Matt Walsh (32:02)
The right, the right decision was made there. Half of the right decision anyway. The deputy should have, should have been cleared of all charges, which he was. The other part of this is that the quote unquote trans woman who's a man should be charged with a number of crimes. If he misrepresented himself as a woman, then he should be charged with attempted sexual assault. He should also be charged with crimes related to gaining entry into the deputy's home under false pretenses. I mean, there are several crimes committed here by, by the trans identified individual. But most of all, again, if you're a man and you're attempting to have a sexual encounter with another man without disclosing that you are a man, then that's assault. The deputy, if he did use physical force, was defending himself against an attempted assault. Now I don't know how the deputy could have not known. I mean the biological reality is always pretty obvious, especially in person once you get past the filters and the Photoshop and all the rest of it. But then again, the deputy was intoxicated, so maybe that helps explain it. But in any case, the trans identified male was misrepresenting himself in order to have a sexual encounter and that is again assault. So he's the one who should be charged here, I think, pretty obviously. All right, here's an interesting article this week in the Financial Times. I don't know why the Financial Times is covering this exactly, but here's the headline Finding their Religion. Why Gen Z are turning to Faith. So there's been a series of articles in different publications about this, this phenomenon. But let me read a little bit of this one slowly, slightly. Faith is trickling back at least into Britain. There's something in the water. Religion is civilized table talk. Even non believers mourn the death of Pope Francis with secularism yet to devise a credible alternative as the world's moral conscience. The pews are filling up, notably with young people. Gen Z's attendance at church has quadrupled in recent years, which I didn't, I didn't know that it was that high. That's pretty incredible from a small base, but the significance lies more in the direction of travel. This is shaping up to be the first new generation in a very long time to be making the country more, not less religious. Tiktoking digital natives for whom the old world is unfathomable yet who retrieve now from its analog wreckage of all things Bibles and hymn sheets. Today's Culture is certainly more sympathetic to faith than the naughties. When millennials like me grew up ensnared by the four horsemen of new atheism in their era defining bestsellers, which was Sam Harris, Richard Hawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett dismissing religion as child abuse, mental illness or terrorist propaganda, they seem now as dated as the Dead Sea Scrolls. And then it goes. That's interesting article. So it's another, another article noting correctly that there is a real, a real revival of religious conviction in our culture. Not just our culture, but across the West. It's a real thing. We can officially say that now. I think people were noting this initially, cautiously optimistic, but not sure. Is this some sort of blip? Is this some sort of anomaly? What's going on here? You notice this anecdotally. A lot of us notice this anecdotally for a while that when you go to churches, especially conservative, more conservative, reverent churches, that you walk in and wow, there's a lot of young people in this church. And that's something that we've been noting for a long time anecdotally. But now there's a lot of data to back this up. So we can officially say it's not a fluke that Gen Z is the first generation in many years to be probably more religious than their parents. And now Gen Z is still in the majority, not religious. But the trend lines are pointing in the right direction for the first time in many decades and that's pretty extraordinary and heartening. Now the big question of course is why this is happening. And well, the real answer is that the Lord is working in the hearts of the younger generation and leading them back, leading them back home, back to the truth. And I mean that's what's actually happening. Jesus is happening, but on a like a psychological level, what's going on? And I think it's a deep yet simple truth, which is that human beings need. And the article kind of touches on this, which is that human beings need not want, not just desire. They need meaning in their lives. Human beings need meaning in their lives. This is what's happening with Gen Z. They're searching for meaning. They can't live without meaning. And you cannot have a society that exists without meaning for very long. A society without meaning will either collapse and be destroyed or it will be revived and it will rediscover meaning. What can't happen is that it just kind of lingers on indefinitely in this haze, in this zombie state without meaning that just can't be sustained. So it's got to head one direction or another. And human existence without God, without faith, without religion, is in existence without meaning, without purpose. There's just no way around that. There's no way around it. This is why the article mentions the Four Horsemen of atheism, New Atheism, right? And this was in the 90s and the early 2000s. There was a big surge of