Ep. 1515 - Nagging Democrats Shriek At Pete Hegseth During Confirmation Hearing
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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, Pete Hegseth endured a barrage of nagging and screeching during his confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Much of the discussion centered around the question of whether women in the military are held to a lower standard, but there isn't actually any question about it. They are, we'll talk about it. Also, looters are descending on the opulent estates of Hollywood celebrities who evacuated because of the wildfires.

And now those celebrities have suddenly come to the revelation that looting is bad. Imagine that. Plus, Mel Gibson has a fascinating conversation with Joe Rogan. And it turns out that I was right about the latest viral outrage. This one centering around a dispute between fans of opposing teams at a football game. Talk about all that and more today for The Matt Walsh Show.

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Helps transform financial burden into opportunity. But since these strategies are time sensitive, don't delay. Start building the life you deserve. Visit donewithdebt.com. Talk with one of the strategists. It's free. Go to donewithdebt.com. That's donewithdebt.com. It now appears to be all but certain that Pete Hegseth will be confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense. Republican leaders in the Senate have said as much, and it's not hard to see why that's the case. After weeks of telling us that Hegseth is unqualified for the job, Democrats spent several hours trying to

trying and utterly failing to land a single meaningful blow against his nomination. Instead, Hegseth came across as a Christian who's very aware of his own personal past failings. He was also able to put all that into context. Under the leadership of former Raytheon board member Lloyd Austin, the Pentagon carried out political purges in the military. It oversaw a catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan. It terminated thousands of soldiers who didn't wanna take the experimental COVID shot.

Those are colossal failings that no one in the Pentagon has ever atoned for. So Pete Hegseth is not a perfect man, who is? But he is basically a saint compared to the people who ran the old regime. And after yesterday's hearing, no reasonable person can really deny that. So throughout the hearing, Democrats discredited themselves one after another with botched gotcha moments and non sequiturs.

And the optics could not have been worse, as particular women in the hearing kept screaming at Hegseth, all while trying to make the argument that women are just as capable of serving in combat roles as men.

Now, if there was a way to weaponize nagging so that you could literally nag your enemies to death, they may have a point. I mean, these women could create a weapon of mass nagging destruction and kill thousands of enemy combatants all at once if that was possible. Now, before we get into that particular part of the hearing, the discussion of women in combat,

It's important to set the stage with some of the many blunders that I'm referring to here. So here, for example, is Senator Gary Peters of Michigan attempting to make the point that Hegseth has no business running the Defense Department because he has never, quote, driven innovation in any organization in his life. And here's how that went.

I don't know of any corporate board of directors that would hire a CEO for a major company if they came and said, you know, I supervised 100 people before.

They'd ask you, well, what kind of experiences you had? We need innovation. Can you give me an experience or your actual experience of driving innovation in an organization? Give me an example of where you have done that. Oh, my goodness, Senator. Absolutely. At Concerned Veterans for America, we created the Fixing Veterans Healthcare Task Force, a bipartisan task force that had never been done before to create policy, to drive policy change on Capitol Hill that

organizations fought ferociously against. We got the VA Accountability Act passed and the Mission Act passed in a way that a nonprofit of our size, veterans organization, has never done. And that's testified in all the letters that we put forward to the committee, which are on the record. Okay. I have limited time. Thank you for that. Give me an example of where you've driven down cost. I've heard examples of...

Thank you, I know your answer, we don't need answers here. You misunderstand Mr. Hegseth. We don't want you to actually answer the questions that I'm asking. These questions are not meant to be answered because they're really just statements. And obviously in this case, he asked a question he didn't know the answer to. That's the first mistake. It's like if you're in court and you're questioning a witness, you never ask a question you don't already know the answer to.

And then he made it clear that he didn't really care about the answer to the question either. And so just total humiliation was the result. But

Even aside from that, what's extraordinary about his question is that Lloyd Austin had exactly the kind of experience that Gary Peters is talking about. Austin was in charge of the war effort in both Iraq and Afghanistan for many years. According to Democrats in Congress, that made Austin qualified to be Secretary of Defense, even though both of those wars ended in complete disaster. So that is what box checking looks like.

These people cannot comprehend the idea of hiring someone who hasn't made money in the defense industry and who has not overseen two failed wars. They see that as a mark against Hegseth instead of the primary reason to confirm him. Not to be outdone, there was Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island coming in hot with this takedown. Watch. The other factor, too, is you've already disparaged in writing the Geneva Convention, the rules of law.

all of these things. How will you be able to effectively lead a military in which one of the principal elements is discipline, respectful lawful authority? You have made statements to your platoon after being briefed by a JAG officer. By the way, would you explain what a JAG officer is? I don't think I need to, sir. Why not? Because the men and women watching understand.

Well, perhaps some of my colleagues don't understand. It would be a JAG officer who puts his or her own priorities in front of the warfighters. Their promotions, their medals, in front of having the backs of those who are making the tough calls on the front lines. Thank you, Senator Reid. Interesting. Thank you, Senator Reid. Thank you very much. Now, the implication is that Pete Hegseth is a terrible guy because he used the word JAGOF in the past. Now, I think that Hegseth throwing around insults like that does open him up to the charge of

you know, being a bit of a boomer, but I'm not sure it says anything more than that. And then when Hegseth answers the question, Jack Reed looks stunned. One might even say that he looked a bit like a jagoff. By the way, I will say that, and look, I didn't serve in the military. I know a lot of people who did serve. And so one thing I know is that, you know, guys who served in the military, they don't take kindly to coarse language. You don't, it's...

