Ep. 1582 - The Education System Is Failing, But Change Is Coming

Today on the Matt Wall Show, the Trump administration just waged an all-out assault on the corrupt

university system in this country. We'll get into the details.
And Democrats have found the strategy

that will make them cool again, or so they think. It's called dark woke, and it completely misses

the point. And Michelle Obama says that as a black woman, she isn't able to talk about her stresses

and articulate her pain, which is weird because that's literally all she ever seems to do. We'll

talk about all that and more today on The Matt Wall Show. Being a husband, father, and host of my own show means life never slows down.
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That's balanceofnature.com, promo code Walsh. You won't find a legal theory that's done more damage to this country in the last half century than the idea of disparate impact.
Whether you realize it or not, this is a legal concept that has almost certainly impacted your life at some point, along with the lives of millions of other people. In short, disparate impact allows people to sue whenever a policy, whether it's a government policy or the policy of a private business, has a disproportionate effect on certain demographics, supposedly.
It doesn't matter if the policy is intended to be discriminatory. It doesn't matter if the policy is completely neutral on its face.
All that matters is whether the policy affects some demographics more than others, allegedly. And to give just one example, if a written test for a police academy contains basic math questions, questions which are not racist in any way, the test is still considered to be illegal under the disparate impact theory if, say, 80% of black applicants fail it.
The only way to survive a lawsuit under this theory is to prove that, in reality, the disparate impact is strictly necessary for some important purpose of the business or organization. And in practice, especially in places like New York and California, this is extremely difficult to prove.
After all, meritocracy is now a racist concept, we're told. Why do police officers need to understand that two plus two equals four anyway? Don't they have calculators they can use if they need them? A lot of jurors actually think like this, especially the ones who won't venture outside unless they're wearing two masks and a portable ventilator.
And therefore, most companies and government agencies in the end have decided to simply water down their standards in order to avoid the possibility of litigation. Disparate impact was the precursor for affirmative action and equity, as it's called today.
Mediocrity has become the norm because it's enforced by law. That's what disparate impact is all about.
Now, we've all been conditioned to accept this status quo since the 1960s, even though it's obviously contrary to basic principles of fairness and morality and common sense, several administrations have come and gone, both Democrat and Republican, and disparate impact has remained untouched. But very abruptly, that changed yesterday when the Trump administration issued an executive order formally ending disparate impact in this country in all contexts.
The order called Restoring Equality of Opportunity and

Meritocracy states that, among other things, disparate impact liability has hindered businesses from making hiring and other employment decisions based on merit and skill. And therefore, according to the order signed by the president, it is the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible to avoid violating of the Constitution, federal civil rights law, and basic American ideals, close quote.

Now, yes, there will be inevitable legal challenges to this executive order. Yes, Congress should immediately pass this executive order into law in order to insulate it as much as possible from Obama-appointed judges.
But even as it stands, already this executive order is a major step towards reforming America's failing institutions. It's part of a broader effort by this administration to end the era of racial grievance, which has made a husk out of everything that it touched.
In particular, it's helped destroy the educational system in this country, which is now fixated on spreading propaganda instead of teaching students the skills they need to survive and actually function in society. Universities currently spend, of course, most of their time administering affirmative action programs and teaching students about the evils of white supremacy and colonialism and so forth.
It's a complete waste of time. Actually, it's even worse than a waste of time, and everyone knows that.
And now the Trump administration, with this executive order on disparate impact, is doing something about it. And it's clear that the administration had the education system in mind yesterday when they issued this executive order, because on Wednesday, the administration also took several other actions aimed at reforming America's colleges.
And one of those executive orders, for example, is called Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education. And the text of this order points out that the national six-year undergraduate graduation rate in this country currently stands at just 64 percent.
Yes, just 64 percent of undergraduates currently finish college on time. Additionally, roughly 25 percent of undergraduate programs and 40 percent of graduate programs ultimately yield a negative return on investment for students.
And therefore, the Trump administration is requiring an overhaul of the process through which schools are accredited. If schools can't demonstrate a commitment to merit instead of racial discrimination, then they won't be accredited anymore.
And for many universities, that would be a death knell. They'd immediately lose access to billions of dollars in federal funding for Pell grants and student loans.
This is why Donald Trump, during the campaign, referred to the accreditation process as his secret weapon. It's a way to use the established powers of the federal government to compel schools to start upholding basic educational principles.
Now, for generations, the government has not used these powers. We've allowed pretty much every school from community colleges up to Harvard to get away with scamming their students, discriminating along racial lines, teaching useless classes about decolonizing Shakespeare or whatever.
And at the same time, tuition has increased exponentially because the federal money has just kept flowing in the form of easy student loans. And then to make matters worse, college students, many of them left-leaning, have taken this loan money and refused to repay it.
In other words, people who didn't go to college are directly subsidizing people who spent four years earning useless degrees and then became deadbeats who are unable or unwilling to pay their debts. This fraud was enabled by the Biden administration, as you probably remember.
In fact, even when the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration was breaking the law, they still refused to compel college graduates to pay off their loans. But yesterday, the Trump administration ended this state-sanctioned fraud.
They're now beginning the collections process on these deadbeats, including federal employees who are about to have their pensions frozen if they don't repay their debts. Watch.
In other news, the Trump administration has announced we will put an end to Joe Biden's illegal student loan bailout attempts. No student loan has been referred to collection since March of 2020.
That comes to an end. On May 5th, the Department of Education will resume involuntary collections for borrowers with defaulted federal student loans.
The student loan portfolio controlled by the federal government is nearly $1.6 trillion, but fewer than four out of ten borrowers are in repayment. This is unsustainable, unfair, and a huge liability for American taxpayers.
Debt cannot be wiped away. It just ends up getting transferred to others.
So why should Americans who didn't go to college or went to college and responsibly paid back their loans pay for the student loans of other Americans? The Trump administration will never force taxpayers to pay student loan debts that don't belong to them. Student loan borrowers need clarity and we're finally giving it to them.
Borrowers will now be clearly expected to repay their loans and those who default on their loan obligations will face involuntary collections. The government can and will collect defaulted federal student loan debt by withholding money from borrowers, tax refunds, federal pensions and even their wages.
America is $36 trillion in debt. We must get our fiscal

