Ep. 1575 - Matt Walsh Breaks Down The Deceptive Propaganda In ‘Adolescence’ Netflix Show

Today on the Matt Wall Show, Netflix recently released a miniseries called Adolescence,

which is supposed to expose the problem of toxic masculinity and male rage. The show is fictional

and completely far-fetched, but the British government and the media are treating it like

a documentary we'll discuss. Also, sports commentator Stephen A.
Smith says that he's

considering running for president for some reason, and a CNN correspondent shares a hearty laugh with

Taylor Lorenz as they fawn over accused murderer Luigi Mangione. We'll talk about all that and more today on The Matt Walsh Show.
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Support an American company, invest in yourself, and start getting your best sleep tonight. One of the easiest ways to tell that one side is losing a debate, whether it's about politics or anything else that's grounded in the real world, is when they stop talking about specifics and they start talking about fantasy.
Once you have to start relying on pure fiction to make your point, it's usually a pretty good indicator that you don't have much of a point to begin with. When feminists began citing The Handmaid's Tale as a warning of what Donald Trump's administration would look like, serious people understood that it was not a clever analogy or a useful metaphor.
It was desperation. It was a bit like citing Shrek as proof that we need to open the borders to creepy-looking outsiders.
No one who's attained even a basic level of maturity and competence would fall for that kind of thing. Unfortunately, as we've all known for a while now, basic levels of maturity and competence are nowhere to be found in the UK, which is why the entire country is currently transfixed by a Netflix miniseries called Adolescence.
And the show debuted last month, and already it's something of a cultural icon over there. At this point, calling Adolescence a mere miniseries is practically hate speech in Britain.
They prefer to think of the show as a documentary, if not their Bible. Everyone is expected to watch the entire show start to finish before they can engage in any kind of public debate on any topic.
Now, in a moment, I'll talk about why this is happening. We'll also go through the show episode by episode and discuss the plot and how terrible the whole thing is in every respect.
But for now, all you need to know is that, spoiler alert, the show is about a white 13-year-old boy who stabs a female classmate to death. And he was upset because she rejected his advances and then taunted him online about being an incel.
And the show makes a big deal out of how online interactions like this, along with misogynistic content on the internet, can supposedly radicalize young boys and turn them into killers. From a production standpoint, the central gimmick of the show is that all four episodes are done in one take.
At least that's how they present it, with no camera cuts of any kind. So you follow the journey of this 13-year-old kid as he's arrested for murder and processed, interrogated, and so on at various points as a result of this groundbreaking approach to production, which has been done much better already in other films and other shows.

But you're treated to uneventful 10-minute long car rides to the local store,

which is really riveting television, but they have to do that

because they insist on just doing this all in one take.

Now, as far as I can tell, the point of this gimmick is to remind you

of why things like cuts and editing were invented in the first place.

And if that was the objective, then mission accomplished.

We'll see you next time. the point of this gimmick is to remind you of why things like cuts and editing were invented in the first place.
And if that was the objective, then mission accomplished. But before we get further into the specifics of the show, just so that you understand the magnitude of the mass psychosis I'm talking about, you need to watch this interview that just aired on a morning show called BBC Breakfast.
Throughout this entire conversation, the two anchors berate the leader of Britain's Conservative Party, a woman named Kemi Bandanok, for not watching this show, Adolescence. And as the interview goes on, the anchors become more and more annoyed with the politician for not showing the proper deference to this show, which the anchor calls a documentary at one point.
It's pretty remarkable. Watch.
Have you watched Adolescence yet? No, no, I haven't. I probably won't.
It's a film on Netflix, and most of my time right now is spent visiting the country. It's a four-part series on Netflix, and everyone is talking about it.
It is prompting conversations about toxic masculinity, smartphone use, young men feeling that they're being ignored, the idea of misogyny being increased in school. Why would you not want to know what people are talking about? Well, I think that those are all important issues.
And those were issues that I've been talking about for a long time. But in the same way that I don't need to watch Casualty to know what's going on in the NHS, I don't need to watch a specific Netflix drama to understand what's going on.
It's a fictional series. It is not a documentary.
What I've been talking about recently, for instance, is banning smartphones in schools. I've been going to schools all around the country.
I was in Evesham just yesterday, talking to headteachers, talking to students, and they talk about the problems that phones are causing. The difference this documentary has made compared to, say, a politician, any politician, leader of a party, the prime minister, going around talking in schools, is this has made much more of an impact than any politician has in terms of what people are talking about right now.
Just to remind you, this is real. This is not like a comedy skit.
And it's, I mean, you know, I'm thinking I should do this. I want to do an interview where we invite some important politician on.
And I'm just going to berate them for 10 minutes about not having seen my favorite movie. You know, I'll ask them, have you seen Master and Commander, the 2003 Russell Crowe film about a naval ship? Why haven't you seen it? Why would you not watch this movie? Because that's the most important thing, is that you've watched my favorite thing that happens to be on TV.
We'll play more of this interview in a second, but it's important to highlight this particular moment. Remember, she says the difference this documentary has made is that this has made much more of an impact than any politician has in terms of what people are talking about right now.
This is the anchor's response when the conservative leader reminds her again and again that the show is fictional. She calls it a documentary and says the show is being taken far more seriously than anything any political figure is saying.
But instead of treating that like a very bad development for public discourse in Britain, the BBC anchor embraces it. She's thrilled that the country has decided to abandon reality and fixate on a fictional diagnosis of their problems.
And you can't understand why the politician is confused and appalled by all of this. And the male anchor gets in on the action too.
He begins accosting the politician because she dared to compare adolescence to casualty, which is another fictional show that the British can't get enough of, I guess. And that's when Bananak reminds them of the actual problems facing the country in reality.
Watch. One of the things that I'm more bothered by is the fact that just yesterday we had Labour telling us that they're not going to be investigating the rape gang scandal, something which had happened all across the country.
That's real. That's happening right now.
We're not talking about that. We're talking about a fictional documentary.
Do you think you're... We had thousands of...
If I may just finish. We had thousands of victims, female victims.
Those are girls, young women and some boys too. I met the mother of a boy who killed himself after being a victim.
I want to talk about that because that is real. And yes, I'm glad that the Netflix drama is something that people are talking about, but it is not the only thing.
There are many other things that are going on. And my job as opposition leader is to hold the government to account, get them to hold a full national inquiry on what is one of the biggest scandals in our country.
And do you stand by the thing you just said a moment ago, that you're comparing adolescents with casualty, these TV programmes? Did you really mean to say that? I'm saying very clearly that my job is not to watch lots of TV. My job is to get out there and make sure that I'm talking about the issues that are happening in the country right now.
There are many ways for us to be informed. Adolescence has made more of an impact than any politician has on parents and when it comes to the issue of smartphones and misogyny.
And yet you are saying, despite that, you don't need to know about it. Well, no, I haven't said that I don't need to know about the issue.
You don't need to watch it. I don't need to watch a specific show to know what is going on in this country.
It's a fictional show.

