The Matt Walsh Show
Ep. 1506 - Why Derek Chauvin Deserves a New Trial (And Will Win It)
Thu, 19 Dec 2024
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Derek Chauvin's legal team is pushing for a new trial. I'll explain why, if he gets one, he'll likely be acquitted. Pornhub prepares to pull out of Florida after their age verification law goes into effect. The porn industry would rather boycott a whole state than simply verify the ages of its users. What does that tell you? And San Francisco's new fat acceptance czar explains why it's fatphobic to ask for a smaller slice of cake. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/4bEQDy6 Ep.1506 - - - DailyWire+: It’s your LAST CHANCE to take advantage of our best sale of the year! Get 50% off a new annual membership right now! https://dailywire.com/subscribe My hit documentary “Am I Racist?” is NOW AVAILABLE on DailyWire+! Head to https://amiracist.com to become a member today! Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj - - - Today's Sponsors: Birch Gold - Text "WALSH" to 989898, or go to https://birchgold.com/Walsh, for your no-cost, no-obligation, FREE information kit. Leaf Home - Save up to 35% off when you visit: https://www.leaffilter.com/Walsh Stop Box USA - Get firearm security redesigned and save with BOGO the StopBox Pro AND 10% OFF @StopBoxUSA with code MATTWALSH at https://stopboxusa.com/MATTWALSH #stopboxpod Tax Network USA - Seize control of your financial future! Call 1 (800) 958-1000 or visit https://www.TNUSA.com/Walsh - - - Socials: Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Rv1VeF Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3KZC3oA Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eBKjiA Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RQp4rs
Today on the Matt Wall Show, Derek Chauvin's legal team is pushing for a new trial. I'll explain why. If he gets one, he'll likely be acquitted. Pornhub prepares to pull out of Florida after their age verification law goes into effect. The porn industry would rather boycott a whole state than simply verify the ages of its users. What does that tell you?
And San Francisco's new fat acceptance czar explains why it's fatphobic to ask for a smaller slice of cake. All of that and more today on the Matt Wall Show. Increase tariffs on our trade partners, tax cuts and regulation changes. Learn why gold is a viable diversification tactic and is now more than ever.
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As that trial demonstrated, they can't even sell a BLM narrative to a jury full of liberal women and a guy wearing a COVID mask, by the way. People are more skeptical of racist area now across party lines. They understand when they're being manipulated. They care more about facts instead of whatever the corporate press is saying.
And that's all very bad news for Democrat prosecutors who are looking to collect a scalp. But This development is obviously small comfort to the many victims of these prosecutors who are still languishing away in prison after being convicted in show trials to appease the mob. And of course, maybe the single most prominent of those victims is Derek Chauvin. Chauvin was a
As you know, a police officer in Minneapolis who went to work in May of 2020 with the goal of protecting his community from violent felons, people like George Floyd. He's been sentenced to more than two decades in prison because Floyd, who had a recent history of overdoses, died in his custody while high on fatal levels of fentanyl. Now, the issue of causation was the single most important issue
of the trial. That is the question of whether Chauvin actually killed Floyd. If Chauvin's actions weren't a substantial factor, quote unquote, in Floyd's death, then under Minnesota law, he's innocent. And that pretty much sums up the entire case. That's the whole thing. But after the trial was over, the jury came out and publicly admitted that they didn't really care about this issue at all.
Causation just didn't really matter to them. They gave an interview with CNN where they explained that, in their view, Chauvin's actions didn't matter at all. Instead, they determined that Chauvin was guilty because of what he didn't do. They didn't convict him for murdering Floyd. They didn't convict him because his actions caused Floyd's death.
Instead, they convicted him for failing to care for George Floyd in some kind of unspecified way. Watch.
We got to the point, actually, that we realized for Charge 2, at some point, I think it was Jody, I'm pretty sure it was Jody, said, wait a minute, does the... intended act of harm have to be the death of George Floyd, or can it be him not providing the life support? And it was like, all of a sudden, light bulbs just went on for those people, I think, that were undecided or on the not guilty side.
Yeah. Go ahead. I want to hear from you, Jodi. Why is that? You brought that up? What did you? I brought that up because it's- Tell me what you brought up and why.
I brought up to the fact that this is not what he did, but more or less what he didn't do. He did not provide life-saving measures for George Floyd when he knew that the guy was in pain or needed medical attention.
Why do you think that was a light bulb?
Well, when we were in deliberations, and Jody did bring that up, and we did look through everything very, very carefully, what I thought about is something that was said during the trial, and that is Minneapolis Police Department has a model. And if I'm understanding it correctly, their model is in our custody, in our care. George Floyd was in their custody. He was never in their care.
And that, for me, it just hit hard. I don't feel like they ever cared for him.
It's an incredible piece of footage. First of all, there's no reason for a jury to be looking for a lightbulb moment which allows them to rationalize a guilty verdict unless they were looking for some pretext to convict Chauvin, which they obviously were. The jury shouldn't be trying to find a way to get a conviction.
They should be looking at whether the prosecution proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. And if they find themselves doubting the prosecution proved its case, They don't get to rewrite the law to help the prosecution out. But in this case, it's exactly what the jury did. They ultimately decided to hold Chauvin accountable for things he didn't do.