house in order and restore common sense to our country. If you take out a loan, you have to pay

it back. It's very simple.
President Trump will not kick the can down the road anymore.

So it's a simple principle that everybody understands, which is that if you borrow

money, you should repay it. But Democrats attempted to suspend this principle during the last election campaign because they thought it would resonate with voters.
And in some areas of the country, it did resonate. There's a reason that Joe Biden won the state of Virginia, where all of the so-called public servants live.
But as it happens, the rest of the country wasn't happy about assuming the debts of these alleged public servants, so they won't have to assume those debts anymore. There are other executive orders and actions that Trump took yesterday concerning universities.
For example, one order requires that universities disclose any foreign funding that they might be receiving. The attorney general is tasked with overseeing compliance with this requirement as a matter of national security.
And this is a measure that's obviously long overdue, especially after we learned that Joe Biden was stashing classified documents in his office space at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Biden Center, which was funded extensively by the Chinese. And everyone knows that for a long time, major universities in this country have been openly operating like sort of de facto embassies for various countries that hate us.
And now they could face criminal prosecution for doing so. There was another order that was signed yesterday implementing new procedures to improve the quality of education at so-called historically black colleges and universities, which have struggled significantly in comparison to most other schools in the country.
For many years, the federal government has simply flooded these schools with money without any concern for how they've been wasting it. And now pursuant to this executive order, the Trump administration will seek to, quote, increase the private sector role, including the role of private foundations in funding these schools.
In other words, the taxpayers won't have as big of a role in these institutions. And all of these changes are necessary because under the current system, the university system in this country is failing.
And as a result, a lot of people, as you know, myself included, have made the rational decision to forego college altogether. Bloomberg just published a lengthy report on this trend, and their report focuses on an 18-year-old student who just graduated from high school in Madison, Ohio, which is about 45 minutes east of Cleveland.
And according to this student, anecdotally, neither he nor any of his male classmates are going to attend a four-year university. They're opting out of four-year colleges for one reason or another.
They're going to trade schools. They're going straight into the workforce, but they're not going to a four-year college.
Quote, in this corner of the Midwest, where the median household income is $78,000 and the largest city is $47,000 strong, the share of men age 18 to 24 enrolled in college dropped by more than 15 percentage points in the decade through 2023, the biggest decline in any large county in the U.S. The average slide, by comparison, was about three percentage points.
In 2013, half of the young men in Lake County were enrolled in college. Ten years later, that number was only one in three, according to a Bloomberg Business Week analysis of U.S.
Census Bureau data. Men opting out of college isn't a new phenomenon.
Women have outnumbered men in undergraduate enrollment for about 40 years, and the gap continues to widen. Almost half of women aged 25 to 34 have earned a bachelor's degree, according to Pew Research Center data.
For men, the rate is 37 percent. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of Americans attending college dropped by 1.2 million, with men accounting for almost the entirety of that drop.
When Jennifer Shuler became president in 2023 of Lake Erie College, the only four-year college in Lake County, the drop in enrollment was palpable. She inherited a $5.6 million deficit.
In the previous decade, the student body, which is majority man, had decreased by almost 20%, close quote. Now, as much as I criticize the university system, as much as I encourage young people to not see college as the necessary default option right out of high school that everyone should, has to do automatically, still, I will say that this is not a decline that's worth celebrating.
Of course, it's a completely understandable decline. Universities and colleges have done this to themselves.
They've wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. And all they've done is churn out a useless product in so many cases that more and more people are foregoing because it's too expensive and it's pointless.
I mean, it's completely rational for millions of students to stop attending these schools. That's true.
But ultimately, that's not exactly the outcome we should want. A functioning country should not require that every 18-year-old goes to college, but it should be able to offer 18-year-olds a variety of good schools to attend if they want to master some highly specialized skill, whether it's engineering or programming or medicine or whatever.
And that's the main reason people should be going to college is in a situation like that. That should always be an option for certain students.
But we don't have that anymore. We have a system where even if you're a very smart individual who would theoretically become a doctor, you stand a very real chance of being denied admission to a medical school simply because you're white or because you have the wrong political beliefs.
And if you're confronted with that possibility and you're 18 years old, why would you bother with the whole process? Why not take a guaranteed job where your skills will pay you right away? Why subject yourself to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and years of indoctrination, especially if it may not pay off for reasons that are both completely unfair and outside of your control entirely? Now, young people are asking these questions, and the only correct answer is to tell them that this insanity is coming to an end. Otherwise, the education system will continue to fail.
And the good news is that finally, for the first time in a very long time, some action is being taken on this front. The other day, we talked about efforts by elementary schools to indoctrinate children into the gender cult and how it looks like the Supreme Court is about to put an end to those policies or at least guarantee that there will be opt-out options for schools that have these policies, which in effect will end up ending the policies because most parents will opt out of it.
And now we're talking about how the Trump administration just issued an all-out blitz of executive orders that are designed to restore merit and competence to all of America's institutions, including its universities. This is progress.
Now, it's not a guarantee that these institutions will be saved. Harvard, in particular, is fighting back, as you would expect.
But it's a start. And the truth is that the education system can either teach students or it can attempt to brainwash them into the religion

