Transcript
Matt Walsh (0:00)
Inauguration day, January 20th. Watch it with us. Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, Andrew Klavan and Jeremy boreing live from D.C. donald Trump's historic second term officially begins. Coverage starts at 8:30am Eastern. Watch live on Daily Wire Today on the Matt Walsh show, is the pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality obsolete? Is it insulting and out of touch to tell young people to go work fast food and work their way up in the world? That's the growing consensus among some commentators on the right, and we'll talk about it. Also, Joe Biden speaks to the country for the final time. Thank God. Pro lifers who've been imprisoned by the Biden administration call on Trump for a pardon. And former comedian Bill Burr slams the people who've dared to criticize California's response to the wildfires. What the hell happened to this guy? When did he become such a pathetic little dork? We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh that's right. We're going to D.C. watch the Daily Wire live as Donald Trump has sworn in as the 47th President. Celebrate with 47% off your Daily Wire plus membership. Use code 47@dailywire.com subscribe and join us in making history. Being a husband, father and host of my own show means life never slows down. Imagine trying to eat 31 different fruits and vegetables every day. Sounds miserable and time consuming. But with Balance of Nature, fruits and veggies, there's never been a better or more convenient dietary supplement to ensure that you get a wide variety of fruits and vegetables every day. With 31 different whole fruit and vegetable ingredients, Balance of Nature takes fruits and veggies, freeze, dries them, turns them into a powder, and then puts them in a capsule. You take your fruit and veggie capsule every day, and then your body knows what to do with them. Go to bouts of nature.com use promo code Walsh for 35% off your first order as a preferred customer. Plus, get a free bottle of fiber and spice. That's bowelsofnature.com promo code Walsh if you aren't on X or Twitter, if you insist on dead naming it, you bigot, you will often be surprised to learn about the kinds of things people are arguing about on that platform. In many cases, the debates don't resemble anything that anyone outside of the site is talking about. These debates are often insular. Parochial groups of people will get into heated disputes that last sometimes for weeks or months or longer, and yet which have no relevance beyond the confines of the platform itself. So I'll give you just one example of millions among right wingers on X There has been a long running and quite tedious quarrel over the term woke right. Various groups of conservatives are accusing each other of being woke right as they debate what the term means and whether it describes anything real. Now, I don't know where this woke right idea comes from, but I do know that I've never heard a single soul in the three dimensional physical world ever use the phrase or express any opinion about it one way or another. Yet there are relatively prominent conservatives on X who have spent months locked in combat over a concept that has no real political or cultural relevance at all. Nobody cares about it but them. Needless to say, there are a great many examples of this sort of thing, and even less do I need to say that I have myself been guilty of arguing about things on X that nobody outside of the app cares about. I might even sometimes be the one starting the arguments. Admittedly, however, not every debate on X is so trivial. Sometimes the conversation is relevant beyond social media, sometimes it reflects what's actually happening in the world, and sometimes more often. Now in the Elon era, a debate on the platform is actually important, and this week there's been one of those kinds of arguments. Another round of it. Anyway, as this has been a long running dispute, it's important enough to talk about here, and it'll lead me to a very crucial point that I want to make, especially for the younger people who are listening. The debate revolves around the economic situation that young people in particular are facing. One side of the argument says that although it is a challenging landscape for young people who are just starting out in the world, the best thing they can do is get an entry level job somewhere and work their way up in the world from that starting point. The other side says that this kind of bootstraps mentality is obsolete. Young people have been totally screwed. They can't get a job and work their way up, and they say telling a young person to go work some low paying customer service job is insulting and out of touch. The game is rigged. American jobs are being stolen en masse by foreigners. The American dream says this side of the debate is effectively dead and therefore the old school kind of go out there and work your way up the ladder approach is simply too antiquated to be useful, they would say. Now, as you already guessed, out of the two camps I tend to fall more into the former. Although the latter camp isn't wrong about many of the fundamental points they're making about the system as it's currently constructed. I'll get to that in a moment, but first let's take a look at how this exchange is playing out and I think that the debate may be best encapsulated by this. Chris Ruffo, in a series of tweets a couple of days ago, wrote something that has really provoked people and caused a lot of consternation and