The Matt Walsh Show
Ep. 1531 - Another Insane Government Money Laundering Scheme REVEALED
Thu, 6 Feb 2025
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, as Elon Musk continues to uncover the waste and fraud rampant in the federal government, it's now becoming clear that some of the media outlets panicking over this were, themselves, funded by the federal government. Also, Trump puts an end to men in women's sports. But is this actually the end of it? Will the Left give up the fight? And the NFL has made the highly controversial decision to remove the words "end racism" from the field during the Super Bowl. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/4bEQDy6 Ep.1531 - - - DailyWire+: Watch the movie that triggered the Left, then triggered a landmark new policy protecting women and girls. Lady Ballers is streaming now, exclusively on DailyWire+. Go to https://dailywire.com/subscribe today. "Identity Crisis" tells the stories the mainstream media won’t. Stream the full film now, only on DailyWire+: https://bit.ly/3C61qVU Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj - - - Today's Sponsors: Home Title Lock - Go to https://hometitlelock.com and use promo code WALSH25 to save 25% and receive a FREE title history report to ensure you’re not already a victim! PureTalk - Switch to Pure Talk and start saving today! Visit https://PureTalk.com/WALSH Tecovas - Point your toes west. Get 10% off at https://tecovas.com/matt when you sign up for email and texts. - - - 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 Walsh Show, as Elon Musk continues to uncover the waste and fraud rampant in the federal government, it's now becoming clear that some of the media outlets panicking over this were themselves funded by the federal government. Also, Trump puts an end to men and women's sports, but is this actually the end of it? Will the left finally give up the fight?
And the NFL has made the highly controversial decision to remove the words end racism from the field during the Super Bowl. We'll talk about all that and more today on The Matt Walsh Show. Did you know that American homeowners have over $32 trillion in equity and criminals are targeting it with a growing scam the FBI calls house stealing?
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And make sure you check out the million-dollar triple lock protection details when you get there. Link below, that's hometitlelock.com, promo code WALSH25. As you may have noticed, every so often I read a promo statement for our subscription service, Daily Wire Plus. And by every so often, I mean three times a day. And I explain the reasons why I think it's a good deal, why you should get one.
And then you as a listener can decide whether or not you wanna subscribe. I don't force you to pay the Daily Wire any money. I don't steal anything from you. I just make the pitch over and over and over again. And then the free market takes over from there.
But after reading reports yesterday on some of the government spending that's being scrutinized by Doge, it looks like I've been going about things wrong this whole time. I'm a sucker. We all are here at The Daily Wire. Because as it turns out, there's no need for media companies to actually convince anyone to buy their products, or at least there wasn't.
Up until now, there's certainly no need to come up with a competitive price or anything like that. Instead, all you have to do is make some friends in the federal government, and they'll buy millions of dollars worth of subscriptions from you with tax money. And you can set whatever rate you want for the subscription.
You can charge tens of thousands of dollars annually per person if you want, because after all, it's the federal government. They have limitless resources, courtesy of taxpayers. So who's going to notice? This week as the Trump administration goes line by line through the federal budget, people did notice finally that this was going on.
Reporting from Kyle Becker, Liz Wheeler and others has just established that the left wing outlet Politico from fiscal year 2016 to 2025 has raked in more than $8 million in total from federal government agencies. And specifically, Politico has been selling subscriptions to its so-called Politico Pro service for $10,000 a year per subscription, $10,000 a year.
NASA spent something like half a million dollars on these subscriptions. So did the FDA. They spent nearly $520,000 for just 37 subscriptions. The State Department spent more than a million dollars. The Defense Department spent more than $850,000. And for its part, USAID, the agency that funds secret coups all over the world, spent tens of thousands of dollars on Politico Pro.
And it's not just Politico that's receiving massive amounts of money from the federal government in recent years. The Associated Press has been pulling in several million dollars a year from the government going back several years. So has The New York Times.
In fact, just last August, The New York Times reported that it had received a million dollars or rather millions of dollars from the federal government. This is big money that before 2021, the New York Times was not making. But after the Biden administration came into power, the fire hose of federal subscriptions opened up. All of this is documented on official government websites.
But until now, it's gone unreported. What this means really cannot be overstated. Many countries have state media. There's nothing new about that. You know, it's a hallmark of authoritarian regimes everywhere. But we have something even more sinister in this country, which is state media that claims to be independent.
Say what you will about North Korean state television, but they at least admit that they're controlled by the government. Left-wing media outlets in this country don't have the decency to do that.
They were happy to continue collecting money from the government, which of course means they're taking money from you, from your paycheck, without disclosing their conflict of interest in any of their reporting. The government also never asked you for permission to buy these subscriptions with your money. But fortunately, they're not going to be collecting that money anymore.