Let's talk about what's real.

I'm going out there every day.

I have constituents coming to me telling me what they're worried about.

I had a colleague, an MP, who was murdered due to Islamic terrorism.

You look at what's happened in Southport.

You look at what's happening in Rotherham, in Oldham.

There are real issues.

Do you stand by not watching my favourite show? Oh, you stand by that? Have you ever seen Everybody Loves Raymond? Oh, you haven't. Oh, do you stand by that? Do you today in front of all these people stand by having not seen my favorite sitcom? Interesting.
Hmm. Now, Bananak is trying to explain that in Britain, Islamic terrorists are killing people in the street and Pakistani sex abuse gangs are terrorizing children.
These are real problems. But the anchors didn't ask a single question about any of that.
Instead, they just continue to grill her over the 13-year-old white killer in a fictional Netflix show. We're supposed to believe that this made-up 13-year-old character, his name is Jamie, is representative of the real threat in the UK.
Now, from a statistical perspective, that is not simply false. It is one of the most flagrant lies that BBC has ever told, which of course is saying something.
The statistic I'm about to read comes directly from the website of the Government of London, and it's accurate as of 2022. Quote, despite making up only 13% of London's total population, black Londoners account for 45% of London's knife murder victims, 61% of knife murder perpetrators, and 53% of knife crime perpetrators.
In England and Wales, as of 2017, roughly 38%

of youth knife crime charges involve ethnic minorities, even though they're only around

70% of the population. And of course, most of these killers come from broken homes, as one UK

study found. More than 70% of violent youth offenders came from single-parent households.

