Ep. 1561 - Paid-Off “Conservatives” Are Fighting For Your Right To Use Food Stamps For Soda

Hey, the Matt Walsh Show. The Trump administration wants to ban people from using food stamps on junk food.
This is obviously the correct position. And yet a bunch of conservative influencers mysteriously and suddenly came out against it over the weekend.
It's a bizarre story. We'll discuss.
Also, Snow White predictably bombs the box office. RFK Jr.
wants to ban cell phones from schools. Only question is, why isn't that already the policy in every school in the country? And more and more people on the left are claiming that the 2024 election was stolen.
What evidence do they have to support that claim? Well, none at all.

We'll talk about all that and more today on The Matt Wall Show. Look, I don't know your exact situation, but if you're like the thousands of homeowners American Financing talks to every month, you're struggling to keep up, barely making ends meet, drowning in high interest debt, and it's not your fault.
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Or visit AmericanFinancing.net slash Walsh. It's not an earth-shattering revelation to say that the modern left is far more concerned with dogma and orthodoxy than any kind of consistency.
They are collective in every sense. Whatever they're required to believe at any given moment, they'll believe it without any dissent or questioning whatsoever, even if it completely contradicts what they believed five seconds ago.
We've seen this happen a million times in recent years on everything from Russia to Elon Musk to Donald Trump himself. This can be an effective strategy up to a point.
Mob mentality is a powerful thing. But as we saw in the last election, there comes a moment when relentless orthodoxy simply goes too far.
When every Democrat is saying, for example, that there's no difference between men and women, reasonable people aren't just turned off, they're disturbed at a fundamental level. This is maybe the most straightforward observation in all of politics.
And the lesson we should draw from it is obvious. We should not emulate these people.
Marching in lockstep and reciting canned talking points ultimately leads to incoherence and weakness and defeat. And that should be uncontroversial and conventional wisdom on the right at the moment.
And that's why it's impossible to ignore the bizarre and really pretty embarrassing display that took place on social media over the last few days. Several conservative influencers, seemingly out of the blue, began posting carefully scripted messages on X about SNAP benefits, more commonly known, of course, as food stamps.
And all these messages were essentially identical, like they were written by the same mysterious organization. Specifically, these conservative influencers complained that there was an effort underway in Washington, D.C.
to ban people from using food stamps to pay for soda. And according to these influencers, poor people should be able to use their food stamps to buy as much junk food as they want.
Because why shouldn't taxpayers be forced to subsidize someone else's sugar addiction? And here's what some of those posts look like. And as you can see, the post from the account Clown World, which has 3 million followers, stated that, quote, the government wants to block soda purchases for Americans on Snap.
Remember when NYC tried this and it completely backfired? President Trump proudly had a Diet Coke button in the Oval Office.

This is ridiculous government overreach. Let the people decide for themselves, close quote.
Several other accounts, including Ian Miles Chong, Eric Doherty, Chad Prather, and others posted very similar messages all around the same time. I'm not going to go through all of them, but the basic idea was the same.
According to these influencers, poor people should be able to use food stamps to buy whatever they want. And it's worth noting that several of these messages invoked Donald Trump's tendency to drink Diet Coke, even though it's not relevant in any way, since I think we can safely assume that Donald Trump is not on food stamps.
The post from Ian Miles Chong was especially remarkable because back in 2021, he wrote, quote, Coca-Cola subsidizes food stamps. They want you to become fat and addicted to sugar.
But now in 2025, Ian had exactly the opposite take. He wrote, quote, A new war on soda has begun, targeting purchases made through Snap.
I don't believe it's the government's role to decide what people should or shouldn't eat. And then he posted the same image of Donald Trump drinking a Diet Coke that several other influencers also posted.
Now, for the record, not every major conservative figure on social media went along with this script after receiving some kind of solicitation. Riley Gaines, for example, posted, quote, they offered to pay me to post a big fat heck no.
And before long, the investigative journalist Nick Sartor exposed the whole operation. He posted documents that were sent out to a bunch of conservative influencers by a large PR firm, which included the talking points about Snap and Soda that they were supposed to mention.
He reported, quote, influencers were given a couple templates to use by the firm Influencible, with one of those templates specifically telling them to mention Trump's diet coke habit. This was done to invoke an emotional response from loyal Trump supporters, making them feel as if banning Soda from Snap would be anti-Trump.
Now, at no point was it disclosed by any of these people that they were repeating talking points that they had been handed, or did they at any point tell us what exactly they may have received in exchange for posting these messages. And that's not surprising.
I mean, this kind of tactic is nothing new for the soda industry and their affiliated middlemen. As the journalist Li Feng wrote in his substack this week, quote, When San Francisco proposed a tax on sweetened beverage in 2012, the industry paid protesters up to $13 per hour to attend anti-tax rallies.
The industry has also influenced the debate by funding groups that might otherwise support restrictions. Save the Children, which previously endorsed taxes on sweetened beverages to fight childhood obesity, abandoned this position while pursuing significant grants from major soda producers, including a $5 million contribution from the PepsiCo Foundation.
Close quote. So pretty clearly, something similar was going on here.
And indeed, after Sartor's reporting, some of these accounts posted apologies. Eric Doherty, for example, wrote, yeah, that was dumb of me.
Massive egg on my face. Now, that's a start, but it doesn't really address the magnitude of what happened here.
And to be clear about this, no one should have any problem with people getting paid to promote products or content. We have advertisers on the show.
I promote those products. We get paid for that.
Everyone understands that. Our marketing team has paid money to promote our content, including our films.
All of that is standard. I mean, that's just marketing, right? But it's a completely different matter to take money to push a policy proposal or a political opinion without disclosing that you were compensated in some way for it or that you were handed talking points from a PR firm as part of a broader effort to manipulate public opinion.
In this case, it's especially egregious because these conservative influencers took a position that stands in direct contrast to conservative principles, and in some cases, in direct contradiction to what these influencers have already said on the same subject. And that brings me to the actual issue itself and what the correct position is, which is that we should not allow food stamps to be used for soda or junk food.
Obviously. Okay, I should not have money taken out of my wallet with the express purpose of creating more obesity.
Okay, Mountain Dew, for example, has 46 grams of sugar in a can. 46 grams of sugar in 12 ounces of liquid.
That is more than the amount of added sugar that you should be consuming in an entire day, in one can. The idea that taxpayers should be subsidizing, that taxpayers should be forced to pay for those kinds of products so that other people can consume them is just asinine.
It's totally indefensible. RFK Jr.
and his Make America Healthy Again commission have made this point. Watch.