Yesterday, the White House press secretary announced that this funding, and in particular the millions of dollars for Politico, has now officially been cut.
So upon coming out here to the briefing room, I was made aware of the funding from USAID to media outlets, including Politico, who I know has a seat in this room. And I can confirm that the more than $8 million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers' dime will no longer be happening.
The Doge team is working on canceling those payments now. Again, this is a whole-of-government effort to ensure that... We are going line by line when it comes to the federal government's books. And this president and his team are making decisions across the board on, do these receipts serve the interests of the American people? Is this a good use of the American taxpayers' money?
If it is not, that funding will no longer be sent abroad, and American taxpayers will see significant savings because of that effort.
Now, if you look at the left wing response to this situation, they'll tell you that everything's being blown out of proportion. CNN, for example, ran the headline, quote, White House says it will cancel $8 million in political subscriptions after a false right wing conspiracy theory spreads. So the fact that Politico got $8 million from the federal government is true, just to be clear.
But apparently the story is a false right-wing conspiracy theory. And they make that claim because they say that some people are reporting that Politico got $8 million in one year when really it was spread out over several years. And that's supposed to make this all okay. So rather than Politico getting $8 million in a year, it got about $1 million per year for eight or nine years.
To me, somehow that doesn't make this sound any better. If anything, it's worse. This was not like one single bad decision. This was something that was happening continually for eight or nine years. Meanwhile, an Associated Press investigative reporter named Byron Tal wrote this, quote, I looked at these contracts and I have my own fun fact.
This is occurring because agencies, not just USAID, are buying subscriptions to Politico's pro editorial product, not because Politico is getting grants or other federal funding. Then he adds, quote, this is true of every media outlet with a subscription model. Now, that last line is especially amusing because it's very obviously not true.
Really, every media outlet with a subscription model is getting money from the federal government, really? Now, it's true for the AP, where Byron Tao works. They're selling tons of subscriptions to the federal government. But it's not true for us, for example, conservative publications. As far as I'm aware, we didn't rake in $8 million from the federal government over the last few years.
We raked in nothing. So why might that be the case? Now, if you listen to Politico, they'll tell you that their product is superior. They just put out a statement claiming that they offer, quote, granular fact-based reporting. Now, they didn't cite any specific examples of this excellent reporting, though, which is pretty conspicuous.
In fact, none of the people defending Politico on social media were able to point to this singular, this granular fact-based reporting from Politico. Much less were they able to give examples of the kinds of things that Politico Pro offers that would justify spending taxpayer money on it. No one was able to point to a specific thing and say, oh, well, they do this thing here.
And so obviously, tax money should go to that. And we all know why that is. And that is that Politico doesn't generally offer quality reporting. Unlike the Daily Wire, when they break news over at Politico, it's often completely fake. It's a lie that's intended to benefit the people who are paying their salaries in the federal government.
Maybe the most obvious example of many of this propaganda came just before the 2020 election when Politico published the blatant falsehood that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation. And here's that headline. What happened here is that dozens of partisan former intelligence officials got together and they decided that they needed to give Joe Biden some cover.
They needed to hand him a talking point before the debate. And I'm not speculating about that, by the way. The former acting CIA director, Mike Morrell, literally sent out an email to the former intelligence officials telling them they need to provide a talking point to the Biden campaign. And then when the debate rolled around, Biden used that talking point just like they drew it up.
There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what this he's accusing me of is a Russian plant. They have said that this has all the care. Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he's saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except his and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.
You mean the laptop is now another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax? That's exactly what... Is this where you're going?
Now, whatever you call this Politico story about these intelligence officials, election interference, a fraud on the public, a threat to democracy, or anything like that, you cannot call it journalism. And you also can't deny that the bureaucrats who sent millions of dollars to Politico in the end got their money's worth.
They wanted to keep Trump out of office, and in part because of this stunt, four years ago, it worked. But that whole episode was nothing out of the ordinary. As anyone who reads Politico understands very well, attempting to keep Trump out of the White House is essentially the mission statement over there, or was.
Just ahead of the most recent election, for example, Politico wrote that Trump was delivering a, quote, racist anti-immigrant message, which was getting, quote, darker. This isn't exactly a unique take on the left, of course. Pretty much every liberal blog has been saying the same thing for a decade.
But Politico said that they had watched 20 Trump rallies to really provide a comprehensive analysis of all the racism and anti-immigrant messages. So they went the extra mile. And that's why they deserve $8 million from taxpayers. Because they put a lot of legwork into explaining why Trump is bad.