Now, if all of these numbers sound familiar, especially the 13% accounting for 50% thing, well, that's because that's how crime stats break down in our country as well. Meanwhile, violence that's targeted against women, the problem that adolescence is all about, is actually declining.
Let's take a look at this chart. As you can see, violence against women in particular has been declining for decades in the UK.
So there's no wave of young males taking out their aggression on women. On the other hand, there is an epidemic of violence that's being committed by Britain's non-white population, which has exploded in recent years.
According to the UK's Office for National Statistics, knife crime has increased by roughly one third since 2010 as the population has grown dramatically due to migration. Now, people in the UK can see that this is happening all around them.
But now, rather than confront reality, they're creating a fantasy world in which white young men are the actual problem. The British government is playing a large role in creating this alternate universe for the obvious reason that it deflects from their failures.
And that's why they're now instructing schools to play adolescence for their students as if it has any kind of instructional value whatsoever. Watch.
It has sparked a national conversation and now the prime minister wants to be a part of it. And I have to be honest, as a dad, I have not found it easy viewing.
The creators of Adolescence were invited to Downing Street along with youth charities to discuss the show's themes. The thing that's been really lovely since the show's been on has been hearing friends, family, people that I barely know contact me and tell me that they're having conversations on the sofa that they haven't had with their teenagers.
He's got something he wants to talk to you all about. In order to prompt more of those often difficult discussions, the program is being made available to all secondary schools in the UK for free.
So they're calling adolescence a documentary and they're using it as an educational tool in schools now. This is the British equivalent of the Handmaid's Tale metaphor, except the entire country is transfixed by it.
So what is this show exactly? And just how terrible is it? Well, as it turns out, it's not simply an example of race swapping in this show, as you've probably heard many others say online. Yes, they've made sure that a white boy stabs the victim in this show instead of somebody more realistic, like a Somali migrant, for example.
But if you watch adolescence, you'll realize this is actually much worse than a simple race swap. That's just the beginning of what's going on here.
Throughout the entire show, they beat you over the head with the idea that there's a vast underground community of white misogynist men lurking in the shadows because their brains have been poisoned by content that they're seeing on Instagram or whatever. For one thing, the killer's white male best friend supplies the murder weapon a knife so the killer can scare the female victim with it.
And this is all very upsetting to the studious black student in the school who's dismayed by all the white male rage that surrounds him. Then there's a scene where the father of the killer goes to the hardware store and he's trying to buy paint because his work van has just been sprayed with graffiti.
And then when he's talking to an employee who happens to be a young white man, the employee suddenly starts whispering and the employee tells the father that he's on his side, meaning that he thinks his son didn't do anything wrong. And then he starts offering advice to the father about how his son could be acquitted by challenging certain pieces of evidence, even though the murder was caught on surveillance footage.
The employee even tells the father to launch a crowdfunding campaign because there are apparently a lot of other angry white men out there who think it's great when white males stab innocent victims to death. Now, as maybe you've already realized, the irony, of course, is that there is indeed a large community that's willing to pay money to killers who stab people to death for no reason, but it's not a community of young white men.
I mean, in reality, so that's what happened in the fictional show. In the real world, the fundraisers are being established for thugs like Carmelo Anthony, as we discussed last week.
In fact, Anthony has now raised a half a million dollars at this point, a half a million, $500,000 because he stabbed a white high school student in the heart during a track meet. But in the world of adolescence, reality is inverted.
We're supposed to pretend that all of these deep-seated cultural problems exist among young white men to the point that the father can't even go to a hardware store without being reminded of how many angry incels are out there. And in case you're wondering just how angry these 13-year-old incels can be in this world, there's also an entire episode that's devoted to the killer doing an interview with a female forensic psychologist.
And for an entire hour, you get to listen to this child talking to the psychologist. And it's supposed to be really profound because this is the first time that you see how angry and vindictive this child can become when he's dealing face-to-face with a woman.
And the dialogue includes truly clever lines like, what do these emojis mean? And the kid's hour-long interview with this psychologist ends with her telling him that there won't be any more sessions between the two of them. And then the child freaks out and berates her.
It has to be carried out of the room. So again, they're beating you over the head with the idea that he needs to control women with his male rage.
And then the psychologist breaks down practically in tears because even though she's an adult professional who's trained for situations just like this one, she's still no match for the male rage of a 13-year-old kid. And the rest of the episodes are just as ludicrous.
There's a scene where a white kid assaults a black girl at school. There's a scene where the black girl is distrustful of the police.
And all this, of course, is evidence that systemic racism is real in this world of this fictional world of Netflix. Then there's a scene where the son of the detective on the case, a wise black pupil at the school, explains to his father, who's also the detective, what's going on.
He says that girls at the school, including the victim, bully the boys online, calling them incels and so on. And the pupil explains to his detective father that he'll never understand just how damaging this can be to kids.
And at one point, just to underscore how out of touch the detective is, he asks his son to define what the word incel means. And once again, the message here is completely backwards because they're trying to suggest even when you have a loving and intact family, which is the case for the 13-year-old killer in the show, that it's still no defense against the emojis of the online manosphere.
Having an intact family is supposedly no assurance that if your son is cyber-bullied by a girl, that he won't go out and stab her to death in a parking lot because he's been brainwashed by Andrew Tate. So the show makes this messaging explicit.
It's not a very subtle production. Throughout the entire series, it's clear that the killer's family is very concerned with his well-being.
They're with him when he's arrested. They're hugging him and showing him affection constantly and so on.
The mother and father are together. They're married.
And yet, to their shock and horror, their kid becomes a murderer anyway. And just in case you missed the message they're trying to send, the show's creators have given about a thousand interviews where they explain that, in their view, having an intact family will not prevent your child from going out and committing murder.
Here's just a few examples of them saying this. This wasn't about othering, Jamie.
Don't put this in the extraordinary. Make this feel like it could happen to you, because that is the reality of what is happening in our world.
You'd have a bit by your side all the way through it. All right? Okay? Okay.
We wanted the audience to be thinking, there's no way he's done this. This kid couldn't do that.
So for him to see this act committed by his boy, he's poleaxed. And his life from that moment on will never be the same again.
It was really important to Stephen that this wasn't a show that made easy answers. What are you doing? Eddie? The one thing he said to me right at the beginning was, we can't blame the parents.
I didn't want Jamie to come from a background where his mum was a drinker or his dad was violent and aggressive.