Under Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again plan, SNAP participants may soon be unable to buy things like candy and soda using food stamps. We shouldn't be spending 10% of the SNAP program on sugar drinks.
Supporters say it's a step forward for families on SNAP to make healthier choices. We see the food stamps program as not fulfilling its purpose of providing this more nutritious diet to enrollees.
Anti-hunger groups, on the other hand, say it's actually a step forward to eliminating SNAP altogether. It is a ruse.
Any sort of harm to SNAP, anything that makes the program more difficult or stigmatizes it, it's a cut because it's cutting off more people. Now, you may have noticed that the activist at the end of this clip has no argument for why we should allow food stamps to be used to buy candy and soda.
She just says that as a general principle, it's wrong to restrict food stamps for any reason. And this is a common trend that I noticed over the weekend as some conservatives took the side of the soda companies.
And one after another, they presented non sequiturs and non arguments that didn't remotely answer the question. And the question is, why should taxpayers have to pay other people to consume food and drinks that are grotesquely unhealthy and which have absolutely no nutritional value at all.
There are plenty of taxpayers who don't buy soda for themselves, for budgetary and health reasons. Why should they be forced to buy it for other people? Okay, if you're saying, I don't want to buy soda because I can't afford to buy that kind of stuff, and yet you have to pay for it so your neighbor can drink soda? Again, it's totally indefensible.
Former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis had this to say. She wrote, quote, efforts to restrict snap purchases take away the autonomy of the consumer to make their own decisions.
This is another example of government overreach. Now, this is totally backwards.
The autonomy of the consumer is not the issue here. People who use food stamps to buy soda and candy are using taxpayer money.
This conflating using tax money to buy soda with just buying soda in general, it's incredibly disingenuous. This is what everyone is doing on that side.
they're pretending that by banning people from using snap for soda we are banning people from

buying soda that's not what's happening on that side. They're pretending that by banning people from using Snap for soda,

we are banning people from buying soda. That's not what's happening.
What we're saying is, you can't take my money and buy soda. You can buy it with your own money, but you can't take mine.
If you are taking our money to buy food, you have already sacrificed your autonomy. Taking our money to buy junk food is a slap in our faces as taxpayers.

If you want autonomy at the grocery store, don't go shopping with other people's money. You cannot take my money and then claim autonomy for the same reason that my children cannot live in my house and eat my food and then refuse to do chores on the grounds that they're autonomous individuals.
Another argument I kept seeing was that poor people don't have access to healthy food or they can't afford it. And therefore they're reduced to buying soda and candy out of necessity.
I mean, this is like really what people are saying, but out of necessity, they have to buy, they have to buy, they have to buy Skittles, right? And Dr. Pepper out of necessity.
What I didn't hear from any of these people is one example, just one, one example of someone who has access to soda, but no access to healthier beverages like, say, I don't know, water. I would have been thrilled with just one example of this phenomenon.
Just one. Give me one specific example of a person, one person who's ever existed.
Well, not ever existed because if you go back 200 years, you might find people that have trouble finding healthy beverage options, I suppose, although not that they would have had soda then either. So give me one example of someone who has access to soda, but they're not able to access any kind of healthier beverage, which means that I guess they would, I'm trying to imagine what this would even entail.
I guess they would have to have a store. So they live in a community.
There's only one store in this community. And that store only has soda.
It doesn't have bottled water. It doesn't have milk.
It doesn't have anything. Only soda, and it's the only store reachable from where you live.
That doesn't exist. So this example was never provided because it doesn't exist.
It's complete nonsense.