That's one thing about the military. You're not going to hear any coarse language. I mean, jagoff, you go around guys in the military, you use a term like jagoff, they're going to be very offended by that. They're going to say, sir, we don't use a language like that around. This is inappropriate. So, and, you know, there's also a lot of questioning revolving around Pete Hegzeth's drinking habits,

And that's another one that, you know, guys in the military, certainly they don't touch the stuff. You know, cursing, throwing down a beer or two, not something you find in the military. No, sir. No, sir.

But I do wanna highlight one moment of substantive discussion to the extent that anything in this hearing could be described as substantive. Several senators took turns berating Hegseth over his stance on women in the military. In particular, Hegseth says that he's generally fine with women in combat roles, but at a minimum, he wants the fitness standards to be equal across genders. Now effectively, as I'll explain in a moment,

That actually means that he doesn't want women to serve in combat roles. Now, you're not gonna say it as directly as that in a hearing like this, because the whole point is that you need to be confirmed. And if Hegseth had just come out and said plainly that he doesn't want any women in combat, that would have given squishy Republicans the excuse they need to not confirm him. So you don't wanna give that to them. So instead, he focused on the fitness requirements, which was strategically smart. Now, in response to his position on fitness requirements,

Various senators adopted the bizarre and clearly false position that the standards between men and women in the military are already the same. Watch. As secretary, would you take any action to reinstitute the combat arms exclusion for female service members? Knowing full well you have hundreds of women doing that job right now.

And the standards, your two mile run, Tom, is about the Army combat fitness test. It is not the requirements to have an MOS 11 Bravo, which is infantry. These are the requirements today for people serving in industry, men and women. They are gender neutral and they are very difficult to meet. They have not been reduced in any way. And our combat units, our infantry is lethal.

Okay, and there was a lot of, just using one example, but this question of whether of the fitness standards was brought up by, repeatedly, you know, during this hearing. And the fundamental claim of the people on the other side of this is that, you know, the fitness standards are the same. So if Hegseth is worried about lowering standards for women, it's not happening. You know, that's the claim.

Now, before we play Hegsteth's response to this line of question, it's important to point out that this claim is just not true. The standards of physical fitness across every branch of the armed forces are much lower for women than they are for men. So let's start with the fitness requirements at the Navy. And we've put it up on the screen, as you can see.

Their physical readiness test consists of some variation of push-ups, forearm planks, a one and a half mile run, and a 500 yard swim. So let's take the run as an example, which by the way, the Navy refers to as a run-walk section because they expect applicants won't be able to run the full distance, or at least they don't have to. For men aged 17 to 19, a satisfactory time on the one and a half mile run is 12 minutes and 15 seconds, which is...

by the way, is already way too slow. That's not satisfactory. Okay, my 10-year-old son can crush that time for one and a half mile. So, but, and we'll get to that in a second. For women in the same age group, a satisfactory time is 14 minutes and 45 seconds. So they get a full two minutes and 30 seconds extra to complete the run, which for a one and a half mile race is an eternity.

And by the way, you can technically get even worse times than this and still pass because there's a whole probationary level below satisfactory. For pushups, the difference is even more stark. Men aged 17 to 19 have to hit 46 pushups for a satisfactory rank. Women only need to hit 20. Meanwhile, the minimum outstanding score for men for pushups is 86, while it's only 47 pushups for women. If you go to the Army's website, you'll find similar numbers across their physical fitness tests.

This is the sprint drag carry test, for example. It's a test that obviously has a lot of relevance to people who want to serve in the army in case they need to carry a wounded soldier and not blame them for being wounded as they do in the Los Angeles Fire Department, as we've seen. And as you can see, men get max points if they finish the test in one minute, 29 seconds. Women get max points if they finish it in one minute, 55 seconds. So they get an additional 26 seconds to sprint drag and carry someone.

Just to underscore the real world consequences of this kind of gender-based testing, here's a post from someone named Nathan Spearing, quote, in 2005, I was 22 and had one of the top PT scorers in my platoon in Ranger Battalion. One night, one of my mates was shot and completely immobilized. I worked with a small group of men to get him to the casualty evacuation point while our platoon continued the raid.

Dragging him through the streets of Iraq that night felt like I'd never worked out in my life. It's one of the most physically fit men in an elite light infantry unit. And this combat related task took me well beyond my physical capacities. Women shouldn't do these jobs ever. They can't without endangering the mission and the men around them.

But the military appears to be fine with that. The Air Force, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, even the Space Force have similar arrangements. Here, for example, is the Coast Guard's breakdown of fitness standards, explicitly aligned with men on top and women on the bottom. As you can see, men need to do 29 push-ups if they're under 30 years old. Women only need to do 15. Meanwhile, over in the Marines, men need to do three pull-ups or 34 push-ups in two minutes, while women only have to do one pull-up or 15 push-ups

in the same time period. And I go on, but you get the point. I mean, there is nothing gender neutral about the fitness standards for any branch of the armed services. This is not up for debate. It can't be disputed. It's simply a fact that standards are lower for women. And that's been the case for decades. It's also a fact that the standards for men too have also been lowered. There's been an effort to get more women into the military and also less fit men into the military.