I wanted to eliminate all of those things.

To try and get the audience to ask the question, why?

But also in the same respect think, that could be me.

That could be my child.

I wish he'd have picked you.

You'd have done better.

No.

Yeah, he would.

We wanted to make this feel like it could happen to you.

The one thing he said to me right at the beginning

was that we can't blame the parents, close quote.

So in other words,

the single most important variable

that's indicative of childhood delinquency,

which is a lack of proper parenting, was taken off the table before they even wrote a word of the show. Now, if you remove broken homes, mass migration, and Islamic jihad from the equation, everyone knows that knife crime would plummet in the UK.
It would almost disappear. But those are the three topics that from the outset,

they knew they couldn't talk about. So they've decided to base the entire show around an extreme

outlier fictional case, which is fine in and of itself. I mean, you can have a show that's based

around some extreme event happening. There are plenty of shows and films like that.
But the

problem is that the media and the British government and the creators of the show

are treating it like it's not an outlier case, as if the plot of this show happens all the time. So that's the kind of sleight of hand trick here.
The producers claim that it's impossible to understand what drives the supposed epidemic of male rage beyond vague personalities on the Internet. Watch.
I thought the show was, it was a good watch, but it was a very intense very intense watch i mean the subject matter was i mean it just feels so relevant to so much of what's happening today and obviously steven you kind of co-creating co-wrote this i'd love to start by knowing just what kind of triggered you to deal with this topic i read an incident in the paper and it was about a young boy killing a young girl, stabbing a young girl to death. And then not long after that, I saw on the news, on the television, you know, it happened again in a different, completely different part of the country.
And a young boy had stabbed a young girl. And if I'm really honest with you, both of those incidents really hurt my heart in a way and it just made me think what's going on why what's happened in today's society where a young boy and they are young boys feel a need or or this this age or whatever it may be you know I'll never understand it to to kill a young to stab a young girl to death.
Especially when you're dealing with incel culture, Manosphere. I know Andrew Tate's name is mentioned in this, although you've said you don't really want the show to be dominated by that name.
It is mentioned in this show, but it's only ever mentioned by adults. And that's really deliberate.
Because Andrew Tate is the way that adults understand this issue. Whereas actually, the people who are doing the real damage are not him.
He's not taken seriously by kids, really. You know, there's a lot more pernicious presences out there that are the real damage.
But it's not just about the parents, it's about everything. It's societal, it's governmental.
Do you know what I mean? We need to be talking about male rage and how male rage has been enabled by social media. So you see how excited he gets when he talks about the Andrew Tate name drop.
He thinks it's a clever way to say, well, you don't really understand why we mentioned Andrew Tate in the show. We're just making fun of the dumb adults.
But at the same time, he's obviously a dumb adult himself, and that's why he offers none of his own conclusions about what's happening in Britain. But it's really not hard to do.
I mean, take a look at this image, for example. This is the Netflix stabber.
He's a fictional character. He was supposedly radicalized by emojis and mean comments he read on the internet and the manosphere and male rage and everything and toxic masculinity.
But really, we'll never know. It's a mystery that can't truly be solved.
Now take a look at this person. This is the son of African migrants who stabbed three girls to death at the Taylor Swift dance studio.
And guess what radicalized him? Well, as it happens, it's not much of a mystery. He was carrying an al-Qaeda training manual around.
So on the one hand, in real life, the motivations are pretty clear. But on Netflix, there's no definitive answer.
This is one of the most familiar tools that propagandists use. They try to pretend that reality is hopelessly confusing.
You can't possibly begin to understand it. But actually, it's pretty simple.
If both parents are responsible and present in the household, there's a dramatically lower chance that their son will become a knife murderer. I mean, if you stay married and you pay attention to your kids and you love them, there's an almost zero chance that your child will become a murderer by the age of 13 or any other age.
Not zero, but almost zero. Along the same lines, if a country stops importing third world migrants, there's a much lower chance that jihadists will storm the local Taylor Swift dance studio.
I mean, it's that simple. In the UK, common sense observations like this are basically outlawed, which is why we have headlines like this one from GB News the other day, quote, a Somali criminal seeking asylum in the UK has avoided deportation after a judge ruled that returning him to his home country would cause him stress.
The unnamed asylum seeker who has been dependent on alcohol since 2006 would suffer stress if deported to Somalia, which would worsen his mental health. Yes, we wouldn't want to stress out the Somali criminal.
They won't even say what crimes this Somali committed, by the way. The information is classified.
All you need to know is that it would really, really make him angry and sad if he was deported. So he gets to stay.
Rather than highlight the absurdity of rulings like this, of government policy that directly leads to more murders every year in Britain, Netflix would prefer to blame young white men who spend too much time online. That's the function of the show Adolescence, and it's why the show is revered like holy scripture in the UK as we've seen.
They're pretending fiction is reality because they don't want you to notice what's actually happening. Pay no attention to the reality you can see right in front of you.
Watch Netflix instead. That seems to be the message, and whatever we do, we can't fall for.
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Stephen A. Smith, the sports analyst who shouts a lot, has been getting some buzz recently as a potential 2028 presidential contender, which I find hilarious.
So on Sunday, he made the rounds on the talk shows where he confirmed that he might in fact run for president. Let's watch a little bit of this.
I saw you mentioned Bill Maher. I saw Steve Bannon was on with Bill Maher and he was asked what Democrats he worries about.
And you know what the only name he mentioned as a Democrat, he'd be worried about. So are you, are you really, are you really thinking about running for president? Is this something you think? Listen, I've been I have no choice because I've had elected officials and I'm not going to give their names.
Elected officials coming up to me. I've had folks who are pundits come up to me.
I've had folks that got a lot of money, billionaires and others that have talked to me about exploratory committees and things of that nature. I'm not a politician.
I've never had a desire to be a politician. I just signed a contract extension with ESPN.
I am very, very happy with my day job. I'm very happy with my boss.
This is a pretty damn good one. Just right.
It's a pretty damn good contract. I couldn't be happier.
But here's the reality. People, literally, people have walked up to me, including my own pastor, for crying out loud, who has said to to me you don't know what god has planned for you at least show the respect to the people who believe in you who respect you who believe that you can make a difference in this country to leave the door open for any possibilities two to three years down the line and that's what i've decided to do but again whether it's westmore governor westmore who i know a governor Governor Josh Shapiro from Pennsylvania, who I know, Andrew Cuomo, who I had the pleasure of.
Yeah, yeah, okay, so it goes through the name drops. He says he has no choice but to consider running for president.
Must heed the call. I must heed the call of the pundits who've told me to run.
It's my solemn duty, my sacred