Now, if you show these headlines to Politico's defenders in the federal government, they'll tell you that Politico Pro, which is the product the feds are paying for, is actually different from the free Politico. They'll claim that Politico Pro offers a higher-end product that's actually fact-based and highly useful to the federal government.
But if you go looking at the headlines from Politico Pro, you'll quickly realize that's not true either. Take this headline, for example. The headline states, former Senator James Inhofe, who claimed climate change a hoax, dead at 89. So the reporting on the death of a senator, which isn't exactly a big exclusive scoop, okay? So you're paying $10,000 a year for that?
Um, everybody else was reporting on this at the time also, but political pros special contribution to the story is to mock James Inhofe because he didn't want to dismantle the US economy in order to change global weather patterns. So they throw that little aside into the headline on his obituary.
He's dead, and the most important thing we want you to know about him is that he didn't believe in our climate narratives. That's the keen fact-based reporting that you can only get at Political Pro. And that is apparently worth $10,000 a year.
Now, in their defense, in their statement addressing their payments from the federal government, Politico goes on to claim that, quote, Politico has never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies, not one cent ever in 18 years. So their defense is to rely on semantics, essentially.
They know that subscriptions have such a high price, five figures in most cases, precisely because the government will happily pay it. They know that their coverage has been extremely favorable to permanent Washington. But they think no one will recognize this as a payout or a subsidy because in the line item, it says subscription.
This is the game they're playing, which again, just to emphasize, there's no way they could judge. The reason why the subscription is so expensive is because tax money was being spent on it. If not that, who else would pay $10,000 for Politico Pro? Now, as egregious as this particular story is, the truth is that this problem is far more endemic than the journalism industry.
As Mike Cernovich has pointed out on X, until this week, what we're getting from Doge and from a lot of these revelations is that basically the whole D.C., northern Virginia economy ran on tax money funneled to NGOs, nonprofits, and media outlets.
The White House announced the other day that we've spent $20 million for a Sesame Street show in Iraq, $8 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid binary gendered language, $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala, and $2 million to help the BBC value the diversity of Libyan society.
As the writer Peachy Keenan pointed out, we also spent $40 million for AIDS drugs for transgender prostitutes in South Africa. Specifically, the money provides accessible clinical interventions for sex workers, otherwise known as prostitutes. There's also $8 million that we spent to study the effects of flavored cigarettes on bisexuals and lesbians.
which you would assume is the same as the effect on anyone who is not a bisexual or lesbian, I don't know, but you've got to spend millions of dollars to figure that out, as well as roughly $100 million to combat HIV in Ukraine. Now, again, that's the stated reason for all of these expenditures, but almost certainly most of this money is simply being stolen.
Even if it was being spent on what they say, it would still be a major problem. But we also know that when you hear about stuff like this and you think, even if I thought it was a good idea to fund a study into the effects of flavored cigarettes on lesbians, why would that cost millions of dollars? Well, when you hear that, it's because most likely it doesn't cost that.
The money is going elsewhere. Where else is it going? Who knows? So this is one of the biggest political scandals in American history. I mean, and we've only seen the tip of the iceberg. And this is only a handful of agencies we're talking about here. Imagine what Elon could turn up if he audited the IRS or the ATF or the FBI, other massive federal agencies.
In fact, that appears to be exactly what's happening. Doge officials have just been spotted at FBI headquarters as well as the Department of Education. And last night, the Wall Street Journal reported that Doge is now looking into Medicare fraud, which is far more pervasive than most people could possibly comprehend.
Specifically, Doge has been granted access to payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and they're already on site right now doing this. So if Doge is successful in just this one area, the savings for taxpayers will be astronomical. As the Journal reports, quote, insurers pocketed $50 billion from Medicare for diseases that no doctor treated.
And here's how the journal explained the problem, quote, insurers can add diagnoses to ones that patients' own doctors submit. Medicare gave insurers that option so they could catch conditions that doctors neglected to record. The journal's analysis, however, found many diagnoses were added for which patients received no treatment or that contradicted their doctors' views, close quote.
Now, this is the kind of systemic fraud that is defying government spending for generations. There's massive waste. bribery, corruption at every level. Outlets like Politico haven't reported on it for the simple reason that they benefited from that spending. But it's coming to an end now.
A lot of these corporate outlets are going to have to survive on their own merits, which is to say that they're not going to survive at all. They will run out of money very quickly.
And the rest of us, people who are tired of reading thinly veiled propaganda from the intelligence agencies and wasting billions of dollars on various forms of government sponsored fraud, we'll get to keep more of our own money. And this is what Doge promised to do.
And right now, based on the panic that's overtaking left-wing newsrooms in Washington, they are certainly succeeding beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Now let's get to our five headlines. This country was founded on freedom, freedom from a country that's forced us to buy overpriced tea and tried blockading us when we dumped their tea into the ocean. How'd that work out?
