Matt Walsh reviews the wokest "Big Game" moments throughout the years. - - - Today's Sponsor: Hallow - Visit https://hallow.com/mattwalsh for three months free of Hallow today.
Unfortunately, I cannot give a full analysis of the Super Bowl or the Super Bowl ads if for whatever reason anyone actually wanted me to do that. I watched the game rather half-heartedly, paying only vague attention because I was bitter that my Baltimore Ravens weren't playing in it. I'll admit that. I was bitter. And in protest against this injustice, I boycotted the event.
I mean, I still watched it, but I watched it unenthusiastically. So it was a heroic form of activism on my part, you must admit. But in any case, I did happen to glance up during an early commercial break when we saw what would prove to be one of the most viral ads of the night. It was another Super Bowl commercial for the He Gets Us campaign.
The campaign first run by a group called the Servant Foundation and now run by a group called Come Near Incorporated. both funded by mostly anonymous, but we can assume extremely wealthy donors, is ostensibly meant to evangelize and promote Christianity. Indeed, they're spending tens of millions of dollars to run these ads during the Super Bowl.
There are many very credible and biblically grounded Christian groups in the world that would love to have the resources to run a commercial during the most watched television event of the year. But most of them wouldn't have those kinds of funds if they fundraised and saved for a decade.
The people that are behind He Gets Us do have that money, which means they have a unique chance that few Christians will ever have. They're able to present a message to 100 million people all at the same time. In fact, this Super Bowl is certain to be among the most watched events of all time, making this an unprecedented, or nearly unprecedented at least, opportunity.
So, what will they do with it? What message will they send out to those 100 million souls? How will they use the millions upon millions of dollars that these 60 seconds of ad time will cost them? Will they call the world to repentance? To humility? To obedience? To virtue? No, no, no, and no. Instead, they did this. Watch.
Don't ask me what you know is true. I was standing You were there Two worlds collided And they could never tear us apart
The ad is very careful to make sure that it doesn't depict a white person getting his feet washed by a non-white person. So we see every combination of feet washing going on, except for that one. Apparently Jesus calls us to wash feet unless you're black and the other person is white, because that would be racist.
And this already tells you everything you need to know about the campaign and the people funding it. The ad strictly follows and respects the left-wing victim hierarchy and dutifully makes sure to not depict any image that would run afoul of the rules of intersectionality. If they had reversed the roles in any of these scenarios...
then the ad would have been, to at least some small degree, culturally subversive. Okay, what if it was a black guy washing the feet of the cop? But you would never see that. Okay, even though people defend the ad and say, well, are you saying we shouldn't love each other? Okay, well, then why don't we have the black guy wash the cop's feet? Shouldn't he love cops?
If you saw that, well, that sends the wrong message. We can't have that. But at least that would have offered the viewer something that they don't already see. It would have given them something to think about. It would have challenged the viewer. But they made sure not to do that. So what's the problem here? Aside from the political correctness with the racial dynamics, what's the problem?
Well, to begin with, We should say, Jesus did not go around washing everyone's feet, okay? There is precisely one story in the New Testament of Jesus washing feet, and it was at the Passover meal before his passion and death. In that case, he washed the feet of his disciples, the people closest to him, his disciples, people that have been following him literally throughout his whole ministry.
And now that did include, of course, the disciple who was about to betray him. But the point is that these were his disciples, right? He wasn't out in the street washing the feet of every unbeliever and unrepentant sinner who walked by. And we often do this these days. We take singular moments in Jesus' ministry and we extrapolate them, making them out to be regular occurrences.
But that's not a fair or accurate assumption. So when we say, Jesus didn't hate, he washed feet, it makes it sound like it was a standard form of greeting. There's one story of that happening in a very specific circumstance for a specific group of people. Did he ever go out in the public and wash feet? Well, we don't know. There's no reason to assume he did. There's no mention of it.
But we do know that out in public. Whether or not he ever washed feet, we don't know. We do know that his fundamental message was this, repent and believe. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance, as he says in the Gospel of Luke. This was his message, not stop hating, okay? It was never that. It was repent and believe.
