← The Matt Walsh Show
The Matt Walsh Show
Ep. 1543 - Incompetent Federal Employees PANIC When Asked What They Do All Day
01:03:01
Today on the Matt Walsh Show, federal workers are in a state of panic after being subjected to the smallest amount of accountability and transparency. I already had a pretty low opinion of many federal workers. Now I’m realizing that my opinion was still too high. Also, Joy Reid weeps on camera over her firing. Democrats in Maryland work to put condoms in Elementary School vending machines. And one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a long time is in line to win a bunch of Oscars in a couple of weeks. Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/4bEQDy6 Ep.1543 - - - DailyWire+: Join us for Backstage Live, March 4, at 8:30 PM Eastern—we’ll watch President Trump address Congress, then stay tuned for unfiltered, no-BS reactions you won’t get anywhere else. Watch at https://dailywire.com "Identity Crisis" tells the stories the mainstream media won’t. Stream the full film now, only on DailyWire+: https://bit.ly/3C61qVU Get your Matt Walsh flannel here...
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- [00:00]
Matt Walsh
Today on the Matt Walsh show, federal workers are in a state of panic after being subjected to the smallest amount of accountability and transparency. I already had a pretty low opinion of many federal workers. Now I'm realizing that my opinion was, I guess, still too high. Also, Joy Reid weeps on camera over her firing. Democrats in Maryland want to put condoms in elementary school vending machines. And one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time is in line to win a bunch of Oscars in a couple of weeks. We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh Let me tell you about something that doesn't get enough attention. Your liver, this powerhouse organ is crushing it 24, 7, handling over 500 functions in your body. It's a hard job and sometimes your liver needs a little support. That's where dose for your liver comes in. It's not some weak supplement. This is hard hitting science backed support for your body's most crucial filter. The results speak for themselves. Clinical trials showed over 86% of people got major improvements in their liver enzyme levels. Want to know what makes this different? One shot of dose packs the same punch as 17 shots of turmeric juice. It's designed for peak performance, supporting energy levels, digestion and overall liver function. No BS ingredients either. It's clean, sugar free and engineered to deliver results. Start giving your liver the support it deserves. Save 30% on your first month of subscription by going to Dosedaily, Co Walsh or entering Walsh at checkout. That's D O S E D A I L Y Co Walsh for 30% off your first month subscription. There's an old line from one of Ronald Reagan's press conferences that you've probably heard before. He's talking about trade embargoes and inflation and how farmers in Illinois are being impacted by government policy. And he begins with one of his trademark quotes by saying the nine most terrifying words in the English language are I'm from the government and I'm here to help. And the line obviously resonated and it's quite, quite well known and famous now. And not just with the farmers who were watching that press conference in Chicago. Anyone who's ever interacted with the government understood immediately what Reagan was getting at. Most of the time. When the government gets more involved in your life for whatever reason, it's a good indicator that things are about to get worse and normal people are frightened of that possibility for good reason. At the same time, Reagan's one liner raised a question that until now has gone unanswered and that question is this. If everyday people are mortally terrified of government intervention in their lives, then what exactly do government bureaucrats fear above all else? What short, unassuming sentence could possibly terrorize the entire federal workforce in the same way that the government is capable of terrorizing everyday people and people in the private sector? Well, a couple of days ago, courtesy of Elon Musk and Doge, we learned the answer to those questions. We finally learned how to usher in a state of total panic in the federal government in just a few short words. It turns out that all you need to do if you want federal bureaucrats to melt down in a very public and humiliating fashion is ask them what they did last week. That's it. To bring the entire federal bureaucracy to its knees, you just need to pose a question that every single private sector worker on the planet is able to answer and knows they must be able to answer or they will be fired. As you may have seen by now, here's the email that I'm talking about. It was sent by the Office of Personnel Management, which is essentially the HR department of the federal government, and it was clearly drafted by Elon Musk, who famously asked this same question to the old CEO of Twitter before Musk took over and fired him. But here's what the email looked like. Very, very simple. As you can see, it reads, Please reply to this email with approximately five bullets of what you accomplished last week and CC your manager now. You will not find a less threatening, more straightforward question that an employer could possibly ask an employee. I struggle to think of any remotely productive worker in any context who would have any difficulty answering this question. You know, a janitor could say he mopped five floors. A plumber could say he fixed five toilets. A restaurant worker could say he served a certain number of tables, and so on. A lawyer or consultant or anyone else with an hourly rate could produce a timesheet that outlines everything he did at every single moment of the day. Okay, well, maybe a consultant couldn't do that. But most workers in the private sector, both white collar and blue collar, can and often must answer questions like this. But for many federal workers, this email is an existential threat. That's because, unlike the overwhelming majority of workers in this country, in the private sector, they in many, though not all cases, don't do anything and to this point have not been expected to do anything. They just shuffle papers around and wait until their pensions vest. This is something that's considered impolite to say out loud, I guess, but everybody knows it's true. In many cases, these federal jobs function like a kind of welfare that's designed specifically to provide fake jobs to certain demographics. That's not some right wing conspiracy theory, by the way. Spend 5 minutes reading left wing media and you'll find this statement isn't even controversial. I mean, they come out and admit it. For example, here's a report this week from NBC blk, which is NBC News division that produces reports for black people, which is something that exists for some reason, I guess. And we'll put it on screen. The headline reads, quote, much of the black middle class was built by federal jobs. That may change. For the last several decades, federal jobs helped black workers find stable work with guardrails to prevent bias. But mass cuts are threatening decades of upward mobility. In other words, yes, these federal jobs don't really benefit the taxpayers who are funding the salaries. Instead, they benefit certain demographics that without these fake jobs, would not make anywhere near as much money. In their panic over Elon Musk, Democrats in the corporate press are finally just coming out and admitting that. And as you expect, they're gonna fight like hell to keep that gravy train going. Some federal workers have just filed a lawsuit against the government because of the email asking them what they do all day. Yes. Rather than answer an extremely basic question that demands a bare minimum of accountability, federal workers would rather go to court. As Axios reports, quote, federal workers sue over what did you do last week Email. Only federal agencies have the ability to hire and fire their workers. The lawsuit says the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government's HR office, which sent out the email over the weekend, does not have that authority. The suit alleges. They're specifically objecting to Elon Musk's statement that if workers don't answer the email, it'll be taken as a resignation. They're arguing, in essence, that federal workers are entitled to ignore emails from their bosses asking them what they do on all day. That is the extent of entitlement that we're dealing with here. And by the way, these workers are getting a second chance to answer the email. Now Musk has clarified that, quote, subject to the discretion of the President, they will be given another chance. Failure to respond a second time will result in termination. So they get another chance. And it looks like if they want to keep their jobs, these workers should just take it. Already several federal federal departments have told their employees that they need to reply to this email. The Department of Transportation has instructed workers to reply. So has the Department of Health and Human Services. The Social Security Administration, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and many others. But there are signs that throughout the federal government, many workers will simply be incapable of answering this email. They legitimately cannot think of a single thing they did in the past week that was productive, apparently. And that's probably terrible news for their careers. But it's good news for us because if nothing else, their televised meltdowns have been pretty entertaining. So we'll start with this indignant woman on CNN who works at some unnamed federal agency and she's very upset about this. Watch. First, just tell us about this email and what it was like receiving it and what you all have talked about after getting.