And those two goals are obviously related to each other. Because in truth, 46 push-ups should not be satisfactory for a grown man who wants to join the military. For the Coast Guard, what was the number, 29? 29 push-ups? Which is downright pathetic. I mean, we should expect a lot more of the people who are tasked with defending the country from its enemies. But

What Gillibrand was saying is that at the urging of Congress, certain specialties like the infantry have adopted their own independent gender neutral standards on top of the basic requirements.

But that has not been going well either. As the Army Times reported in 2022, quote, the Army is moving forward with its long-awaited Army combat fitness test this year. But the service has officially dropped the test attempt to set a gender and age neutral physical fitness standard. The leg tuck is no longer an event. A two and a half mile walk has been added as an alternate aerobic event for troops whose medical profiles prevent them from running.

I mean, if their medical profiles prevent them from running, how are they even allowed to be in the military is a question you might ask. But, you know, a lot of a total of 48 percent of active duty enlisted women and 28 percent of active duty female officers could not pass the test. In other words, they tried to make the test gender neutral and women kept failing it. So they responded by gutting the test and making it a lot easier. And after all that, it's still not gender neutral.

In his answer to Kirsten Gillibrand, Pete Hegseth attempted to make these points. He also outlined his own firsthand observation of lowered standards in the military. And Gillibrand responded by, of course, shrieking at him. Watch. My critiques, Senator, recently and in the past, and from personal experience, have been instances where I've seen standards lowered. And you mentioned 11 Alpha, 11 Bravo, MOS, places in units. And it

The book that has been referenced multiple times here, The War on Warriors, I spent months talking to active duty service members, men and women, low ranks, high ranks, combat arms and not combat arms. And what each and every one of them told me and which personal instances have shown me is that in ways direct, indirect,

Overt and subtle standards have been changed inside infantry training units, ranger school, infantry battalions to ensure that commanders meet. Give me one example. Please give me an example. I get you're making these generalized statements. Commanders meet quotas to have a certain number of female infantry officers or infantry enlisted. And that disparages those women who are incredibly capable of meeting that standard. Commanders do not have to meet quotas for the infantry. Commanders do not.

have to have a quota for women in the infantry. That does not exist. So this was the theme of the hearing. Democrats demand an answer, then they get one that they don't like, so they start screaming. And look, the truth obviously is that if men and women were held to the same standard in the military, there would not be any women in the military. The way that we know that the standards are not the same

for women in the military is that there are women in the military. That's how we know. We don't need to know anything else about the, just show me the, you know, if we're talking about the military and the question is, are standards lower for women? The only question I need to ask is, well, are there women in the military? Yes. Well, and the standards are lower because otherwise they wouldn't be in there.

All right, now Pete Hegseth may not want to say that out loud at a confirmation hearing, which makes sense. He shouldn't, cuz the point again is to be confirmed. But it's the truth. Including women in the military necessitates by definition, lowering the standard. Women cannot measure up to the same physical standard as men. So if you set the physical standard for men to something reasonably challenging, there would be almost zero women.

the country who could make it, okay? And that's exactly why I say we should raise the standard for everyone, make it the same for everyone, and then let the chips fall where they may, okay? I mean, it's not just about pushups, but let's start with that. But pick a number for pushups, 29 is not enough. I don't know, you should be able to do, what's a good starting point? Satisfactory for a man who wants to join the military, how many pushups should you be able to do?

I mean, 60 at least. So let's say you said it there. All right, how many women could do 60 pushups? I mean, in the entire country, in the whole country, there's how many adult women are in the country? 100 plus million. How many of them could do 60 pushups? Almost zero, almost zero.

And so that alone, and then before you even get into any of the other physical fitness tests. So set it to a reasonably challenging standard and let the chips fall where they may. And they're gonna fall on an all-male fighting force, which is how it should be anyway. Of course, even aside from the fact that women can't do the job as well as men can when it comes to combat, they also just shouldn't be serving in combat anyway. A functional society does not send women out to die on the battlefield.

They're not equipped for it physically or psychologically. It's not what women are meant to do. But our government has been denying this basic fact for years. A decade ago, when the defense secretary at the time opened up all combat roles to women, he said, quote, they'll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars, and lead infantry soldiers into combat. And it made that sound like it was a sign of great progress, but it's a sign of decay, not progress.

It's also a sign that we're going to lose the next major war we're a part of unless we turn back from this madness. And after yesterday's confirmation hearing, finally, it seems like we'll have a defense secretary who understands that. Now let's get to our five headlines.