He didn't respond compassionately enough to George Floyd's overdose or live up to the police department's motto, I guess, even though none of those things, even if they were true, would make Chauvin a murderer.
The new rule, according to this jury, is that police officers have an obligation to perform CPR on violent suspects the moment they say they can't breathe, even though Floyd was claiming that he couldn't breathe just a few minutes earlier when he was resisting arrest and struggling with the officers in the back of a patrol car.
And if police officers don't administer CPR and someone dies, they will just assume that the officer killed them. We'll just make that leap of logic because, you know, why not? But just because the jury didn't consider the issue of causation to be relevant, that doesn't mean that it's not relevant. From a legal perspective on appeal, it's still very important.
And that's why a federal judge in Minnesota named Paul Magnuson, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, has just issued in the last week a ruling that could ultimately lead to a new trial in this case. This is a decision that's Worth looking at and dissecting at length because it highlights what a farce the trial of Derek Chauvin really was.
No matter how corrupt you think this trial was, it was actually a lot worse than you probably think. Now... The decision came in response to a motion filed by Chauvin's new lawyer in federal court. Chauvin's legal team is seeking to have his conviction overturned in part because his previous lawyer was ineffective to the point that he denied Chauvin his constitutional right to a fair trial.
There are other objections, too, including that many of the jurors said they felt threatened by the mob. So Chauvin obviously didn't get a fair trial because they thought that their lives were in danger if they didn't convict, which they probably were. Not that that excuses them. But there are two central claims in the motion arguing that Chauvin received ineffective assistance of counsel.
And the first is that Chauvin's lawyer during the trial failed to tell Chauvin that a doctor had determined that George Floyd died due to acute heart failure resulting in pulmonary edema and death.
There were indications that Floyd had a heart tumor that could have caused sudden cardiac death, and Chauvin was never told about that, nor was it brought up at trial, even though it seems like an extremely relevant fact. The second claim is that Chauvin's lawyer should have listened to the doctor and ordered tests on samples that were preserved from George Floyd's body. Those tests
could have determined whether Floyd died of a type of myocarditis or some other heart ailment. And now, several years later, the federal judge has finally allowed Chauvin's new legal team to conduct those tests. Depending on what they show, they could completely undermine the prosecution's argument that Chauvin caused the death of George Floyd.
And that, in turn, could lead to the conviction being thrown out and potentially a new trial if prosecutors decide to pursue it. Now, one of the reasons this is such an important ruling is that in Chauvin's trial, there was clear evidence that the prosecution lied about the concentration of fentanyl in George Floyd's system when he died.
And if this case is tried again, this is going to be a major issue. You might remember that in the initial autopsy report, The medical examiner determined that Floyd had lethal levels of fentanyl in his system. He said that there were no physical signs of strangulation and that it looked like a textbook overdose. But shortly afterwards, his assessment changed. Watch.
Medical examiner Dr. Andrew Baker testified that in his initial autopsy on George Floyd, he found no physical evidence of asphyxia and that coronary artery disease and hypertension contributed to his death. Baker later added Floyd's high level of fentanyl and other drugs in his system also were factors in his death, as was the police restraint.
Baker says his office received hundreds of complaints and threats as a result of these findings. But Baker denied he ever felt pressured to change his conclusions.
Now, the threats and political pressure we're supposed to conclude didn't influence the medical examiner. We're supposed to pretend that he somehow wasn't bothered by the mob that was threatening to destroy the entire city of Minneapolis when he changed his determination about the cause of George Floyd's death.
We're also supposed to think that Democrats in Minneapolis didn't exert any political pressure at all, but As the reporter Liz Carlin found, there were even there was even more pressure on the medical examiner than many people realize. Here's one internal memo from a prosecuting attorney in Minneapolis at the time.
And as you could see, according to the memo on May 26, 2020, a team of six FBI agents met with medical examiners, medical examiner Andrew Baker, to discuss his preliminary findings. And then after this meeting, he changed his conclusions. He decides that Floyd's death was a homicide caused by neck compression and that fentanyl wasn't the cause.
A new trial, if that's where this goes, would offer Chauvin's new defense team an opportunity to pick this claim apart. And this is an opportunity that Chauvin's first legal team missed completely for some reason during the first trial.
Outside of a few accounts on social media, people like Data Hazard, for example, no one's really talked about this, but it's an incredible oversight by the defense team and a remarkable act of corruption by the prosecution. And if anything completely blows apart the case against Derek Chauvin, it's this. So here's the moment in the trial that I'm talking about.
This is maybe the single most important testimony in the whole case. The prosecution is questioning a forensic toxicologist about the levels of fentanyl in Floyd's blood. And watch how that unfolds. Here it is.
So this is basically a post-mortem concentrations or samples that were hospital blood samples that were submitted for Mr. Floyd and we found fentanyl at 11 nanograms per milliliter and norefentanyl at 5.6 nanograms per milliliter. So this slide shows what the ratio of the parent drug to the metabolite is.
So 11 nanograms per ml divided by 5.6 to norfentanyl gave Mr. Floyd a ratio of norfentanyl of 1.96.
How does Mr. Floyd's ratio compare to that data set?
So Mr. Floyd's ratio is roughly just a little bit below the median ratio in DUI.