In response to my post, someone named Corey Forrester, who says he's a columnist with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, provided his reasoning for why food stamps should cover soda and candy. Here's what he wrote.
He said, quote, quote, I can defend it. Poor people deserve a treat every now and again.
I thought I'd have to type more, but that was easy. Yes, according to columnist Corey Forrester, poor people deserve a treat every now and again.
So what he's saying is that taxpayers should be required to give poor people treats. He is literally talking about the poor as if they're dogs without any self-awareness whatsoever.
Actually, anyone who's ever been broke like I have immediately recognizes this kind of patronizing rhetoric for what it is. It's insulting and demeaning, even if it's delivered under the guise of compassion.
When I had very little money, there was not a single moment where I felt that I was entitled to someone else's money so that I could buy some cookies or a bottle of Coke. That's because I understand that I was not a child and the taxpayers are not my parents.
It's not the responsibility to treat me to a root beer float every once in a while. It's not how it works.
But the account Diamond and Silk apparently disagrees. Here's what that account wrote in response to one of my posts on this topic.
Quote, question, can anyone name a food slash soda sold on the grocery stores that doesn't have junk in it? Even organic isn't truly organic. So why are a few items being singled out as junk when junk slash chemicals slash pesticides, et cetera, are in foods that are purchased with food stamps? Is this about being healthy or being a dictator? Close quote.
Well, once again, yeah, if you're taking my money, yes, I get to be a dictator.

You're taking my money to go buy something, I get to be a dictator about what you're spending it on.

If you don't want that, once again, don't use my money.

Use your own.

And this is one of the arguments that you see a lot from the Soto Lobby.

They're basically saying that it's impossible to define junk food, and therefore we shouldn't restrict food stamps in any way. Now, of course, there is some truth to the idea that, as with any line-drawing exercise, there are going to be edge cases.
But at the same time, there are obviously plenty of foods that would not qualify as junk by any rational definition of the term. These people are acting like we can't ban soda from the SNAP program without also banning apples and carrots.
They're suggesting that if we ban Mountain Dew Code Red and Monster Energy Drinks, then we have no choice but to ban water as well. And therefore, they're saying that we shouldn't implement any regulations at all.
You cannot ban one type of food from SNAP without banning all of them. There is no difference between any type of food at all.
All food is the same, is what these people are actually arguing with a straight face. This is the kind of frankly brain-dead logic that has led to extraordinary amounts of waste and fraud in the food stamp program.
Because food stamp applicants aren't vetted carefully, it's extremely easy for people to qualify for food stamps, even if they don't really need them. That's why there's a big resale market for these food stamp cards.
And by the same token, there's a lot of people buying items with food stamps that they don't really need for themselves. The Economic Policy Innovation Center reports, citing government data that, quote, the food stamp program makes billions in improper payments each year.
These improper payments often include fraud, abuse, and waste, but are not always indicative of illegal activity. The USDA has reported more than $45.75 billion of improper payments between fiscal year 2003 and fiscal year 2022.
The reported improper payment rate was 11.5% in 2022. Yes, more than 10% of food stamp payments are improper, according to government records.
Of course, that's almost certainly a vast undercount of the actual amount of waste that's occurring. That shouldn't surprise us.
Any government program that involves handing out free money, meaning your money, is going to be abused to a comical degree. Any effort to curb that abuse should be welcomed.
Conservatives have understood this for a long time, but at the moment, for reasons that are obviously very self-serving, some conservatives are pretending otherwise. It's a useful reminder to remain skeptical of any kind of political pitch that you see online, even if it's from somebody that you usually trust.
It's also a good opportunity to highlight that on the left, this kind of thing happens every day. I mean, they're given their marching orders and they follow them no matter how absurd they might be.
Even after what happened this past week, this is still a pretty rare occurrence on the right. And when it does happen, it's called out immediately.
The moment that stops being true is the moment that the conservative movement will falter, just as the left is now faltering. And that's why now that this whole debacle has been exposed, it simply cannot be allowed to happen on our side ever again.
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Okay, we'll go to the AP for the update that we all saw coming a mile away. The Walt Disney Company's live-action controversy bedeviled Snow White opened in theaters with a sleepy $43 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates on Sunday.
With a budget above $250 million, Snow White had set out with higher ambitions, particularly since it returns Disney to its very origins. The 1937 original Snow White and Seven Doors was the company's first animated feature and paid for its Burbank studio lot.
But that's where it falls. So $43 million on a budget of $250 million.
And keep in mind, as you always have to keep in mind with these kinds of numbers,

that the production budget is not anywhere close to the full budget of the film.