And yet, neither one of those points were mentioned in the ad, curiously enough. So, Is this a good entry point, though? Maybe that's the argument. Well, yeah, it's not really the gospel, but it gets people in the door with the feet-washing stuff. Well, no, it's probably not a good entry point. It probably won't get them in the door.
And even if it does get them in the door, they'll be coming through the door for the wrong reason. When you say to unrepentant sinners, come and get your feet washed, you are reaffirming them in their sin. You're feeding into their pride and ego. Okay, for the disciples, this is another key difference. For the disciples, getting their feet washed by Christ was a humbling experience for them.
They felt uncomfortable at first. They tried to stop him. Okay, they knew they were unworthy. But again, a major point here was humbling for them. But if somebody sits down and says, yeah, come wash my feet. I deserve this treatment. Come cater to my every whim. then the very last thing you should do for that person is actually wash their feet, whether literally or metaphorically.
You are not saving anybody's soul by feeding their ego. Yes, we should be inviting sinners into the fold. We're all sinners after all, but we're inviting them to repentance, to strive for virtue, to live holy lives, or at least to try. The problem with modern Christianity in many cases is that it offers the invitation to right? But it forgets what the invitation is for.
Google put out, I think they probably won the trophy. Los Angeles, they won the trophy for winning the Super Bowl. But the trophy for wokest ad, I think has to go to Google because they put out an ad advertising their new phone, I guess, which has great camera technology, which is fine because everybody wants, I guess the cameras on the phones are never good enough.
I think that's like what we have now is probably enough. It kind of it captures the scene well enough. We got to keep improving the cameras. So they put out an ad that advertises that. But in the context of the ad, they basically accused cameras, other cameras, cameras before this one of being racist. So let's I'll probably have to narrate some of this because it's mostly visual.
But let's let's play this. It says, historically, camera technology hasn't accurately represented dark skin tones.
Every single yearbook photo of mine has been terribly shot since I was a kid. I always show up as too dark or shiny. Because if you love me, you love all of me.
Introducing Real Tone on Google Pixel 6.
And there we go.
I think that's, is that Lizzo in the background singing there?
I think it is.
You know what's a problem? You know we talk about Lizzo too much on the show and I can actually identify one of her songs. I can identify her voice. That's a problem. All right. So there's basically the ad. And then we see pictures of a lot of non-white people, and they're nice. Oh, there's Lizzo there. There she is. Everyone deserves to be seen as they truly are.
So the point is that previous to this, cameras were systemically racist, and you were not able to take a picture of a non-white person. All the pictures look bad, and Google is fixing that now. Now, here's the thing. If in the past, cameras... The lighting with the camera technology wasn't good. You could just advertise that. You could make that point in your ad and it would be fine.
But everything has to be framed in a racial context if it can be. And it turns out that everything can be. They'll find a way to do it. And so even this ad for a camera is framed in a racial context. Which, by the way, if there's some idea that there's white privilege when it comes to cameras and pictures... I look horrible. I look like a ghost in every picture that's ever been taken of me.
I look dead. I look like I've been dead and in the ground for five days in every single picture taken of me. Which you might point out, I look like that in real life, but I look even worse in the pictures. So if you're white, then you end up looking kind of more pale in pictures oftentimes. I guess if you're black, oftentimes you end up looking darker in pictures.
So I think that just has to do with lighting. And you could probably solve a lot of those problems just by positioning your camera differently and making sure the lighting is better. Just a thought. Now that the gym memberships, the diets, the New Year plans have likely already faded away, there's still one plan worth keeping, growing closer to God.
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This year, put your relationship with God first. Let Hallow guide you on your spiritual journey. One prayer at a time. Go to hallow.com slash Matt Walsh for three months free of Hallow today. continued last night its alleged efforts to fight racism in the United States.
Efforts that for the past several seasons, up to and including the game last night, has included writing the phrase end racism in huge letters directly on the field. And many people expected that this would be enough. We imagine that all the people of the world would see the phrase end racism written in the end zone, and they would all say, wow, the NFL is right. We should end racism.
And then racism would be ended and global peace and harmony would commence. After all, racism only exists in the world because no one has ever suggested that it shouldn't exist. So we simply needed the NFL to go, hey, what if we cut out that racism stuff? And everyone would respond, oh, so we shouldn't be racist? Jeez, okay, well, we hadn't thought of that. And that would be it.