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You know, you like to think that when tragedy happens, people band together to help each other out. And indeed, a lot of that kind of thing has been happening in the wake of the L.A. fires. There's also the darker side. There are the lowlifes, the opportunists, the thugs, criminals who exploit tragedy for their own benefit.

which is why there's been a lot of looting in LA as people leave their homes and flee the inferno. New York post reports, dozens of out of town vultures have been busted for sneaking into ritzy neighborhoods in the Los Angeles wildfire evacuation zone to loot abandoned homes and local police are naming and shaming them as a warning to the rest. More than 40 people have been bagged by the Santa Monica police for allegedly preying on the thousands of homes left abandoned, uh, there and in the neighboring Pacific Palisades. Um,

And that's the number arrested, but of course, there's many more people participating in it. And so the article has this little selection of mug shots that the police have provided. And so we'll show you that. Let's put that up on the screen. Yeah, right there. They want to name and shame. I'm all about shaming scumbags. So I'll do my part here. And we can see them there. And of course, they say don't judge a book by its cover. But you look at those mug shots. There's not a single person on the screen who you would look at and go, really? Really?

they don't seem like the type. Maybe grandma down at the, you know, grandma down at the bottom, bottom center. Maybe that one, you're a little bit, but even, you know, she has kind of the aura of a looter. And, yeah,

Actually, this would be a fun game show now that I'm just thinking about it. It would be a fun game show. You're shown a mugshot and you have to guess what crime the person was arrested for. That would be fun. I think I'd be great at that. I would nail that game. I'd be even better at that than I am at Wheel of Fortune. And I'm a Wheel of Fortune master, just so you know. Guess the crime, we could call it. And it may get a bit racist, granted. And sometimes looks can be deceiving. For instance, like,

The guy, the top center, a lot of these guys, if you show me the mugshot, I'd say, oh yeah, looting. That was their thing. Top center, I think if you showed me that and I had no context, I would say, oh, serial killer, for sure. That's a serial killer. I'd be certain, I'd be absolutely certain that that guy was arrested because they found severed limbs in a freezer in his basement. So sometimes-

Sometimes, sometimes you can be surprised. And just to be clear, I'm not saying that that guy is a serial killer. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that that's the assumption, the wrong assumption I would have made. So anyway, there's a lot of looting going on. And what's really been interesting is the reaction of the celebrities who are being targeted. So here's the Daily Mail article.

Julia Roberts delivered a spicy comment to the criminals who are preying on the vulnerable during the LA fires. On Monday, the Pretty Woman star took to Instagram with a rare remark, F you looters, wrote the mother of three. So that was it. I mean, that was kind of the whole message in terms of addressing the looting. F you looters. But wait a second, Julia, what do you mean F you looters? You're a liberal. You're a Democrat. You supported Kamala. I mean, you did ads for her.

The woman who bailed out the looters and rioters during the BLM riots. So I thought, according to you guys, isn't looting the language of the unheard? So these people that are looting your homes and your fancy neighborhoods, they're just unheard. They're trying to communicate. They're trying to communicate with you. They're just looking for bread. Remember, isn't that what AOC said? They're starving. They're desperate. They need something to eat.

Now sure, they're not stealing food, they're taking valuables, they're taking jewelry and electronics and so forth. That just shows you how hungry they are. I mean, they're so hungry, they're trying to eat your jewelry. That's how hungry these people are. That's what they've been reduced to. It's the poor things, it's tragic. Now, of course, I'm being facetious. I realize that none of that applies anymore. Your compassion, your magnanimous nature, your tolerance for lawlessness,

stops right outside the gate of your mansion or really outside the gate of your gated community. It doesn't even get close to the mansion. And so I get that. And now that it's in your neighborhood, now that you're being targeted, now you can see that criminals who take what doesn't belong to them and steal and rob and commit violent crimes. Now you can see that those criminals are not misguided children.

They're actually evil. Like they're bad human beings. They are the bad guys. And so you're angry at them. But this is really, this is why I say this is the test of compassion. As I've said forever, if a person is truly compassionate, if you're truly empathetic, you will, if anything, err on the side of being too angry at criminals. You know, when someone says,

And I'm not saying this, to be clear. I cannot say this on YouTube. So I'm not saying it. I'm saying if someone said, when someone says something like looters should be shot on sight, when someone makes a statement like that, hypothetically, people have said that. And when it is said, that statement is, even if you say that goes too far, it's one that comes from a place of

deep love, love for the victims of the predators. Okay, love for justice, love for law and order. If your instinctive reaction is to sympathize with the criminals, it's not because you're a sensitive, bleeding heart liberal. It's because you are callous and uncaring and indifferent. If you only hate criminals when they commit crimes against you and otherwise you tend to side with them,

That, again, just makes you a selfish, uncaring, unfeeling, cruel, indifferent person. The desire to see criminals get what's coming to them, the desire to see them punished severely for their crimes, that is a desire. And in particular, if you have that desire to see criminals treated that way, even when they're committing crimes that don't affect you.

Well, that is because you love the victims of these crimes and you sympathize with them, with the innocent people who are having these things done to them. It's good news here. Two House Democrats have voted alongside Republican lawmakers to ban athletes born male from participating on girls school sports teams. The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act would amend federal law to specify that students, student athletes must participate in school sport teams that coincide with their gender at birth.

And there were a couple of Democrats who voted for the bill as well. So another victory. And, you know, you know, my take on this, that the the Dems have lost on this issue and and it's just over. You know, men and women's sports is all but over. It's not officially over. We still have to root out every instance of it.

for sure, but the political momentum, public opinion are against the left here. And I don't see that changing. So they've just lost, they've lost the argument. Most recent polls I've seen show that around 70% of Americans are opposed to males and women's sports, which is already striking consensus by today's standards. To get 70% of people to agree on anything is impossible, it seems like.