responsibility. He says, what I love about this is that Stephen A.
Smith has never done anything ever that should lead anyone to believe that he could be president. The only reason that he has any of this buzz about being president is that he's gone on podcasts recently and given his opinion on politics.
That's it. He has recently, only recently, shown some vague awareness of politics, which means he should be president.
He started talking about politics five minutes ago, and now we have people saying, oh yeah, well, that guy should be president then. He said one thing about politics last Tuesday that I sort of agree with.
Well, he should be president, obviously. Not even like, oh, senator or governor or congressman, president.
He should go right to president of the United States. He should be the most powerful man in the world because he said some opinions on a podcast.
This guy has never been involved in any kind of political activism or organizing. He has not been engaged in politics at all until 10 seconds ago.
He has no experience leading in any form or any capacity at all ever. He's not a business owner.
He's never held public office. He's never led any organization of any size at any point ever in his life.
All he's done in his career is shout his opinions about sports. That's it.
And recently, he's also sort of shouted his opinions about politics occasionally. His opinions, which by the way, is not insightful or interesting, just saying, oh, I hate everyone.
They're all terrible. I don't like Republicans or Democrats.
Okay, you get these guys like Stephen A. Smith who come along and they say that we're all supposed to go, oh, wow, that's edgy.
He doesn't like anyone. I've never heard that before.
Okay, that's not any kind of special insight. That's what everyone says.
His takes are lukewarm, shallow, surface level. Stephen A.
Smith is only impressive, only impressive to the kinds of people who think that like George Carlin was a great philosophical mind of our time. You know, the people that posted George Carlin clip, and they say, this is amazing.
This guy was a genius. I wish we still had George Carlin around.
And then you watch it, it's just George Carlin going, rich people are screwed us all up. You know, rich people are the worst, aren't they? Right, folks? Aren't rich people the worst? Damned rich people.
That's it. You know, you've got these people that post those clips.
Wow. Wow.
Incredible. Did you hear what he said about how rich people are bad? I've never heard that before.
Whether you think there's any truth to that at all, by the way, it's what 5 billion other people have already said.