So it's a lots of process with the graphs and the numbers flying around. But the basic idea is that the expert is telling the jury that they collected postmortem blood samples from George Floyd, meaning the samples were taken after Floyd died. And they compared these samples to other overdose victims and DUI suspects after their deaths.
And Floyd's level of fentanyl were well below both of those groups at the post-mortem stage. And so the conclusion was that Floyd didn't overdose on fentanyl. The fundamental problem here is that Floyd's samples, according to the medical examiner's records, were not actually conducted post-mortem or after death. they're comparing Floyd's pre-death samples with other people's post-death samples.
So to restate, there were samples of blood collected from George Floyd before he died in the hospital, according to the government's own documents. He wasn't actually pronounced dead until an hour after this incident with Derek Chauvin when he was in the hospital, which a lot of people don't know that either. And while he was in the hospital... his blood was drawn.
And as the judge put it in his ruling this week, quote, the autopsy report shows that anti-mortem blood was collected. And the prosecutor's own statement from 2020 confirms that. Here's what they said at the time. This is from another internal memo, quote, Dr. Andrew Baker said that he had the final toxicology results from Mr. George Floyd's samples.
Those samples are from Mr. Floyd's hospital admission and were not acquired at autopsy. Baker said that these samples are better for determining actual blood toxicity than samples taken at autopsy. Samples taken at autopsy may have undergone post-mortem distribution. So here we have anti-mortem samples or pre-death samples of Floyd's blood.
And that means that they were taken before the effects of Floyd's death could impact the samples. And here's the autopsy report, which also confirms that Floyd's samples are anti-mortem. It reads, testing performed on anti-mortem blood specimens collected 52520 at 9 p.m., fentanyl 11 nanograms per millimeter. So this couldn't be any more clear.
These are pre-mortem samples, according to the prosecution's own records. Now, you might be asking, what's the big deal? I mean, who cares if Floyd's blood was collected before his death or after it? Aside from the fact that the fact that he was not dead until he got to the hospital also seems pretty significant. He didn't die there on the street, as pretty much everyone thinks happened. But...
Even aside from that, this is a pretty significant distinction because after death, fentanyl concentrations in the bodies of overdose victims are dramatically higher than they are before death. It's a difference of up to 900% within eight hours of death. And that's because when you die, blood stops pumping. So blood concentrations change and it drastically affects the way that these samples read.
So what the prosecution did in effect was compare Floyd's fentanyl levels before this massive spike with the fentanyl levels of overdose victims after this massive spike. Of course, Floyd's levels were lower in this case because it was before the spike. And based on this apples to oranges comparison, the prosecutor convinced the jury that Floyd's death could not have anything to do with fentanyl.
So in other words, when he arrived at the hospital, Floyd had a level of fentanyl in his blood that was consistent with an overdose victim when his pre-mortem blood was tested. In fact, Floyd's levels of fentanyl were more than two times the average lethal level that you see in fentanyl overdoses. But prosecution hid this fact from the jury by presenting these blood samples as post-mortem.
They compared Floyd's number with other people who had been dead for several hours. That's the game they played and largely how they got a conviction. Now, it's impossible to overstate the significance of this deception. This was the crux of the prosecution's entire argument. I mean, they hit it again and again, including during closing arguments. Watch.
Let's talk about what was in the system and the toxicology report. And you heard from Dr. Eisen Schmid, right? And what he testified was that George Floyd's fentanyl to norfentanyl ratio, that metabolite norfentanyl, that was well below the ratio of people who die from a fentanyl overdose. It was even below the median. And George Floyd's methamphetamine level
That was 94% lower than the population for driving under the influence. And Dr. Rich and Dr. Smock, they've treated patients who are under the influence of both fentanyl and methamphetamine, and they testified these drugs did not kill George Floyd. It didn't. We know that he had a tolerance because he used drugs in the past.
So again, he's showing the chart with false information, presenting the numbers as post-mortem. And then at the end of that clip, the prosecutor claims that Floyd has built up a tolerance to fentanyl, implying that because he had overdosed before, his body could handle a high concentration of the drug. But that was never proven at trial either.
We know that George Floyd had used fentanyl several times before, even overdosed just months before his death, resulting in his hospitalization. But that's very different from saying that Floyd was somehow... immune to the fatal effects of a fentanyl overdose, which was never demonstrated at trial because it's impossible, it's absurd.
The other major problem here is that the prosecution's witness testified that Floyd died on the street, which seems incompatible with the idea that pre-death blood samples were later collected in the hospital. Watch.
You're seeing here fatal injury to the brain from a lack of oxygen.
Minutes later, still pinned to the ground by Chauvin.
That's the moment the life goes out of his body.
So this whole trial was full of incidents like this. There was the fact that Floyd's suspected drug dealer wasn't prosecuted, which allowed him to take the fifth and avoid testifying about the drugs in Floyd's possession. There was the prosecuting attorney who was allegedly threatened with professional consequences for refusing to add charges against Chauvin.
There was testimony from Andrew Baker who admitted under cross-examination that Chauvin's knee did not cut off Floyd's airway. There was the statement from the judge in the case saying every case is about racial justice, you may remember.
There was the fact that the prosecution tried to hide the tape of George Floyd saying, I can't breathe when he was still in the squad car and Chauvin's knee was nowhere near his neck. In 2024, there would be a chance that a jury would see through all of this corruption and vote to acquit Derek Chauvin. But in 2021, Chauvin was never going to receive a fair trial.