of leftism. Those are the options.
There's no middle ground. And if there's one thing this week has made clear, it's that the current administration, unlike every other administration in recent history, understands that choice very well.
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That's expressvpn.com slash walsh to get four extra months free and start protecting yourself today. So Elizabeth Warren, who apparently is still alive,

appeared on a podcast called

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso.

And never heard of that,

but that was the podcast she was on.

And she was asked about her repeated statements

during the campaign that Joe Biden was mentally sharp.

And you could tell that she was not expecting

this question at all. She was not prepared to answer it.
Watch. Do you regret saying that President Biden had a mental acuity? He had a sharpness to him.
You said that up until July of last year. I said what I believe to be true.
And you think he was as sharp as you? Um, I said I had not seen decline. And I hadn't at that point.
You did not see any decline from 2024 Joe Biden to 2021 Joe Biden? Not when I said that. You know, the thing is, he, look, he was sharp, he was on his feet.
I saw him. Live event, I had meetings with him a couple of times.
Senator, on his feet is not praise. He can speak in sentences, is not praise.
All right, fair enough. Fair enough.
Look, it is, the question is, what are we going to do now? Okay. He was sharp.
He was so sharp that he could even walk for short distances. I mean, I had a meeting with him.
He was awake even for most of it, I think. You know, the thing that makes this all the more pathetic is that there is an answer here that in the eyes of a lot of people, not mine, but a lot of people, would basically let Warren off the hook.
In fact, there's an answer that would make a lot of people, not me, sympathize with her even if she could deliver it in a convincing, authentic sounding way, which she can't. But she could have said this.
So I'm giving this to Democrats for free. I don't know why, but I am.
So she could have said, look, when you care about somebody as deeply as I cared about Joe Biden, who's one of my closest friends and a mentor for many decades, it can be hard to admit to yourself that they're on the decline. And many Americans have been there.
You know, so many of my friends have been in the same position. When your parents or grandparents start to lose their faculties,

you just don't want to admit it to yourself because they mean so much to you.

And you just can't see it because you're so close to them that you just can't see it.

Sometimes you've got to take a step back, you know,

and that's when you realize what's actually going on.

So that's why I didn't see Joe's decline.

I love him too much to admit it to myself. I was too close to him.
That's why I didn't see it. Something like that.
You know, I mean, I'm not saying it's very plausible, but that's at least a better answer than what we get from these people. And the media would run with it.
You know, they would run with it and they would say that it was a courageous moment of raw emotional honesty or whatever. And it's an answer.
At least it's an answer. But Warren is not smart enough to come up with that on the fly or even to come up with it not on the fly because it's not like you need to be on the fly with this.
These people have had months to workshop some kind of good excuse, and yet they haven't. So instead, she stammers and gets all flustered and even almost starts laughing at the absurdity of her own answer, which is pretty remarkable.
And by the way, when you watch this clip, this is kind of the answer to the mystery of why Democrat politicians don't do podcasts. There's always this question of why Democrats will not embrace the podcast era and go do the podcast rounds where there's the much bigger, much more engaged audience, where you're offered the opportunity to sit.

You get like two hours of free advertising, free promotion,

where you can just sit down with someone,

an audience of millions.

And it's an incredible opportunity

that they refuse to take advantage of.