It's a political rant that high school sophomores, any high school sophomore could deliver exactly that rant. So anyway, that's Stephen A.
Smith's politics. That's his political insight.
But this isn't even about politics. I mean, this is about a guy entertaining running for president despite having no, zero, no leadership experience at all, at any level, ever.
And of course, people will say, and I've already heard this from people that, yeah, well, but Trump became president with no political experience. And that just shows you that lots of people still don't understand the Trump phenomenon somehow.
Yes, Trump was an outsider, but he was also a businessman who had operated at a very high level for a long time. And he'd been engaged and speaking about issues like trade and so on for decades by the time that he ran.
So this was a business mogul with a long track record on issues like the economy and trade and foreign policy, which is very different from an ESPN personality whose entire career has been spent shouting about basketball. It's a very different thing.
Political experience isn't necessarily important if you want to run for president. In fact, as we've seen, there's something to be said for people that don't have political experience, but leadership experience is important.
That's essential. If somebody's made it to the age of 60 or whatever, however old Stephen A.
Smith is, and has no leadership experience, then I wouldn't hire them to run a Wendy's. If I was the owner, if I was a franchise owner of Wendy's restaurants, I would not hire Stephen A.
Smith to manage one of the restaurants because he has never displayed any leadership or organizational skills at any level. So why would I think that he could even run a Wendy's, much less the country, for God's sake? So when you have some celebrity who wants to run for office, if they have no relevant experience, if they weren't even politically engaged or interested until recently, then there's a really good test to see whether they're running because they want to serve or whether they're running because they are on an ego trip and this is a publicity stunt.
And the test is this, what office are they running for? Okay, if Stephen A. Smith was talking about running for state senator or even Congress, I would say, okay, maybe he's doing this because he feels called to do it.
I still wouldn't vote for him, but I would at least buy that maybe this is sincere. Maybe it's more than just an ego trip.
But if they're going right for the highest office in the land, right from the top spot, from zero leadership experience of any kind to president, then that tells you this is just an ego trip. If you had even an ounce of humility, you would recognize you need to prove yourself.
You need to work your way up. You can't just jump in.
I mean, how would Stephen A. Smith react if the janitor at ESPN went to his bosses and said, hey, give me Stephen A.
Smith's job?

You know, I've never been a sports analyst at all, ever.

I have zero experience in anything relevant to this.

But give me his job.

Well, I'm pretty sure that Stephen A. Smith would say to that, like, wait a second.

No, no, no.

I mean, he's never, I've been doing this forever.

This guy's never done anything like this ever. So you can't, obviously you can't just give him my job.
Even though actually pretty much anyone can do sports analysis. If you watch, if you watch sports, you can do sports analysis.
Not that hard, but not anyone can be a good president as we've seen. That's not a job that just anyone can slide into and do well.
And so that's the case here. All that said, I hope he does run, and I hope the Democrats nominate him.
I don't really see that happening, but I hope it does, because it'll be a total bloodbath. I mean, this should probably be the last time that I rant about why Stephen A.
Smith shouldn't run for president because really he should. I mean, just being strategic, it would be great if he ran and somehow was nominated by the Democrats because it would make the wave in this past election look like a ripple in a pool, right? Compared to the tidal wave, the red tidal wave that would happen if they ran Stephen A.
Smith. Oh yeah, those Rust Belt voters are really looking for a guy whose experience is shouting about LeBron James.
That's who they're looking for, those Rust Belt voters, all right. So yeah, forget everything that I said.
I think that Stephen A. Smith should definitely run for president.
And if you're a Democrat, you should nominate him. I think that'd be fantastic.
Okay, this is pretty great. Gretchen Whitmer, the Wicked Witch of Michigan, also the governor there, appeared at the White House a few days ago.
And she was there ostensibly to talk about federal funding for an Air National Guard base or something. But what she didn't expect, reportedly, is that...
So reportedly, she thought this would be a private meeting, but she got led into the Oval Office where a whole gaggle of reporters were waiting for her. And because she didn't want anyone really to know that she was palling around with Donald Trump.
And so she walked into this room, into the Oval Office, and all the reporters are there. And she panicked because she didn't want to be seen.
So here's how she responded. Let's put the picture up on the screen.
Okay, so there's Gretchen Whitmer hiding behind a binder that she's holding in front of her face so that she isn't photographed. But of course, she was still photographed.
It's just that now the photos are of her using. Okay, I saw this photo and I'm like, what does that remind me of? I couldn't quite place it of her.
No, that's my toddlers. Okay, that's every kid I've had at the age of two playing hide and seek.
That's how one of my two-year-olds, one of the twins right now, if they're playing hide and seek, that's how they do it. It's the classic move for toddlers.
I just play hide and seek with the twins yesterday. And one of them did exactly that.
They just picked up a thing and held it like this over their face because they think that if they can't see you, then you can't see them.

Which is very cute for a small child, but I've never seen an adult try that before. I've never seen an adult attempt that move.
And I'm just, I'm fascinated by it. and I'm also fascinated that somebody could make it to this level in politics and have zero political instincts at all.
And this is not the first incident to demonstrate Whitmer's total lack of political instincts. It's one of many, but this maybe is the worst.
This is maybe the most egregious. Because when you find yourself suddenly in the middle of an event with reporters and you don't want to be seen, out of all the possible ways to respond, trying to hide your face behind a stack of folders that you're just holding up like this, okay, playing like a game of peekaboo, that's the worst option on the whole menu of options.
It's so bad that if I were in that position, that wouldn't be on my menu. I wouldn't think to do that.
You would be better off just running out of the room. You'd be better off faking a heart attack to change the subject.
You'd be better off pulling a Jamal Bowman and tripping the fire alarm. You would be better off pretending that you are your own evil twin.
You'd be better off just riding with it and then later saying, no, that wasn't me. That was my evil twin.
I have an evil twin you never heard about. And she's a Republican.
It's a whole thing. That would be better than putting a binder in front of your face in a photo that will live in it.
I mean, her political, it's one of those moments, her political ambitions are done. Like she cannot be president.
She cannot, that never should have been an option to begin with. And I think it'd be very unlikely that she could even get nominated, much less win the presidency.
But now that's over. Yeah, she certainly had presidential ambitions.
I think we all know that. And that's done now.
This is one of those, you know, it's one of those rare moments you get where some, a politician does something and we can all point to that moment and say, yeah, well, that's done. You're finished.
Your career's over. You're never going to advance.
You're never going to be president because of that moment. Because you held, even though you've been a terrible governor and have screwed up immeasurably in so many ways, you held a folder in front of your face to hide from the press.
And that is the thing. You cannot survive that.
Just that, this is what we've learned. As a politician, you could have like many scandals.