The threat of violence by BLM was too real. Propaganda from corporate media was still believable to millions of Americans, in part because all social media was censored. And Democrats had far too much political power. So none of that is true anymore. That's why Daniel Penny was just acquitted.
And if you reverse it, and if Daniel Penny had his trial back in 2020 or 2021, the result probably would have been very different. It's also why if Derek Chauvin is granted the new trial that he clearly deserves, I think he will be acquitted too. Now let's get to our five headlines. You're busy enough this season without having to get up on a ladder to clean out your gutters.
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It's always fun doing a talk show when you can't talk. We'll start with this. Gizmodo has this story. At the dawn of the new year, Pornhub will leave Florida thanks to a harsh new age verification law that takes effect on January 1st. The porn giant will no longer do business in the Sunshine State.
The law mirrors similar laws passed in other Republican-led states where Pornhub has stopped doing business. Users in Florida visiting Pornhub have been treated to a fun pop-up in recent days, saying, you will lose access to Pornhub in 14 days. It reads the window that dominates the screen on the site when it's accessed from an IP address in Florida.
Did you know that your government wants you to give your driver's license before you can access Pornhub? As crazy as it sounds, it's true. You'll be required to prove you're 18 years or older, such as by uploading your government ID for every adult content website you'd like to access. That's what the little warning thing says on the PornEd site.
As it repeatedly promised, the GOP is fighting pornography. In many states, it's winning. In Oklahoma, Kentucky, Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Arkansas, Utah, Mississippi, Virginia, Louisiana, a citizen who wants to access an adult website has to prove they're 18 years old by showing a government ID. Florida's law is HB3. The law is broad.
It requires a website that provides material that is harmful to minors to provide a means of anonymous age verification to its minors. The Free Speech Coalition, a trade group that represents pornography websites, has been fighting these laws in court. Quote, these laws create a substantial burden on adults who want to access legal sites without fear of surveillance.
Despite the claims of the proponents, HB3 is not the same as showing an ID at a liquor store. It is invasive and carries significant risk to privacy. The parent company of Pornhub has said that, quoting now, the best solution to make the internet safer, preserve user privacy, and prevent children from accessing adult content is performing age verification at the source on the device.
So, and they also, ILO is the name of the parent company, I guess, A-Y-L-O. And they say that there's, you know, safety concerns and privacy concerns with requiring users to give an ID, to show an ID. So a few things. First of all, congratulations to Florida. This just makes Florida an even better place to live, I imagine.
And second, I love this claim that a law requiring users to provide identification is somehow a substantial burden. That's what they're saying. That's what the Free Speech Coalition so-called is saying. It's a substantial burden to have to provide an ID.
Well, let me just say, if you live such a life that having to provide your driver's license to a porn site is a substantial burden, if you are substantially burdened by that, then it tells me something about you. That's a reflection of you, not the law. And this is... One of the two scenarios where the left tells us that having to show an ID is some great, terrible, unreasonable burden.
It's like porn, and then of course the other one is voting. Those are the two. You have to show ID to do everything else in life, in adult life anyway, right? You have to basically carry your ID around with you everywhere. You have to be ready and able to show it every single time you sit in the driver's seat of a car. Everything requires ID.
But if you have to show it to vote or to watch porn, suddenly it's oppressive. It's not oppressive in any of those other scenarios, right? But in those two specifically, it is. It's an enormous burden all of a sudden. Well, I just don't take those crocodile tears very seriously. Because if you would rather expose children to pornography...
than be slightly inconvenienced while accessing pornography, then I just really don't care about your opinion that much. You're not a serious person, or a good person, or even a vaguely decent person. Because when it comes to any law, there are always going to be trade-offs. There will always be competing interests when it comes to any law, right?
And in this case, you have, on one hand, the need to protect children from extremely harmful content that will damage them emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally. On the other hand, you have the desire of porn users to access porn quickly without any inconveniences. So those are the two competing interests in this case. Those are the two forces that are pulling against each other.
And it's really not much of a competition, I have to say. It's a trade-off that I'm perfectly willing to make. Any decent person would be. And you notice the other thing about this that's pretty wild, which is that Pornhub says that it puts users at risk, it puts their privacy at risk if they have to give their ID to access the site. So this is the argument that Pornhub is making.
They're saying it's not just a matter of inconvenience, it's also a risk because you're giving your ID. Well, wait a minute, Pornhub. Why would that put anyone at risk? They're giving their IDs to you, aren't they? Isn't that what's happening? They're giving their IDs to you as the website? Are you saying that you're not capable of protecting the privacy of your own users?
You're a multi-billion dollar company, and yet you can't figure out how to keep that information private. It's only a risk. It's only an invasion of privacy if you know, if you somehow cannot keep your users' information private.
So if you're admitting that, if you would rather shut down access entirely in a state instead of simply ensuring that you protect the privacy of your users and handle their private information with care and discretion, well then again, that also tells me something about this company. So don't get me wrong. I'm perfectly happy for Pornhub to shut down entirely in a state or in every state.
But this is a pretty revealing statement. It's really it's like a confession because their argument is that you can't trust them with your ID. You know, that's the argument. Again, imagine that anyone else, any other, let's say, adult-oriented business used an argument like this.