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Again, that's puretalk.com slash walsh to claim your new iPhone or Galaxy with qualifying purchases from Pure Talk, America's wireless company. Daily Wire reports President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday banning men from women's sports, a historic moment in the fight to protect the integrity of women's spaces from gender activists and ideologues.
From now on, he said women's sports will be only for women. The president signed the order in the East Room of the White House, surrounded by young schoolgirls, female athletes, and advocates, including independent women's forum ambassadors Riley Gaines, Paula Scanlon, and Peyton Edwards. It is the reading from the executive order.
It's the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.
It shall also be the policy of the United States to oppose male competitive participation in women's sports more broadly as a matter of safety, fairness, dignity, and truth. So he signed the executive order. We have a quick clip from the event. Let's see it.
This was one of the big reasons that we all won, and it's one of the big reasons that we had a record, a landslide like they haven't seen before, very often anyway. And who could forget last year's Paris Olympics where a male boxer stole the woman's gold medal after brutalizing his female opponent so viciously that she had to forfeit just after 46 seconds. And she was a championship fighter.
And actually they had two women or two people that transitioned and both of them won gold medals and they won them very convincingly. But all of that ends today because with this executive order, the war on women's sports is over.
Thank you, everybody.
So he says the war in women's sports is over, and it could be. I mean, this could be essentially the end of the issue. It really depends on what the left decides to do next. This is a major victory one way or another, but it remains to be seen how the left's going to respond to this because they've lost the battle completely. They've lost politically. They've lost culturally.
Everyone is against them. Public opinion is very much against them. The question is whether they want to keep falling on the sword in a desperate attempt to pull the culture back towards allowing men in women's sports again, which would be a fool's errand. But I think it remains to be seen whether the left decides to do that. And I think that I think right now they don't know what to do.
And I also think they probably won't try to do that. Because let's say a Democrat wins, God forbid, in 2028. The Democrat president could sign an executive order just overturning what Trump just did. And it's hard to predict what will happen in four years from now. But as it stands right now, I wouldn't see that happening. Because it would be an extremely politically unpopular thing to do.
And what you have to remember about this issue and the trans issue generally is that almost nobody on the left ever believed in any of it. Almost none of them actually thought it was right or fair or made any sense to have dudes compete against women.
They took this position cynically because for a very brief moment in time, like kind of a blip on the screen, but for a brief moment in time, the trans rights quote unquote movement seemed to have the cultural upper hand. And so for a very brief moment, it seemed like the more popular position, the safer bet. And so they decided to ride that horse.
Now, if the left had the foresight to see this moment coming, Donald Trump flanked by smiling female athletes, signing an executive order banning men from women's sports with the wide approval of the public. I mean, if they could have seen that, they never would have embraced this position to begin with. And please don't think I'm giving the left any credit here. I mean, precisely the opposite.
My point is that most of them knew better. Most of them knew that the trans rights stuff was ridiculous the whole time. The trans agenda was always something that almost nobody truly believed in. How could they? It's objectively, plainly, egregiously wrong in every way, morally and scientifically. This was a political play by the left, and it backfired in historic fashion.
You know, if you rewind the clock back to 2017, let's say, and everything plays out the same since 2017, except the left never leans into the trans stuff or tries to shove it down our throats. If it had played out that way, then I think a Democrat probably is in office right now. That's how badly this whole thing has backfired on them. So...
As always, you've got to remain vigilant, and you never know what will happen next. The trans activists are fully bought in, and they're getting more and more desperate and more and more angry and panicked. And so you have to worry about that. There's no telling what they're going to do.
We also know that there's an established history of violence among trans activists, so that also becomes a concern. That, I think, is a major concern right now, when they start lashing out violently even more. And then the other thing, too, as we talked about a couple days ago, is that you have to keep in mind that one of the reasons why
the trans ideology caught on so much, particularly in high levels of government, in media, Hollywood, big tech. It was a political ploy, like we just discussed. That's true. But then the other part of it is that for a lot of the people in positions of power, it's personal for them. Like they're kids. They transitioned their own kids.
And for those people, we talked about this a couple days ago, they can't just let it go. They can never let it go. Because to let it go would be to admit to themselves and to the world what they did to their own kids. And so they can never let that go. And that's another factor here, which means that even as the culture moves past trans ideology,
there's going to be this core of people, some of whom are powerful, who can never move on from it. And the more that everyone else moves on from it, the angrier, more desperate they get. So how does that play out in the next few years? Well, we're going to find out. Now, staying on this topic for a moment, I thought this was funny. Here's a tweet from ESPN about this.