But keep in mind that the most recent polls, I mean, the 70% one I saw was in, I think, 2020, like summer of 2023. And I think the following summer, there was another poll that showed basically the same kind of result. What would it be right now? I mean, the winds have shifted even more in the direction of sanity just in the past six months, especially in the wake of Trump's win. So what would it be now? 70%, what I'm saying, 70% is an undercount.

When you take into account the changes that have happened culturally, even just recently, and then especially when you consider that you're going to have people who pretend to be tolerant and accepting of transgenderism when they're asked a question by a pollster because they want to seem progressive and tolerant to the pollster. But nobody is lying in the other direction. So then what's the real number? It's more than 70. 70 is like baseline.

Is it 80 percent? 90 percent? Whatever it is, it is an overwhelming majority of Americans are on one side of this issue. And there's also no will. There's no political will on the other side to even really have this argument. And that kind of tells you what you need to know. I haven't really talked about this. I haven't talked about this at all, but you've probably seen some of the clips. Mel Gibson was on Joe Rogan. Excellent person.

conversation between Rogan and one of my favorite filmmakers of all time, Mel Gibson, obviously artistic genius. I think I mentioned I watched Apocalypto recently. Again, probably, I don't know, fourth or fifth time I've watched it. Just a perfect film. I mean, and he's made a number of movies that are classics. But Apocalypto, I think, if you were to make a list of

movies, which would not necessarily be the same as a list of the greatest films of all time. Now, I think Apocalypto is one of the greatest films of all time. But when you talk about a perfect film, a film can be essentially a perfect film and not necessarily be one of the greatest of all time. Perfect just means it perfectly accomplished what it set out to accomplish.

And there's not any change that you would make to it that would help it to better accomplish what it was trying to accomplish.

Well, that's one of the reasons I say that, you know, movie like I think the Princess Bride is a perfect movie. I don't think it's one of the top 10 movies of all time. I think it's a perfect movie. I think it just perfectly does what it sets out to do. I wouldn't change a single part of it. Perfect film. Apocalypto is in that category. It's actually in both categories. Perfect film and one of the greatest of all time. Anyway, so.

Listened to the podcast with much interest, was not disappointed. I especially appreciated when Mel started telling Joe about the Shroud of Turin. This was interesting. Watch this. And I still have that faith, but as I got older, I came to it through intellect and through reading and putting things together and accounts and then occurrences like in my own life.

Mean just recently they verified the Shroud of Turin. Have you seen that? I've been reading about it And I know that there's some contention there's some some discussion and debate about it But they used to think that it was only a couple hundred years old. Yeah, and now they've they've changed that yeah They said no it is back then they also don't understand how it was made which to me is very fascinating because it's not paint and

It's not, they don't know what caused the image itself and how that technology would have even been available. It wasn't. A couple thousand years ago. An intense light. I mean, atomic light.

To leave almost like a photographic imprint on a piece of cloth. Yeah. And it's wild. Pull that up. Pull the Shroud of Turin up. Oh, yeah. It's wild to look at because it's so interesting. Yeah, yeah. Scourged, beaten. Yeah. The wounds on the thorns, the hands, the feet. And the scourging. Longer conversation about the Shroud of Turin and faith. And they got into, of course, filmmaking and all these different things. Yeah.

I was, but I was particularly happy that Mel Gibson brought up the Shroud of Turin because the Shroud of Turin presents a real dilemma for skeptics. That's what's so wonderful about it. And because the problem is that there is no ordinary explanation available for the Shroud of Turin. It's one of those things that no matter what, you're left with an extraordinary, you're left with an extraordinary explanation no matter what.

because all the ordinary ones have been ruled out. So there's the supernatural explanation, which is that this was the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. The image was imprinted miraculously on the cloth, which is what I believe. And if you don't like that, if you've ruled that out because of your... And there's really only one reason why you would rule out that explanation ahead of time, which is that you have a preconceived bias against supernatural events.

And if you're in that camp, then you're left with an equally sort of inconceivable, extraordinary scenario, which is that some forger would have to be, I mean, again, if you're a skeptic, you would say the Middle Ages. You would probably try to claim that it doesn't go all the way back to the first century, even though there's evidence, as Mel Gibson talks about, there's evidence that it did.

But at a minimum, you can't claim that the Shroud of Turin was actually forged by someone 50 years ago, obviously. I mean, there is a written record of the Shroud going back to the Middle Ages, at least. So if you're in that camp, then you're going to say, okay, well, we know that the Shroud of Turin has been known. There's records of it going back to whatever, the 11th or 12th century.

And so someone, some forger, all the way back then, someone almost 1,000 years ago, figured out a way to imprint this image on a piece of cloth. And they were able to do it in such a manner that nobody, no scientist for the next 1,000 years would be able to explain how they put it on there.

So this is someone with obviously had no access to anything approaching modern technology. And yet they were able to somehow get this image on a cloth in a way that would stump scientists who have access to technology so advanced that this alleged forger couldn't even conceive of it. That's still an extraordinary explanation. So again, there is no ordinary explanation here.

Speaking of extraordinary, one other quick thing, something I wanted to mention. I know corporate America gets a bad rap, and for good reason most of the time. But sometimes you got to give even a big corporation some credit for being innovative. Because you might think that innovation is dead. Apple putting out the same phone for 20 years claiming it's new, but it's just the same thing. Disney doing live action remakes now of cartoons that they put out eight years ago. Soon they'll be doing...