anger on other side of this argument. Here's what he wrote. Every generation has challenges. We currently have huge problems with the cost of housing and splintering culture. But the economy is strong, incomes have never been higher, trades are hiring apprentices straight out of high school, and tech has enabled a wave of entrepreneurship and high income email jobs from anywhere on earth. We should remember that the boomers, whatever their faults, had to make their way in a much poorer America and had to navigate war, stagflation, recession and high interest rates. It's never a cakewalk. We should work to provide opportunity for our kids, but should also remind them to be grateful for the opportunities they have. I didn't make $50,000 a year or own a car until I was 30. Then after years of struggle in a creative field, things paid off. I could live in Seattle or New York or D.C. but I choose to live in a small town. It's all a trade off and one can make a good life in almost any metro area in the us. Now in a follow up, this is a thing that really sets some people off. He posted a job listing from Panda Express and he wrote this. This is basically full employment. The Panda Express near my house is offering $70,000 a year plus benefits for the assistant manager. He can make $100,000 a year at Chipotle for a few years and working up to store manager. Now as I said, this set a lot of people off. They're very upset by especially the Panda Express. The suggestion by Chris Ruffo that Panda Express may be a viable option for young adults, you know, starting out in the world. This is very offensive to a lot of people. On X, a prominent account that goes by the handle Bronze Age Pervert responded in a way that I think kind of captures the general attitude of the other side of this argument, he wrote. This is an absurd thing to post. This environment is the worst in decades and maybe ever in America to build wealth through any normal career. It's the worst work environment and worst prospects for wealth accumulation ever. For a young person. It's next to impossible. In fact, even with the best degrees and an elite job, it's absurd and a joke to see conservative pundits who work as writers and commentators in media and aren't frankly exemplars of Protestant capitalist enterprise. Recommend working at Chipotle and UPS for a few smart young right wing men who are deploring decades long trends. Maybe you'll care to also give them advice on manning up and marrying a local sweet girl high school sweetheart. Now the debate spiraled from there. A writer named Aaron McIntyre agrees with Bronze Age pervert, he posted. If you're worried about Andrew Tate's influence on young men, telling them to climb the fast food ladder probably isn't the move. Another commentator named Scott Greer chimes in with a similar sentiment. Conservatives wonder why young men turn to Andrew Tate when they tell the same demographic to be content with fast food work and marrying much older single moms. Someone else gave his perspective. He said that it is possible for a young person to get started and succeed even in this tough environment. He offered the example of his own 22 year old son who he said has a job at UPS making $70,000 a year. At 22 years old, he said he's about to marry his girlfriend who he said is 10 years older. And to that, someone else in a post that has 27,000 likes, said Poor kid is grinding, about to marry a 32 year old living in his dad's basement, stuck in a dead end job for $70,000 a year. He'll likely never have kids or own a home. Imagine how out of touch you have to be to post this proudly. This is losing. But Boomer dad imagines everything is okay. A 22 year old getting his $70,000 a year is losing and is doomed to never own a home. That's the idea. Now Mike Cernovich is on the other side what we might call the bootstraps camp. And he thinks, and so do I, that you know, work is not supposed to be fun all the time. It's not even necessarily going to be fulfilling. You'd like for it to be, but it won't necessarily be. But you have to do it because that's life and always has been, he wrote. Quote, you're supposed to hate your job. That's why it's a job. Someone pays you because they don't want to do it. Most of us had jobs. It's nothing special. You're not a snowflake. Fight club and office space covered this decades ago. Work sucks. This isn't new, but it's this reply to that post that I think best captures kind of the essence. And what I think is the fatal flaw in the, I guess, anti bootstraps position, somebody responded and said the reason why jobs were worth it is that you could afford a home in a nice high trust society and support a family. Why do it now? I will not be reduced to an effing serf. Jobs are not worth it. He says. Jobs make you a serf. And this is why I think there's value in talking about this. What may seem like very online controversy, but it's not just online. It seems clear to me that a lot of demoralized young people feel exactly this way. They think jobs aren't worth it. I hear this kind of thing a lot, so there's no point in even trying. They think they have it harder than anyone has ever had it. It's hopeless, everything's unfair, and so on and so on. And these young people are being encouraged down this hopeless road by people who are considered intellectuals on the right, like Bronze Age pervert, who we recall, said that today's work environment is the worst ever, the worst ever in history and that it's next to impossible to become successful and accumulate