And the reason is what you just saw. It's a long-form conversation with somebody who is not a part of the mainstream media club, which makes them, there's kind of an understanding if you're Elizabeth Warren and you go on CNN or MSNBC or ABC News or NBC News.
First of all, it's a much shorter, most likely it's like 10 or 15 minutes, if not less, that you're going to be talking. And there's just kind of an understanding, like, you know these people, they're part of the same club, they're part of the same, you know, you see them out in public, and you're part of the same social circles.
And so there's just an understanding that they're not going to say anything, like, they what kinds of things will embarrass you. And so they're just not going to say those things.
They're not going to ask those questions. But you go on the podcast and these are people that are just not part of that club.
And so they don't, there's really very little incentive for them to avoid embarrassment. And it's a long conversation.
It can go in a million different directions. So either you have to be very quick on your feet and able to evade all the potholes and keep track of all the lies that you've told, or you just have to be honest and not have any lies to keep track of.
And then in that case, you got nothing to worry about. Now, you know, Pete Buttigieg is one of the few Democrats who will do the podcast.
He was on Andrew Schultz yesterday. A lot of clips of that are circulating.
I'm not going to play any of them because it's not, I mean, there's nothing terribly interesting that came out of it. Other than, you know, you see, I'm seeing all these clips on X now.
Look at this. People very impressed, very impressed with Pete Buttigieg's performance on this podcast with Andrew Schultz.
And then you watch the clip and there's nothing, he's not saying anything incredibly insightful. It's just, they're impressed with his ability to speak coherently and not on a script for two hours.
And that's how low the bar is. You know, there was a time when we just, when this was par for the course, we expected politicians to be able to do that.
Now, this is back at a time when podcasts didn't exist, but you just expected a politician to be able to hold a conversation, have an in-depth conversation for hours at a time, potentially. There was, I mean, even though they didn't have podcasts, you can go back and watch interviews of politicians in the, you know, in the, say, the early days of the news media, go back to the 60s, and you could see these interviews that maybe weren't two or three hours long, like Joe

Rogan, but were long enough. They were long form interviews.
And even your average politician back then was just impressively insightful and intelligent compared to what we have now. So you've got the two categories of people now, of politicians who can kind of do this, who can go on these podcasts and do these interviews.
And one category is smart enough to think on your feet, or just honest and you've got nothing to hide. Or both.
Maybe be smart and honest. That's the best combination.
Buttigieg is in the first category in that he's relatively quick on his feet by the standards of modern politicians. He's relatively intelligent by the standards of modern politicians.
And he can keep track of the lies that he's supposed to be telling and he can kind of get around the landmines. And so he performs well enough.
President Trump did a bunch of podcasts, of course, without fear because he's in the second category. Now, he's also intelligent, and he's quick on his feet in conversation.
But more importantly, he's just honest about how he feels about things. So there's nothing to worry about.
Most of these politicians, they're like terrified. I mean, this is Kamala Harris, didn't want to do Joe Rogan for this reason.
Terrified of the idea of like an unscripted conversation for an hour or two hours. There's just so many things they want to avoid and not have to talk about.
Trump did not have that compunction because for him, it's like, yeah, I'll tell you what I think. I don't care.
The Dems don't have very many people in either category, really, least of all the second. And when someone is not honest and also not especially quick or intelligent, and they try to do one of these podcasts,

one of these long-form interviews,

well, you get what you just saw there.

And this is the problem that Democrats have

and are going to continue to have,

which I think transitions us into this

that I wanted to talk about.

It's kind of related.

But I've had this on deck for a few days.

So over the past few months,

there's a phrase, a term term that started popping up in headlines. And the term is dark woke is the term.
And this is a new form of wokeness that has emerged. It's called dark woke.
And the media is very excited about it. They're very excited about this.
This is perhaps the answer to countering Donald Trump and MAGA. They've not been able to come up with an answer over 10 years.
What's their answer? And they think they've finally landed on it. And they're calling it Dark Woke.
And now the New York Times has a long think piece on the topic. Headline, What is dark woke? Democrats are trying out a new attitude.
It's provocative, edgy, and perilously towing the line of not being too offensive. Sounds exciting.
Provocative, edgy. It's been a long time since we got anything like that on the left, anything that can be called provocative or edgy from the left.
So here's what the article says.

There was a time last summer when the Democratic Party was cool.

Kamala Harris had just stepped in

as Democrat Party nominee for president

in the waning days of brat summer.

She went on the popular podcast,

Call Her Daddy.

Tim Walz's outdoorsy drip

led to a Chapel Roan-inspired camo trucker hat.

The memes were flowing and the party's mood was high.

Now, just to cut in here, we haven't even gotten to dark woke yet,

but just to cut in just for a moment, to clarify editor's note,

the Democratic Party was not cool during that time.