You could screw up in so many ways.

And you could survive that because people don't remember it or, you know, it's more complicated.

But when you do something that can be captured on camera like that, it's just an image. Just that one image.

That destroys you, right? So her political ambitions are done forever because of that. And it really just goes to show that we have a real crisis of midwittery in this country, which is not really a word, but we have a crisis of midwits, especially in the leadership class.
And look, I'm happy that people like Gretchen Whitmer are morons. Don't get me wrong.
I guess I'd rather have evil dumb instead of evil geniuses. But in a way, I don't know.
In a way, there's a part of me that actually would prefer if we had evil geniuses screwing the country up. Because it's less demoralizing to have your country destroyed by evil geniuses.
Because they're geniuses, right? I mean, you could always say, like, what are we going to do? There's evil. They're evil and they're geniuses.
So they destroy the country. What can you do? But instead, we're being run into the ground by evil morons, people who have the strategic intelligence of toddlers.
Okay, those are the people driving us into the dirt. The state of Michigan has been destroyed by Amelia Bedelia here, hiding behind a folder.
And I don't know, there's something about that that I find even more depressing, but also funny in its own way. Let's be honest, I have a long list of things I'd rather do than maintain my gutters.
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Do it right now. Now let's get to our daily cancellation.

This morning, I took a little trip down memory lane and went back to a show that I posted about four months ago in the wake of the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

And if you recall that show at all, then you remember the position that I took.

It was a bold position, a provocative one. And my position was and still is that first degree murder is wrong.
It is wrong to shoot a man in the back while he's walking down the street. We should not applaud murder.
We should not defend it. We should not take the side of people who defend murder or commit it.
And that means that just because you don't like a company where somebody works, that doesn't make it morally permissible to walk up and execute anyone on the executive team of that company. I personally don't like a lot of companies.
I don't really like most companies, but I still think that you can't just kill the people who work there. That was my stated position, and I was absolutely, as you may recall, excoriated for it.
And you can go back, as I just did, and read the YouTube comments for that show. You can scroll for pages and not find a single comment that agrees with me.
My opinion that it's not okay to commit first-degree murder is, judging by the comments, maybe the most unpopular thing I've ever said in my career, which is really, really saying something, as you know.

You'll find hundreds of comments, often from self-professed conservatives, not just disagreeing with my stance against first-degree homicide, but actually angry at me for taking that stance.

They declared that I'm out of touch and I'm elitist for thinking that we shouldn't just

start murdering CEOs. And that's not a straw man, by the way.
That's what the comments said. You can go back and read them.
It's a huge number of them saying that. Now, of course, I know that most of those comments weren't really from conservatives and most of them certainly weren't from my actual audience.
But I do think that there were at least some people on the right who really did fall into the mass psychosis of defending and siding with a murderous scumbag. And I imagine that most of those people are now embarrassed that they jumped on the pro-murder bandwagon and would probably rather pretend that it never happened.
But I think we need to revisit this whole episode so that we can figure out what sort of lessons we should learn from it. And what brings all this back to mind is an interview that a CNN correspondent named Donnie O'Sullivan did with the demented shrew named Taylor Lorenz.
Lorenz, who pretends to be a journalist, was one of Mangione's most unabashedly outspoken cheerleaders. At the time, she fawned all over him, justified his murderous acts.
She even said, as you may remember, she said that she felt joy after hearing that Brian Thompson, who's a father, by the way, and had never been convicted of any crimes, was murdered. She felt joy about it.
And in this interview, which was just posted yesterday, she doubles down and goes even further. And I want you to watch this clip.
And if you were one of the self-professed conservatives taking her side on this issue, I want you to watch even closer and ask yourself if this is really the kind of ally that you want. Here you go.
Hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America, as if we don't't lionize criminals as if we don't have you know we don't stand murderers of all sorts and we give them Netflix shows there's a huge disconnect between the narratives and angles those are mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels and you see that in moments like this and I can tell you I saw the biggest audience growth that I've ever seen because people were like, oh, somebody, some journalist is actually speaking to the anger that we feel. The women who got her outside course in New York.
So you're going to see women especially that feel like, oh my God, right? Like here's this man who's a revolutionary, who's famous, who's handsome, who's young, who's smart. He's a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.
Yeah, I just realized women will literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me. That's where we are.
So to review, Nurse Ratched here brags that she experienced the biggest audience growth she's ever seen when she started fawning over Luigi Mangione. Then she starts gushing over the murderer, describing him as famous, young, handsome, smart, and most insanely, a morally good man.
The CNN correspondent, of course, listens to all this with a smile on his face, then starts giggling. And the whole scene is comically evil.
I mean, Taylor Lorenz has always been a cartoon. Now she's playing the role of a cartoon villain.
She's like Cruella de Vil, if Cruella de Vil was a frumpy hypochondriac. And I must say again, if you're a conservative who found yourself on the same side as this psychotic demon, I mean, you really screwed up.
You should