atheism. And you had the, you know, Christopher Hitchens and, and Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and those guys, Sam Harris, and they were very popular and they sold a lot of books, but they ultimately failed. And why did they fail? Well, it's because they never solved this problem, which is the most important one, which is, okay, where's the meaning in it? And atheists, for really, for centuries have been trying to find a way around this, right? They've been trying to devise all kinds of philosophies, all kinds of existential conceptions of life and existence that would imbue life with meaning and purpose without God. But it always fails. And I've read the, I've read at least the, the, the, the most famous, you know, anti God book from each of those four guys, and I read all four books. And yeah, it's, it's, it's repetitive after a while and redundant. They all make kind of the same points, but this is, this is the area where they all failed. And most of them attempted to deal with this at least a little bit. They make all their same points. But then you get to the point of, okay, why does life matter then? Like, if you're right, why does life matter? What's the point of life? What's the point of any of this? Who cares? Why should we? It always fails. Because the stark reality is that if there's no God, then our existence is an accident. We were formed by blind chance and we will soon be obliterated into nothingness. That's our fate. It's the fate of everyone we know and love, the fate of the entire world. The fate of the earth itself is nothingness. And you can't escape that without God. You just can't escape it. And this is a thing the atheists have never, they've never been able to grapple with it. They've never been able to find a way around it. They've never been able to come up with a coherent and believable and powerful argument for why life can have meaning in a world without God. Now there, there have been some atheists who have basically admitted that, but when they admit It. It gets pretty stark and depressing pretty fast. In fact, I remember years ago I read an essay by a philosopher that very few people have ever read or ever even heard of because he's very obscure. A Norwegian philosopher from, like, the 20s or 30s. And I think he only had one essay that was translated in English. It was called the Last Messiah. And the guy's name was Peter Wessel. Zapffe, I believe. I think I have the name right. And anyway, Zapffe was a. He was an atheist and he was like a pessimist and a nihilist, but he was honest at least. And he thought that in a world without God, which is the world that he thought we lived in, life just had no meaning. And not only did it not have meaning, but life is therefore a curse. It's an enormous error. It's a kind of cosmic joke. And he thought that human consciousness in particular was an accident of evolution. That was the only way he could sort of figure out, like, why. Why are we conscious? Why does life exist? Why are we conscious without God? And. And he came to the conclusion, well, if there's no God, then. Then evolute, then consciousness is a product of evolution because that's all that it can be. But why would. Why would we. Why would nature evolve consciousness of all things? Why would we evolve an understanding of our own meaninglessness and of the. Of the nothingness of our. Of our lives? Like, why. How do you. How could that be an evolutionary adaptation? And his answer was, well, it's like a horrible accident. It's like a mutation, basically. It wasn't supposed to happen. And he. He compared it to a. Like a species of deer where the horns grow too big, and so the deer has to chip off bits of the. Of their horns. Otherwise the horns become so heavy that they'd be. They'd be pinned to the ground by the horns. And so he kind of compares that to. That's what's happening with human beings, that this. We have our consciousness and we're sort of, in effect, metaphorically pinned to the ground by this. By this enormous weight of our consciousness and our own awareness of. Of the meaninglessness of our lives. Anyway, I stumbled across this essay, and I don't remember how exactly, but I found it actually quite profound and powerful. Profound and powerful as an argument for God, which is definitely not how it was intended, but it really just shows you that this is the other option. Either there is a God or we are walking accidents. Our lives are a curse. Our consciousness is a cosmic joke. And all we can do is just distract ourselves until we fade back into nothingness. That's the only other option. That's it. Those are your two choices. And I think that's become clear to a lot of people. I think, I think that's why they're fleeing back to faith. Now granted, just because existence without God is a horror beyond comprehension, which it would be, that in and of itself doesn't mean that, like that is not in and of itself proof of God. In other words, the fact that a godless universe is terrible doesn't mean in and of itself that we don't live in a godless universe. Because, well, you could say, well, maybe, maybe it's. Maybe the truth is just. Yeah, maybe that it is terrible, but maybe we just live. Maybe, maybe our lives, maybe that's it. Maybe our lives are terrible. You know, terrible things happen. But I think the point is that we all innately recognize that that isn't