Okay, so you say that there was a time last summer when the Democrat Party was cool. No, there wasn't.
That time didn't exist. No, it thought it was cool, but that's a very different thing.
In fact, thinking you're cool and being cool are not only different things, but like opposite things. Or I should say, the Party was trying hard to be cool.
And that was all the memes and the trucker hat and the brat summer stuff and this and that and whatever it was with the coconut tree and the TikTok videos. I don't even know.
trying hard to be cool. But being cool and trying hard to be cool are definitely opposite things.
The essence of being cool is not trying to be cool, right? That's like the paradox of coolness is that the moment you try to be it, you aren't it. The only people who can be cool are people who aren't trying to be cool.

Every attempt fails by definition. Cool is perhaps, it's like a riddle.
That's like,

what's the one thing you can become but cannot try to become? And that's cool.

You know, someone can become cool, they can be cool. But you can't attempt it.
You can't say, you know what, I'm going to give being cool a shot. Let's try this out.
Let's give this a spin. Already, you're not cool.
No matter what happens next, you're not cool just because of the way that you approached it. So anyway, back to the article.

As liberals try to get their groove back,

some party insiders say Democratic politicians

have been encouraged to embrace

a new form of combative rhetoric

aimed at winning back voters

who have responded to President Trump's

no-holds-barred version of politics.

It's an attempt to step outside

the bounds of political correctness

that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing and requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point. Online, it has a name, Dark Woke.
Republicans have essentially put Democrats in a respectability prison, said Bavik Lathia, a communications consultant and former digital director for the Wisconsin Democrat Party. There's an extreme imbalance in strategy that allows Republicans to say stuff that really grabs voters' attention, while we're stuck with boring pablum.
I see this as a strategic shift within Democratic messaging. I'm a big fan of Dark Woke.
Dark Woke, for now, is a meme that lives mostly online, but its roots have been sown throughout the party for years. In the waning days of the Biden administration, memes about dark Brandon, often referred to the version of the former president that were conservatives most feared.
Outside the party, the dirtbag left, the term for a cohort of leftist provocateurs, inspired headlines for their unrestrained derision of conservatives and liberals alike. Okay, so, I mean, first of all, the idea that the Democrat, I mean, you hear this from Democrats all the time, that this fantasy that, you know, they're in a respectability prison, that they're held to this standard of being respectable, that Republicans aren't.
The truth, of course, is exactly the opposite. We talked about this yesterday, two days ago, that you've got liberals right now on a nationwide campaign, for instance, of vandalizing and destroying Teslas because they don't like the guy that owns Tesla.
They're celebrating the massive drop in profits. The stock hit.

DAs are refusing to prosecute. Really?

That's your respectability prison?

Really?

That's your problem?

Is that you're too respectable?

This is the side that not too long ago was setting entire city blocks on fire because you were upset.

So I don't think that's your issue. But this is what they're claiming, that Democrats have this problem, and they've started to get more aggressive and more confrontational because they weren't already.
With the rioting and destroying vehicles and all that, they weren't already aggressive and confrontational enough.

But that's what they're doing.

They're offering Jasmine.

They offer Jasmine Crockett, as given as an example in this article. And this is dark woke.
And the New York Times says that it may just save the party. This is the party's redemption, is dark woke.
Now, the problem is that this is all an attempt to basically mimic what they think they see on the right, but they don't understand what they're seeing. This has always been the left's biggest, their downfall, really, their Achilles heel, is that they are incapable of understanding their opponents.
And if you don't understand your opponents, you're hopeless. You're going to lose.
So they don't understand what they're seeing. For one thing, it's the reason why the people on the right who have achieved popularity and influence, whether we're talking about Donald Trump all the way at the top or podcasters or anybody in between, they've achieved it not because they're crass and confrontational and insulting.
That may be a personality trait of some of them, right? But we know that Donald Trump has a tendency to insult people he doesn't like. There's also people that are sort of at least perceived as being on the right, being kind of right wing, part of the right wing podcast sphere who don't do that at all.
Like Theo Vaughn, for example. Now, he might use profanity, but he's not insulting.
This is not insulting. He's a really nice guy.
He seems like it anyway.

That's actually part of his brand, is not really being insulting at all.

So that's not it.

You don't have to be insulting.

Here's what it is.

Again, if I'm doing Democrats a favor by explaining things to them, it doesn't matter because they won't listen to me anyway,

which is part of your problem.

You don't understand us, and even when we try to help you out, which we shouldn't even do, by explaining to you, it's like, we'll explain ourselves to you so you actually understand it. You still won't listen.
I am someone on the right, and I'm trying to explain to you how it works. And if you're on the left, you'll just tune this out.

You say, well, what do you know?

Don't listen to him.

So for what it's worth, which I guess is not much,

the way that they have achieved this popularity is not simply by being crass or insulting or anything.

It's through authenticity.