- [08:12]
Unnamed Federal Worker
Sure. I got this email Saturday afternoon about 3pm and I felt absolutely infuriated getting this email with a demand within 48 hours to provide a response on what I did within the last week or face termination. This is clearly an attempt from Elon Musk to harass and bully and intimidate the federal workforce, which is part of his broader plan to gut the federal workforce and privatize public sector services to ensure that corporations like his own can get more profit. And that makes me really angry.
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Matt Walsh
My coworkers as well, these spoiled brats, I mean, it's amazing. They just can't help themselves. Yeah, the plan is to gut the federal workforce. And this is. You are why, lady, you're. The reason why we want to gut the federal workforce is exactly because of you and people like you. Infuriated. Infuriated. That she's being asked to simply what did you do last week with the taxpayer money we are paying you? It's our money out of our pockets to do a job. Did you do the job? What is the job? What did you do? That's the question. Now, evidently this woman has a lot of time to appear on CNN and claim that she's being bullied and harassed. And she's absolutely infuriated. But even after talking through this whole segment, she still never explains what she does all day. Instead, she attacks her supervisors, which is, again, it can't be emphasized enough in the private sector. You would not get away with this. If your boss comes up to you at your job and says, hey, what did you do last week? And you said, well, I'm infuriated that you even asked me that question. How dare you? How dare you expect me to explain what I'm doing with the money you're paying me to do the job that I'm. How dare you. If you responded that way, you would just be fired. And of course, this Woman is just one of many examples. On Reddit, federal workers are posting various plans for non compliance and retaliation. They're talking about ways to spam the federal email system. For example, one viral post, which was picked up by cnn, reports that some federal workers may be considering leaking top secret information to foreign adversaries. That's how committed they are to public service. Okay, Rather than explain what they've done last week, they would rather commit treason. That's what they would prefer. And what's especially funny about this whole meltdown is that a few years ago, documents obtained by the investigative reporter Patrick half found that 25% of federal workers went a full month without even attempting to check their emails during the COVID lockdowns. So they just went dark a full month. So really you can make the case, as Musk has, that these emails are necessary just to make sure these workers are still alive. This is like proof of life. We just want to make, you know, just are you alive and opening your laptops at least every once in a while. But apparently that's too much for these workers to deal with. They're worried that if they have to answer the email honestly, they might lose their jobs. Thousands of probationary federal workers have already met that fate. In particular, terminated workers at the IRS are having some of the better meltdowns. Here's one of them, which was posted by NBC Philadelphia Watch.
- [11:43]
Unnamed IRS Worker
I mean, it was an illegal firing. My performance was good. I was, you know, I was doing everything I was supposed to be doing. I was even one of those government employees that went every day of the week. I had to report Monday through Friday, you know, 7 to 3, 30. That was my tour duty. And that's what I served. And here I am.
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Matt Walsh
Did you, did you get. I was one of those government employees who went to work every day. One of those. Yeah. No, but that's exactly the problem. You know, I was, I was even one of those federal workers who went to work every day. But that's. That, that shouldn't be one of those. That should just be all of them. That's, that's not, that shouldn't be like a type of federal worker. That shouldn't be a special category. I was one of those special ones who actually went to work every day, Monday through Friday. Yes, this IRS worker stated that he was shocked to be fired because he actually showed up to work five days a week. That was his tour of duty, as he put it. These are people who legitimately think they're storming the beaches of Normandy just by Going into an office building on a regular schedule. They cannot imagine a scenario in which normal people don't see them as war heroes because they leave home and commute to their job and occasionally conduct audits that make people's lives a living hell and then punch out at 3:30 in the afternoon. Okay. They have a schedule about as grueling as a third grader. That's when elementary schoolers get home is 3:30. So this seems to be something of a trend at the irs. Here's another recently terminated IRS worker with his sob story.
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Charles (IRS Worker)
I was just in training. I was just in training. I waited four months to go to training just to be fired.
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Unnamed Reporter
He's one of 6,000 plus federal employees who work for the Internal Revenue Service fired this week as part of mass layoffs happening under the Trump administration. The majority of those workers, like Charles, were probationary workers employed for less than a year. Charles told us more than two dozen employees were laid off from his office here. Off Gessner. He says it took over a year to get his dream job as a tax exempt officer dealing with nonprofits, organizations and compliance. His pride and passion taken away.
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Matt Walsh
Excited.
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Charles (IRS Worker)
I was so excited to learn the job. I was telling my management I was gonna be the best, they can count on me. And it's not like I have.
