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Today on the Matt Walsh Show. Some of us have been arguing for years that ADHD is a fake disease. We've been shouted down and defamed as science deniers. But now these so called experts who sold this fraud to the public are coming out and admitting that we were right all along. We'll discuss also the President of El Salvador visits the White House, Cory Booker embarrasses himself on camera again, and the media celebrates the historic space flight of an all female crew. The only problem is that it was not historic at all. Talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh While many fitness influencers offer minimal value at premium prices, fitbod provides comprehensive workout planning and tracking tools designed to help you maintain consistency and achieve real progress. Their expert certified personal trainers have fine tuned their approach to deliver proven exercise science and industry best practices directly to you. 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Join Fitbod today to get your personalized workout plan. Get 25% off your subscription or try the app free for seven days at Fitbod. Me Walsh that's F I T B O D me Walsh at the risk of angering all the people who will scream from the rooftops, that correlation doesn't equal causation. Like it's some kind of scriptural edict. Here's some data that's worth considering. From 1980 to 2020, the share of male teachers in both elementary and middle schools declined from 40% to less than 20%. Men have mostly stopped teaching young children in school. And during this same period, as men have abandoned elementary schools, there's coincidentally been another major change in childhood education. Everyone's being diagnosed with ADHD. More than 21% of 14 year old boys in this country now supposedly suffer from this condition. The number goes up to 23% for 17 year old boys. And as a result, prescriptions for drugs like Ritalin and Adderall have skyrocketed. From 2012 to 2022, the total number of prescription for stimulants to treat ADHD increased dramatically by nearly 60%. And boys between the ages of 10 to 14 were the demographic that saw the highest increase in these prescriptions. Now, for decades, you've been instructed to believe that there's no significance to this correlation whatsoever. As women increasingly entered the workforce and replace men in teaching jobs, we're not supposed to draw any conclusions about how the behavior of male children is now being addressed. The truth, we've been told is not that a feminized education system has increasingly punished normal male behavior that it doesn't understand. It's not that schools have lost their capacity to educate male students. It's not that smartphone use and electronics in general have become distractions which teachers have been unable to control. Instead, we've been led to believe that in truth, boys have suddenly become afflicted with a severe and mysterious psychological disorder. There's no objective biologically based test for this disorder, nor can anyone point to a specific gene or pathogen that might cause it. But the scientific consensus for many years now has nevertheless been clear. Adhd, they've said again and again, is real. And the way to treat it is to give children speed in the form of drugs like Ritalin. Now, as I've said repeatedly all this time for well over a decade, the science behind the theory of ADHD isn't simply under baked or inadequate. It is comically useless to the point that it is obviously fraudulent. The whole thing is a fraud. And to give just one of many examples, a few years ago, researchers at the University of Central Florida conducted a grand experiment where they put a child in front of a computer. And here's what it looked like. You could see it there. The researchers showed a child two separate videos. One of the videos was about mathematics, and it involved a teacher talking about basic addition, subtraction and multiplication. The other video was the pod racing scene from Star Wars. And as you can see from the videos, the child became bored during the math lecture. He starts spinning in his chair and fidgeting. On the other hand, when the child is shown something more engaging, he suddenly stops fidgeting. He's actually paying attention to Star Wars. He was not paying attention to the math video. Now, unless you're an alien who's never interacted with a child and was never a child yourself, there is nothing remotely interesting or Surprising about this footage, it's exactly what you would expect a normal, healthy child to do. But in the academic world, which exists to sell pharmaceuticals to children, this was a groundbreaking experiment. The footage was the basis for a peer reviewed article in something called the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology. Abnormal Child Psychology. And the University of Central Florida bragged about their findings with this headline, ADHD kids can be still if they're not straining their brains. Their conclusion was that ADHD is a nefarious disorder that's only triggered by cognitively demanding tasks and that we need to be vigilant of ADHD whenever children have to use their brains in specific ways. Now, in reality, of course, the University of Central Florida had simply discovered the concept that is known as boredom. That's all they accomplished. The kid was bored of the math video, because a math video is boring. Every person on the planet would also be bored by a math video. It would be like discovering that children prefer ice cream to broccoli and then announcing that you've identified a major new psychiatric disorder. It's exactly like doing a study to discover that children are more excited about opening presents on Christmas than they are about doing their chores. And then concluding that there must be some previously