the case. We have an inherent recognition of the fact that life has meaning, that existence has meaning. We see that existence without God is not only a great horror, but also an absurdity. It's an absurd concept. It's almost like a contradiction in terms. Our existence therefore testifies to God's existence. And I think people are seeing that. Gen Z is seeing that. And our consciousness is also a testimony to God's existence. And I think actually that's how I stumbled across this essay, because I was interested in how atheists deal with and explain consciousness. Because to me, of all the kind of rational arguments for God's existence, the best one is not the origins of life or the fine tuning of the universe, although those are both good arguments. But to me personally, I've always thought the best one is consciousness. The fact of human consciousness. Consciousness is itself proof of a transcendent, immaterial realm of existence. Consciousness, I think, is proof of the supernatural, I would argue, because otherwise how is it possible that inanimate matter in a blind and dumb universe could have somehow become aware of itself? I mean, it just makes no sense. And as we said it, it makes no. Then you would have to argue that it's some sort of blind, dumb evolutionary adaptation. And it makes even less sense in, in that, in that version of events. And then you're left with what this guy was saying in his essay, which is that, yeah, it's a, it never should have happened, but it did, and it's a mistake. Like, it's a big. It's a big, It's a big. Something went horribly wrong and now we have consciousness and the capacity for love and self awareness. All of that never should have happened. It's all a terrible thing. So that's like the honest atheist answer to the problem of consciousness. Although it's not really an answer at all because it still doesn't explain how that would be possible. How could that be? How could you have inanimate matter that accidentally assembles itself in such a way as to trigger an awareness of itself? To me, that just makes no sense at all and is an extremely compelling argument for, for God. And so I think, you know, some of this now I'm off in the weeds, but I think what it's, what it ultimately comes back to is meaning. And, and a lot of Gen Z, they were born into a culture where there was no sense of meaning and they are rebelling against that as well they should. And that's all a good thing. So praise God. Did you know that all chips and fries used to be cooked in beef tallow? Up until the 1990s when big corporations made the switch to cheap processed seed oils. Today, seed oils now make up a staggering 20% of the average American's daily calories. Recent studies have started linking these oils to metabolic health issues and inflammation throughout the body, which got the folks at Vandy Crisps thinking there had to be a better way. They decided to go back to basics and create a potato chip with just three simple heirloom potatoes, sea salt, and 100% grass fed beef tallow. What makes Vandy different isn't just what they've taken out, but what they put back in that grass fed beef towel isn't just for flavor. It's actually packed with nutrients that are great for your skin, brain and hormones. 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And now Ben Shapiro is back with his most important book yet. It's called Lions and Scavengers and it hits shelves September 2nd. In it, Ben dismantles the myth that all cultures are equal and that success is something to be ashamed of. This is a rallying cry for those who build lead and refuse to bow. Pre order lions and scavengers now@dailywire.com Ben Shapiro. Now let's get to our daily cancellation. We began the week by talking about the collapse of Pride Month as parades are canceled due to low attendance and corporate sponsors drop out. Didn't happen by accident. It happened because conservatives organized rallies and defense of children, investigated hospitals and medical providers that were abusing children, boycotted corporations that promoted gender ideology, and ultimately voted to elect politicians who recognized the reality of human biology. For the first time in many years, conservatives rallied behind a worthwhile cause and secured meaningful change to American culture. As you can imagine, this effective campaign by conservatives, if only because it's so unprecedented, has led to sheer panic and confusion among many left wing activists. They're really not sure what to do with themselves or how to explain their massive defeat. As recently as a few years ago, they seriously thought that they could convince people to celebrate International Pronouns Day and Gay Uncles Day and a hundred other fake holidays. They never imagined that their whole ideology would be so discredited and so universally despised that people would forsake Pride Month. Their their crown jewel. This is a total shock to them and therefore all over the country, dramatic meltdowns are currently in progress. To give one example that's making the rounds, here's a liberal woman who discovered to her horror that the local Target isn't selling trans T shirts and chest binders or tuck friendly swimsuits this year. Instead, Target has replaced its Pride section with patriotic clothing that says USA on it. The sacred Pride shrine has been defiled. This woman's not happy about it.