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Matt Walsh
I.
- [14:30]
Charles (IRS Worker)
Have no say so, like they just toss you away. I thought corporate America was like this, not the government. I thought the government takes care of their people.
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Matt Walsh
So as you catch his dream job, he was a tax exempt officer dealing with non profit organizations and compliance. That's what he's crying about on national television. You know, that this was his dream that has been shattered. This was his, you know, his, his pursuit of happiness, you know, kind of story. And you know, growing up, some people want to be astronauts, some kids want to be race car drivers. They want to be, you know, they, they, they want to be heroes. They want to be. But not this guy. He dreamt of becoming a tax exempt officer dealing with nonprofit organizations and compliance. That's how he thought he would serve the American people. As he sits there in sweatpants with his smoke detector beeping, which is so on the nose that I thought that that was a joke. I had to look up to see if that beep was in the original video. It is. I don't, you know, some stereotypes just are stereotypes for a reason. In fact, they almost all are. And then of course there's the part where he explains that in his understanding, the federal government took care of its people, unlike corporate America. In other words, he thought he'd score a permanent job with no accountability whatsoever. That that was actually his dream, right? He wasn't actually dreaming of enforcing compliance on nonprofits or whatever. He was dreaming about having a job where there was no accountability. None of these people can hear themselves speaking. None of them understand what they're acknowledging. In reality, they're making the case for their terminations better than Elon or Donald Trump possibly could. They're more or less stating that they don't do anything. But to be fair to the federal government, there are some exceptions. There are some employees, particularly employees in the federal intelligence agencies, who have been very busy in recent years. And I'm talking specifically about the National Security Agency, or nsa. And we know they've been busy at the NSA because the City Journal just obtained chat logs from the agency's top secret internal messaging system. As the City Journal has just reported, quote, these logs, dating back two years, are lurid, featuring wide ranging discussions of sex, kink, polyamory, and castration. One popular chat topic was male to female transgender surgery, which involved surgically removing the penis and turning it into an artificial vagina. Mine is everything, said one male who claimed to have had gender reconstruction surgery. Another intelligence official boasted that genital surgery allowed him to wear leggings or bikinis without having to wear a gaff under it. These employees discussed hair removal, estrogen injections, and the experience of sexual pleasure post castration. And it goes on from there. So at least we know what the NSA has been up to. So if you ask them what they did, you know what their five things were last week. It's a list that none of us would want to read, but they would be able to list it. And if we're being honest, we all know that this kind of thing was going on at many other federal agencies. If it was happening at the nsa, supposedly one of the more serious federal agencies, then it was happening all over. None of these federal workers ever thought they'd be held accountable for what they do all day. That's because for more than a century, thanks in part to various Supreme Court decisions, the idea of an ever expanding, vast federal bureaucracy has been taken as a given in this country. Nobody thought it could ever be reined in. The federal government assumed just more and more powers and, quote, civil service protections and so on. And, you know, no one ever did anything about it. But despite what you may have been told, the Constitution does not require any of this. Instead, the Constitution empowers the executive to run the executive branch, which employs Every single one of these perverts, narcissists and incompetents, no judge, no lawsuit, no act of Congress, certainly no CNN appearance can circumvent the constitutional separation of powers that gives the executive branch that control. What we're seeing now, which is something that we should have seen a long time ago, is an executive branch that's finally willing to exercise that control. Now let's get to our five headlines. You know what keeps me up at night? The state of our country. But at least I'm not tossing and turning because of my mattress anymore. That's right, folks. I'm talking about Helix sleep. I never realized how badly I needed a new mattress until I finally got one. My Helix mattress actually supports my body the way it should. And I'm sleeping straight through the night for the first time in years. 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Helixsleep.comwalsh yesterday we talked about the tragic passing of Joy Reid's show on msnbc and I explained why. I'm personally heartbroken by the news, mainly because we now lose all the content that her show provided to lazy right wing podcasters like myself. But we now have Joy's reaction to this news, which we didn't have yesterday when we talked about it. And it is everything that you would expect and hope for minus the smoke detector beeping. Here it is.
- [20:22]
Joy Reid
My show had value and that. I'm sorry that, that what I was doing had value. Had value. And in the end, I'm sorry. I try not to cry on TV and I think this is kind of like being on tv. So I apologize and Then. And that it kind of. And then it mattered. I see Karen is there and she's been texting me as well. And so what I will just say is that in the end. Thank you. Where I land. Is that the moment of guilt that I felt that I went hard on so many issues, Whether it was the Black Lives Matter issues of a young baby or a mom or a dad that was killed, or when we opened up people's eyes to the fact that Asian Americans were being targeted and not just black folks, or went hard for immigrants who've done nothing but come to this country like my parents did and try to make a life and defended them. Or whether we've talked about what the President is doing that is subversive to the Constitution, that is injurious to our liberty, you know, defending books that people find inconvenient. You know, that Nikole Hannah Jones put into our spirit that we need to understand 1619 as the real founding of this country, whether it's talking about any of these issues. And yes, that's enough.
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Matt Walsh
You know, she says, well, I talked about Black Lives Matter. The Black Lives Matter issue of a. Of a young baby or no. And she kind of. Then she. Then she quickly moves on to or, you know, a mother. Cause that's actually the one. You specifically don't talk about the fact that the life of a baby matters. That's the one. That's actually the one category of person Joy that you leave out is. Is that so? But anyway, she's devastated. She's crying on camera. No dignity, no sense of decorum or self respect. And in case anyone out there would make the mistake of feeling any pity for this woman, remember that she mocked many times what she calls white tears. You know, she has total contempt for white people, in particular, white women who cry. She talks about white tears. So I guess these are. I mean, using her sort of phrasing, her terminology, these are Joy Reid's black tears. Is that how we. Can I say that I'm tired of Joy Reid's black tears? Am I allowed to say that? That only goes one way? Of course. Right. But even aside from Joy's racism and hypocrisy and the double standards and all that, it is. It again, it's just gross and pathetic to cry like this. I mean, it's one thing to cry publicly over some tragedy, some national tragedy that's befallen the nation, but to cry over your show getting canceled is disgusting. It's grotesque. And speaking of grotesque and pathetic people, Rachel Maddow took to the air on Monday night on her own show to call out her network for racism, for firing Joy Reid.