There's also a marketing budget, which is often the same as the production budget, if not more.

Which means that the total amount that Disney probably spent on this Snow White adaptation

was probably closer to half a billion dollars, half a billion dollars for a movie, for a Snow White movie of all things. So let's just start with this.
There is no reason why Snow White needs to cost half a billion dollars. Let's just take the production budget and leave the marketing out of it.
There's no reason why Snow White needs to cost $250 million. You should be able to make Snow White for less than $100 million.
Much less, actually. Like, a lot less.

What are you spending the money on?

You didn't hire a big-name actress in the lead, right?

Nobody knows who the hell Rachel Zegler is.

She had essentially zero name recognition before this movie.

Now she has a lot of name recognition, but for all the wrong reasons.

People know her name because they know her as that annoying, loud-mouthed feminist actress who worked hard for two years to tank her own movie. So I don't think they spent a lot of money on her.
Gal Gadot is a bigger name, even though she's a really bad actress. I mean, a really bad actress.
But I don't think they, you know, it's not like they gave her $50 million. So where's the money going? The special effects aren't good.
You can tell that just from the preview. So you're not spending a lot of money on the actors.
The special effects are trash. Where's the money going? What are you spending it on? And you only need a handful of sets for this film.
You know, maybe they probably used a lot more than a handful, which is part of the problem here. But all you actually needed was the castle, right, where the evil queen lives, the seven dwarves' house, the woods, and what else? Maybe the mine where the dwarves are whistling while they work, but that's all you needed.
You could have made this thing for $20 million. You could have made it for $15 million.
People talk about how the movie industry is dying and movies don't make any money anymore, which is true, but when you're just lighting pallets of cash on fire, you're going to lose money. This movie could have easily been cheap enough that they would have earned back their production budget and then some, even with this mediocre opening weekend.
$43 million for an opening weekend is terrible. It's terrible for a widely released high-budget Disney film.
Terrible for that. But it should have been more than enough to make your money back.
Instead, it's nowhere close to it. And they definitely are not going to make their money back because, you know, part of making movies now is this profligate, obscene, gratuitous waste of money.
And then there's the movie itself, which by all accounts is terrible. It was destined to be terrible.
We've been through all the problems with it. This is an uber woke feminist girl boss re-imagining of one of the most cherished films and stories of all time.
There's no way that it wasn't going to be awful. There is no non-awful version of that.
It's like if you told me they were going to make an all-female remake of The Godfather with, I don't know, Melissa McCarthy in Marlon Brando's role, I don't need to see the movie. There's a 100% chance that it's terrible.
It's 100%. Total logical certainty that it's bad.
And it's the same kind of thing here. You have no respect for the source material.
You hate the original story. You're stripping it of the magic and romance and everything that made it connect with people for many decades.
So, of course, it's going to be terrible. But leaving aside the woke PC angle, because we've covered that, it's been talked about ad nauseum, even if they actually tried to respect and adhere to the original film, it would still be very bad.
And it would still probably underperform. And that's because these live action remakes are soulless and pointless in their conception.
There is no reason for them to exist. There is no reason for anyone to see them.
These remakes seem to think that they exist in some kind of alternate universe where the original films have been lost to the sands of time. And so they have to kind of do the film over again from memory because the original films are not accessible.
But that's not the case. You can go watch the original films right now.
They're just as accessible as the remakes. So why in the world would you have any desire to watch a shot-for-shot retelling of The Thing when you can just watch The Thing? and here's the not-so-secret secret about these live-action Disney remakes, and I say this as a parent, that kids don't even like them.
Now, we were not going to take our kids to see this feminist Snow White thing. That was not going to happen.
But our kids have seen a few of the live-action remakes. Kids are bored by them.
Kids prefer the original. Because, of course, they do.
The originals have captivated audiences for generations. The original Snow White was made 80 years ago.
One of the most popular movies ever made. And it's that way for a reason.
So these remakes are either they're going to be color by numbers, shot for shot retreads, or they're going to be mostly that along with a politically motivated ideological updating of some of the themes that liberal Hollywood finds problematic. And in either case, there is no actual storytelling going on here.

There's no art.

This is not art.

This is tracing.

You're tracing something.

It's like, imagine you go to an art museum and the Mona Lisa is in this art museum.

But in the next room, there's a tracing of the Mona Lisa. Who would want to see the tracing? Why would there be zero people in that room? There's no reason for any...
The actual thing is here. Why would I want to see what you traced of it? It's not even like your take on it or you were inspired by the Mona Lisa and you painted something else.
It's just your attempt to recreate the thing that I can just look at the thing. It's right there.
And even worse, it's actually worse than that. The analogy is worse because what it is, it's somebody tracing the Mona Lisa, but then making a couple of alterations to make it more appealing.
It's like if someone took the Mona Lisa and then said, well, you know, the enigmatic look on her face is upsetting to modern audiences. They want to see more positivity.
And so we're going to put a huge grin on her face instead. But okay, so now it's a tracing of the original,

except that you've totally misunderstood the point

of the thing that you're tracing

and ruined it at the same time.