Okay, this is the fundamental

thing that has always made Trump so appealing, is that he's being authentic. He came onto the

political scene, and he was exactly the same guy there as he had been for decades. And for him,

yeah, he can be kind of crass, kind of profane. He can start insulting people.
He can do all that. But it's not that alone.
This is what people have been trying to mimic that. It's all, this was his formula.
The reason why it works for him is just because that's who he is. And it resonated with people, not because they were so impressed that, oh, look, here's a presidential candidate who used the S word.
It's not that. It's just like, well, that's the kind of guy he is.
That's how he speaks. And he's speaking like this now, and he hasn't changed just because he's running for president.
And we respect that. So whether you hate or love Trump, whether you hate or love the guy, he's just being who he is.
And it's the same thing with the podcasts that are most popular. What makes them popular is the authenticity.
It's a format where it kind of naturally strips away the sheen and the gloss, and you're left with real people having actual human conversations and saying what they really think about things. So if you're on the left and you're looking at this and you're studying it like some kind of mathematical equation, and then you're trying to follow the same formula, you've already lost.
It's not going to work. The formula is that there is no formula.
Donald Trump doesn't have a formula. He's the least formulaic politician that's ever existed.
The formula is just himself. Joe Rogan is not trying to follow a formula.
He's just having conversations with people who interest him. He's exploring things he finds interesting with people who he thinks are interesting.
That's it. That's the whole formula.
That's actually it. Theo Vaughn, as I just mentioned, what's his formula? There isn't one.
He's a curious guy who's also very funny, and that's it. It's not a formula.
It's just who he is. And so they're trying to copy a formula, but the formula is, again, that there is no formula.
And then you have to deal with the actual substance. And one of the things, again, that makes right-wing podcasts and the MAGA movement generally popular is that these are people who are saying the things that lots of people think but aren't supposed to say.
Okay, how do I get away with saying all the stuff that I say all the time? Well, first of all, it's because I want, it's because I want, it's what I actually believe. And the audience knows that I'm just being honest.
I'm telling you what I believe. So whenever there's a big, a big, a big controversy and people get upset and they're saying, Oh, can you, can you believe what Matt Walsh said? My audience hears that and says, yeah, so what? It's what he thinks.
You don't have to think the same thing, but it's what he thinks. So what's the big deal? But also leaving aside, at least for me personally, leaving aside some of my more bizarre tangents, generally, the things that I say out loud are the things that millions of people have already said out loud in their living rooms to their families and to their friends.
And that's the case for almost anybody on the right with any size platform. Much of our success is due not to trying to be edgy, but almost the opposite.
It's due to the fact that most of what we say is stuff that hundreds of millions, if not billions of people believe. It's the stuff that everyone believes, but you're not supposed to say.
When I got in trouble after the Austin Metcalfe stabbing, saying that, well, everyone already knew the assailant was a young black male. Even though there was a controversy around that, everyone in my audience heard it and said, well, yeah, we all think that.
Let's be real. Let's be honest.
We all think that. Now over on the left, and this is why dark woke just doesn't work, with leftism, it's all about saying things that nobody really believes.
So on the right, we say what everyone believes, but you're not supposed to say. On the left, they say what nobody believes, but you are supposed to say.
It's the stuff that people believe versus the stuff that people pretend to believe. There is no dark, woke version of that.
There is no edgy way to go about that. There is no edgy way to avoid the basic truths of life, which is what wokeness is.
It just can't exist. You cannot be woke and edgy.
You cannot be woke and provocative. You can be woke and use profanity, right? You could be Jasmine Crockett using profanity and screaming and yelling and all this kind of stuff.
But that doesn't resonate with people. Because the problem is that you cannot be woke and honest.
That's the point. If there's one word that could describe why podcasts are so popular, it's that word.
but, we already said authentic or honest, either one. It's basically the same thing.
Which, by the way, also doesn't mean... So on the left, when they complain about the podcasting world and they say, oh, there's misinformation.
Not everything these people say is true. They say things that aren't true sometimes.
Yeah, of course. Anyone who's a fan of podcasts, no one thinks that everything you hear there is true necessarily.
People can be mistaken. We can have opinions that aren't true.
We could be wrong about stuff. Of course, no one is right all the time.
But people aren't listening because they think that everything they hear is automatically true just because someone like me says it. No, they think it's honest.
So even if we're wrong, we're wrong, we are sincerely wrong. We're just wrong because we're mistaken.
We're not wrong because we're pretending to believe something that we don't.

So you know what?

Here is the only real version that I can imagine of like, what could dark woke actually be? maybe this

maybe dark woke

is Jasmine Crockett

let's say, coming out and saying, hey, you know what? I actually just hate white people. Okay.
Let me be real with you. I don't like white people.
I want policies that punish white people. I want to elevate my people over them because I think they deserve it.
And that's just what I think. Now, something, and you can say she's kind of already said that, but she hasn't actually directly said that.
Maybe that could be kind of a dark woke. That's the only thing that could maybe qualify as dark woke.
That's the only thing that could maybe be sort of what they going for, because it's honest. That is what Jasmine Crockett actually believes.
So if she came out and said that, I would strenuously object to it on the merits, but I would give her credit for being honest. I would say, okay, well, at least she's being honest.
At least you're being honest, finally. That's progress.
So it would be an honest articulation of left-wing racial ideology. And you know what? It would, unfortunately, it would probably resonate with a certain portion of the country.
There'd be a certain portion of the country that would say, yeah, finally, I feel the same way. And so I guess that's sort of the woke answer to right-wing authenticity.
The woke answer to right-wing authenticity is left-wing authenticity. It's where you come out and just say what you really believe.