- [23:34]
Rachel Maddow
Listen, an even bigger programming change is at 7pm 7pm Eastern where joy Reid's show. The readout ended tonight. And Joy is not taking a different job in the network. She is leaving the network altogether. And that is very, very, very hard to take. I am 51 years old. I have been gainfully employed since I was 12. And I have had so many different kinds of jobs. You wouldn't believe me if I told you. But in all of the jobs I have had, in all of the years I have been alive, there is no colleague for whom I have had more affection and more respect than Joy Reid. I love everything about her. I have learned so much from her. I have so much more to learn from her. I do not want to lose her as a colleague here at msnbc. And personally, I think it is a bad mistake to let her walk out the door. It is not my call and I understand that, but that's what I think. I will tell you. It is also unnerving to see that on a network where we've got two, count them, two non white hosts in primetime. Both of our non white hosts in primetime are losing their shows, as is Katie Fang on the weekend. And that feels worse than bad. No matter who replaces them. That feels indefensible and I do not defend it.
- [24:58]
Matt Walsh
Well, it's unnerving, she says. Unnerving. It's unnerving and indefensible to fire a non white host. I guess if you have a non white host, you just are obligated to keep them on the air indefinitely no matter how far their ratings sink. Which of course is. So all you're doing is hurting the cause of non white tvos. Because then the lesson you learn from that if you're a TV network is like, well, we better not hire any non white people to host any shows cause we're not allowed to fire them ever. And when it comes to ratings, by the way, Joy's ratings were really bad. I mean like just in the key demographic, which is all that really matters to the cable news shows. 25 to 54, the key demo. Guess how many people in like the last week of her show, how many people on average tuned in in that demo? 60,000. 60,000 people in key demo. That is a. That's like nobody. I mean if we put up just a YouTube video and it gets 60,000 views, we're like, well that didn't really work. That's just for a YouTube video. This is a prime time cable show, 60,000. And that you want to talk about indefensible. That is indefensible. That's. Those are indefensible ratings if you want to keep your job. But Maddow says that they're morally compelled to keep the show on the air. I guess even if it gets zero viewers, it should still stay on as a. As Again, a kind of like welfare system, I guess. Never mind the fact. And you know, the thing that makes. Of course, making this about race is so absurd for every imaginable reason, but the show is being replaced, apparently by another show that is hosted by three people. Two of them are black. So Joy Rhee is being replaced not just with one black person, but two. And yet it's still somehow racist to fire her. And that's. And also when Matt El says that, well, we only had two, count them, just two non white hosts in primetime. Well, primetime is four hours, so that's 50% of the slots go to non white people. That means that non white hosts are overrepresented on msnbc, you know, by per capita, by. If you're, if you're judging by population metrics, there are too many nonwhite hosts on msnbc, not too few. Not that I'm looking to defend msnbc, of course. I'm perfectly happy to see the network get eaten alive from within. It's a lot of fun to see that, as always. But it just goes to show that the left is not free of and will never be free of this kind of racial insanity that has defined it for so long. I know we talk about Wokeness being dead, and it is certainly on the run. It's backed into a corner. It has been losing battle after battle, but it's not actually dead. Because look, if Joy Reid could be fired for having abysmal ratings and nobody on the left, nobody prominent on the left made it about race, then that would be a pretty clear sign that Wokeness is basically dead. That didn't happen. Instead, they all did exactly what you knew they would do, which is make it about race right away, no hesitation. So this is who they are. It's how their minds work. It'll never change. Okay, well, we've lost Joy Reid for now and all the content she brings, but fortunately we still have the View, So we still have them. And here they are yesterday claiming that it is unchristian to criticize Wokeness. Listen.
- [28:51]
Unnamed View Host
I thought about the conversations you and I have had, Whoopi, so many Times about the co opting of the word woke and the fact that the right somehow has made it a dirty word to be. Woke is a word that came out of the African American community, and it was about being. Acknowledging social justice inequities, acknowledging people's suffering. It is not a bad thing to be to care about other people, to care about the sufferings of others, and to act upon it. And so Whoopi will often tell me, well, I've never been asleep, and that's how I feel. My parents, you know, they grew up in the civil rights movement. I grew up in the late 60s, 70s. I was always a part of it. And so I've never been asleep. And so it angers me when people are like this woke stuff. That's telling me that you don't care about my lived experience. You don't care about the oppression of the LGBTQ community. You don't care about the oppression of the disabled. You don't care about the oppression of immigrants. You don't care about your fellow neighbor. And that is ungodly. That is not Christian.