So there's just no reason for it.

Okay, RFK Jr. is discussing

the possibility of banning cell phones

for kids in school.

And he was on Fox & Friends a couple days ago talking about it. Let's play that clip.
There are many other countries in the world that have banned cell phones in our schools. There's now 19 states with these restrictions.
I applaud Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia. And I asked him to take me out to one of the schools that was the first one to adopt his executive order, which was the Louisa County High School.
And that school is one of the top performing schools in the state. I think it is the top performing school in the state.
And I wanted to see, I wanted to talk to parents and students and the teachers about what they felt about the cell phone ban, and I was shocked by how supportive they were, particularly the students. I polled students in a bunch of classrooms and in the cafeteria, and only one of them said he didn't like the ban.
The other one said that it helped them increase their socialization, and it helped them do better homework. And the parents were very happy because the discipline of not having a cell phone at school also meant that it was easier to teach your kids not to use it when they were driving their car and to do their homework at home without referencing their cell phones all the time.
The phones also produce electromagnetic radiation, which has been shown to do neurological damage to kids when it's around them all day. Okay, so things kind of veer off to the left field towards the end there.
We're talking about the electromagnetic radiation causing neurological damage. I don't think there's any solid proof of that.
If there was, then why would we be talking about banning them just in schools? We should be having a much larger conversation if these things have electromagnetic radiation that are damaging our brains. Banning them just in school, why is that the discussion? And maybe that's true, but I'm not saying that.
To me, it seems quite possible that we've got these things to our faces all day long that are just shooting radiation directly into our brains. I don't know.
Maybe that's the case. I'm not sure that it's actually been proven.
And like I said, if it has, then we need to be having a much larger conversation about cell phones. In any case, we don't need to get into electromagnetic radiation to justify a cell phone ban in school.
Obviously, they should be banned. Clearly, there is no upside to having kids walking around school and sitting in class with smartphones.
It is insane that it's allowed anywhere. It's just crazy that it isn't already banned in every school in the

country. Why should it be banned? Well, again, for every reason, for all the reasons, any reason

you could, I mean, the phones are a huge distraction. That's the big one.
They make educating kids basically impossible. Teachers have to compete with the phones, which is just not possible to do.
Chronic smartphone use among children also clearly damages their, it damages their minds in ways unrelated to radiation. It makes them much more easily distracted, makes them more dependent on constant stimulation.
It shortens their attention spans. It exposes them to every kind of inappropriate image or video or piece of content in existence.
Cell phone use among children has been linked to depression and anxiety because of course it has. There's plenty of evidence that it impacts your memory, your ability to retain information, and on and on and on.
So there is only downside to letting kids have smartphones in school. There's no upside.
What's the upside? So why is it allowed anywhere? Why aren't they all banned in every school? And why hasn't that been the case for 15 years? This is not an issue of constitutional

rights. I hope I don't have to explain that kids don't have a constitutional right to bring a smartphone into a government school building.
So it's not a freedom thing. So why haven't they already been banned? Well, it mostly comes down to the fact that, You know, I'm sorry to say that parents are insane on the issue of cell phones and their kids.
Many parents are just crazy when it comes to this topic. I don't know how else to put it, but you've got parents giving their kids smartphones at the age of seven and letting them bring them to school.
You are a crazy person. That's an insane thing to do.
It can only harm your kid. It can only cause problems.
It cannot help in any way whatsoever. Why are you doing that? But yet, this is what plenty of parents do.
It's why it's an issue. Talk to any teacher.
They'll tell you this. You know, they're constantly having to compete with the phones.
It's not possible. It's already hard enough.
You got 30 kids in a classroom trying to hold their attention for 45 minutes while you teach them about geography or reading or whatever. But to do that when they've all got, they're all staring at their phones like it's, how do you do it? You can't do it.
So if there was 100% agreement among parents that cell phones should not be in school, then bans would already be in place everywhere. And they would be banned, and the bans would be enforced by the parents at home.
But that isn't happening. In fact, there was a poll several months ago that found that 68% of adults support a ban on cell phones in the classroom specifically, while 36% support a ban on cell phones in the school period.
So you got 36% that say cell phones should not be allowed to be brought into the school

And then you've got, but only 36% say that

And then 68% say, well, you shouldn't be allowed to have them in the classroom

But you can still have them at school

So let's break this down

68% support a ban on cell phones in the actual classroom

That's a wide majority

Great

But that means that 32% of adults don't support a ban on cell phones in the classroom. They actually think that kids should be allowed to have their cell phones on them in the classroom.