At least that's what we thought. But somehow this strategy has proven insufficient. And so it has added, the NFL has added another prong to their anti-racist battle plan. And yet again last night, the Super Bowl began with the performance of two national anthems.
There's the regular national anthem, the one written by Francis Scott Key after he watched British ships lay siege to Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812. And then the so-called black national anthem called Lift Every Voice and Sing. This was the third year in a row where the most watched sporting event of the year featured a special national anthem for one special racial group.
It's the third time the broadcast has featured the song, yet it's the first time that the song was performed on the field, which is significant because that's, of course, how they also performed the real national anthem.
Now, all of this is, of course, totally grotesque and outrageous and the kind of gratuitous display that no country outside of the Western world would ever be stupid enough to allow. And yes, I use the word allow here intentionally. You'll notice that nowhere else do they permit individual racial groups to come up with their own national anthems that are then performed before major events.
That's the sort of thing that can only happen here. And I don't mean that as a compliment. Now, there are, as always, some people looking to defend the indefensible and minimize even the most outrageous excesses of leftism. There are even conservatives who enjoy participating in this pastime. There are many conservatives who love doing this.
And from those people who, you know, we've heard that, well, lift every voice and sing. It's a nice gospel song. It's not actually a national anthem. So there's no reason for us to object to it. They didn't call it the black national anthem during the broadcast after all. They didn't specifically say that during the broadcast.
For example, a guy named Ross Schuman, who identifies himself as a conservative, made this case to me last night. He tweeted, quote, at no point in time was Lift Every Voice and Sing called a national anthem on the broadcast. Why do you take the left's bait? Well, except that the NAACP has billed the song as the black national anthem since 1917.
Not to mention the woman who performed the song at the game, Cheryl Lee Ralph, said that she was performing the black national anthem. That's what she said. She posted, quote, it is no coincidence that I'll be singing the Black National Anthem, lift every voice and sing at the Super Bowl on the same date it was first publicly performed 123 years ago. Happy Black History Month.
So everyone, including the performer herself, knows what the song is and why it's being performed. There's a reason they had her sing it on the field with the audience in the stadium standing in solemn reverence just as they do for the real national anthem. There's a reason why every media report has hailed the inspirational rendition of the, quote, black national anthem.
And they've all called it that specifically. The media, the NFL, the left, they're not celebrating the performance of a gospel hymn, okay? Their intention is not to glorify God. That's not what they're excited about. That may be the focus of the lyrics in the song, but that's not why it's included in the broadcast. And that's not the intention behind its performance.
The intention is to do the only thing a racialized national anthem can do, which is to divide Americans along racial lines, Elevate some races above others. You know, some races are special and they get two national anthems while the rest of us have to settle for just one. While diminishing our most cherished national traditions.
Because the message of the black national anthem is that the actual national anthem isn't enough. It isn't good enough. It isn't inclusive enough. Like, nobody disagrees. that black people should have a national anthem. No one is looking at black people and say, you don't get a national anthem. This isn't for you. No, the point is that the national anthem is everyone's national anthem.
So if you're a black person, that's your national anthem. If you're a white person, that's your national anthem. If you're a Native American, that's your national anthem. It's everyone's national anthem. But the other message, the other idea behind this, which is just as false and just as insidious, is that the situation, this is what they're trying to claim. This is why they're doing it.
that the situation hasn't improved much for black people since the song was declared the black national anthem over 100 years ago. It was a rallying cry during the civil rights battle.
Well, bringing it back now, not just bringing it back, but elevating it to a status equal to or even surpassing the real national anthem is meant to send the message that black people still do not have their rights, that the civil rights battle of 100 years ago is still ongoing, which is all total nonsense.
And we see yet again that those supposedly fighting against racism are in fact determined to create racial divides, deepen them where they already existed, open new wounds and reopen old ones, and keep the resentments of the past forever at the forefront of our minds. The whole point of performing the national anthem, the real national anthem,
is to, first of all, show our respect and gratitude for this country and for the traditions in our country and for the people who have made all this possible for us. It's also to show our unity and to celebrate our national identity under one flag and one God. That's the point. But the powers that be don't share that goal. Their goal is exactly the opposite.
And that's what the Black National Anthem is really all about.