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Matt Walsh
Well, that's true. I don't care about the oppression of LGBT people or disabled people or minorities in this country, because it's not happening. So it's hard to care about something that isn't actually occurring. You know, it's hard for me to care about a thing that is fictional unless it's, you know, in a movie or something. The word oppression has a meaning, and the meaning of oppression is that this is cruel or unjust treatment being inflicted on a person or a group by somebody in power. It's an unjust, cruel use of power against a person or group. That's what oppression is. So in what way are LGBT people or black people or even disabled people since they got wrapped into this somehow? In what way are they being unjustly and cruelly treated and abused by people in power? And I know when you say that people on the left are like, what do you mean? There are a million ways. It's the easiest question. Okay, well, go ahead. Easy question, right? Give me one example, just one clear example. You can't do it. So that's our problem with wokeness. One of the problems, anyway. As a woke person, you expect us to have sympathy for the entirely invented plight of people who are not only not being persecuted, but are often the recipients of unfairly advantageous treatment. And that's because in your woke mind, oppression and persecution are not words with any objective meaning. These are. These are not things that actually happen. Or at least it doesn't matter if they happen or not. What matters is that you feel like they're happening. So to be woke is to believe that your lived experience, a phrase that only a woke person would ever be vapid enough to actually say out loud, your lived experience, quote unquote, which is to say your own personal perception, your feelings about your experiences, more than the experiences themselves, outweigh the facts on the ground. And that, by the way, so many people, I mean, I've always complained about this phrase lived experience, because it appears to be redundant. I mean, of course, if you had an experience, of course you lived it. You can't have an unlived experience, can you? And it is redundant when taken literally. But you can't take anything that woke people say literally because, again, nothing has any objective, literal meaning in their minds. So what they actually mean when they say lived experience, what they mean is felt experience. To live and to feel to them are the same thing. These are words that are interchangeable. And so what they're saying is felt experience. And they do. There is a distinction between your felt experience and an actual experience. Like, there's what's actually happening, and then there's how you feel about what's happening. And so when they say, well, my lived experience is that I've been oppressed, what they mean is, I feel like it. My experience is that I feel like I'm being oppressed. And then when a rational person responds and says, well, yeah, but you weren't actually oppressed. Like, that didn't happen. Well, but I feel like it did. So I feel like it did. So then it basically did. That's what it means to be woke. And. And so, yes, our lack of compassion and concern and empathy is for that. Your feeling like we don't. If you feel a certain way and the way you feel totally contradicts the reality on the ground, then, yeah, we don't care about your feeling. You can't do anything about that. That is your problem. That's like the very definition of a you thing. There's nothing we can do about that. And so that's how you. That's the difference. The Post Millennial reports this. The Maryland House of Delegates passed legislation on Friday that would repeal a prohibition on selling condoms and vending machines within public schools. House Bill 380, sponsored by Democrat delegate Nicole Williams, would allow contraceptives to be sold in vending machines in nursery schools, preschools, elementary schools, and high schools. According to the Baltimore Sun. The bill also eliminates the current misdemeanor criminal penalty, which carries a $1,000 fine. Williams explained, quote, it's a really simple bill. All it does is remove a criminal penalty. It's not setting policy. It's not dictating to anyone what they should or should not do. All we're doing is removing a misdemeanor from our criminal law article. The bill, however, has drawn criticism from Republican lawmakers. Republican Delegate Cathy Zaliga referred to it as condoms for Kitty, saying the bill goes too far. Harford County Republican Delegate Lauren Erican also opposed the measure, questioning the necessity of condom sales in places for education. I actually agree that they should remove the misdemeanor penalty for giving condoms to elementary school students. They should get rid of the misdemeanor penalty and make it a felony. That's get rid of the misdemeanor and replace it with a felony. It should not be a misdemeanor with a thousand dollar fine to give condoms to elementary school students. It should be a felony with prison time. So that's if you're gonna make a change to that law, that's what the change should be. And this is obviously perverse and totally insane. Anyone who supports putting condoms in a public school vending machine is a dangerous pervert who should not be allowed around children, much less teaching them or setting public policy that affects them. But, you know, when I read these kinds of articles, what I want to focus on is the statement from the lawmaker who opposes this measure. So we're told that this Republican delegate says she's against it, and it's good that she's against it. You should be against it. But then she says the phrase that I hate the most from Republicans, I hate this phrase from Republicans. I want all Republicans and conservatives to take this phrase just out of their. Remove this phrase from their vocabulary entirely. This is a phrase that will be on the tombstone of the Democrat Party, or rather the Republican Party. This is the tombstone of the Republican Party is this phrase this goes too far. This is like the mantra of the Republican Party as the Democrat Party has run roughshod over American culture, ransacking and pillaging and taking whatever they want. Republicans have stood by for decades and impotently shouted this goes too far. Now, granted, in recent times, and by that I mean, like the last month or so, Republicans under Trump have actually been effectively for the, you know, have been operating effectively and enacting an agenda for the first time, like in my lifetime. But historically, usually this is what we get. We get these shouts of that goes too far. And I don't wanna give Kathy a hard time. I don't know anything about her. Maybe she's a very solid right wing conservative. I truly don't know. It's possible that she is. I just don't know. I'm only saying that it goes too far is the wrong response to this kind of thing. Putting condoms in public school vending machines doesn't go too far. It is an outrageous and depraved act of sexual predation against children. It's a thing that like no degree of this thing should be happening. It's not that we went too far in the direction of giving birth control to kids in school. It's just, it's a thing that should not. We should not have gone one inch in that direction. So goes too far means or implies that there's a form of giving birth control to kids in public school that would be acceptable, but that putting them in vending machines or maybe putting them in elementary school goes too far. So goes too far is what Republicans have historically said when the left tries to enact some crazy far left policy. But Republicans would prefer a slightly less crazy far left policy. It's like if somebody robbed you and stole $300 out of your wallet and then you shouted, well, this is ridiculous. You've taken too much. You stole too much from me. You wouldn't say that because obviously