But the problem is that they won't do that because what they really believe in so many cases is just awful.

Like what Jasmine Crockett really believes about race in America, she just hates white people.

There may be some people that resonates with, but it's going to be a minority of the electorate. I guarantee you that.
So she won't say it. What would be the dark, woke version of approaching, say, an issue like abortion? It's not coming out with this, oh, I believe in reproductive rights and women making choices.
No, the dark, woke version, the authentic, right? Authentic version would be coming out if they just come out and said, you know what? Yeah, we use the word fetus, but really it's a baby. Of course it's a baby.
It's a living human being. Obviously it is.
But I just don't care about babies in the womb. I just don't care about them.
And I think it's okay to kill them. Flat out.
That's what I think. Again, you hear that a little bit, like there are some people on the left who have come close to that line, but you're never going to hear.
No Democrat politician will ever come out and say that, even though it's what they actually think. And that would be the So go ahead.
I'd like to see Democrats do that.

You know, On the right, we're pretty honest about what we think. So on the left, just be honest.
Just come out and say what you really think about all this stuff. Let's just put it on the table.
Let's put it all on the table. And then we can have some real arguments, real debates in this country where everyone is actually being real and honest about what they really think.
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Everybody will be talking about an all new episode of the Ben Shapiro show streaming now on Daily Wire Plus. Now let's get to our daily cancellation.
As we've discussed on the show before, Michelle Obama has made a career pivot into podcasting. Lots of people thought that she would run for president.
Instead, she's run for podcaster. And this campaign is having about as much success as her presidential campaign would have had.
It's not going well, in other words. Now, we've dealt with Michelle's podcast already.
I hadn't planned to revisit the topic, but a clip from her latest episode is now making the rounds on social media. And it's so cancelable that I have no choice but to do a segment on it.
So here we are. And here is Michelle Obama yet again.
Listen. We grew up with women who weren't voicing the pain and the burden.
They made it look easy. And when you make stuff look easy, people assume that you must like this.

Yeah.

It's okay with you, right? Right. You know, we don't articulate as black women our pain because it's almost like nobody ever gave us permission to do that.
And does anyone care? Yeah, there's that. Well, if we knew, I think we would care.
If we knew. If we knew.
Or, you know, yeah. And we have to ask ourselves, the men in our lives is, you know, why wait to be asked? You know, it seems like what we go through is pretty obvious.
I mean, maybe we're not complaining, but we're actually living life out loud, you know, turn that cycle on its head. Yeah.
And we have to talk about our stresses openly, you know, and also as black women, we are so easily labeled as angry and bitter. I see the difference in some of my white female friends.
I see a lightness, an ability to be in the world and see what's going on, but still be not as burdened about it as I think I am. I think that what I see happen in the news, you know, the assault on immigration rights, the, you know, the challenges that face our community, the inequality.
I think it burns at me in a different way. Because it affects you.
Yeah. It affects your children.
Yeah. It affects you.
Yeah. Now, I'm no fashion guru, but Michelle Obama appears to be going for a kind of 1500 BC look.
She's dressed like one of the wives of an Egyptian pharaoh or something. Don't quite understand the look.
But in any case, aside from that, three points to make here. First of all, Michelle Obama has an estimated net worth, along with her husband, of $70 million.
And I suspect that's a pretty significant undercount. The Obamas, for example, made $65 million on one book deal in 2017.
And to put it mildly, as someone who's written books myself, $65 million as a book advance for two books, one from Michelle, the other from Barack, is astronomical. I mean, mind-boggling amounts of money.
And Michelle didn't even write her books. She had not just one ghostwriter, but an entire team of ghostwriters.
That's the kind of luxury and privilege that few people in the history of this country or the world have ever enjoyed. It's a luxury and privilege that none of her white female friends have enjoyed.
I mean, Michelle Obama is almost certainly richer than almost all of her friends. She's more famous.
She's more powerful. She's more influential.
She's more beloved. She's more celebrated.
She doesn't deserve to be any of those things, but she is. And yet, if you listen to her without context and you didn't know who she was, you would think based on the way that she speaks and what she says that she's like impoverished and oppressed.
You would think that she works for a house cleaning service or something. She drives home from her 14-hour shift every day in her beat-up Honda to her two-bedroom rancher, tries to feed her children, craft macaroni and cheese for dinner, but the power's shut off because her account is delinquent.
That's the kind of life you would imagine someone must live based on the way that she speaks. You would never guess that, in fact, this woman is chauffeured home to her 7,000-square-foot coastal estate in Martha's Vineyard after a long day of doing whatever the hell she wants because she doesn't have a job and hasn't had one for like 30 years.
This is what a victim mentality does to you. It means that you can never be happy.
You must always be a victim. You could be the richest person on earth.
You could be the supreme dictator of the planet. You could have more power and wealth than any human has ever possessed, and you would still be unhappy.
You would still feel put upon and persecuted. Victimhood is a religion for Michelle, and she literally cannot see the world any other way.
Second point, she says that black women don't articulate their pain, that they don't talk about how they feel. Now, I want to be delicate in how I phrase this, but I will only say that that is not what I've noticed.
If someone asked me to describe black women, afraid to tell you how they feel is not the first description that would come to mind. Now, if I were to make a list of all the ethnicities and divide them by gender and then rank them according to how stoic and reserved they are, black women would not be number one on that list or number two or three or four or five.
For the record, I think East Asian men would probably rank the highest and then probably Eastern European men, Western European and American men might land at number three. You'll notice that all of the spots