Imagine that the alcohol industry and liquor stores started arguing that, well, you shouldn't have to show an ID to... Imagine a liquor store saying that. No, you shouldn't have to show me your ID because then you're putting your privacy at risk. I was like, well, that's the liquor store saying that that's them confessing to something. Why should that put privacy at risk?
Unless you are saying that you are going to be careless with that information or use it in some nefarious way. And the thing is, I agree, actually. I certainly wouldn't trust Pornhub with my ID. I wouldn't trust them. So they're basically saying you can't trust them. And this is one area where I agree with them. I would not want Pornhub to have my ID.
But that's an argument for just not patronizing Pornhub at all. It's not an argument for not having systems in place to protect kids. And by the way, one other thing. is I actually agree with them on another point, sort of, partially, in that they say that there should be age verification on the device. There should be age verification on the phones, on the computers, and so on.
Now, they're only saying that. They don't actually want age verification on anything, let's be clear. They don't want age verification on the phones. They don't want it on anything because they want kids to access this stuff. They want everyone to access it because it's more money for them. More clicks, more money. And so they don't care. They don't care if it's adults, kids. They don't care.
But they're just deflecting. They're punting the ball. And they're saying, no, don't make us do it. Make the cell phone companies and all that do it. But yeah, there should be age verification on the device too. There should be protections put on devices, on computers. Let's do all of that. Okay, that's the answer.
That every porn site should be required to verify ages and every cell phone company should be required to put protections in place on the device. to protect children from this stuff. I mean, this should be, it's not an either or proposition. It's all of that should be happening. We should, as a society, be treating this as a, this is a crisis level event. That's how we should be treating it.
When you've got millions of children who are accessing the kind of content that even Even up to 20 years ago, the vast majority of humans, including adults, would never see or have access to. Of course, the people that want to be dismissive of the harmful effects of pornography will always say, oh, well, there was a Playboy magazine existed for decades before internet porn.
There have been strip clubs and all the rest of it. First of all, I think it should be needless to say something like Playboy magazine is is tame in comparison to stuff that's all over the internet. That's the first thing. But the second thing is the accessibility of this stuff. I mean, now it's everywhere. It's on every device. Anyone can access it. And it wasn't like that in the past.
I mean, they may have had strip clubs in the past, but the vast majority of people weren't going to a strip club. And kids were not going to strip clubs. And the vast majority of people didn't have Playboy magazine. And kids, the vast majority of them, did not have access to Playboy magazine. Now everyone has access to it. And so that's the crisis.
Having a whole generation, multiple generations of kids now who... are growing up, going through their formative years while on a steady diet of the most perverse filth imaginable and not imaginable, we can't even begin to understand the long-term effects of that. But we do know it's going to be really bad. It already is really bad.
And so we need to be pulling every lever to stop this and to protect these kids. And that should be the number one priority. Yesterday, we told you about San Francisco's new fat acceptance czar. I think that was her official title.
This is a woman that has been hired by the city to consult with them on how to better promote obesity and heart disease, promote those things, not fight them or combat them or treat them, but promote them. They want to promote it. They want to celebrate it. And so over the last day or two, more videos of this woman, Virgie Tover is her name, have surfaced.
Videos of this now tax-funded fat consultant. And I just want to play a couple of these for you. And we'll start with this. This is our friend Virgie. tax-funded fat consultant in San Francisco now, before she got the gig, I believe, declaring that, quote, nobody has to be healthy, which is an interesting statement. Let's listen.
Where do you see the intersection really? What is your definition of health?
Mm, yeah, that's really complicated, right? I think I want to sort of, I want to talk about that question, but I want to start by saying that, you know, no one has to be healthy. No, right? Like, I mean, it's like, no, like there is no governing body that's like out there putting, you know what I mean?
It's like, no one owes anybody that in either the traditional sense of the word or any other more innovative or, you know, more politicized, maybe even version of that word. So I think it's important to say, and I want to back up and bring in intersectionality and say, look at the disabled community.
I think people with disabilities and activists within that space have consistently been saying, I'm never going to be your notion of healthy. That doesn't mean I don't get to be a full human. You get to treat me some kind of way. And so I think that I love taking that principle within disability rights, to fat activism and to understandings of fatness. So I want to start there, right?
Like no matter what size you are, you don't owe anybody else your health. But I mean, for me, like in an ideal world where, like in an ideal world, there wouldn't be health-based gatekeeping.
So she says that nobody has to be healthy. There's no governing body forcing you to be healthy. Well, first of all, RFK Jr. might have something to say about that very soon. But that aside, yes, you are correct that you don't have to be healthy. You have the right to be unhealthy, I suppose, if you want to put it that way.
You have the right legally to become fat and diseased and die before you turn 40. You don't have the moral right, right? Because a moral right, you know, because you in fact have a moral obligation to... be healthy and to take care of your body, take care of your health. That's a moral obligation that you have.
So you actually don't have the moral right to abuse yourself to the extent that you become morbidly obese. But you do have the legal right. And our legal rights and our moral, you know, you have legal rights and moral obligations and sometimes those things line up and sometimes they don't. But Sure, legally, like no one can legally require you to not be fat. And I think that even with RFK Jr.
coming in, it would be very hard to come up with a law. Even I, even in a scenario where I ascend to my throne and become a dictator of the I'm not even sure that I would outlaw obesity. I would outlaw a lot of things, don't get me wrong, but I don't know that I would outlaw obesity just because the enforcement mechanism just seems like a pain and it's not worth my time.