I'll tell you what, soon they're gonna be doing animated remakes of live action remakes of animated films. That's gonna happen, I'm telling you right now. By the year 2060, there will be 52 versions of the same Lion King movie. So it's bad, it's bad, it's bland, nothing is new. Nobody outside of Tesla and SpaceX seems to be innovating. Until now, until now, Walmart has grabbed headlines this week, a lot of headlines about this because they rolled out

The biggest brand update in 20 years. Pretty big news. In the marketing world, this is big stuff. They completely revamped their logo. A total makeover. Just a glow up, as the kids would say. So get ready for this. Let's check it out. This is the... There it is. That's the revamped logo. So you see on the left is before, and then on the right is now. A complete transformation. It's so much... It's so much...

It's very blue. It was blue before, don't get me wrong. But now it's even more blue, which is incredible. So you know that some marketing whiz was paid millions of dollars to come up with this. They brought in the top marketing guru. This is Walmart, okay? This is Walmart. They had access to the top marketing guru on the planet. And that guy was in the lab for years, years, working on the new Walmart logo, slaving away. It was like Beethoven writing Symphony No. 9 or something.

This genius, this eccentric genius in his office for years at a time coming up with this. And then he unveiled it and people were stunned, stunned by its beauty. Or maybe it was different. Maybe this was a flash, kind of a light bulb moment. Maybe this was some savant, some wisecracking new kid on the block type, some rebel without a cause. Just kind of sauntered into that marketing meeting at Walmart HQ, took a drag of his cigarette and said, blew her.

Make it bluer. And everyone was stunned. That's all bluer. Not just bluer, by the way. Also yellower, too. It's bluer and yellower. There's more yellow and there's more blue. I mean, there it is. Anyway, so who's to say? Who's to say that innovation is dead? At least there are some. There are some real risk takers out there in the world. And I appreciate that.

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It is bizarre. I should be on some TLC special about my strange addiction. Isn't that a TLC show? I'm addicted to white noise. I can't sleep without it. I need to have the fan to sleep. I run it when I'm on my computer, when I'm writing in my office. I don't know. Is this a thing? Am I the only person on the planet who's like, I always have white noise running? I don't know why it is. It's one of my many weird hangups.

The irony of a talk show host claiming he's not a talker. You know, it's actually not as ironic as it seems. A lot of the people who talk or perform for a living are introverts. You know, that's very common. If a person is good at standing on a stage in front of people, whether it's a physical stage or virtual, especially physical, or both, there's a very good chance that the person is not talkative enough.

or extroverted. Jerry Seinfeld put it well, during some standup special, he said that when he's on stage, he said, I can talk to all of you, but I can't talk to any of you, which was a funny way of putting it, meaning that he can talk to everybody all at once,

He's very good at doing that, but he would have trouble talking to people individually. Whereas you'll find a lot of the people who are the social butterfly types, and they can kind of work their way through a room and have all these individual one-on-one small talky type conversations. Those same people, if you put them in front of a microphone and you said, okay, now have a conversation with all of these people.

you know, at once, you know, talk for 30 minutes. Those same talkative extroverted types would oftentimes have a lot of trouble with that. And, you know, these are just different muscles that you're flexing, I suppose. Other than management coaches and players, no one should care more than 15 minutes after the conclusion of a game.

That's true, objectively speaking. I admit I'm emotionally impacted by a big Ravens loss for more than 15 minutes. So I do admit that. At least if it's the playoffs and the season's over, Ravens are playing the Bills on Sunday night. And if they lose, I am going to be impacted by it for more than 15 minutes. I totally admit that. It's not all day, though. It's like an hour or two. It is an hour or two. It's an hour or two of actually being...

Upset. I mean, really upset about this. But here's the difference. I'm totally conscious of the fact that it's completely unreasonable. I'm completely conscious of the fact that it makes no sense. There is no reason for me to be actually sad about this.

Because whether the Ravens lose this weekend or they play for a few more weeks and win a Super Bowl trophy, it has zero impact on my life. It does not mean anything to me, to my life. Positive or negative. Everything in my life is exactly the same, no matter what happens with them and whether they win a game or not. Fully aware of that. And yet...

And yet, emotionally, I'm still invested. I can't, I don't know. I can't, it's one of those things, if you think about it too literally, it does start to ruin it. But, you know, it doesn't, I mean, you could, look, you could say the same thing about a movie, right? I mean, when you watch a movie and something sad is happening on screen and you are sad in response to the sad thing, you could argue that that is irrational. Like, because you're aware that this isn't really happening. These people are just reciting words on a script and

Right, they're doing cuts in between takes, they're going to grab a snack. I mean, why are you sad? This isn't actually happening. So I would say that it's part of what makes us human is that we're able to become emotionally invested in these sorts of things that maybe don't directly impact our lives. I don't know, I gotta work on my rationalization here a little bit, but I'll figure it out.

The whelp and then starting a whole new conversation sounds like a good old fashioned Midwest goodbye. Yeah, well, I'm Irish by descent. And so we have the Irish goodbye, which is the, I guess, the opposite of the Midwest goodbye. Because the Irish goodbye is that you don't say goodbye. The Irish goodbye, that's another one. I'm big on the Irish goodbye. The Irish goodbye is you're at a function, you're at a party, some kind of social function. And you're there, you're talking to people.