at the top of the stoicism list are occupied by men. And that's because women in general, black,

white, or any other color, are not generally shy about, as Michelle says, articulating their pain.

And I say this with all due affection to women, but if a woman in your life is feeling sad or hurt, you'll know it. If a man in your life is literally dying, you might not know it.
Michelle Obama is herself a perfect example of this. All she does, all she's ever done is articulate her pain.
I don't know Michelle Obama. I've never met her.
And yet I know exactly how she feels. I know everything about her emotional state.
I know about all of her fears and worries and stresses and concerns. I'm not even trying to know any of that.
I'm not interested in knowing any of it, but I do because it's all she talks about. Third, finally, whether you're a man or a woman, and no matter your race, I think that we would all do well to take Michelle Obama's advice to heart and then do exactly the opposite of what she's saying.
You know, she says that it's really important to articulate your pain and talk about your stress. Well, I think we should go exactly the other way.
You should actually be talking about your stresses and pains a whole lot less than you likely already do. However often you talk about your stresses, you should ratchet it down by about 75 percent or let's say 95 percent.
Contrary to Michelle Obama, talking about your pain and stress is generally an unhealthy, selfish practice. Now, for one thing, and you have to understand this, most people don't care.
Your stories of woe are boring to them. When you start droning on about it, they politely listen, but in their heads, they are just waiting for you to stop.
Because everyone has their own problems that they're dealing with. They also have people very close to them in their lives who are not you, spouses, children, whose problems are also their problems, right? So they don't have the mental or emotional capacity to care that much about your issues.
We all have a limited bandwidth, which is why most of us, most of the complaints we hear from most people just go in one ear and out the other. We don't have the space to store that information on the mental hard drive, even if we wanted to.
Now, you know, a lot of people seem to find this fact very troubling. They just can't deal with the fact that 99.99999% of the people on the earth truly don't care about their problems at all.
Like at all. But no matter how you feel about this reality, it's still the reality.
And there's also no reason why it should be troubling to you. This is all the more reason, by the way, to get married and start a family and remain closely bonded to your family.
These are the people who care immensely about you. Most of the rest of the world would hardly notice if you died.
But these people, these few people, they love you deeply. They know you intimately.
Although even they don't want to listen to you complain 24-7. I mean, the honest truth is that most of your worries and most of your stresses and personal hang-ups are not interesting or relevant to any other human on the entire face of the planet.
That web of tangled anxiety in your mind that you spend all day staring into, like nobody wants to hear about most of it. Certainly not constantly, certainly not on a daily basis.
And that's why if you really want someone in your life who will sit and listen to you complain incessantly about every last little thing you're worried about and stressed about, you have to pay them to listen. Only your therapist will endure that kind of barrage of self-obsessed whining.
And they only do it because you pay them to. And even they are annoyed by it.
And are probably making fun of you behind your back. So, you can choose to find this fact isolating and depressing.
You can choose to see it that way. I prefer to see it as liberating.
You know, the fact that most of your pains and stresses are boring and uninteresting to everybody around you, including and especially your family, is a good indication that most of your pains and stresses are just not that important. You can be free of them.
You know, now you can whine to yourself and say, nobody cares about this problem I have. It's not fair.
Nobody cares. Or you can stop and think, well, wait a minute.
Maybe nobody cares because it's actually unimportant. Maybe nobody cares because there's not much to care about.
Maybe nobody cares about the vast majority of my incessant complaints because my complaints are small and dumb and superficial. You can see it that way too.
You could choose freedom, freedom from your own petty narcissism. But that requires a certain amount of self-awareness, self-awareness that

Michelle Obama simply is not capable of. And that is why she is today, again, canceled.

That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching.
Thanks for listening. Talk to you

tomorrow. Have a great day.
Godspeed.