So yeah, you have the legal right to be fat and to die. But here we see the very common confusion, common in modern culture, this common confusion between what we have the right to do and what is right to do. And for a lot of people, especially people on the left, especially somebody like this, they just very much struggle. They conflate those things.
They don't understand that it's like when, and this is why they'll often respond, when you make a moral statement And you say, you should be healthy. You should take care of your health. You should take care of your body. And when you say that, they'll respond by saying, well, I don't have to. I don't have to do that. You can't tell me what to do.
It's like, well, you don't have to, but you should. We're talking about what you should do, what is right to do, not what you have the right to do. And there's the conflation between those things. The number of people who struggle to understand that basic distinction is pretty mind boggling.
Here's another video from this woman and here she is explaining, we're not gonna play the whole thing because it goes on at length, but it is all about cake and why it's oppressive to make people feel bad about the amount of cake that they eat. Listen.
CRFI. If you're like many women, you've been to a birthday party or a small office gathering, an event that's meant to bring people together. There's swinging tunes, some adult beverages, and good convo. And then it comes time to cut the cake and someone decides to ruin everything.
Oh my God, that slice is huge. That slice is bigger than Beyonce's paycheck.
Can you cut me half of half of that? A cake-related fatphobic incident or CRFI is that moment when it's time to eat delicious cake and it's interrupted by a moralizing impulse.
Inevitably, there's always someone at the party who has to declare publicly that their slice is too large and that the person who's cutting the cake, almost invariably a woman, must do some disproportionate amount of labor in order to accommodate their need to feel superior. Let's take a look. Can you do a little bit?
Cake-related fatphobic incident is what she just said, and not as a joke. That was not meant to be a joke. I'm not sure I've ever seen a video that better illustrates one, well, really multiple important points about these woke activists. And Maybe first and foremost, this is why wokeness is dying. This right here.
I mean, not this specific video about cake, but this kind of thing, this utterly inane bull. It's so ridiculous. It's so just vapid and preposterous that it's not sustainable. I mean, it collapses out of exhaustion. A lot of the people in that video probably collapsed out of exhaustion after walking up the steps. And wokeness is kind of like that. It is also collapsing out of exhaustion.
And I was talking about this recently with, I think it was with Adam Carolla on his show, that wokeness reached a point, it crossed a threshold, and beyond that threshold Once it crossed it, you could debate exactly when that moment was, but once it was crossed, its end, its demise became inevitable because the suspension of disbelief was just too much.
And what I mean is that wokeness has always relied not on convincing people of its claims, because almost nobody was convinced about any of this stuff. Whether it's the racial stuff, the fat phobia, gender ideology, of course, big one. Very few people were ever convinced of the claims of left-wing activists.
So people weren't convinced, they weren't persuaded, but rather the left was cajoling people into pretending that they were convinced. Wokeness thrived even though 99% of the country never believed it. Most of them pretended to.
But eventually the burden of pretending became too great because the things that they were being forced to pretend, the beliefs that they were being told they have to falsely adopt, were just too outlandish. It was too out there. It was too far-fetched. It was too embarrassing and too outrageous and too insane.
You know, it was one thing when the left, we used to call it just political correctness before it became wokeness. It was just, you know, and political correctness. We lived in a politically correct culture for decades. And that was the kind of thing that most people would just go along with, even if they thought it was a little bit silly. But they kept pushing and they kept pushing.
And then it became something that it's just too... Even someone who desires to be sort of polite and not to rock the boat and someone who's more kind of wired to be non-confrontational, which is most people. Those are the people who were cajoled into going along with wokeness. But it only works up to a point.
And you can get to a point where the average person, what you're trying to force them to pretend they believe or to nod along with and smile and nod and sort of accept, it's just too much. It's too outrageous. And this is a good example of that. This kind of thing where it's fatphobic. First of all, the idea of fatphobia, just the term itself is too much for most people. It's ridiculous.
And everything else there too. And the other thing you see in that video is that for most woke activists, Their whole worldview is really structured around their own personal pet peeves and hangups and anxieties. So in this case, you've got a bunch of women who feel embarrassed when another woman eats less cake than they do. And so that's what this is really all about.
That when they're at a work function and someone brings cake to the break room or they're at a party, And when they see a woman who's in good shape, say, oh, I'll take a smaller piece. These other women who are fat feel, that makes them feel embarrassed. And because they know they're about to chow down on the whole dance.
In fact, they wanted, they were going to ask for a bigger piece than what they were being served. And now they've constructed a whole philosophy, really, around condemning that skinny woman who wanted less cake. It's like their whole worldview, their whole personal philosophy is really just structured around that woman and condemning her and all of that. That's basically what wokeness is.
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A few years ago, a pastor in Colorado named Will Duffy came up with a project called the Final Experiment, which is a pretty bald name for an experiment, especially since the Final Experiment wasn't trying to break any new ground in science or anything like that. Instead, the idea of the Final Experiment was to debunk once and for all the idea that the Earth is flat.