32% of adults think that.

Why?

Why?

You actually want that?

You want your kid to be sitting there with a cell phone in his hand while he's in class?

Why do you want that? How do you think that's helping your child?

What good do you think is being done here? But the bigger issue is that over 60% of adults don't want a full ban on smartphones in school. Over 60% think that kids should be able to bring phones into the school at least.
And again, it's just, it's nuts. I can't, I can't, I can't understand.
I can't understand, I can't understand buying your nine-year-old a cell phone in the first place and especially allowing him to, he's going to school. Hey, do you have your portable distraction device?

Make sure you have it with you when you go to school, junior. What? Now, I know I'm being a little bit intentionally obtuse here.
I think that most parents who allow this, it's not because they think it's good. it's because they just lack the ability to stand up to their kids on this topic.
And I think that what a lot of parents would say to justify it is they would say, well, I need to be able to get in touch with my kids. I need to be able to stay in contact with them.
Look, first of all, as I've said a million times, if that's really all you're concerned about is just that you want to be able to get in touch with your kid in case of an

emergency, you can buy him a cell phone that has no internet capability whatsoever, a dumb phone,

not a smartphone. They do sell those.
It's not hard to get them. You can order them on Amazon.

You can go to most cell phone stores. But those are not hard to find.
They're not expensive. And you can even program that this phone can only receive calls from certain numbers and can only call certain numbers.
So if all you're concerned about is just that your kid has the ability to reach you in case of emergency, then give him a dumb phone with no internet connection that can only call you or be called by you. And 911, you know, let's say.
So that clears up that concern. But that's not what parents are doing.
Like parents, if that's all that kids had in school, it wouldn't even be an issue. It would basically be a non-issue.
But no, parents are saying, I need to be able to get a hold of my child. So I'm going to give him a cell phone with full internet capabilities where he can access anything on the internet and call anybody, text anybody, receive calls from anybody.
Just so that I am able to contact my child, I need to make sure that my child has a device that gives him direct access to the whole world in school. So it doesn't make any sense.
And that argument just doesn't hold up. And so again, the real reason why parents do this is because they don't want their kid to feel left out.
God forbid. God forbid that all of your kid's friends turn into screen addicted zombies and your kid doesn't.
God forbid that your kid is left out because he's not a zombie. Wouldn't want that.
You know, when I was growing up, the classic thing we heard from our parents all the time, you know, remember the classic, classic thing was, well, just because your friends are jumping off a bridge doesn't mean you would too. And of course, that never really worked because, you know, assuming the bridge is not too high and there's water down below.
Actually, if, you know, as a, like, as a teenage boy, if all my friends are jumping off a bridge and that, like, I definitely would. That sounds like a lot of fun.
So that never worked. But the idea was pretty solid that like,

well, just because all your friends are doing something really harmful doesn't mean you should

do it too. But now it's like parents are saying the opposite.
The parents are saying to their

kids, well, you know, if all your friends are damaging their brains, you need to do the same.

You don't want to be left out as the only non-brain damaged person. It's crazy.
It's just crazy. Speaking of brain damaged people, here's Rosie O'Donnell, who I believe has fled the country to escape Donald Trump.
And here she is on British TV implying that the election was stolen. Listen.
You know, a lot of people did vote for him. Yes.
Do you accept their right to do that and their opinion of him? Well, I respect their right to do that. I question why the first time in American history a president has won every swing state and is also best friends and his largest donor was a man who owns and runs the internet.
So I would hope that that would be investigated and that we would see whether or not it was an anomaly or something else that happened on election night in America when Kamala Harris was filling up stadiums with people who supported her and Donald Trump was not able to do that. So it's curious to me and as an American and a believer in democracy I would hope that we would be able to look at all of the reasons why this happened in our country.
So there it is you knew that was coming. I mean we've already heard a little bit this kind of thing, but this is Rosie O'Donnell directly implying the election was stolen.
She has no evidence, obviously. She doesn't even have a theory of the case.
Like, there's no theory of the case here as to how that might have happened. even if Trump wanted to rig the election in his favor, how would he have done that? The entire system was against him.
The entire system was trying to put him in prison.

So all the people who would need to be involved in rigging system was against him. The entire system was trying to put him in prison.

So all the people who would need to be involved in rigging the process hate him. So how does that work? All Rosie could say is that Trump is friends with the guy who owns and runs the internet.
I have no idea what that means. I guess she imagines that the internet is like the matrix and there's a, what was it?

You know, there's like the guy in the white room.

So. means.
I guess she imagines that the internet is like the matrix. And there's a, what was it?