The tweet says, President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Wednesday designed to prevent people who are biologically assigned male at birth from participating in women's or girls' sporting events. Now, it may not look like it, but this tweet actually signifies, I think, a major capitulation by ESPN. Because by their uber-woke standards, this might as well be them endorsing Donald Trump.
The phrase biologically assigned male at birth. Biologically. The woke thing, the orthodox thing on the left, obviously, is to say assigned male at birth. which makes no sense for reasons we all know now. You're not assigned anything, least of all, at birth. Your sex is not assigned or decided at birth.
It is noted or noticed or recorded at birth, although actually it usually is noticed and noted and recorded before birth. But that's the woke way of putting it, is assigned male at birth. ESPN, though, has tried to split the baby here because the two ways of phrasing it, there's the correct way, which is to say that Trump has banned biological males from women's sports.
Now, yeah, biological male is redundant, but it at least makes sense. You don't need to add male is a biological category. You don't need to add biological male, but it's not a nonsensical phrase. So that's the correct way of putting it. The other way to phrase it is the woke, nonsensical, assigned male at birth. ESPN has tried to combine them.
And so they've said biologically assigned male at birth. And this is their attempt to compromise. But they've ended up with a phrase that makes even less sense. This is the most nonsensical way of phrasing it you could possibly come up with. biologically assigned male at birth. Now, biologically assigned male maybe sort of makes sense, because I guess you could say biology assigns our sex.
That's a weird way of putting it. Not necessarily wrong, I guess. But then they added at birth, as if biology doesn't decide if we're male or female until we emerge from the birth canal.
So if you heard the phrase biologically assigned male birth and you didn't know any better, you would think that it means that the moment the baby emerges from the birth canal, their sex takes shape in that moment, like this mystical moment of transformation. And that's the way that they have presented it in their attempt to compromise ever so slightly. And
but it makes even less sense because there is no, you know, when you have something that makes sense and something that's nonsensical, any attempt to compromise between sensible and nonsensical, you just end up with something that's nonsensical. That's the problem. All right. I've had this for a couple of days. I want to mention New York Post has a report.
Smartphones are making teenagers more aggressive, detached from reality, and causing them to hallucinate, according to new research. Scientists concluded the younger a person starts using a phone, the more likely they would be crippled by a whole host of psychological ills after surveying 10,500 teens from between the ages of 13 and 17 from both the U.S. and India.
People don't fully appreciate the hyper-real and hyper-immersive screen experiences, which can blur reality at key stages of development, according to addiction psychologist Dr. Nicholas Kardaris. The digital world can compromise their ability to distinguish between what's real and what's not, a hallucination by any other name.
20%.
Whereas today's 17-year-olds typically got a phone at age 11 or 12, today's 13-year-olds got their phones at age 10, the report noted. And the report goes on from there. I mean, and whether it's true that 20% of 13-year-olds are having hallucinations, I mean, you have to wonder if those 13-year-olds really understand what a hallucination is. So this is obviously all self-reported data.
But it does all come back to the same conclusion, which a million studies have found something similar, which is that just to basically summarize it and generalize it. Phones are really bad for kids. It's just not good. It's not making anything better. And of course, everyone's heard my rant about this many times. I really think that we're whistling past the graveyard on this issue.
Having generations of children who are addicted to screens and phones practically from birth is a major civilization level problem. And I don't think that most of us are facing that or allowing it to really sink in. And in fact, even when someone calls attention to this problem, I think that the focus is often on the wrong things, or it's presented in the wrong way.
Like in this article, they treat the screen as a kind of medical problem, which means, and that's often how this is, even the studies that are trying to demonstrate the harms that are done by having kids addicted to screens from the youngest ages Even those studies, they treat it like a medical issue, which means that someone's going to come up with a medical solution.
We already have those, allegedly, right? There are drugs for kids who have aggression or experience depression and so on. And so that's going to be the solution. We already see this happen. And we've talked about ADHD this whole week. It's been a recurring theme. And the screens play a big part of that.
One of the reasons why kids are perpetually distracted is that they are surrounded by distraction. What do you know? And when you got a kid walking around with this distraction machine in their pocket 24 hours a day, they're going to be distracted. And so what's our solution to that is to give them drugs, right?
Not to take away the distraction machine, but to just give them drugs to kind of dull the effects. Maybe eventually somebody will come up with a vaccine to protect against the effects of chronic screen usage in children. And I don't even mean that as a joke. Eventually that's going to happen.
But I think the real problem here cannot actually be quantified in a study because it's bigger and deeper than that, I think. The problem is that raising kids on a screen as screen addicts, along with all the other things, the fact, does it make them more aggressive? Yes, I think certainly. Does it detach them from reality? I think yes, certainly. Does it make them distracted? Absolutely.