undetected mental illness that's infecting every child on the planet. Now, multiply this garbage study by about 10 million and you get the sum and substance of ADHD research over the past few decades. None of it is legitimate. It is all nonsense. And as a result, we've all been waiting for the moment when, at long last, the medical establishment and mainstream media will finally acknowledge that none of this science is legitimate. Because when that happens, millions of children will be spared these damaging and grossly unnecessary ADHD drugs. And this week, belatedly, that moment has started to arrive. It would seem so. The New York Times Magazine has just published a very lengthy article entitled, quote, have we been thinking about ADHD all wrong? Now, it's important to note at the outset that this article is not the result of some new discovery in the field of adhd. There has not been any new groundbreaking research. Instead, the piece is a collection of existing studies about adhd. Some of them are dating back more than a decade, along with testimony from researchers who in the past were some of the leading voices promoting ADHD medications. And now these researchers would like you to know that they've changed their minds. Because after thinking about things for a while, they've realized that they were completely wrong. Oops. Sorry about that. You all have your kids on speed for no Reason our bad. Now, the article opens by discussing a researcher named James Swanson who conducted a famous experiment in the 1990s that tracked three groups of students over a long period of time. One group of students received drugs for their alleged adhd. Another group received behavioral training, and then a third group didn't receive any kind of treatment at all. After a little over a year, the study supposedly showed that the kids who received Ritalin were doing a lot better than any other group. And this study immediately became a major national news story. It was sold as proof that Ritalin works and that ADHD is real. Researchers like Swanson became highly paid consultants for the pharmaceutical industry shilling ADHD drugs. So, you know, everybody was happy, at least everybody who's making money off of this thing. And that is in spite of the fact that even if the drugs really did improve a child's behavior or academic performance, that obviously in and of itself does not prove that he has a disorder. Okay, steroids improve athletic performance. If you were to do a study with kids who took steroids and kids who didn't, you would find out that the kids took steroids. What do you know? They're performing better in sports. But that doesn't mean that a child who lacks athletic skill is disordered. Okay, Just because a drug enhances performance, that doesn't make it a legitimate medication. But it turns out that these drugs don't even do that much, as the New York Times now admits. The researchers understood very quickly that their narrative was false. Quote. As time passed, Swanson began to grow uneasy. He and his colleagues were continuing to follow the almost 600 children in the MTA study. And by the mid-2000s, they realized that the new data they were collecting was telling a different and less hopeful story than the one they initially reported. It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in other groups. But listen to this part. By 36 months, the advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms. Swanson is now 80 and close to the end of his career. And when he talks about his life's work, he sounds troubled, not just about the MTA results, but about the state of the ADHD field in general. There are things about the way we do this work, he told me, that just are definitely wrong. So in other words, now that he's 80, this researcher who played a vital role in the mass prescribing of ADHD drugs has no problem going on the record and explaining that the so called science on ADHD is essentially meaningless. You know, in the end, we're not correcting any kind of disorder in the brain. We're not providing a long term solution to a medical problem. We're not, we're just giving children amphetamines which have the predictable effect of artificially stimulating their brains so that they seem less bored, while introducing a whole host of catastrophic side effects that we'll discuss in a moment. And like all drug highs, eventually it stops working and reality sets in. The quote, unquote top scientists are all admitting this now. It's not just James Swanson who's recanting his old research on ADHD. For example, in 2017, a Dutch neuroscientist named Martine Hugman announced that she had discovered evidence confirming that ADHD is a real observable disorder that's reflected in human biology. She stated at the time, quote, we confirm with high powered analysis that patients with ADHD have altered brains. Therefore ADHD is a disorder of the brain. That's what this researcher found with her high powered analysis less than a decade ago. That was her statement. But now this same scientist is admitting that her data showed something completely different. And so this is again from this week's Times article, quoting the reporter who wrote the story. Quote, when I interviewed Hoogman by email recently, I was surprised to learn that she now wishes she could have revised that statement. Back then, we emphasized the differences that we found, although small. But you can also conclude that the subcortical and cortical volumes of people with ADHD and those without ADHD are almost identical, she wrote. In retrospect, she added, it was not fitting to conclude from her findings that ADHD is a brain disorder. The ADHD neurobiology is so much more complex than that. Close quote. Okay, so here we have a leading expert who claimed in 2017 that her research proved that ADHD alters the brains. And now, via an email with