Now, you think that if there was a final experiment that proved that fact, it already happened like 500 years ago, but some people in the modern world are somehow still not convinced, which brought us to this experiment.
Will Duffy planned to talk to a bunch of flat earthers, earn their trust, and ultimately fly them out 9,000 miles to Antarctica on a $40,000 trip that would cure them of their delusions. This might seem like a complete waste of time, sort of like trying to convince the local vagrant that the voices in his head aren't real.
But as it turns out, there's still an active community of flat earthers on the internet. And many of them are surprisingly not crazy. I mean, the flat earth stuff is crazy. But aside from that, aside from believing the earth is flat, they can often be relatively reasonable people.
Now, sure, they'll look at satellite photos of the Earth and constellations and boats that circumnavigate the globe, and they'll come up with bizarre, incoherent explanations for all of it. But otherwise, aside from that, they often seem like relatively high-functioning people. So...
For several reasons, Duffy has been having conversations with flat earthers to, for several years rather, having these conversations to figure out why they don't believe the official consensus. He's been posting a lot of these conversations online. This is a clip from one of those recent conversations. Watch.
From a flat earth point of view, I've always been mindful that the government isn't always truthful and that's been with me for years. When I was age 20 I read a book by Vance Packard called Hidden Persuaders which opened my eyes to the invisible forces that are controlling how we think and
Now, if you watch enough of these interviews, you'll realize that this is the common thread that unites a lot of flat earthers. They become skeptical of everything they're told by experts and the government, which at face value, that part of it is an understandable perspective.
But in their case, that skepticism metastasizes until they're questioning some of the most basic and obvious and observable facts of reality. Their imagination kind of runs wild and They come up with new arguments that supposedly disprove the idea that the earth is a sphere. Almost as if they're not really convinced of what they're saying, but they want to hear someone prove them wrong.
And in this particular conversation, the flat earther, his name is Steve, goes on for about an hour with various arguments that in his mind prove the earth is flat. Now, of course, because flat eartherism is incoherent, the arguments he presents are also incoherent. At one point, he displayed ring doorbell footage that's supposedly from the same location at the same time of day.
And in the photos, there's significantly different lighting. And apparently this ring doorbell footage is proof that we're not revolving around the sun in any kind of predictable orbit. Then he pulls up random stock images from a photography website to make a similar point, but appears to confuse the sun with the moon, which is kind of an important distinction. So it's all very hard to follow.
And you also notice how this is the one thing about flat earthers and anyone who ascribes to... subscribes to the delusional conspiracy theories. And not everything that's called a conspiracy theory is delusional. Flat eartherism is delusional. And there is that category of conspiracy theorists who are actually delusional.
And you notice this about this category, that they tend to be a bit selective in their skepticism. So in this case, they'll dismiss any video or photograph taken from a satellite or a spacecraft or the space station. Because you can look at any of those images and you can see, well, clearly it's a globe. But they'll dismiss that and they'll say, well, you can't trust that.
But then they'll build a whole case around footage from a ring doorbell camera. So trust no one except... Ring doorbell cameras. Photos from the space station are not reliable. Images from a ring doorbell camera are. How do you make sense of that? Well, that's just the way they look at it.
But eventually, Steve finds his footing, and he delivers probably his best argument in favor of the idea that the Earth is flat. And while this argument still makes no sense whatsoever, and in fact is an affront to common sense and the concept of science and human reason itself, it's at least somewhat entertaining. So we'll play part of it. Watch.
You know, from the top of North America, a couple of thousand miles, it changes two hours, another couple of thousand miles, another two hours. Then you get down to Yeshua and then you get onto Drake's passage in the ship and it leaps 16 hours. over across 500 miles. I think 600 miles maximum between Yeshua and when you get to Antarctica, supposed continent of Antarctica. So it's a mind game.
It's a mind F if you don't, you know, they get on the boat and so they'll be looking up at the sun and they'll look at their clock and they go, my goodness me, what a magical place, you know, and it's not magical at all. It's basic common sense. I'm asking
a question of the powers that be, please really explain to me why you have made the time zones go two hours, two hours every few thousand miles, get down to Yeshua, then it's a 16 hour. time zone difference. What's that all about? Why?
Now, one thing that Steve doesn't clarify in his explanation is that time zones don't change when you go from north to south. They change when you go west to east or vice versa. And that's a key point because it helps demonstrate that the time zones or rather the different lighting conditions in different time zones actually provide evidence that the Earth is spherical.
I mean, if you needed evidence, additional evidence, there you go. It doesn't suggest it's flat. It actually suggests the opposite. It's sunny in Manhattan when it's dark in Japan because the sun is on one side of the sphere and not the other. Will Duffy understood that the best way to convince flat earthers that they're wrong is not really to engage them in any kind of rational discourse.
Instead, you have to use a physical demonstration that these people can see with their own eyes. You have to demonstrate to them in person that they're very confused about time zones and the positioning of the sun and so on. You have to prove to them that their understanding of all these concepts is fatally flawed. So to that end,
Duffy offered some prominent Flat Earthers the opportunity to go to Antarctica to witness the 24-hour sun or the midnight sun. As Upworthy reported yesterday, quote, in a Flat Earth model, Antarctica is usually depicted as an ice wall that encircles the rest of the planet. Sometimes it's shown as its own distinct continent.