Does it destroy their memory, their capacity to retain information? Yes, yes, yes. But I also think that, again, you go a couple of levels deeper than that. it kind of robs them of fundamental aspects of their humanity.
Like for example, and again, I don't know how you account for this in a study, you probably can't, but one of the defining things about being a person is that you can or should be able to entertain yourself in your own mind with your own thoughts. You should be able to get lost in a thought, right? This is where every great creative idea comes from. It's where every profound philosophical concept,
that's ever been conceived of has come from. It's where every great song or work of art or movie or painting originates. It originates with somebody thinking, just simply thinking. But now, with the constant reliance on screens and phones, a lot of kids never develop, I think, that very basic ability, which is to sit and ruminate and think and develop a thought.
Because any moment that would have otherwise been an occasion for thought and reflection and daydreaming is now used for mindlessly staring at a screen, whether it's a phone or a TV or video game or whatever. And we all know this. I mean, how many people today, kids or adults, how many people have the experience, have had the experience anytime recently of just sitting somewhere?
sitting on a chair or on the couch and that's it. It's just sitting and thinking. And you might think about this in your own life. In fact, you should try doing it just to get an idea of how screwed up your mind is at this point. Get a read on how bad the situation is for you. I think we should all do this. So just try it. Try it. Try sitting somewhere, just on a couch.
I'm not saying this is not a meditation exercise, just to be clear. I'm not saying sit on the ground on a yoga mat, cross-legged. No, just sit on a couch, a chair, and just try sitting there. How long can you do it before you pull out your phone? And because that's the other part. I'm not saying to turn your phone off and leave it in another room. Like, have it with you, just like you would.
Well, we all do. Have it with you. Have it on. And try sitting on a couch or on a chair and just how long can you do it before you pull out the phone? I think for a lot of people now, the answer is 20 seconds. I don't think that's an exaggeration. I think there's plenty of people walking around today who could not do that for more than 20 seconds. Just can't do it.
literally do not know how to occupy themselves with their own minds, which is to say they don't know how to think, basically. And probably the older you are, the more successful you will be in this exercise because you lived longer without these things. So you at least developed that ability at some point. Maybe it's atrophied, but you still have it.
I think for a lot of kids whose parents just give them the phones as soon as they're, you know, The kids are just three-year-olds running around now with tablets. And those kids, like, what the hell chance do they have?
When that three-year-old with a tablet who becomes a six-year-old with a phone and full Internet access, when he's 25, how long is he going to be able to just sit here, just out of a chair, just kind of sit, just thinking? He won't be able to do it. Which, again, is to say you don't know how to think. You actually don't know how to think. That's maybe the biggest problem a human can have.
And then what happens when you have a whole society of people who don't know how to think? What happens there? Extrapolate that for 50 years. What do you end up with? You know, and there's no indication that it's good. And then you add to that, you got a whole bunch of people who don't know how to think, utterly incapable of entertaining themselves with their own thoughts.
And then you add in the rise of AI and everything, which is getting smarter and smarter so that you can get away with not thinking more and more. What does it look like in 50 years from now?
That's why I've said many times that Idiocracy, which is a very funny movie, but I truly do think that it was far too optimistic because it painted a picture of the dystopian future that it imagined was won 500 years from now, where people are just drooling morons who do not know how to think and rely on technology for everything, but they also don't know how to operate the technology because they're too dumb.
In idiocracy, that took 500 years. It is not going to take that long. We are well on our way. Give it another couple decades and we'll be there. So that's my encouraging thought for the day. Let's get to the comment section.
If you're a man, it's required that you grow a beard. Hey!
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I've yet to meet one single person who's an actual Snoop Dogg fan. Seriously, point to me one single person who's so in love with Snoop Dogg enough to justify him being on television every single ad break for the past few years. Yeah, it's a great mystery. Zero demand for Snoop Dogg. The supply has exceeded the demand by 100%. There's 100% more supply of Snoop Dogg than there is demand for him.
And to be clear, I'm not saying that people hate Snoop Dogg. That's not my point. Nobody cares enough about Snoop Dogg to actually hate him. What I'm saying is that nobody has ever turned on a show or a movie or a commercial or anything and said to themselves, man, I hope Snoop Dogg shows up in this. Nobody has ever said that. And yet he does show up in everything always.
Matt's take on ADHD is very embarrassing to say the least. It's definitely overdiagnosed, but there's tremendous scientific evidence to show that it's real. And yes, you can see that the ADHD brain is real and different than the norm by a significant amount. Yes, it should be diagnosed with brain scans, but just because it's generally not and it's overdiagnosed doesn't make it unreal.