you're implying that there's a certain amount of money that you would be okay with them stealing. And your issue is not that you got robbed per se, it's that they took more money than you would have preferred for them to take when they did rob you. Now, in reality, 10 cents is too much when you're getting robbed. There's no amount that is the inappropriate amount. And it's the same thing here. So I'm not trying to be pedantic, but I've been following politics for long enough to know what these phrases mean. And the point here is important. We should not merely object to public schools going too far in their efforts to sexualize children. We should object wholly to the sexualization of children in every form and to any degree whatsoever. Another way of putting it is that we need to object in principle to these kinds of things, not just to the kind of crazier manifestations of it, but to the thing itself is what we should object to. All right, let's get to the comment section. If you're a man, it's required that you grow up in hey, we're the Sweet Baby Gang. Tax season's Here again. And the IRS isn't messing around at 2025. Look, I get it. Tax problems are about as fun as a root canal. Maybe you've got some unfiled returns collecting dust, or you're sitting on a pile of back taxes that's giving you night sweats. And with April 15th breathing down your neck, it's tempting to just walk into the woods alone, never look back and hope it all goes away. But here's the thing. Trying to ghost the irs, well, that's like trying to outrun a bear. Spoiler alert. It does not end well. And that's why you should let Tax Network USA deal with this headache for you. These folks aren't your average tax people. They've got direct line to the irs. Apparently that's a thing. So they know exactly which agents to talk to. Whether you're in the hole for 10k or 10mil, they've got tricks up their sleeves that actually work. They've already sorted out over a billion dollars in tax debt, so they must be doing something right. Talk with one of their strategists today. It's free. Stop the threatening letters, stop looking over your shoulder and protect yourself from property seizures and bank levies. Don't let the IRS control your future. Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit tnusa.com walsh April 15 is just around the corner, so act now before the IRS acts first. Okay, a lot of comments on the beard subject. So these are all beard comments we're going to do today. Matt, during the beard segment, you said beards are one of three things you agree with the Taliban on. Can you please list this the other two for historical record? That feels like a trap. Feels like you're trying, you know, you're trying to trap me. You're not going to trick me into singing the praises of the Taliban again. Not again. Not for two shows in a row. Only one. That's a once a week thing. We don't do that every day. So check back next week and maybe we'll revisit the topic. Worse with a beard. David Letterman? No, that a lot of people have tried. I said, I defy anyone to come up with an example of a man who looked worse after growing a beard. And there have been many attempts, all of them unsuccessful. David Letterman is not. Is also a failed attempt to come up with an example. And by the way, I said every man looks better with a beard. I didn't say that every man necessarily looks better with a beard grown down to his ankles. I respect those kinds of beards. I respect the effort. But you can have too much beard. I will say that. I mean, it's possible. It could get to a point. It's like if I said every man looks better if he builds muscle. That's definitely true. Every man would look better if he built muscle. It could go too far. I mean, you could be just a roided up lunatic. You know, one of these over the top bodybuilder types where you've got biceps five times bigger than your head kind of thing, where it doesn't even look like your body matches anymore. You look like they took the head from another person and put it on your body. Then it starts and the muscles aren't even functional anymore. Like, you wouldn't even. You can't. There's no function. It's all just there for show. So it could get to that level where it's like, it's too much. Okay, you've gone too far. But that doesn't disprove the statement that every man looks better if he builds muscle. And same for beards. Every man looks better if he grows a beard. Ben Shapiro and Michael Knowles both need beards. Lol. Oh, they do. And you know, and I've talked to both of them about this privately and publicly. I've called them both out for their, I think, outrageous refusal to grow a beard. And the crazy thing is that Ben, for a short period of time, looked like he was threatening to grow a beard. And it was a good look. I tried to encourage him when he was. He kind of had the beard thing going slightly as this was, you know, in the last year or two. And I can remember even privately giving some encouragement like, keep it going. And then he just gave up. And this is the thing. A lot of guys will do this. They'll start to grow the beard, and then they get to a point where they become frightened and they turn back. And often I'll hear guys will say to me, well, yeah, I tried to grow it and then it got itchy. Okay, well that's. You gotta push through that. It's not gonna be itchy forever again. I'm not sitting here every second of the day just feeling like I have poison ivy rash all over my face. Cause I have a beer. But you have to get through it. You have to push through it. Okay. It takes a certain commitment. So you're getting. If you get to the itchy phase, you're getting right to the precipice of being a legitimate bearded man, of being a beardsman. Being a real beardsman is on the other side of the itchiness. But you have to push through it. This is literally what separates the men from the boys. The mat just declared that Michael, Ben and Andrew are all shriveled, leprous little weaklings. I did not declare that. That's not me saying that. That's science. This is basic biology that makes these determinations. Matt, I'm one quarter Native American Indian. If I try to grow a beard, it comes in patchy and uneven. I would grow one if it didn't make me look like a homeless psychopath. You know, there were a lot of comments like this. A lot of people claiming their ethnicity gives them an excuse to not grow a beard. I heard a lot of, oh, I'm Native American. Oh, I'm Asian. You know, that's not an excuse, okay? You're the one who decided to be Native American. So that's. Don't start. Come. Don't come to me with that excuse. That. Don't use that as an excuse. Now, whatever the. Be any. I mean, everyone is capable of growing some kind of beard. Whatever it is. That's your beard. Let's see. Says the guy who can grow a nice beard. My patchy as hell. Well again. And here we go with the patchy beard thing again. Patchy beards are also. Those are. Look. This might be controversial. Those are a fine look, I think. I think those are fine. That's like. That's a. They call that hobo chic, I think is what they call it. That's. So you got. It's a little. The hobo look is a look that's fine too. So I would rather look like a hobo than look like a baby faced freak. Okay, so those are your two options. I'm afraid those are the two options that you have. And I take the hobo look. In that case. You look like a hobo doesn't mean you actually have to beat one. Okay, I didn't say you have to actually go get a box and lay on a street corner. Matt, why don't you have a beard? Are you stupid? Matt, half a second later. Buy these Jeremy's razor blades. That's. That's fair. That's fair. Actually, that's not fair because you know what? This is another misconception. I hear this a lot. Well, what are you selling Jeremy's razors if you're such a fan of beards? Well, first of all, I'm not. I don't sell them like this is not. It wouldn't be my choice. So this is not