You know, there's like the guy in the white room surrounded by screens who just, who, what was that guy's name in the matrix? That, wasn't it the architect or something like that? Anyway, that, that's what she thinks. That's how she thinks the internet works.
And she thinks that Elon Musk is that guy. But really, is, you know what this is? This is the leftist claim of a stolen election is a great example of a fallacy called an argument from incredulity.
And this is a phrase that I think originally was coined by Richard Dawkins. I could be wrong, but it's a term often used by atheists in reference to theists.
It's falsely, incorrectly used, but the argument for incredulity is a fallacy where you argue that something can't be true simply because you can't imagine how it could be true. Something that contradicts your own personal experience must then be false.
And again, atheists say this about theists, but really I would argue that the term applies much more to them than it does to us. But that is what we're seeing here.
Rosie O'Donnell and a lot of leftists are like this. They can't personally imagine how it could possibly be that Trump won.
It contradicts their own experience so much because they live in a bubble where everybody around them, I mean, if you're Rosie O'Donnell, God forbid, not that I'd wish that fate on anybody, but if you're Rosie O'Donnell, you live in a world where you never even, you never physically come in contact with anyone who doesn't hate Donald Trump down to the very depths of their being. And so a lot of leftists, that's the world they live in.
And that's why they assume, they really assume that he'd probably lose all 50 states. And because to them, he's the most despised man in history, And yet he won.
He won bigly. And they just can't wrap their minds around it.
I want to tell you about my friends at PragerU, the conservative nonprofit fighting to educate the next generation and win back the culture. Conservatives won big in November, but the fight is far from over.
The left still controls our schools and is undermining faith, family, and freedom. One election is not going to fix that.
That's why PragerU is making real lasting change. They're reaching young people like never before with pro-American content, nearly 2 billion views a year with 65% of their audience under 35.
And now PragerU is getting into classrooms. Nine states have already partnered with them to bring PragerU videos and books into schools with more states on the way, but they can't do it alone.
Right now, every dollar you give is triple matched to help push back against radical indoctrination. Don't wait.
Go to PragerU.com slash DW and make your donation today, which will be triple matched. Together, we can keep the momentum going and stand strong for our values.
That's PragerU.com slash DW. you.
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Now let's get to our daily cancellation. For our daily cancellation today, I have to talk about something very personal.
I prefer not to air my dirty laundry in public, but in this case, the laundry must be aired. The laundry is too soiled and smelly to keep private.
In fact, the laundry smells like a goat. The laundry is a goat.
So let me back up for a moment. If you've listened to this show over the years, then you are aware of a certain plight that I have been dealing with in my personal life.
The plight is that I have a wife and now also children who see my glorious beard and they think, perhaps understandably, that I must be the biblical Noah and that our home is therefore Noah's ark. And so we must accumulate all of the animal species on earth and bring them into our home or onto our property.

And I've tried to explain to them very nicely many times that I am not actually Noah, and our home is not an ark, and God has already promised not to flood the earth a second time, so we don't need to adopt every type of animal that exists on the planet. All the animals will be fine living wherever they currently live.
They don't need to live with us. But this explanation has fallen on deaf ears as my wife and children have continued to lobby for