I like how we quickly jumped over the part about how you can actually see that ADHD brain is tangibly different by blurting out, well, then why don't they all diagnose them the same way? Okay, this is the last thing I'll say about this for now. And I'll try to explain this one more time. I am not disputing that an ADHD brain, quote unquote, may be visible in brain scans.
My point is that it's irrelevant because they don't consult brain scans at all during the diagnostic process or at any other point. So whether someone's ADHD brain can be found in the brain or not, the diagnosis would be the same. So it's not relevant. Right? At best, it's an after-the-fact rationalization. But it doesn't factor in to the diagnosis. But that's not even the point.
Because let's just say, for the sake of argument, that ADHD is very visible and obvious in the brain. And let's even imagine a scenario where they do diagnose it with a brain scan. They don't, but let's just say that they did. Well, the question still remains... an ADHD brain looks a certain way, okay, who's to say that it isn't supposed to look that way?
If an ADHD brain is ordered a certain way, how do you know that it's disordered? You see, that's the question. So you being able to establish, well, yes, this is how an ADHD brain is ordered. This is how it's structured. This is how it looks like. Okay, that's fine. But that's not the case you're making. You're saying it is disordered, that it looks this way and it should not look that way.
That's the part you got to explain. I don't need to be told that it looks a certain way. Okay, fine. But you're saying that it shouldn't look that way. So you have an idea in your head of what a brain is supposed to look like. And which to a certain extent, we all agree.
I mean, there are a lot of things we could say about the human brain and there are certain components of it that if those components are missing, then we know that there's a major problem. But with the ADHD brain, like there's nothing, it's not going to, there's, you know, it's not a degenerative illness. It's not eating away at your brain. It's not going to kill you. It's
A person could have an ADHD brain and live just as long a life as anybody else. So how is it an illness? Maybe this is the best way to look at it. If our technology and our understanding of the brain was sophisticated enough, we would be able to, and I think can already in many cases, locate any personality type in a brain scan.
So let's just say, and I don't know, I'm not sure to what full extent we can do this now, but certainly if we can't now, there'll be a time in the future when we can look at a brain scan and if we had the technology right and someone has the right training, they'd be able to look at it and pinpoint many different aspects of that person's personality. Okay, a person prone to optimism
probably has, in some way, a different brain from someone who is not prone to optimism. There is probably an optimistic brain. Well, if we could look at a scan and see an optimistic brain, would that mean that optimism is now a disease that we have to medicate? If somebody is more prone to optimism than average, and we can locate that phenomenon in the brain?
Should we then give them drugs to drag them back down to the average? Should we just figure out what the kind of average personality is and just give everybody drugs to either bring them down or bring them up to the mean, the average personality? Is that what we should do? Or do we accept that everybody has different personalities and therefore everyone has different brains
And some personalities work better in some situations than others. And that's just being a person. That's what it means to be a person. That's my point. And if that still doesn't get across, then I don't know what else to tell you. Stephen Colbert is the biggest bell end on American TV. And that's saying something because you have loads of them over there. P.S.
Sorry, Matt, but the best whiskey is made in Scotland. Yeah, scotch is good. So quite. I mean, I like scotch, but I have to say I kind of prefer Japanese whiskey recently, which is I've been on a bit of a Japanese whiskey kick, which is basically scotch, but made in Japan. And I kind of prefer it, you know. So that's it. That's nothing else to say about that.
Sometimes I get the feeling that Matt is not really as happy to lick Trump's boots as he'd have us believe. I mean, he's a team player, but he knows who Trump really is and it bothers him. Yeah, this is funny. So I'm a Trump bootlicker now. That's the latest. If you've been following my career, that's the latest development. And it's funny because over the past eight years, nine years,
I have been accused, alternatively, of being a never-Trumper and a Trump bootlicker. It's one or the other. For the last eight years, I'm always one or the other. And it seems to fluctuate back and forth. I'm just kind of trading places as we go along.
So maybe what's happening here, here's a thought, maybe what's occurring is that when Trump is doing stuff that I think is good and that I agree with, I praise him. And when he does stuff I don't like, I criticize him. And since taking office this time around, I've liked almost everything he's done. I've been very impressed. I just, I don't know what to tell you. I've just been very impressed.
I think it's been great. I think he's done a great job. Sorry, I don't know what to tell you. That's just my take on it. And so I'm telling you my take. So could that be it? Could it be that I'm just, I'm... The opinions that I give about Trump are based on what he's doing. And when he does different things, I say different things about them. It's possible. Like something to consider anyway.