not be on Taylor Lorenz's side on any topic, especially not when she's explicitly advocating

for first degree murder. And since we're on the subject, and now that perhaps the initial hysteria

that led so many people in Taylor Lorenz's camp, led so many people to be in Taylor Lorenz's camp

has worn off a bit, I thought it'd be useful to go back and review the two major reasons why we should never applaud a guy who walks up to another guy in the dark and shoots him in the back. These are the two major reasons beyond the number one fundamental reason, which is that murder is a grave sin.
It breaks not only the laws of man, but also the laws of God. It violates a code written in the Bible, in the Ten Commandments, and written into the heart of every man.
Even if you never read the Ten Commandments, which rather clearly forbids this kind of activity, you would still know that it's wrong to execute an unarmed man in the street. That's natural law.
Okay, so that's all the reason you should need to know that this is not okay. But there are two other points worth making.
And the first, as I tried to explain at the time, it's that the major voices cheering on or excusing the murder of Brian Thompson will not stop and have not stopped with Brian Thompson. If you're a conservative, you should understand that the Taylor Lorenz's of the world think that you deserve to be executed just as much as Brian Thompson does.
You are standing beside and finding common cause with a person who would feel just as joyful if you were shot dead on the sidewalk. And that fact should matter to you.
You are shouting amen to an argument that can be and will be and has been used to justify violence against you and your loved ones. What does Taylor Lorenz mean when she says that Luigi Mangione is a morally good man? I mean, from my vantage point, he's a spoiled trust fund baby and murderous coward who snuck up behind an unarmed man under the cover of darkness, shot him in the back, and then tried to run away and escape accountability.
What part of that is morally good? Well, when Taylor says it, she means simply that Mangione did something that, in Taylor's mind, advanced her own political interests. This is how it works for moral relativists.
Whatever advances their interests is morally good, by definition. So if killing a father and husband in cold blood advances her interest, then it's morally good.

Well, again, you should keep in mind that if you are a conservative, then Taylor Lorenz also thinks that your death advances her interest. Whoever shoots you in the head is also morally good.
And, you know, you might say that I'm biased here because making this personal for a moment, I can say that approximately 100% of the leftists who cheered Thompson's murder would also cheer, probably even louder, if I was murdered. I mean, there are a lot of leftists out there waiting eagerly for the day when I drop dead.
I know that because they tell me all the time. And why do they want me dead? I mean, I'm not a healthcare CEO.
I've never denied anyone coverage. I've never hurt anyone.
But they want me dead because I'm an outspoken conservative, and they've determined that it would advance their interests if somebody got rid of me. So am I going to find common cause with the people who are actively and vocally wishing for my demise? Am I going to legitimize an argument that these people would directly use to justify my own murder?

No, I'm not going to do that.

I'm not going to do that because I'm not suicidally insane.

The second point, related very much to the first, is that as conservatives,

one of the most basic things that we're trying to conserve and defend is civilization. Leftism is an anti-civilizational force.
Leftism despises civilization and wants to destroy it. We are supposed to be the ones defending and conserving civilization.
If we will not conserve civilization, then there's no point to anything. There's no point to any of this if we will not, at the most basic level, conserve and defend civilization.
And one of the very first things you need, I mean, if you're forming a civilization from scratch, one of the very first things you need is law. Okay, law.
That's the starting point for civilization. And the most basic law of all laws is the law that forbids you from walking up to someone you don't like on the street and executing them.
So I'm opposed to the murder of Brian Thompson because I am a fan of civilization. I prefer civilization over the alternative, which is degradation, depravity, and chaos.
In a civilized society, men who shoot other men in the back are treated as cowardly, murdering scum, which is what they are. We don't lionize them.
We don't justify their actions. We certainly don't fawn over them like groupies.
That is if we want to be civilized people, which I do. Because the other option is to be morally debased savages.
And that is really what our culture war comes down to. It is civilization versus savagery.
Those are the choices. Okay, we could call it right versus left.
No, it's civilization versus savagery. I know which side I'm on.
It's really not a difficult choice. And that is why Taylor Lorenz and everyone who took her side are all today canceled.
That'll do it for the show today.

Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening.
Have a great day. Talk to you tomorrow.
Godspeed.