dogs. divine living wherever they currently live.
They don't need to live with us. But this explanation has fallen on deaf ears as my wife and children have continued to lobby for dogs and cats and rabbits and chickens and turtles and birds and gerbils and ponies and pigs and three-toed sloths and whatever the hell other creatures they feel we need to become roommates with for some reason.
And I have relented on some of those animals, but certainly not all. If it were not for me, if it were not for me standing in the gap saying, no, we would be one of those animal hoarder homes that you hear about on the news after the health department comes and finds the floors covered in 14 feet of animal feces and rats the size of poodles running around, and they have to drag the crazy guy out while he screams that the rats are his friends, please don't hurt them.
That would literally be us, if not for me. The point is, I have a family of animal lovers, and I'm not sure how this happened.
I am famously not much of an animal lover myself. And yet, my wife and kids are like Disney characters running through the forest, frolicking and dancing while the woodland creatures sing to them and a squirrel plays the tambourine or whatever.
And out of all the animals on earth, for some baffling reason, my wife has always had a particular fascination with goats. She has wanted a goat for many years.
I don't understand why anybody would want a goat. I don't see the appeal of goats unless they're diced into small pieces and served with a spicy curry sauce.
As living animals, goats are not very appealing. They're loud.
They smell. They have weird demon eyes.
There's a reason Satanists worship goats. Think about it.
But for years, my wife has lobbied for a goat. For years, I have said no.
I held the line. I was firm.
But the pressure campaign went on, unrelenting. And she continued with her goat propaganda.
She kept developing and honing her pro-goat talking points. She would constantly send me videos of baby goats.
She would say, oh, isn't this goat so cute? And I would say, no, the goat is a goat. That's what the goat is.
She would bring goat literature into the house. She would say, here, look at this goat brochure.
Did you know that if you have a goat, you never have to mow the lawn again? They eat all the grass. And I would say, no, thank you.
I prefer a lawnmower over a goat. Lawnmowers don't poop.
They aren't living things we have to take care of. You don't have to build a pen for a lawnmower.
You don't have to give it food. You don't have to take it to the vet.
So I had an answer for every argument. But then this past weekend, my wife played her final card.
She took it all the way. She called in a nuclear strike and she recruited our five-year-old daughter to come plead for the goat.
Now, my wife knows that I have a lot of trouble saying no to our five-year-old daughter. Usually, I'm very good at saying no most of the time.
I say no all the time to everybody. I am an expert at saying no.
I am a black belt in no. It is my greatest skill is saying no, but I'm also a dad, and she's my youngest daughter.
Every dad understands this. It's our Achilles heel.
I mean, it's just, it is how it is. It's why very often one of my sons will come and ask for something like a snack.
And they'll say, dad, can I have a snack? I'll say, no. Then one of my other sons will come, can I have a snack? And I'll say, no.
And then my five-year-old will come and ask for a snack. And I'll say, sure, sweetie, would you like candy, ice cream? How about candy and an ice cream? How about $50 also? Would you like, here you go.
Now it's not fair, but that's just the way it works. So my daughter came to me and she said, these were her exact words.
She said, daddy, all I've ever wanted in my whole life is a goat. Now, I know that's not true.
She has wanted way more things than just a goat, but it got to me, I have to admit. So my defenses had already been weakened after years of intense pressure from the pro-goat lobby in my house, and then my wife called in her closer in the form of our five-year-old.
And all of these factors together added up to a weight that I could no longer carry. I folded.
And so as you can see, here I am holding our new goat. You can see the joy radiating from my face.
The goat's name, for some reason, is Waffles. It doesn't even look like a Waffles.
Waffles have nothing to do with goats, except for the fact that they're both edible. But nobody looks at a goat and thinks about waffles.
So the name makes no sense. And it's a moot point anyway.
I will not call it waffles. I will not call anything waffles except for actual waffles.
I will only ever call this goat goat. The goat's name is goat.
I will not humanize the goat by addressing it by name, especially not that name. So now we have a goat.
Why do we have a goat? What are we going to do with this goat? What the hell purpose does it serve? These questions have not been answered. Maybe we'll become full-time goat farmers.
That appears to be my wife's great ambition in life. We have now had this goat for two days.
The goat has not made itself useful at all. At all.
It mostly just walks around in pees and poops. That's all it does.
And it screams. Now, I thought that goat screaming was like an internet meme.
No, they actually do scream. It sounds human.
It's like a weird primal, almost humanoid scream. Last night, I'm sitting on my porch, trying to smoke a cigar, read a book.
I kept hearing this damn loudmouth goat screaming in the darkness.

Very loud.

And they technically call it bleeding, but that's not a bleat.

I've heard bleats.

A bleat is much quieter, much more mellow, more dignified.

This is a shriek.

This is a screech, a yell.

As if there wasn't already enough noise in our house with six kids,

now I have a goat yelling at me too.

And it's rude. It's a very rude sound.
It's very presumptuous. This goat is a jerk.
I can tell it's a jerk. Now, when I talked to my wife about the noise pollution problem, she said that we need to be patient with waffles.
It's not Waffle's fault that he's making noise. I said, stop calling him waffles.
Just call him goat. Secondly, he's too loud.
And then she said that, well, the goat is calling for other goats. So the best way to solve the problem is to get a second goat.
And that way the goat will have a little goat friend. Goats are herd animals, she said.
And I said, yes, they obviously are herd animals. I've heard him a lot since he got here.
He doesn't shut up. And so anyway, now we're getting a second goat.
I actually, I bought the argument about how there will be less goat noise if we have more goats. I know that can't possibly be true, but I bought it.
And you know what's even worse? This is what's even worse. She sort of made me feel sorry for the goat.
She said the goat is lonely and calling for a friend. And I felt inside my dark cavernous soul a brief flicker of actual empathy for this damn stupid ugly goat.
I was actually mildly and momentarily concerned about the goat's mental health. See, this is my problem.
My wife knows something about me that nobody else on earth knows because it's a very closely guarded secret, which is that I do have emotions, sort of. And she made me feel like emotions about this freaking goat.
So we went from zero goats to two in the span of two days. The exponential growth rate of the goat population on our property is very troubling.
I've done the math. At this rate, we'll have 900 goats by the end of June.
A process has started, and now there is no stopping it. The virus is spreading.
It's like a zombie apocalypse, but with goats. I tried to stop it, but here we are.
In three years, I will have dropped out of podcasting, and you'll find me sitting in a field with a staff wearing a robe and sandals, watching over my flock of goats and sheep. I will be the first person in history to parlay a lucrative media job into a career as a

medieval shepherd. And that is why it's come to this.
I'm sorry to say that my wife, who I love

dearly, but who is also a shameless goat propagandist, is today canceled. That'll do it for the show today.
Thanks for

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