Let's get to the daily cancellation. I have something difficult that I need to talk about today. This is going to be upsetting to hear, just like it's upsetting for me to discuss. But here goes, according to reports this week, the NFL is going to remove the words end racism from the end zone during the Super Bowl this Sunday.
I know that sounds so shocking that you think it can't be real, but it is. Here's the Daily Wire quote. The NFL has reportedly sent the word to remove the messaging end racism from the end zone for the Super Bowl in New Orleans on Sunday. It'll be the first time since February 2021 that the message end racism has not appeared in a Super Bowl end zone.
According to multiple sources, when the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles take the field at Caesars Superdome, the messaging in the end zones will read, it takes all of us and choose love. Quote, we felt it was an appropriate statement for what the country has collectively endured, given recent tragedies and can serve as an inspiration, according to NFL spokesperson Brian McCarthy.
Now, I don't even know where to begin. All I can say is that obviously I'm very opposed to this move. Not just opposed, but I'm anxious, I'm worried, terrified. Because how are we supposed to know what to do about racism now? There's some people that are celebrating this announcement because they're saying, well, this means that racism is over. Racism is done.
The NFL ended racism by putting end racism in the end zone. And so now we can all move on. And look, sure, there's no doubt that the end racism message did end racism. I'm not disputing that. I know just from my own life. Prior to that message being spray painted in the end zone, I myself was racist.
But then I saw end racism on the field during a football game and I said, wait, we're supposed to be not racist? My God, I had no idea. And from that day forward, I was transformed. I was born anew. I stopped going to clan meetings and I started volunteering at after school programs for disabled minorities.
And I'm sure that this is the same thing that happened for so many millions of people out there. But here's the problem. We ended racism. We created a post-racism utopian society, or I should say the NFL did. That message and racism was the glue holding our new paradise together. And now they're taking that slogan off the field. What then? What if everybody starts doing racism again?
How are we supposed to know if we should keep racism ended or if we should start it up once more? Is that what the NFL is saying? We should start racism again? People are gonna watch the Super Bowl and they're gonna say, wait a minute, it doesn't say end racism. I guess we need to start doing the racisms again. And who's to tell them that they shouldn't? Now, sure, there will be a new message.
The NFL says it's gonna put the words, it takes all of us on, and they're gonna put that on the field. That's not good enough. I mean, what takes all of us? Racism? Super Bowl viewers are gonna think that it's a rallying cry to join together and be racist again. The other message, choose love, doesn't help much. Who are we supposed to love? Who shouldn't we love? What if somebody loves Hitler?
What then? Think about it. We need to be more specific. It should at least say, choose love. But just to be clear, that doesn't mean Hitler. And there's more than enough. It's a football field. You could write that whole message on there. No problem. So they could give us a lot more information. They could give us a lot more guidance, but they aren't. And that's inexcusable. And now I'm lost.
And think about the message that this sends to kids or doesn't send more specifically. Just last night, this is true. You know, my son heard about this news and he came up to me and he said, Father, does this mean that we should do racism again? And I didn't know how to respond. The truth is that I'm just as confused as he is. And I said to him, I don't know, my son. I just don't know.
And he paused for a moment and his eyes got misty and he looked at me and said, I'm scared. And I said, I am too. And then my son started crying. And so did I. And we wept. We wept for hours. This is what the NFL has done. Now, the point is that we are lost without moral instruction delivered to us via slogans painted on football fields.
Now, in general, of course, I have always looked to professional sports leagues, athletes, sports commentators for guidance and direction. Like any American, I never form any opinion on anything without first consulting NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, all the SportsCenter anchors, and LeBron James's Twitter feed.
Professional sports leagues have, over the past 10 years especially, positioned themselves as our teachers, our surrogate father figures, really. And I've always been very happy with this arrangement.
It makes a ton of sense to me because after all, if a guy knows how to throw a ball into a hoop or run with a ball down a field really fast, it stands to reason that he also has deep insight into the most important questions of life. I think two follows from one there pretty logically. Every time I see a basketball player hit a three-pointer, I think to myself, wow, he must be a great philosopher.
And every time I see a football player make an open field tackle, I think, geez, that guy must have great moral intuition. And I realize I'm not saying anything that you don't already know. This is what we all think when we watch sports. But the NFL is now abandoning its post. It's hanging us all out to dry. Racism is about to make a major comeback in this country.
Millions of people are going to tune into the Super Bowl, see that the words end racism have been removed. and then immediately run out and commit hate crimes. And I will too. I'm gonna go commit hate crimes. I don't know what else to do. We're all now like lost sheep wandering alone through the pastures without our great shepherd, the NFL, there to show us the way.
I feel so alone now and so scared and also so, so racist. All because of the NFL. And that is why the NFL 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.