However, by visiting Antarctica in the summer, the team would be able to see Antarctica's famous 24-hour sun or midnight sun up close and personal. Flat earthers crucially do not typically believe that a 24-hour sun is possible, In their models, the sun would rise and set in Antarctica the same way it does everywhere else.
The existence of midnight sun would, if not outright prove, at least heavily suggest, the Earth is a tilted sphere. The other benefit of going to Antarctica is that it would hopefully demonstrate that the Earth is not, in fact, entirely surrounded by an ice wall which separates the Earth from the rest of the universe. This was the proposal that Duffy came up with.
He covered the expenses of these flat earthers to go and see the 24-hour sun in Antarctica. And to their credit, the flat earthers took Will Duffy up on his offer. The whole trip was streamed online via Starlink. And in the end, as expected, the sun was up for 24 hours, providing fairly convincing evidence that the earth is not flat.
Now, I don't see why it would necessarily be any more convincing than the 9 million other pieces of incontrovertible evidence, but maybe exhibit 9 million in one would somehow break through for people who ignored the first 9 million. What wasn't expected, at least not by everyone, is how the Flat Earthers would respond. And in many cases, they didn't storm off in anger or disbelief.
Instead, for the most part, they processed what they'd seen. relatively reasonable about it. Here's one of those flat earthers, a man named Jaron Campanella on the trip to Antarctica. This is a video that's gone viral the last couple of days. And this guy is apparently pretty big in the flat earth community, I guess. But here he is after having his whole worldview crumbled. Here he is.
Now, turn it over to the flat earthers. Who would like to go first? So obviously you all know Jaron Campanella of Jaronism, one of the most popular Flat Earth YouTube channels. All right, guys.
Sometimes you are wrong in life. And I thought that there was no 24-hour sun. In fact, I was pretty sure of it. But I respect Will Duffy for being a stand-up guy, at least in the way that he kept saying it was true. I kept saying it wasn't. He said, do you want to go? I'll take you. And he brought me here. And it's a fact. The sun does circle you in the south. So what does that mean?
You guys are going to have to figure that out yourself. Don't listen to my beliefs or my opinion. It shouldn't matter to you. But at least you should be able to accept... uh that the sun does exactly what these guys said as far as circles the southern continent so that's about it i i realized that um I'll be called a shill for just saying that. And you know what?
If you're a shill for being honest, so be it. I honestly believe there was no 24 hour sun. I honestly now believe there is. It seems like the moon does circle here as well. So you start thinking about that as well. It doesn't mean that a map is over. Flat Earth is over. Maybe somebody's got the answer. I don't have that answer right now. So I just want to say thanks again. Appreciate it.
So at the end, he leaves open the possibility that maybe the flat earth theory can somehow be validated. But for the most part, he's polite and rational as he processes the whole thing. He's been confronted with evidence that everything he's been saying is wrong. He built his whole worldview, I mean, his literal worldview around a falsehood and handles it about as well as you could hope.
At the same time, not everyone on the trip had the same reaction. For example, one flat earther named Austin Witsit was a little hesitant to draw any conclusion from the trip. According to The Sun, the publication of The Sun, he said, quote, I don't think it falsifies flat earth. I don't think it proves a globe. I think it's a singular data point.
He added, quote, I've seen a physical demonstration that could show this working, but I do think that some of the data we're going to have from this trip will help to clarify if that is what's actually happening. It's a bit like jumping off of a building and then saying you still need more data to prove that gravity exists. Obviously, this person is never going to be convinced of anything.
And somehow to this day, there are a decent number of people like him out there. And on one level, You know, that's pretty surprising. It's kind of mind boggling that flat earthers exist in a world with satellites and air travel. I mean, it's impressive that people could be so wrong about something that's so readily observable to everybody on the planet.
This is one of the ironies, right, of the information age, that there are almost certainly more flat earthers in the world today than there were 100 years ago, even though we have immediate access to more information than a person 100 years ago would have encountered in a lifetime, in 100 lifetimes.
At the same time, as Flat Earther Steve said earlier, there's a possible explanation for this phenomenon, which is that Americans and people all over the world have no trust in our institutions anymore, which is not an excuse for Flat Eartherism, which is a, you know, Flat Eartherism is objectively very extremely stupid, but it does kind of put it into context.
You know, when you lie to people about pretty much everything, then you get people who start to question. They start questioning everything. And that can extend down to the basic fundamental facts of the universe. Now, the good news is that as the final experiment demonstrates, even some people who are this confused and deluded are capable at some level of recognizing the error of their ways.
They're capable of going out and looking at the world around them and challenging their prior assumptions in a respectful and dignified manner. The bad news is that you know, if the Earth isn't flat, which I guess the jury's still out for some people.
And we still have no explanation for why all the water doesn't fly off the planet and go into space, you know, just like water flies off clothes when they're spinning in the dryer. That's a mystery that simply can't be solved or explained by modern science, at least perhaps until some brave and enterprising pastor runs another final experiment someday. We'll have to wait and see.
But until that day comes, We have no choice but to stay grounded in reality instead of indulging in fantasy and pseudoscience. And that is why the few remaining flat earthers and everyone else who insists on denying basic observable reality are all today canceled. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. If I can talk. Godspeed.