a product that I would choose to sell. It's not my product. But second, just because you have a beard doesn't mean you don't use a razor. Like, if I didn't use any kind of razor at all, I would be like a werewolf. So you do, you know, it's a little bit of maintenance. That's what the razor's for. These two things are not, do not contradict, don't. So nice try. This is one you don't want to miss. On Tuesday, March 4, President Donald Trump is addressing a joint session of Congress at 9pm Eastern laying out his America first vision tackling immigration reform, economic revival and national security. And you know we're not sitting this one out. Join us for backstage live at 8:30pm Eastern. Our pre show breakdown with me, Ben, Michael, Andrew and Jeremy and then we'll watch the entire speech together live on Daily Wire. Plus, when Trump's done, we're back with unfiltered no BS reactions you won't get anywhere else. This is the event shaping America's future. So make sure you're there. Watch it all live on Daily Wire. Plus this Tuesday night. Subscribe now@dailywire.com now let's get to our daily cancellation. This cancellation segment today exists mainly so that I can justify three and a half hours that I wasted this weekend. But it also, I hope, serves as a warning that will save many of you from suffering the same fate. There's also a lesson to be learned here, I think, or relearned about Hollywood and movie critics and the kinds of films that earn all the praise and accolades these days. So my wife and I just watched a critically acclaimed new film called the Brutalist. And this is a movie that when the Oscars roll around in a couple of weeks, is likely to likely set to take home several awards. It has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It already took home the Golden Globes for best Drama, Best Director and Best Actor, along with a slate of other smaller awards. Throughout this award season, critics have hailed the film as a work of genius, a masterpiece. Its critics score on Rotten Tomatoes sits at 93%. And if you scroll down the poll quotes on the Rotten Tomatoes website, you'll find critics saying stuff like, quote, it is quite easily one of the greatest films of the 21st century and quote, a monumental work of cinema and quote, it's not a film to devour, but to be devoured by. There's such a weight to it that it creates its own field of gravity. Now these are ringing endorsements. While the first two quotes are, I'm not exactly sure what the hell the third one is even supposed to be trying to say, but this is what happens when film critics are really taken by a film. They get so caught up in the experience that they start babbling incoherently. All told, suffice it to say, this film is a critical darling. And it's not just the critics singing its praises. The audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is a very respectable 80%. And I have personally heard from multiple people that it's a good film, even a great film. And it was this last piece, the endorsements of actual humans as opposed to movie critics, that convinced me to sit down with my wife and watch this thing. And that is a decision that I very much regret. I am sad to report that the Brutalist is not good. It is very bad. In fact, it is all told one of the most unpleasant film experiences I have ever had. Indeed, I find it very hard to believe that most of the people who claim to like this film actually did like it. When someone tells me, oh, I like the film, I think you're lying. I think you're a liar. I'm calling you a liar. I don't believe you liked it. Because every year it seems there is one especially artsy and self indulgent film that everybody pretends to like because they think they're supposed to. You know, they're convinced that the film is some sort of IQ test and the score is pass fail. And the way to pass it, they think is to. Is to think the movie is a masterpiece. Even if in reality they spent at least half the runtime praying for the damn thing to be over. You know, the movie becomes a kind of psyop that critics run on the public and then the public runs on itself. Everyone goes around speaking in hushed and reverent tones about the monumental artistic achievement of a film that almost all of them actually hated. Every year gives us at least one of those kinds of movies. And the Brutalist is this year's addition to that pantheon of films that people hate but pretend to like. And I'm here to tell you, do not fall for the psyop. Do not waste your time on this movie. And if you don't believe me, I will describe the film to you and there will be spoilers. This is your warning. If you don't want the plot spoiled, don't listen to this review. Although the good news is that the plot really can't be spoiled because there isn't much of a plot to spoil. The Brutalist is a slow, meandering slog to nowhere. It is a long, dreary, monotonous journey into the void. And when I say long, I mean long. I mean three and a half hours long. You could watch two and a half other movies in the time it takes to watch this one movie. There is no valid excuse for a movie to be three and a half hours long. Anyone who's ever made a film knows that editing is a crucial process of the filmmaking process. Okay? You also know that if you're not getting rid of scenes you like when you're editing not just scenes you don't like, but even some of the moments you do like, then you're not editing it enough. Editing and cutting down a film should hurt. It should be painful. And if it doesn't hurt, you have not cut nearly enough from the film. And it's clear that the director, Brady Corbett, took apparently very much the opposite approach. So he put the film together, came up with his V1, looked at it and said, this is absolutely perfect. We will cut not one single thing. In fact, let's add some more random stuff. The movie's only three hours long. Let's add about 15 more shots of people staring forlorn into the distance. Oh, and we already have nine scenes of the protagonist shooting heroin. Let's add five or six more because you know, you can never have too much heroin in a movie. I say that was apparently the conversation that happened in the editing bay while this film was being put together. And the end product is an endurance test that the vast majority of the audience will probably fail. So what is the movie about? Well, the Brutalist is a story of a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect named Laszlo Toth, played by Adrian Brody, who flees war torn Europe and immigrates. Immigrates to. Immigrates to the United States, where he is eventually reunited with his now disabled wife and niece. They're initially split up and then they reunite a little bit later in the film and he faces a lot of hardship. He befriends a homeless black man, one of the only virtuous characters in the whole film, of course, develops a heroin addiction and is eventually taken in by a wealthy American business magnate played by Guy Pierce. And Pierce's character, Harrison Van Buren, enlists Toth to build a giant community center in Pennsylvania, which as far you know, if you can call that a plot, that's basically the plot of the film. Now, the theme of this movie is that immigrants have a Hard time in America and are underappreciated and often abused. And this theme, which is not exactly a unique or revolutionary theme, but it's a theme that, like approximately 90% of all Oscar bait movies explore. And the theme is explored in relatively subtle ways for the first, about half of the film, in fact. If the movie had only consisted of its first half, if it had ended around its midpoint, it might have been a decent, though not great film. But unfortunately, it continues. And then it continues and it continues and it continues. And finally, just in case the audience has not quite gotten the message that Americans are cruel to immigrants, there's a scene towards the end where again, spoiler. Van