And then all of a sudden people look around and say, oh, what happened to, where'd Matt go? Is he still here? No, I'm just gone. I didn't say goodbye to anyone. I'm gone. Mysteriously. Gone with the wind. And that's the Irish move. You just want, you're there one moment, the next moment people are looking around and you're gone. And that's it. And I, I kind of, I prefer that strategy. You know why? Because saying goodbye is painful to me.

You know why it is? Because I enjoy it so much. I enjoy being around people so much. I'm so invested in it that to say goodbye is too difficult. I can't do it. I can't do it. I can only leave. Like a band-aid, just rip it off. Mandy Moore asked her fans to donate to her in-laws because they lost everything in the fire, even though she's getting paid like $250,000 an episode for her show. What is her show? I don't even know.

Crazier thing is that they raised over 200,000 bucks. These celebrities really have some nerve. There are many regular people that became homeless that won't get that help. Can't believe the administration is only offering one-time payments of $700 to victims if they qualify. Yeah, I saw that story about Mandy Moore. It is obscene, I agree, for a famous celebrity to put out a GoFundMe.

their own family members rather than just paying for it themselves. I think another lesson of maybe of that story and also the tragic tale of our poor friend Digimon Han Solo or whatever his name was, is that a lot of the people in Hollywood are not as rich as we think or as they portray themselves. So you watch the Oscars red carpet,

I don't watch it, but if you do, you're going to see these kind of ostentatious displays of wealth with these people walking around with designer outfits that cost more than your house. Most of that stuff is rented. They can't afford it either. So they portray themselves as uber wealthy. And some of them are, but not that many of them. The rest of them are just regular wealthy. And so then they want to turn around and cry and want sympathy.

because they're not uber wealthy, they're just regular wealthy, the poor things. Are we tired of winning yet? Because look, it's just begun. The Daily Wire will be live from DC for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as he's sworn in as the 47th president of the United States. And we're not just gonna watch history, we're bringing it to you live and uncensored. To celebrate the 47th president, we're giving you 47% off at Daily Wire Plus annual memberships right now. Plus, we're including a free $20 gift

as a thank you for joining the fight. And remember, Daily Wire Plus is the only place where you get our daily shows ad-free and uncensored, plus unlimited access to premium entertainment, hit movies, groundbreaking documentaries. And you can join the celebration. Use code 47 at dailywire.com slash subscribe for 47% off your membership today. Now let's get to our daily cancellation.

All right, today for our daily cancellation, we have a brief update to a story we discussed yesterday. The update is, in summary, that I'm right. Not to spoil the ending, but this whole segment really has one point, which is just to say that I'm right. And as you know, I hate, I hate having to point that out, that I'm right about something. Man, I hate it. Darn.

Darn that I have to do this, cuz due to my overriding humility, I don't like saying I told you so. But I feel that I must say it because the fact is that I did tell you so and I'm so I'm duty bound by my code of journalistic ethics to give you the facts, especially when the fact is that I'm right. So yesterday we talked about the viral story of that the Packer fan, a man named Alex Basara, who posted a video of an Eagles fan at Eagle Stadium on Sunday verbally accosting his fiance.

Here's that video one more time in case you missed it. As we discussed yesterday, this short clip of the Eagles fan cussing out Alex and his fiance went very, very viral. The video racked up tens of millions of views on Twitter alone. The outrage mob got to work and within a very short time, the name of the Eagles fan and his place of employment had been published all over social media.

And now the fan has not only been banned from the stadium, but has also been fired from his job. His now former company, a DEI-focused management consulting firm,

which is admittedly pretty funny, put out a statement condemning his conduct, calling it vile, disgusting, unacceptable, and horrific, and saying that he'd been terminated. So this guy's life is effectively destroyed. Granted, it's hard to have sympathy for him. His behavior was reprehensible, not to mention he worked for a DEI firm. And he's an Eagles fan, worst of all. So this is not exactly the sort of guy that I am predisposed to sympathize with, and I don't. But even so,

Justice is proportional. And so we have to wonder whether being doxxed and villainized on the national stage and then fired from your job is a proportional response to the offense of using bad language at a football stadium. Now, I've always said that in most cases where there's some kind of random dispute or altercation between private citizens, assuming nobody was killed or seriously hurt,

In most of those cases, there's no reason for the dispute to become national news. The entire country doesn't have to get involved. And I would say that even if the incident was fully and accurately captured in the clip and there was no need for additional context, still, I would say probably there's no reason for anyone outside of the people who are directly there to care about this.

Like people say rude things to each other all the time, like millions of times a day, this sort of thing happens. But here's the part where I sadly have to say that I told you so. The other problem with these viral videos of random altercations between random people is that, as I said yesterday, they are always out of context. Always, okay? 100% of the time, they're out of context because they always pick up in the middle.

There's a reason that somebody started filming, which means that there's a whole part of the story prior to when the camera was turned on, or at least prior to when the video that's being presented to us begins, that we're not seeing. We're not seeing that part of the story. We're getting like act three here. We're not getting act one and two.

So the person who posted the viral video wants us to see just the part they're showing us, which is why if you spent more than 30 seconds on the internet in your life, you should know by now that anytime a viral video is used to gin up outrage, it is always lacking at least some important context. So you should always ask what happened before the video started.

Or now you could just say, I don't care about this. So I'm not gonna ask, which is fine. That's fine too. That's perfectly fine response is to say, I just don't care one way or another. But if you're sharing the video and expressing your outrage about it, then you clearly do care. And so if you do care, then you should care about what actually happened. If you don't care about what actually happened, then you shouldn't care at all. You just say nothing.

Now, there's nothing that could justify the language the Eagles fan used, but it is very possible, even likely, that the two sides were being mutually obnoxious to each other throughout the course of the game. But we were only given a glimpse of the obnoxious behavior of one side. Which, by the way, this is like a classic passive-aggressive manipulation move that people do, where they say the things that set somebody else off.

So that people will only see the reaction and not see what the other person did. The classic, classic move. And look, if that was the case, it would mean that the victims here are not really victims. It would also mean that the two day outrage cycle is massively overblown, even more overblown than it already appears. There would be no reason for anyone to care about

about some people being jerks to each other at a football game, cuz that would be the story. The story then is just, well, you got three people at a football game who are just being to each other. Who cares? Why should there be any outrage at all about this? Because there'd be no clear bad guy. They're all jackasses in that case and there's nothing else that needs to be said about it. So is that what happened? Well, yesterday it was revealed that this guy Alex Basara, unsurprisingly, first of all, is a YouTube content creator.

Okay, apparently he posted a GoFundMe last week to raise money to go to the game with his fiance. Now, it's already rather pathetic that a grown man is begging strangers for money so that he can watch a football game. That's not really the point. But I do just wanna say that I've got no problem with people raising money.

When it's needed, when you've got someone who's in a place of need, and I have given to those kinds of fundraising campaigns many times, I got no problem with that. But begging for money from strangers as a grown man because you want to go watch a football game is pathetic. Well, let's go to the description that Basara wrote on this GoFundMe page.

He said, "If you didn't know, I'm born and raised in PA and actually one hour from Eagle Stadium. So I ask of you, the fans, send me to Philly. Send me into the belly of the beast. I've done it multiple times, repping the Packers proud, and I'm fully ready to do it again. I've been cursed at, stuff thrown at me, and even my first ever cheese head ripped off my head and thrown into a fire bin while supporting my team in Philly. But I'm sure as hell not scared to do it again." Okay.

Leaving aside that he is panhandling for money to go to a football game. The point is that this is a content creator who has stated ahead of time that he wants to go to the belly of the beast where he has already, according to him, been verbally and physically accosted on multiple occasions. Now he's going back with his fiance in full Packers regalia.

He knowingly brought his fiance into that environment, fully aware of what would happen and seemingly hoping that it would happen. Here's the selfie that he took on the way into the stadium. And as you can see, he's wearing a body camera, okay? I thought this was a video taken by a phone. He's wearing a bike, got a GoPro on. So we have a YouTube content creator with a body cam going into a place where he fully and consciously and explicitly expects to be harassed.

and bringing his fiance along for the experience, hoping to get some content for his YouTube channel. And then when his fiance is cussed out, he doesn't defend her or even switch seats with her. Instead, he just uses it for clips, clicks, which was clearly the entire point all along. So we still don't know what happened in the moments leading up to the clip that we've all seen. Basara could post the whole video in full context, which by the way, you just destroyed a guy's life

Okay, and we can all say he's an a**hole, he deserved it, but fine. That's a real thing you did. Like, this is not just a game. And whether the guy deserved it or not, you just destroyed this man's life. So you now have a moral obligation at a minimum to give, like, let everyone see the whole thing. You have an obligation to do that.

But he hasn't done that. Instead, he's just moving on. Well, okay, got the clicks there. That guy's life is over. I'm moving on to the next thing. And the outrage mob goes with it. The outrage mob says, yeah, I didn't care about that anymore. We cared about that a lot for 30 seconds, enough to pass judgment on this. We don't care anymore. Who cares what actually happened? We cared yesterday for 30 seconds. We don't care anymore. I mean, that's the attitude.

And there's a reason why this guy has not provided the whole video, because it seems now highly, highly, highly likely that Basara and his fiance were engaging and antagonizing the Eagles fan just as much as he was antagonizing them. Again, they raised money through GoFundMe so that they could go there and capture precisely this kind of interaction.

The likelihood that the Packers fans are at least equally at fault here and also said obnoxious things that they just happened to not show us the video of seems to me to be extremely high. And yet only one side of the dispute gets his life destroyed. The other guy gets YouTube followers and social media clout. This is obviously not the first such case. It's not even close to the most egregious case.

That's my point. We see the same story play out time and time again. The masses react to a 15 second video of an interaction between people where the interaction obviously lasted for a lot longer than 15 seconds. And they don't even ask what happened before it or what happened after. They don't ask who filmed it or why or what their motives were. There is no discernment. There's not even a slight curiosity.

They'll dig into the life story of the assigned villain and find out where he works and lives and who his relatives are before they ask even one single question about the people on the other side of the dispute. To put it simply, people are very easy to manipulate, which is certainly not breaking news, I understand. But it is why the outrage mob that barks on command in response to out of context viral videos

is today canceled. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Have a great day. Godspeed.