin addict immigrant that he violated. So that's probably all you need to know about this movie.
There are enough problems in what I've just described that I would think would convince you not to watch it. But there are plenty of other problems too.
For one thing, and this is not a small issue, Toth is supposed to be a brilliant architect in the film. The whole point is that he was a brilliant architect.
He came here. He can't get a job.
He's shoveling coal. And then Van Buren discovers him and says, oh my gosh, look at your buildings.
It's beautiful. Except that his buildings are monstrously hideous.
They are these clunky, behemoth, unartful masses of concrete. And in a way, they're a good metaphor for the movie itself.
And meanwhile, the main character, Toth, has essentially no redeeming qualities. He's a junkie and an adulterer who designs ugly buildings.
Even worse, he gets raped by a man and still goes back to work for him. Doesn't have to, by the way.
He's like, he's at this point, he actually, at this point in the film, he had gotten a job in New York, like just a steady, stable office job in New York. He could go back to that.
He's not desperate and impoverished. He decides to go back and work for the guy who just raped him.
And then he leaves it to his disabled wife to go confront the guy. Now, I'm not saying saying that movies have to have happy endings or that they have to always tell stories about saints and heroes I have nothing against sad movies I have nothing in principle at least against movies that focus on flawed people or even bad people The godfather is one of the greatest films of all time after all but If you want me to spend three hours three and a half hours with a character If you want me to stay invested through something like 30 years of this character's lifespan, you have to give me some reason to care about him.
And there is no reason to care about this character. Now, there's a principle in screenwriting called Save the Cat.
It's a phrase coined by Blake Snyder. The idea is that in a film, you want your protagonist to do something generous or heroic in the first 10 or 15 minutes of the film in order to get the audience on his side and to make us care about what happens afterwards.
And I think this is probably an overly simplistic rule. It's a formula that doesn't always hold up.
But there's a general point, which is true, that as the filmmaker, you need to give us as an audience

a reason to care about this character. And The Brutalist does the opposite.
It takes a kind of anti-save-the-cat approach. And in this film, the protagonist, in the very beginning, makes it to America without his wife.
His wife is, as far as we know, still in a concentration camp. And the first thing he does is visit a prostitute.

His wife is in as far as we know, still in a concentration camp. And the first thing he does is visit a prostitute.
His wife is in a concentration camp. And his first move, his very first move is to have sex with a hooker.
A scene that, like many other sex scenes in this movie, they show in long and gratuitous detail. And I have no idea why.
I mean, this is, I don't know who gratuitous sex

scenes in movies are for. I don't, every time I see it in a movie and there's like five or six

of them in this movie, who is this for? Why is this here? Anyone who wants to watch porn can find

it anywhere else on the internet. Like they don't need to sit through a three and a half hour movie

about a Holocaust survivor to see porn. They could unfortunately find it anywhere else on the internet.
They don't need to sit through a three and a half hour movie about a Holocaust survivor to see porn. They could unfortunately find it anywhere else.
The rest of us would prefer not to have it interjected into the middle of a film for no reason. You want to have the guy visit a hooker.
Story-wise, I don't think you should do that. I think all it accomplishes is it makes me hate this character.
And then you're going to put this character through the ringer for the next three and a half hours. I don't care about what happens to him after that because he's a bad guy.
So I just don't care that much. But if you want to do that, you can show the guy walk into the brothel and then walk out buttoning his pants up and we get it.
We can fill in the rest. We don't need to actually see the stuff that happens in between.
No adult watching the movie is going to go, well, what happened in there? What was the meaning of that? What was that all about? Anyway, the bigger problem is that the character doesn't really grow or change in any way from this point. Another basic principle of filmmaking is that the main character has to undergo some kind of transformation.
Some sort of change should happen. That's what a story is.
A character goes through a change, both an internal emotional change, and there should be some kind of, so there should be the internal journey and the physical journey. Both of those things should happen in a story.
It's not a real story if we don't see that. And instead, Brody's character goes from sad to a lot sadder by the end.
He's a pitiful figure in the beginning, and by the end, he's even more pitiful. Why do we need to see that? Why should we want to see that? Why does this movie exist? Why did the filmmaker feel the need to tell this story? None of that is clear by the end of the movie.
I will say the performances in the film are quite impressive. They're good performances.
It is a beautifully shot film, but the movie underneath is quite ugly. It is ugly and pointless and depressing and demoralizing just for the sake of it, for no reason other than just to be that way.
And I just asked why the film exists, and I think I answered the question. It exists in order to be ugly and pointless and depressing and demoralizing.
And that's why a lot of films exist these days. And they usually win a bunch of awards, and people pretend to like them, but that doesn't change the fact that they are at their core simply bad films.
And this is simply a bad film. And it is also today canceled.
That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.
Have a great day. Godspeed.
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