a New York Times reporter, she. She casually admits that her research showed that the brains of people who are diagnosed with ADHD and the brains of everybody else are almost identical. Now, to call this a walk back would be a massive understatement. These people are completely abandoning everything they've been saying with absolute certainty for years now. And yet their research is still being used by believers in ADHD to support the theory that ADHD is a real disease, even though the actual researchers themselves no longer stand by it. To be clear, it wasn't just this one scientist. Dozens of leading experts pushed the idea that ADHD is a symptom of observable physical issues in the brain. They even published a consensus statement claiming that a single gene caused ADHD and that ADHD patients had less brain matter and less electrical activity in their brains. None of that was actually true. When they ran experiments to prove that this was true, they got the opposite result. But they pretended otherwise at the time. And that's what this Dutch scientist is now admitting to. It's impossible to measure the full extent of the damage that's been done to millions of young children as a result of this fraud. Here's just one metric citing the MTA study. Quote. Children who took Ritalin for an extended period of time grew less quickly than the non medicated children did. By the end of those 36 months, subjects who had consistently taken stimulant medication were on average, more than an inch shorter than the ones who had never received medication. Many of the scientists in the MTA group assumed this height suppression in childhood would be temporary, that these shorter children would catch up during adolescence. But when data was collected again nine years after the initial experiment, the height gap remained. Amphetamines can be powerfully addictive. And last year, a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that even a medium strength daily dose of Adderall more than tripled a patient's likelihood of developing psychosis or mania. So, yes, we have drastically increased the risk of permanently destroying children's brains and bodies. We have given them drugs that are stunting their growth permanently based entirely on junk science. And that's just what the New York Times is willing to admit right now. You know, give them another 20 years and they'll tell you all about the effects that amphetamines have on the heart as well. And all of this data already exists, of course, like it's all out there. They're just refusing to tell you about it. Now, to be fair, there is one study that the Times cites that is actually recent. Here's the groundbreaking insight that the new MTA study has uncovered. Quote Last October, the MTA group published a new study that explored how ADHD symptoms in MTA participants changed over the course of their childhood and young adulthood. In contrast to the categorical model of adhd, you either have it or you don't. The researchers showed that for most subjects, the symptoms and level of impairment in fact fluctuated over the years, often quite substantially. Only about 11% of the children who entered the study with an ADHD diagnosis experienced the symptoms consistently year after year. Close quote. This is something you don't need an MTA group or a controlled high budget study to realize any parent could tell you this. Anybody with common sense can tell you this on this show a few months ago, I said this exact thing in the context of the ADHD debate. Just to remind you, here's what I said at the time. And if I could get parents to understand one thing, it might be this. Nothing is permanent. Everything changes. And they go through phases. And those phases can be intense. They could last for six days or six years, but either way, they won't last forever. So just to give you one example of the dozens and dozens that I could supply from my own life and my family, my oldest daughter struggled to read, hated reading for many years. Many years from the age of like about four, right around the time when you first start reading to right around 11. Getting her to read was like pulling teeth. And she had a very hard time with it for a long time. She was for a long time way behind her peers. And yes, as parents, we worried about it. For all this stuff that I'm saying about, you know, give it time, it's not easy to do. I understand that. And so as a parent, we're worried and we're fretting and we can't help but imagine a dark future where our daughter is 25 years old and can barely read. Well, then one day it changed. And now at eleven and a half, we can't get her to stop reading. I mean, she reads like two whole chapter books a week. I'm talking books that are 300 pages now. Everyone, whether they have children or not, intuitively understands that children go through phases. We don't need to administer psychoactive drugs every time they go through a phase we don't like. And we all know that it didn't really take decades for leading scientific experts to come to this conclusion. They knew it all along, but they had a financial incentive to say otherwise. Only now that the situation has devolved into total absurdity, now that we're supposed to pretend that 25% of teenagers suffer from this diagnosis, are some of these experts finally telling the truth? And they're also finally admitting that in reality the cure for ADHD is simply doing things that are interesting. That's turns out that according to the Times, ADHD patients suddenly lost their symptoms when they started doing things that they actually like doing. Quote A hairstylist told the researchers that her inability to concentrate in school vanished when she began studying hair. A young man who was training to be an auto technician said that in his new career, his ADHD was no longer an issue. Patient symptoms tend to improve rather than worsen during times of higher environmental demands. Periods of more responsibility and busier schedules, Jobs or college courses that were demanding and interesting helped alleviate their symptoms. And as their symptoms lifted, they changed the way they thought about themselves. Close quote. So again, we're talking about boredom. That's what all this is, people who are bored. Imagine that it turns out that people become bored when you talk to them about something that isn't interesting. It turns out that when you sit kids down in a structured educational environment, especially boys, you sit them down in a classroom with 30 other kids for seven hours a day, five days a week, for nine months out of the year, and you have them do busy work, they're going to get bored and they're going to get fidgety. Wow. Amazing. What a revelation. But they become more engaged when you talk about things they find interesting. This is the cutting edge of the science on ADHD medication. They're figuring out things that anyone with 10 brain cells could have told you a long time ago and something that a lot of us did say a long time ago. You know, as I've mentioned plenty of times, I have gone through this myself. I was a terrible student in school. I could have easily been diagnosed with ADHD if my parents wanted to go that route, which thankfully they didn't. But even though I couldn't complete a school assignment to save my life, now as an adult, I write the word count equivalent of like two or three chapters of a book every single week while preparing for this show. I also read all the time. I enjoy learning new things I didn't when I was in school. What changed? What accounts for the change? Did my ADHD wear off? Well, no. For one thing, I grew older and became more mature and more disciplined. And for another thing, I enjoy what I'm doing now and I'm interested in it. And I was not interested in school, so therefore I was less engaged. Like, it's not that complicated, but the medical field has treated it as if it's complicated for decades. This whole thing has obviously become something of a pattern in the field of modern medicine. In the last few years, we've learned, or at least those of us who hadn't been paying close attention learned, that the chemical imbalance theory of depression was a lie, gender affirming care was a lie, the claims about how lockdowns wouldn't hurt children was a lie. And now ADHD is a lie. At this point, you have to ask yourself why Would you trust the psychiatric industry ever again? They are lying about everything. They are constantly lying. And these are not lies. Of little consequence. Millions of people, especially children, have been hurt, often permanently. The only winner in this process, as always, has been the pharmaceutical industry, which has convinced millions of parents to buy their drugs and medicalize a completely normal aspect of the human condition. These are all points that some of us have been making for years, even decades. We were shouted down as science deniers and now we get the inevitable missive in some corporate media outlet unceremoniously announcing that the people they defamed and insulted were actually right all along. That's what this New York Times article amounts to, and I get no pleasure out of it. I find it infuriating. And all you can do going forward is to treat these self described experts in the field of psychiatry and in the big pharma with maximum contempt and skepticism. Especially when they're trying to convince you to drug yourself or your child. Just be prepared for the inevitable backlash that will follow when you don't go along with the next wonder drug they're pushing for you or your children. First they'll call you a science denier. Then they'll try to censor you on social media. And then, many years later, without giving away a dime of the money they've made from their fraud or suffering any consequences whatsoever, they'll tell the New York Times that you were right all along. Now let's get to our five headlines. You and your family's dreams matter, and so does protecting them. Secure your family's future with policygenius life Insurance. They make finding coverage simple, giving your loved ones a financial safety net to handle debts, expenses, or even build wealth over time. With policygenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $292 per year for a million dollars of coverage. Some options are 100% online and let you avoid unnecessary medical exams. Their side by side comparison tool shows you quotes from top insurers across America completely free, with no hidden fees. 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That's policygenius.com Walsh Daily Wire reports the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, and Trump administration officials tore into CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins after she asked if there are plans to return to the United States an illegal alien and suspected MS.13 gang member who was recently deported. The exchange came as Trump hosted Bukele in the Oval Office on Monday, with the two discussing immigration and the ongoing agreement between the two nations which allows the United States to deport criminal illegal aliens to an El Salvadoran prison facility. Collins questioned President Donald Trump on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien and suspected MS.13 gang member who was deported to El Salvador and is now being held in the country's terrorism confinement center, a massive prison holding tens of thousands of cartel and gang members. And Kaitlan Collins was asking about this. And in fact this clip is pretty entertaining because Trump brings into the conversation half of his cabinet, the whole Trump administration kind of gangs up to respond to this line of questioning from Kaitlan Collins. And let's watch some of that.