wealth. This is what they're being told. They're being told by these supposed thought leaders that they should ignore anyone who even suggests that they start off in a low paying job, working customer service or something similar. And again, a lot of young people, especially young men, have heeded this advice, I think to their own detriment. So here's what I want to say after this very long preamble where I unfortunately had to give you a bit of a blow by blow account of a Twitter war. I acknowledge that young people face serious challenges starting out in the workforce. I can clearly see, and do not deny that it is harder than it should be for a young man to get into a stable career, buy a house, start a family and all of that. I agree that we are importing foreigners to take American jobs. That is hideously evil and unfair. I'm in favor of any policy that puts an end to that scam. So I agree with the anti bootstrappers on that point. They're going to hear no argument from me. Okay, once we've agreed on that, what then? What is a young adult supposed to actually do tomorrow? See, this is the question that matters. It's the question that in these kinds of conversations most people just skip. You know, it reminds me of my frequent debates with the Red Pillars and Manosphere where they declare that, you know, the dating scene is a disaster and young Men have no hope of meeting a quality woman and building a stable family. Marriages are broken. It's all broken. It doesn't work. Well, my question to them is always the same. What do you want these young men to do then? What do you want them to actually do with their lives? Give up and die alone? Is that it? What do you want them to do? And I ask that here as well. What should they do tomorrow? I'm not asking what the President should do or what Congress should do or what government agencies should do. I'm asking what the actual individual human being we're talking about here, the newly minted young adult, should do. He will wake up in the morning and brush his teeth and eat breakfast, and then what? That young man, who is 22 years old and has no job, if you believe it, is deeply insulting to suggest that he should go apply at Panda Express or ups, what do you want him to do instead? What do you recommend? What is your plan? Complaining about it incessantly on Twitter is not a plan. Talking about how it should be and used to be is not a plan. Calling for policy solutions is fine, and I agree that we should work on those. Yeah, but what about tomorrow? What is the demoralized young person supposed to actually do in his life tomorrow? Because it seems to me that anyone who makes any kind of practical suggestion of what he could actually do in his own life individually tomorrow is shouted down by this other side. So what I'm asking, what's he supposed to do? Don't deflect. Don't tell me about the H1B program. I think we should abolish it. I don't want to import any foreign labor at all. Okay, But a young man who wakes up in the morning tomorrow cannot abolish the H1B program. That's not something that he can accomplish tomorrow. So what should he do? Should he post about abolishing it? Okay, fine. That takes about 60 seconds. Let's give him 30 minutes for a series of tweets about H1B visas. Great. What's next? How is he spending the rest of his day? And if you have no answer to that question, then your contribution to this discussion is worthless. You have nothing of value to offer this young man. Now, here's what I say. I say that he must get up onto his feet in spite of it all and begin to pursue his goals one small step at a time. He must get the best job he possibly can, which will almost certainly not be very good or very fun. But he's not in A position right now at 21, 22 years old, where he can afford to worry about what is fun. He has to work as hard as he can to achieve what he can right now. He has to gain experience and establish himself. And if he's just starting out in the world, the best job is probably whatever job he can get. Because you have to start somewhere. And a job is better than no job. He has a difficult road. Every young man in his position through the entire history of the earth has had a difficult road. Life itself is a difficult road. Is his road more difficult than the road that, say, young men of my generation had to walk? Perhaps. I mean, I entered adult life right around the time of a great recession and a housing market collapse. It wasn't exactly, you know, an easy path. I worked many, many awful customer service jobs that I hated with every fiber of my being. And my hatred of them fueled me even more. I was more determined to become successful so that I would never again have to work the kind of job where you wear a name tag and get paid by the hour. But I had to work those jobs in order to get to a point where I didn't have to work those jobs. Cause you have to start somewhere and that's how it goes. So I'm not recommending that anyone do anything that I have not already done. Is it harder now? Maybe. Is it harder than it was for the boomers when they were just starting out? Probably. Although I think the comparison is overstated. Is it the hardest ever? Is a young person in America today facing next to impossible odds and unprecedented historic hardship? Of course not. That is an absurd suggestion. If you are a 22 year old man today, you may, you may have it a bit harder than some in your parents and grandparents generation, but that is as far as it could even theoretically go. World history did not begin in 1955. No matter what, no matter what, you and I and our parents all had it and have it easier than the vast majority of humans who have ever existed on the planet. We are all, all of us, every person listening to me right now, myself included, we are all in the top 1% of easiest lives ever lived by human beings. Which is why even with all of our problems, you would not want to live anywhere else on the planet today. And I know that because you're not. You're here. And if you had a time machine, the farthest you might want to go back is the middle of the 20th century and no farther. And if you did go back even that far, you would almost Certainly discover that it was not the cakewalk you imagined it would be. None of this diminishes the difficulties that you as a young person are currently experiencing. Okay, I only mean to put it in context, and the context is important. Here's why it's important. Because if you think that nobody has ever had it harder than you, you may then be justified in wondering whether success is simply impossible in your case. After all, no one has ever succeeded against odds so great as what you're facing. But that's why it's important to realize that many millions of people, millions, hundreds of millions, have succeeded against odds many times greater than anything you have ever faced. That should inspire you, not offend you. The point is not to be dismissive. That's an inspirational point. And either way, my message to the young man that we're talking about here is that he still has to get up and walk, even if he did have the hardest life anyone has ever lived on this or any planet. Still, I would say, well, then, get up and move forward. What else are you going to do? Lie down and die? Now, my attitude is condemned by some right wingers whose doomerism has now descended to a point where they will call you a traitor for suggesting that a young man has any agency at all in his life because they want to hear and dispense nothing but misery, porn and hopelessness. Anything else makes you a boomer cuckoo. And that's because these people, who also, by the way, many people were talking about, they're all also like commentators and pundits while they speak with such contempt about the contempt of the Con Inc. Pundits, like all of them, are also that, by the way, you know, but they don't actually give the slightest damn about the young people that they pretend to be speaking for. And I know that because all they offer, all they offer is just relentless, relentless hopelessness. So instead, we end up with the solution, which I've seen repeated in different forms countless times offered by the commenter I mentioned earlier that jobs aren't worth it, he says, because he's not going to be a serf. So instead, he will presumably live off of the government or his parents. But here's the problem. That's not how you escape being a serf. That's how you become one. You are volunteering for a life of failure and servitude. Working at Panda Express is beneath you, but to eat it for lunch using your dad's credit card because you refuse to support yourself is not beneath you. Who do you think is in the higher position there. You think you're in a position where you can look down on the Panda Express manager when you're the one there eating lunch that your daddy is paying for. It makes no sense. So again I ask, what is your plan? What are you going to do tomorrow? Some people like to mock the bootstraps mentality, but they have given young people precisely zero alternatives. They have not given them any idea of what they should actually do tomorrow. And to me, that is the most important and most useful question here. What should you do tomorrow? My answer is simple. Tomorrow you get up and you put on your shoes and you get started. Now, let's get to our five headlines. Let's talk about something that affects all of us, those of us who are responsible, hardworking Americans, and that is taxes. Now, it's the new year, and tax season is upon us. Are you prepared for what's coming? Do you owe back taxes? Are your tax returns still unfiled? Did you miss the deadline to file for an extension? Well, with the new year beginning and heading into the busy tax season, the IRS may be ramping up enforcement. Let me tell you, they're not playing around. You could face wage garnishments, frozen bank accounts, or even property seizures if you haven't taken action. But here's the good news. There's still hope. Tax Network USA has been in this game for years, and they know exactly how to navigate the complex world of tax law. They've helped taxpayers save over a billion dollars in tax debt and have filed over 10,000 tax returns. That's billion with a B, everybody. They specialize in helping hardworking Americans like you reduce their tax burden. And I get it. Dealing with the irs. IRS is about as fun as a root canal. But, you know, ignoring the problem is not gonna make it go away. So here's what you gotta do. For a complimentary consultation, call today at 1-800-958-1000 or visit their website at tnusa.com walsh. That's 1-800-958/1000 or visit tnusa.com walsh today. Don't let the IRS take advantage of you. Get the help you need with Tax Network usa. Joe Biden delivered his address to the nation last night. Not much noteworthy there. Honestly, I could barely muster to even talk about the guy at this point. I'm ready for him to be gone, and mercifully, he will be very shortly. I do want to play this one clip from the 20 or so minute speech. Listen to this.