Buren finds an intoxicated Toth laying in a back alley and proceeds to rape him while telling him how disgusting and useless he is. Yes, the white Christian American businessman makes anti immigrant comments while raping the Jewish immigrant in a back alley. And that's an actual scene in this movie, all right. And Toth, for some reason, goes back to work for Van Buren even after this episode. But now he's an even more morose character, understandably. And this leads to the climactic moment in the third act where Toth's disabled wife wakes up screaming from pain in the middle of the night because she's disabled. She has osteoporosis. And so we also. This is also a scene, by the way, that we see like 10 times of her waking in the middle of the night, you know, screaming in pain. Because we gotta get the point. She's disabled and in pain. They say that's. We can't have one scene that tells you that. We need 15 scenes so that you understand that this woman is disabled and in pain. And finally there's this scene and Toth decides, cause he's such a good husband, that the way to make his wife feel better is to give her intravenous heroin, which he does. And then has sex with his overdosing wife, who almost dies. And when she wakes up in the hospital, she tells her husband that she wants to move back to Israel, or move to Israel because America is rotten. Quote, the whole country is rotten, she says. And then she leaves. She goes home. Well before going back to Israel. She then goes to the home of Van Buren to confront him for raping her husband. And Van Buren runs away and kills himself. At least that's implied. They never actually show it. But he goes and kills himself. And the end. Like that's the end of the movie. There's a totally unnecessary epilogue scene because unnecessary Scenes could be the actual name of this movie. But the movie essentially ends with the homosexual Christian rapist millionaire committing suicide after he's confronted by the strong feminist wife of the Jewish heroin addict immigrant that he violated. So that's probably all you need to know about this movie. There are enough problems in what I've just described that I would think would convince you not to watch it. But there are plenty of other problems, too. For one thing, and this is not a small issue, Toth is supposed to be a brilliant architect in the film. Like, he's. That's. He's. The whole point is that he was a brilliant architect. He came here, he can't get a job, he's shoveling coal. And then Van Buren discovers him and says, oh, my gosh, look at your buildings. It's beautiful. Except that his buildings are monstrously hideous. They are these clunky, behemoth, unartful masses of concrete. And in a way, they're a good metaphor for the movie itself. And meanwhile, the main character, Toth, has essentially no redeeming qualities. He's a junkie and an adulterer who designs ugly buildings. Even worse, he gets raped by a man and still goes back to work for him. Doesn't have to, by the way. He's like. He's. At this point, he actually, at this point in the film, he had gotten a job in New York. Like just a steady, stable office job in New York. He could go back to that. He's not desperate and impoverished. He decides to go back and work for the guy who just raped him, and then he leaves it to his disabled wife to go confront the guy. Now, I'm not saying that movies have to have happy endings or that they have to always tell stories about saints and heroes. I have nothing against said movies. I have nothing, in principle, at least, against movies that focus on flawed people or even bad people. The Godfather is one of the greatest films of all time, after all. But if you want me to spend three hours, three and a half hours with a character, if you want me to stay invested through something like 30 years of this character's lifespan, you have to give me some reason to care about him. And there is no reason to care about this character. Now, there's a principle in screenwriting called Save the Cat. It's a phrase coined by Blake Snyder. And the idea is that in a film, you want your protagonist to do something generous or heroic in the first 10 or 15 minutes of the film in order to get the audience on his side and to make Us care about what happens afterwards. And I think this is probably an overly simplistic rule. It's a formula that doesn't always hold up. But there's a general point which is true, that as the filmmaker, you need to give us as an audience a reason to care about this character. And the brutalist does the opposite. It takes a kind of anti save the cat approach. And in this film, the protagonist, in the very beginning makes it to America without his wife. His wife is, as far as we know, still in a concentration camp. And the first thing he does is visit a prostitute. His wife is in a concentration camp. And his first move, his very first move, is to have sex with a hooker. A scene that, like many other sex scenes in this movie, they show in long and gratuitous detail. And I have no idea why. I mean, this is. I don't know who gratuitous sex scenes in movies are for. I don't every time I see it in a movie and there's like five or six of them in this movie. Who is this for? Why is this here? Anyone who watch it, who wants to watch porn can find it anywhere else on the Internet. Like, they don't need to sit through a three and a half hour movie about a Holocaust survivor to see porn. They could unfortunately find it anywhere else. The rest of us would prefer not to have it interjected into the middle of a film for no reason. Okay, like you want to have the guy visit a hooker. I don't. Story wise, I don't think you should do that. I think all it accomplishes is it makes me hate this character. And then you're going to put this character through the ringer for the next three and a half hours. I don't care about what happens to him after that because, like, he's a bad guy. So I just don't care that much. But if you want to do that, you can show the guy walk into the brothel and then walk out buttoning his pants up. And we get it, we can fill in the rest. We don't need to actually see the stuff that happens in between. No adult watching the movie is going to go, well, what happened in there? What was the meaning of that? What was that all about? Anyway, the bigger problem is that the character doesn't really grow or change in any way from this point. Another basic principle of filmmaking is that the main character has to undergo some kind of transformation. Some sort of change should happen. That's what a story is like. A character goes through a change, both an internal emotional change. And there should be some kind of. So there should be the internal journey and the physical journey. Both of those things should happen in a story. It's not a real story if we don't see that. And instead, Brody's character goes from sad to a lot sadder by the end. He's a pitiful figure in the beginning. And by the end, he's even more pitiful. Why do we need to see that? Why should we want to see that? Why does this movie exist? Why did the filmmaker feel the need to tell this story? None of that is clear by the end of the movie. I will say the performances in the film are quite impressive. They're good performances. It is a beautifully shot film. But the movie underneath is quite ugly. It is ugly and pointless and depressing and demoralizing just for the sake of it. For no reason other than just to be that way. And, you know, I just asked why the film exists, and I think I answered the question. It exists in order to be ugly and pointless and depressing and demoralizing. And that's why a lot of films exist these days. And they usually win a bunch of awards and people pretend to like them. But that doesn't change the fact that they are, at their core, simply bad films. And this is simply a bad film. And it is also today canceled. That'll do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed.