Ep. 1733 - San Francisco BANNED "Racist" Algebra A Decade Ago. The Results Are Now In.

Today on the Matt Wall Show, as the public school system has descended into woke insanity, students have particularly been getting dumber and dumber, but one state has apparently broken ranks from the woke brigade and the results are being described as miraculous. We'll talk about it. Also, another trans mass shooter, this time in Canada, and a viral post by somebody in the AI industry warns that AI is about to destroy millions of jobs and we're not taking it nearly seriously enough. Plus, the New York Times begins to walk back its endorsement of legalized marijuana. We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Wall Show. When you read enough news about the declining quality of schools in this country, particularly public schools, It's easy for your eyes to sort of glaze over after a while. All the stories sound the same. We spend nearly a trillion dollars on our public school system every year, a trillion dollars. And the results are objectively terrible. Only around one third of 12th graders have English language proficiency, meaning they can barely speak English. Math numbers, as you might imagine, are even worse. Roughly one in 10 public school students experience sexual misconduct at the hands of a school employee. And that's a conservative estimate that's not been updated in two decades before the LGBT movement was spending millions of dollars, billions of dollars, rather, a year with the express goal of sexualizing children. So it's probably a lot worse than that. Meanwhile, a quarter of students are chronically absent, meaning they miss at least 10 percent of the school year. Violent incidents in schools have increased by around 40 percent in the last couple of years and so on and so on and so on. We could easily drone on for the next hour listing all the problems that you're probably already aware of. This is going to be a very different monologue because for the first time in memory, there's actually something to be hopeful about when it comes to the public school system. And if you know anything about this show or my career, you know that I do not say that lightly. There's genuinely a legitimate reason to believe that the education system in the U.S. may not be entirely doomed, at least to the extent that we thought it was. Thanks to a new finding that's somewhat controversial, as we'll discuss in a moment, there is maybe a new path forward for educating American students. And it is a really obvious path, one that we never should have abandoned in the first place. But it's important to talk about nonetheless. And if we continue in this vein, we could one day live in a at least moderately safer, more educated and more literate society. We can reverse the trend of everything getting crappier all the time. Maybe. But to understand the changes that may soon be coming, we need to start around a decade ago when the left made a deliberate decision to turn our already terrible public schools into indoctrination camps with no standards whatsoever. Amid the cultural revolution of Barack Obama's first term, school districts in the state of California went insane. San Francisco eliminated the algebra requirement for eighth graders. They also stopped failing students. They let students move on to the next grade level when they clearly were not qualified for it. And they turned every subject, even mathematics, into an exercise in racial equity. They taught students that everything, including algebra, was really a social justice issue. And these changes continued for many years afterward. Watch. Some of the state's largest school districts are coming up with a new approach towards grading. Those districts are getting rid of D's and F's, so students won't be able to get anything under a C on their assignments. And if they do fail or miss an assignment, they're going to be given a do-over or an extension. So the idea is to encourage students to learn the material rather than lose their confidence from a low grade. Let's see if my math matches your math. A controversial math curriculum taking root in California, as reformers this month overcame strong opposition from math and science educators. It definitely will not help them learn math better. I've been teaching math for 43 years, and I can say with certainty that this will cause a great deal of confusion and set students back. The new framework urges teachers to focus on historically marginalized people and take a justice-oriented perspective by changing course material with less emphasis on problem solving. More than a thousand university professors pushed back, calling it a, quote, insult, immoral and foolish to replace arithmetic with what they say is an endless river of fads that inserts equity, social justice and environmental care into math class. 360 divided by 24 is. Mathematics should be about numbers and calculating and not about politics, not about political indoctrination, not about turning children into activists. Why is one state so important? As the nation's largest textbook market, publishers tend to follow the California framework. Now, essentially, the idea behind all these changes and many more changes like these was to help students who are supposedly disadvantaged, particularly racial minorities. Somehow we were told it was a good thing that students would graduate without the ability to read and write. In reality, of course, the goal of these policies was to hide two very inconvenient facts. The first inconvenient fact was that the public schools clearly were not doing their jobs. They were taking enormous sums of taxpayer money, and students in turn were getting dumber by every objective metric. So to prevent people from noticing this, the objective metrics were simply eliminated. And the second inconvenient fact, which the left also wanted to hide, is that the allegedly disadvantaged students have not been underperforming because of white supremacy. Often they're underperforming because they lack discipline. They were not raised in stable households, and as a result, their behavior is incompatible with a functioning school system. They routinely engage in criminal behavior that disrupts the entire campus. This is difficult to measure with precise statistics because, for the most part, public schools don't report many fights and other acts of violence to law enforcement. And that's because if the schools did file those reports, then they'd run the risk of being designated as a persistently dangerous school, which would mean that they would lose their federal funding. So there's a significant incentive for schools to bury the evidence of violence that students are committing. There's basically no incentive for them to tell the truth, and there's a lot of incentive to bury it. And of course, by the same token, the media doesn't want to cover the violence either, because it would look racist to do so, since the perpetrators are almost always black, and very often they're attacking white students in large numbers, which is a common theme, by the way. You have to keep this in mind whenever you see crime statistics. They're much, much worse than the official numbers show. Always. Black on white violence in many cases is not recorded at all. Like, for example, remember the case we talked about yesterday with the black judge who reduced the sentence of a black rapist by 50 percent, even though he demonstrated no remorse whatsoever. In fact, he demonstrated the opposite of remorse. He said he was glad about what he did and he'd happily do it again. Well, it was one of the most extraordinary cases we've ever talked about. she cut his sentence by more than 30 years because he, quote, fell through the cracks. Meanwhile, the rapist mocked the victim repeatedly, mocked her family, said he would do it again. The judge said that she felt sorry for the rapist because he grew up in our society as an African-American male. So she gave him a pass because of, you know, white supremacy or whatever. And guess what? We don't know the race of his victim. Her identity is shielded. Not just her identity, but any identifying information about her at all has been withheld. You won't find the victim's race listed in any media reports. Now, if you look around, there are some indications that the victim may have been white. The attack took place in an overwhelmingly white area, for example. Now, is it possible that the judge went easy on the rapist because his victim was white? Is it possible that she saw the attack as a way to strike back against white people like the OJ jury did, who she considers members of a different tribe? We don't know. Certainly seems possible based on what the judge said in court. But whatever the case, we can be sure of one thing. The crime, if it was black on white, will never be recorded as black on white crime in any statistical database at all. After all, the victim is anonymous. We can't know anything about her. That's how it works. That's true in the criminal justice system, and it's true in public schools as well. Now, for the most part, it requires a mass shooting in order for the media to cover violence that takes place in public schools. And in that case, whatever the shooter's motivation was, and regardless of whether the shooter identified as transgender or not, the media will immediately start talking about gun control and suspending the Second Amendment. But the truth is, you don't really need news reports or police reports to understand what's happening in American public schools, especially the schools that are located in major cities. You can go to the WorldStar website and look up the massive database of documentary evidence that public schools are basically fight clubs for these disadvantaged minorities that we hear about so often. And we'll put a couple of those videos up on the screen to the extent that we possibly can. You know, it's just one video after another with titles like messed up. Teacher gets jumped by students at high school in Georgia. And damn, teacher fights student for smacking her during argument. And damn, student beats up teacher at Florida high school. Now, it's content that we can't show on YouTube in its entirety. Videos depicting acts of violence, particularly acts of violence involving children, are banned from most social media and video sharing platforms. And while you can understand why those policies are in place, you also have to acknowledge that as a side effect, The fact remains that it's not easy to see the videos that give you a realistic picture of everyday life in many of our public schools. This is an aspect of American life, a very important aspect, because it's where a lot of our 50 million children are spending their time there. That's mostly shielded from the public. So to recap, in the Obama era and beyond, public schools decided not to report most crimes to law enforcement, not to fail anyone, not to hold back, not to hold anyone back a grade and not to teach difficult subjects. And there was a media blackout on the violence that was occurring in these schools. The idea was out of sight, out of mind. If the schools were failing and everyone knew they were, then at least we wouldn't have to think about it very much. We wouldn't have to deal with any uncomfortable statistics. And indeed, this line of thinking quickly spread. Colleges and law schools dropped standardized test scores. They started demanding DEI statements to weed out conservatives, along with any independent thinkers. Schools at every level became expensive government funded daycare. Students who actually wanted to learn in the end paid the big price. And our country as a whole suffered as a result. We started falling behind countries like China, which actually take education seriously. And every few months, our education deficit grew larger and larger by design. Just last year, San Francisco Public Schools proposed yet another equity policy, which allowed students to pass with a grade of 40%. They could skip homework with no penalty and retake tests indefinitely until they pass them. And even if they don't pass them, they still get moved on anyway. Other blue states and cities followed with similar policies, and soon enough, their test scores began plummeting. Take Massachusetts, for example, where they use the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS, to measure student achievement. Massachusetts typically performs very well on standardized tests, but lately, things have not been going so well. As the Commonwealth Beacon reported late last year, quote, new MCAS results reveal that the performance of Massachusetts public school students remains far below pre-pandemic levels and shows few signs of improvement. The data follow a national assessment of educational progress scores released earlier this year in which the Commonwealth student scored at a 20 year low. In 2010, Massachusetts jettisoned the nation's best English language arts and math standards, replacing them with national academic standards known as Common Core that dramatically cut the amount of literature students read and slowed their progression to higher mathematics study. Last year, voters eliminated the requirement that students pass the English math and science test to graduate from high school. Well, the overall portion of students meeting expectations fell from half before the pandemic to 42 percent. Now, the portion of students who failed rose from 11 percent to 18 percent. Only 39 percent met or exceeded expectations on the just unveiled eighth grade civics test. And you'll find similar stories from Maine to New York to California. They dropped the standards and shortly afterward, the performance of the students plummeted. Again, it all seems inevitable. All the numbers everywhere were dropping year after year. Conservatives would complain about the numbers, but nothing would ever change. Politicians would throw more and more money at the problem and reward the unions and the non-profits with massive new contracts, and everything would get worse. It seemed like a death spiral that we couldn't possibly pull out of. But then something very strange happened in the state of Mississippi. The state's fourth grade reading scores went from 49th place in the country all the way to ninth place in the span of 10 years. And their fourth grade math scores, meanwhile, went from 50th dead last to 16th. And when you adjust for demographics like poverty and race, as of 2024, Mississippi went to number one. Yes, from 2013 to 2024, regardless of how you measure the data, Mississippi pretty much leapfrogged the entire country. Watch. Thank you. This is being called a Mississippi miracle. The state schools, once ridiculed over its test scores, now have critics singing a different tune. Mississippi's fourth graders are ranked first for reading, second for math when adjusted for demographics. That's according to a national assessment. This after the state was ranked 49th a decade ago. 49th. Former Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant was involved in this turnaround and analyzed the data in this report. Governor, good to have you on this morning. This comeback in students' reading scores was no accident. This was a Herculean feat. I mean, what or who do you credit this success to? Well, first to the students. I mean, this was a heavy lift for them. And these are third graders. Many of them with reading disorders. many of them living in poverty. So it was the children and their parents, parents who took this very seriously, who went home and said, we're going to start language within our home. We're going to start reading because we've got a benchmark now that we have to meet on that third grade. Only 33% of Mississippi's children are reading on the third grade proficiency in 2012. Now, one of Mississippi's main innovations was that at the end of third grade, they started administering a reading fluency test. And this was a genuine test with actual consequences. If students failed it, they'd be held back and forced to repeat the grade. In a typical year, something like 10% of students failed the test in 2018. By 2022, the number was down to 7%. And if students failed this reading fluency test and were held back, then they wouldn't take the national test that's used to measure Mississippi's progress against other states. They have to wait another year. So Mississippi began holding back far more students than most other states. They broke with the established consensus, decided that children should actually learn to read before becoming fourth graders. Under Mississippi law, students could be held back for a maximum of two years. And along the way, Mississippi enacted other reforms. In particular, Mississippi started teaching students to read using phonics rather than context clues. So to give you an example of how this might work, if you teach a student using context clues, you might show them a photo of a barn and say something like, what building is that cow in? It starts with the letter B. And what word with a letter B would make sense? In other words, in the context method, teachers would challenge the student with a series of riddles and basically push them to guess the right word. Teachers would also offer suggestions like these when students had trouble reading a word. Quote, look at pictures and skip the word and reword and reread and try a word that makes sense. It should be obvious what the problem is here. Guessing words and skipping words and looking for clues elsewhere is not a reliable strategy. The context system is basically cheating. You might get the right result, but you're getting it for the wrong reason. In order to actually learn to read, you need to be able to understand the relationship between letters and sounds without relying on some hint that you able to you know dig up somewhere And that what the phonics system which Mississippi now uses is all about. If you're teaching a student using phonics, you tell them to go from left to right and sound out the word barn. They don't need a picture to provide context. They don't need hints. They don't need to skip the word and try to circle back later. They learn a much more generalized, useful method of reading. And if they fail to understand this method and bomb the test, then they get to try again the next year and potentially the year after that. As a system that is clearly superior, you have to wonder if the context system wasn't an intentional effort to sabotage the reading abilities of young children. That's certainly been the result based on these latest numbers from Mississippi, but not everybody agrees with that assessment. You might have heard in various circles that some observers are doubting that the so-called Mississippi miracle is actually real. In particular, there's a paper from a statistics professor named Howard Wehner, who says that the numbers are highly misleading. And here's what he writes. Here's his argument. Quote, prior to 2013, a higher percentage of third graders moved on to the fourth grade and took the NAEP fourth grade reading test in Mississippi. After 2013, only those students who did well enough in reading moved on to the fourth grade and took the test. It's a fact of arithmetic that the mean score of any data set always increases if you delete some of the lowest scores. So in other words, he's saying that Mississippi's fourth grade test scores only went up because the state prevented the low scoring students at the completion of third grade from moving on to the fourth grade and taking the national test. His argument is that students aren't actually becoming better readers. The state is just preventing its bad readers from taking the test. And you'll find this analysis pretty much everywhere on the left. They're all using this paper to make the case that the Mississippi miracle is actually fake. They have a vested interest in making this claim, of course. If this supposedly miraculous event is real, then the entire philosophy of education, their entire philosophy has collapsed. All of the justification for their racial equity programs is also gone. But the big problem with their reasoning is that Mississippi is not preventing low performing students from taking the test. Instead, the state is delaying the administration of the test for a small number of students. You know, they aren't being expelled. They aren't being disappeared. Eventually, they'll take the national test and their scores scores will definitely be reflected in the totals over a 10 year period. And to be clear, you know, the number of students taking the test in fourth grade has remained very high in Mississippi, even with the new policy in place. It's not like they're only letting five kids take the exam. As Steve Saylor pointed out in Mississippi, quote, the response rate for both fourth and eighth graders was above the national average in 2022. So even when they're holding students back, they still have more students taking the test. And here's how the journalist Kelsey Piper responded to the professor's argument. She has a detailed rebuttal on her substack. Here's the key paragraph, quote, the student that repeats the third grade does not conveniently vanish off the face of the earth. They just take third grade again and then they move on to fourth grade. The state still tests them. They just do so a year later. Additionally, Mississippi has been gaining ground steadily for two decades. So any explanation for the results needs to explain steady gains, not a one off jump. For all these reasons, while weaker students have having an extra year to learn to read is almost certainly contributing to Mississippi scores. It cannot explain Mississippi's gain since 2003 or even much of Mississippi's gain since 2013. So the big drive by the big drive by debunking of Mississippi's achievement doesn't really hold up. But the other argument you'll hear from leftists who are enraged by the Mississippi miracle is that by the eighth grade, the state was no longer ranking number one or even number nine. So the saying that the gains are mostly concentrated at the fourth grade level. And actually, that's true, at least for now. One of the charts we showed earlier actually illustrates that decline. We'll put it back up on the screen so you can see it. As you can see, from 2013 to 2024, grade eight reading in Mississippi went from 50th to 41st. And grade eight math went from 49th to 35th. So these are not quite as earth shattering as the grade four numbers. But the state is no longer dead last in the eighth grade, which is where they were before. And that's an impressive achievement when you consider the demographics that are involved. The sailor puts it, quote, Mississippi eighth graders being only four unadjusted points behind the national average for all races is not bad. By eighth grade, Mississippi's black students reading score has fallen to the national black average. But it's still better than you'd expect. What's perhaps the poorest and most rural black population in the country. So we still have significant across the board improvements in reading and math in Mississippi from fourth grade on up. That's why it's a very good sign that other southern states, which leftists have long dismissed as hopeless, are taking a similar approach as Mississippi. And they're seeing significant improvements as well. Since 2019, Louisiana went from 50th in the nation to 16th in terms of fourth grade reading. Alabama went from 49th to 34th. So this is a clear improvement in public schooling that it can be reproduced. It's the first good news to come out of the public school system in at least a decade. And it didn't really come about because they threw more money at the problem or certainly because of affirmative action or because of racial equity. It came about because the state of Mississippi recognized that everyone, including children, respond to incentives. If you tell students that it doesn't matter whether they pass or fail or learn or don't learn, then fewer students will pass and fewer students will learn. It's amazing how that works. On the other hand, if you attach real consequences to success and failure, and if you stop giving context-based cheats during reading lessons, you actually make the lessons more difficult but instructive, everything changes. Students, including many black students, are capable of reading at a higher level much earlier. And it's pretty revealing that the moment this massive improvement emerges, the very first thing that a lot of leftists attempt to do is undermine it. They claim it's fake and they publish papers that misrepresent what's actually happening. It could be more obvious that these people desperately want our education system to remain dysfunctional and useless. You won't find anyone who resents education more than the well-educated. They know that an illiterate country is one that's much easier to control. And by making their state and the entire American South a much more literate place, Mississippi has struck one of the biggest blows against the leftist project in the past decade. And like Louisiana and Alabama, it's time for many more states to follow their lead. Now let's get to our five headlines. This year, our sponsor Pure Talk is celebrating President's Day by giving you great wireless service for only $25 a month. Get unlimited talk text and plenty of data for the cost of only one or two meals out. No reason that wireless service needs to be in the hundreds, so make the switch and feel better about your finances. The low price isn't the only perk either. You can feel good knowing your wireless company is based right here in the U.S. with an American customer service team and a passion for supporting veterans. 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And so does that mean like an actual female school shooter? That's unusual. It does happen. But immediately it kind of sends your antenna up because you think, well, that's unusual. so was it a woman or was it what you might more uh more immediately expect a man in a dress well here's how police in canada um in the the hours after this attack here's how they described this uh this individual the the shooter listen that includes the deceased gun person okay And then separately, do you know the gun person's relationship to? Gun person. Have you ever heard that term before? I mean, unfortunately, we have a lot of experience now with these with with, you know, media coverage of mass shootings. Gun person. It sounds like a person who is a gun. That sounds like an anthropomorphic gun came to life and killed people. Gun person? Well, why would the police in Canada use that term? Why not gun man or gun woman? That's the term we're used to hearing. Well, the answer is that, first of all, Canada continues to be a joke of a country. It's a country where the police, in the moments after someone slaughters children at a school, they are more concerned with not misgendering the killer. And the reason they're worried about that is that, as you may have already guessed, apparently this was another trans mass shooter. Andy Ngo is reporting along with Juno News that this was a trans killer. here's the Juno News report Juno News by the way is a Canadian independent news outlet and here's what they say the individual alleged to be the shooter in the deadly attack at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School of British Columbia has been identified by a close family member as Jesse Strang or Strang S-T-R-A-N-G however you pronounce that strange maybe Juno News spoke directly with Russell G. Strang Jesse Strang's uncle who confirmed Jesse was transgender and responsible for the shooting that left 10 people dead, including the suspect. A public YouTube account believed to be owned by Jesse features the transgender flag and uses she, her pronouns. Now, as far as I could tell at this point, as we're filming anyway, no other mainstream news outlet has picked this up or reported it. But which is not surprising. this does seem to be accurate that this was a trans killer and that is also not remotely surprising we will probably get into this in much more detail tomorrow but for now we could just reiterate that trans identified people account for the most mass shooters per capita out of any group in existence and it's like not even close which is exactly what you would expect. That's what I've been warning about for a long time. You know, trans identified people are already by definition, like by the, by nature of being trans, even though being trans is not actually part of anyone's nature, but by definition, if you are trans, it means that you're divorced from reality, right? By definition. It means you are self-destructive by definition. And it means by definition that you are radicalized because trans ideology is, among other things, a radical ideology. So you've got an entire population of people who are mostly male. or even if that's at least among the shooters they're mostly male although certainly not only because we know what happened at covenant school so even putting that aside you certainly have an entire population of people who are divorced from reality self-destructive and radicalized and then what happens next and then you take that population that is already all of those things. And then you tell them that there's a genocidal conspiracy against them. You tell them that anyone who does not respect their pronouns or go along with their fantasies is a threat to them, is an actual threat to their lives. right you tell them you take those people already delusional self-destructive radicalized and you say to them hey you know you are whatever you say you are and anyone who tells you otherwise is a threat a threat to your very life what happens next well, exactly what we're seeing here. And we'll get into that in much more detail tomorrow. Our sponsor, Grand Canyon University, is an affordable private Christian university based in beautiful Phoenix, Arizona, one of the largest universities in the country, widely praised for its culture of community and impact. GCU has 369 academic programs with over 300 of those available online. At GCU, you'll join a nationwide community of learners who are redefining online education through their 100% online MBA program. 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The Times wrote, much of what we wrote then holds up, but not all of it does. At the time, supporters of legalization predicted that it would bring few downsides. In our editorials, we described marijuana addiction and dependence as relatively minor problems. Many advocates went further and claimed that marijuana was a harmless drug that might even bring net health benefits. They also said that legalization might not lead to greater use. Despite those prior claims, at times argued that it is now clear that many of these predictions were wrong and that the legalization of the drug has led to much more use. Each year, nearly 2.8 million people in the United States suffer from cabotenoid hypermesis syndrome, which causes severe vomiting and stomach pain. More people have also ended up in hospitals with marijuana-linked paranoia and chronic psychotic disorders. Bystanders have also been hurt, including by people driving under the influence of pot. These are all things that they were arguing. And it's a good article. You should read it. I don't say this often, but the New York Times should be commended for this. I don't think they went far enough because they're saying that, well, we're not saying there should be a ban. I think there should be a ban. But they at least admit that they got some things wrong. And, you know, I can't hold it against them for getting this wrong. I got it wrong, which I've admitted many times. I went through the same. I went through it much sooner, but I went through the same awakening process when it comes to this issue. I was in favor for a while. I was in favor of marijuana legalization, even though I don't it doesn't really it doesn't benefit me. I don't smoke pot, but I was in favor of it because of all the all the libertarian arguments that I basically bought into. in particular the argument that hey well you know alcohol is already legal and it's so much worse in every way so why not have you know why should marijuana be singled out in this way so i bought into that argument But then like the New York Times editorial board I was forced to reevaluate when new information came in Which is what we should always do. And to be completely honest, it's like it's not all new information, actually. I mean, there's new information because, well, once you do the thing and you legalize it, well, now we see what the impact is. We see what effect it actually has on society. It's not in the realm of theory anymore. Now it's, okay, like you support legalization because you say, well, it's not going to have this kind of impact. Right? It will have no real impact or it will be a positive impact. It's not going to have this negative impact. Well, then you do it. And now it's happened in enough places for long enough that we can look back and say, OK, well, who was right and who was wrong? And it turns out that the people who all along said it will have a very negative impact were right. And we can see that. But it's also but, you know, so that's the new information. But there's there's also been data about the harms of marijuana for decades now. That. Was available for anyone who did enough research into it. Which a lot of people, including myself, did not. So, you know, The New York Times talks about a lot of the different dangers associated with pot use. It is addictive. You do see huge increases in people driving under the influence. Of course, people are getting killed because of that. You have things like, as they mentioned, these hypermesis, these serious medical conditions that are associated with marijuana use. There's also the societal level issues, which we've talked about at length, the implications of having entire cities where like everybody is walking around stoned all the time. Very bad for society. Basically no upside. And on the addiction side of it, by the way, according to some figures, including data compiled by Yale, 30 percent of marijuana users are addicted. And for alcohol, which weed smokers will say is so much worse. Well, the addiction rates are are lower. It's probably probably about a third of that. So most estimates say that like eight to 12 percent, 13 percent, 15 percent at most of alcohol drinkers are alcoholic. But I want to focus for a moment on something the article mentions kind of briefly, which is. And Brett Cooper posted about this yesterday, talking about her family's experience. And she was pilloried, torn to shreds by the potheads, even though she's 100 percent right. And that is the link between marijuana use and psychosis. And here's the thing about that. And you really need to understand this if you're a pot smoker. The link between marijuana use and psychosis is very, very strong. It is very well documented. This is not like, oh, one study 20 years ago. It indicated that maybe there's some kind of correlation. It's not that. This is not some obscure theory. This is something that's been demonstrated scientifically many times. I mean, it's real. It just is. So you've got experimental studies over the past 40 years from the 90s all the way to today. I found three at least showing that marijuana use can induce paranoia, hallucinations, other psychotic symptoms. You've got longitudinal studies, which mean that these are studies that track data over a long period of time. There's a Danish study, a Swedish study, a study out of Australia, a Canadian study, all separate showing this link. And these are studies. The Swedish study was done. It was a 15 year period. Which included 50,000 heavy cannabis users. And it showed a several fold increase in schizophrenia risk because of marijuana. There's been research looking at genetics, whether some marijuana users are genetically more vulnerable to the psychosis risk. And the answer is yes, some of them are. You've got reviews by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the CDC concluding that there is consistent evidence linking cannabis use to psychosis. You've got you've got analysis in various European countries showing that indeed. It's like, well, we've got all these studies. Showing this link, if all of that is true, then we should be able to look at places that have legalized marijuana. And and marijuana use has increased and we should notice that also the rate of psychotic disorders increases as well. And what do you know? That's exactly what we find. So you have studies that are small scale studies that are medium scale, large scale. You have research focused on small groups and short periods of time, large groups over long periods of time. You have research looking at correlation at the population level, research looking at causation all the way down to the genetic level. You have research with predictive, you know, you have a you have a theory here. Right. The theory is that marijuana use can cause psych psychosis, psychiatric conditions. That's the theory. Well, if it's a valid theory, it should have predictive power. Right. That's what a valid any valid theory has predictive power. It means that, well, here's what I here's what's happening. And here's my theory. And if my theory is true, then when I look at what's actually going on in the real world, I should see X, Y, Z. And these theories, this theory has predictive power. Because then when you look at what's happening in the real world, you find exactly that. Like these, the theory would predict if this is true, it predicts that as marijuana use increases in a population, psychotic disorders also increase. And that is exactly what we observe in reality. So this is very thorough and there is a lot of data here. And perhaps most importantly, all of this data comports with common sense. So it's not like you're being asked to accept something that makes no intuitive sense based on studies. No, it makes sense. Of course, a mind altering substance, if used constantly every day, will have a deleterious effect on your mind. Of course it will. Of course, it's harmful to your mind to take a mind altering substance every day. That's exactly what with common sense you would expect that. And then what do you know? It's what you find. So. It's all right there. And here's the thing, I'll tell you, the one thing. On top of all this, that makes weed so dangerous. Is that and this, I think, also explains the high rate of addiction. when you compare to things like alcohol. Well, with alcohol, everybody admits, everyone acknowledges with alcohol that it can be a dangerous substance and it can hurt you. Everyone admits that. You will not find anyone who will claim otherwise. I defy you to find a single person who will claim that there are no serious risks with alcohol. Now, you will find alcoholics who are in denial about their own consumption. They're in denial about their own habits. They'll say that, you know, I don't have a problem. So they're in denial about that. But they won't deny that. Well, yeah, like alcoholism exists. Yeah, other people have a problem with it. Yeah, it can hurt you if you drink too much. But I don't drink too much. So that's a level of denial. But it's different from the denial you find with potheads. with weed smokers. Because for them, they are also personally in denial about their own consumption. I don't have a problem. Yeah, I smoke every day. Yeah, I'm high every single day, but I don't have a problem. There's that denial. But also there is a blanket denial among advocates of marijuana that marijuana has any negative effects. I mean, marijuana users have this like, superstitious, almost religious faith in the substance. They think it's the one mind-altering drug in existence that you can take as much as you want, and it will not harm you at all. It will have no health impact at all. Unless it's a positive impact, maybe. So that's the kind of denial you have with marijuana, And I think that that makes it even more dangerous. Because then you have a lot of people that think like, yeah, I can get high every day, all day, and it will not hurt me. They really do believe that. Nobody believes that you can drink all day, every day and not be hurt by it. There are people who have that habit and it's really bad. But no one really believes that you can just do that and you'll be fine. With marijuana, I think like millions of people believe that. They really believe it. look at the comments under this video. You're going to see some of them. And I think that contributes to the problem. Lent begins next week. So you probably already started thinking about what you're giving up. It's obviously an important thing to choose, but there's an even more pressing question. How do you plan to approach this season in order to see real lasting spiritual change? Our sponsors and friends at Ascension Press invite you to join them for the Crux Lenten Challenge, a daily program that teaches you how to surrender your life to God, Each day, participants take on four challenges inspired by the cross of Christ, daily scripture reading, a nightly examine, one physical exercise of your choice, and one dietary fast of your choice. But don't worry, Crux isn't about extreme penance or white-knuckled self-improvement. It's about encountering your weakness honestly and discovering the God who meets you there. And you don't do this alone. Each day, Father Columba Jordan shares short video reflections in the Ascension app to encourage you, guide you when you struggle, and help you recognize where God is inviting you to surrender. For a limited time, you can join Crux with 90 days of premium access to the Ascension app for just $4.99. Visit ascensionpress.com slash walsh to download the app and get the free Crux action plan to prepare for the challenge and track your progress through Lent. Offer excludes current subscribers. You know, I'm not going to get into another 45 minute anti-AI speech right now, I promise. I'll have plenty more speeches like that in the future. Don't get me wrong. Just not today. I do just want to tell you about about this. I think a very important and sobering, frankly, terrifying article post by a guy named Matt Schumer, which is going viral right now for good reason. Matt works in the industry and the article is titled Something Big is Happening. and basically argues that we are with, and I've had this feeling for a while. I haven't quite been able to put it into words. So what he argues with AI is that we are, with AI, we are basically in February of 2020, right? February 2020, you first started to hear reports about, unless you were really clued in and you really followed global events, if you were a normal person, And February is when you really first start to hear reports about some weird virus in China. And but if you were a normal person, what you didn't understand at that time was that our entire lives were about to be changed abruptly, severely and really irreversibly. Like something was about to happen that was going to change everything permanently. And then it did. Right. Right. And his point is that that's where we are right now with AI. Like it's February 2026, but really it's February 2020. And the pandemic is AI. And, you know, March and then April, 15 days to slow the spread like that's that's coming. AI is about to change everything. All of our lives will be irrevocably changed. And in many cases, for the worse. millions and millions of jobs are going away and soon not like in 10 years but it's already happening that that's the case he's making like this is already happening and it's it's going to it's only going to happen more at a more rapid rate now matt schumer argues that although ai is going to totally, basically dismantle human civilization as we know it. That's my words, not his. That's what he's kind of arguing. Ultimately, he thinks that it could work out for the best. I don't think that. So he's not nearly as pessimistic as I am. He kind of like goes through this whole thing, quite terrifying. It's like a horror. It's just a horror story about it's a nightmare scenario that he says is upon us. And there's no getting out of it now. And then by the end, he tries to say, yeah, but cheer up, guys. It's not so bad. That's the one part of the article that I found not compelling, unfortunately. But even he will say that in the short and medium term, AI is coming for millions of jobs just to start with. And eventually, probably every job, one way or another. Like no one is truly safe. You think you're safe, you're not. and you know you know where i stand on this i do believe that ai is a civilization level threat probably unlike anything we've ever seen before i truly believe that um five years from now if everything is fine and ai is basically where it is now and it's like it meant for many people just a novelty if that's the case five years from now then you can take all All of my chicken little sky is falling stuff, you can take it, you can repost it, you can make fun of me. That's fine. But I don't think I'm going to be wrong on this one. I think that the sky really is falling with the AI. I just do. And the thing that, I hope I'm wrong. Like this is one of those things I'd be very happy to be wrong. I pray that I'm wrong. and sometimes there are people that have reposted this article and made the counter argument saying that well this is hysterical this is nonsense AI is not going to do all this it can't do it there's a limit there's a cap with what AI can achieve and I hope they're right I read those counter arguments and I want to believe it but I'm not persuaded And I'll tell you that the thing that so this is what I was thinking about the thing that is most startling and most shocking and most, frankly, terrifying to me about AI as a layman. As someone who admittedly, I don't understand how this stuff works. But it is the ability of AI to understand. Apparently, it's the ability of AI to apparently. understand or to do something that closely resembles understanding. That is what is truly shocking to me. And maybe someone who knows this stuff better than I can could respond and say, well, that's just because that's just because you don't understand it. Maybe so. Maybe so. But I don't think we've ever seen anything like this before. I mean, it really is the closest. It certainly is already the closest thing to non-human consciousness we've ever seen in the history of the human species. I'm not saying that I think AI is conscious. I don't. But it's the closest we've ever seen to something like that. And now maybe you might say yeah it close but it still a million light years away Maybe But that is the that what I noted as I as someone who an AI Not a fan. I've experimented with it a little bit. And. And that's the thing that I've noticed is its ability to understand, at least from my perspective, seems to have. seems to have improved rapidly, just even over the last few months. And so I've done two, two, two just personal experiments that a lot of other people have done. You can do this. Um, just testing its ability to understand things. So one thing you can do with AI right now is you can feed it a contract and it will spit out in 30 seconds, a lawyerly analysis of the contract. And I've tested this with, I actually went back and found like an old book deal contract I had from years ago. And I gave it to the AI. I said, can you, you know, here's the contract. What do you think? And it came back with an analysis that lined up with what my actual human lawyer said to me years ago when we went through this. And not only that, but it picked up on things that my human lawyer did not pick up on. It was now, maybe I had a bad lawyer. It was better than the human at interpreting and understanding the contract. And that, you know, maybe that you could you could just say, well, yeah, it's a it's all about legal language. OK, maybe you can build the other thing that I can do. And I've experimented with this. You take a script that I've been developing and. I'm not going to get into the detail because I actually want to make it one of these days, but been developing the script. So I experimented with this, feed the AI the script, the film script, and say, okay, give me, actually, I tried two things. So one thing I said, okay, here's an idea I have for a movie. I gave all the ideas. I said, can you generate, like, write a script for me, write a couple of scenes based on this idea. And it did that, and it was terrible, as I expected, and I was relieved. It was like, it's awful. This is terrible. And then I said, well, here's I fed it the entire script, like 100 pages and said, give feedback on the script. And in like 30 seconds, maybe a minute. It read through the entire script and spit out this lengthy analysis. Which is not just analysis of the structure and form of the script, but even the themes, the subtext. They're like individual character beats. And you read this back and you're like this. That looks an awful lot like understanding. It looks an awful lot like a thing that was able to understand what you just gave it. Because it's not just picking up on legal language. It's picking up on theme and subtext, like picking up on things that you didn't because that you didn't actually write in the script. But like you because that's what a subtext is. and then it gives a feedback and it gives suggestions, and most of the suggestions are not good. It's like I'm not going to, just in principle, I would never actually adopt any of those suggestions. I just wanted to see what it was able to do. Also probably a bad idea to give AI intellectual property, because there's something, how does that work? It's like now it just has that. So then when someone else uses the AI and says, can you write me a script, can it like crib from, I don't know, how does that work? Probably not a good idea, but whatever. I did it. And what it was able to do in return was, again, something that resembles understanding. And how? I don't know. That's the thing. And, you know, people who are more have a more relaxed view of AI will say, well, it's not really understanding things. It's just like interpreting its pattern recognition. It's cross-referencing this with the other things that it's that it has in its system. Well, it's like, but isn't that what understanding is? I mean, well, how do we define human understanding? Isn't human understanding pattern recognition, cross-referencing, memory? Like, isn't that what it means for us to understand things? And if a piece of technology can get to a point where it's doing something that looks almost identical to understanding, then how, then doesn't the distinction between actual understanding and resembling understanding start to collapse? So that it's basically an irrelevant distinction? I don't know. So that's what concerns me about it. And this is not, this is not me saying, oh, AI is going to become conscious and take over the world and enslave us all. I mean, who knows? Maybe. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about a Terminator scenario. I do think it takes over the world, but it takes over the world because it just takes over all the things that humans do. It just becomes better at doing everything a person can do. And so there's nothing left for people to do. That to me, that's the Armageddon scenario that I'm worried about. Not Terminator. It's just like now we're human beings with nothing to do and there are no jobs that we need to do anymore. How does that work? Can you have a human society that way? How do you transition into society that way like that without everything collapsing? How do you transition into that society without without absolute desolation and an untold human misery preceding it? I don't think you can. 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And I am a lawyer, as you know, and we do the We have a constitution, and it allows us to freedom of the press and freedom of speech, protects us from unreasonable searches and seizures, and makes it that we have to have probable cause to be pulled over. And what's happening in Minnesota is wrong. There's no shades of gray. It's clear. and I really love what's been happening there now with people coming out showing the love the compassion integrity and respect for others that they don't know and helping them out and we love Minnesota for that okay so articulate as always these people are so articulate But what's been happening in Minnesota is bad. What's been happening? I don't like what's been happening. I believe in the Constitution. Yeah, what has been happening, Rich? What are you talking about? I mean, what specifically is bad? What specifically defies the Constitution in your legal opinion? Can you explain? Like arresting and deporting people who are not legally authorized to be in the country? Is that is that the bad thing that's happening? Is that against the Constitution? is that your legal analysis as a lawyer it's total nonsense of course and again even if it were not nonsense even if he had legitimate complaints which he doesn't this still would not be the forum for them this is not the place you don't go to a foreign country on a global stage and start attacking your own country you don't do that and you especially don't do that if your sport is curling because this guy is a curler That's his sport. So if you're wondering why, like how this Olympic athlete is a pudgy 50 year old man, well, it's because he's he does curling. Which is not a sport and should not be in the Olympics. Like, can we just get real about this? I don't mean to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm not saying that all of the curlers are anti-American communists. This guy is, but maybe not all of them are. Some of them might be might be patriots. But this is not like this is not a sport, guys. and I'm not even saying it's not necessarily entertaining to watch. Like of all the Olympic events, I think a lot of them are quite boring. You know, you could make the argument. This is not the least entertaining of the bunch, but I mean, look, I had, I think we have this clip. So this is the clip for, I think from yesterday, the gold winning curler. I thought it was the, the, whoever won the gold in, in the women's curling, but this is actually a mixed, a mixed gender event, which tells you something. Okay, if at the Olympic level, men and women can compete together, that is not a sport. But here was the winning shot, the winning curl. I don't know what you call it, but go ahead. Isabella Rana has been nearly flawless in this Olympic final. 97% shooting. If she delivers again, the Swedes are golden. And it'll do the trick. The brother-sister combo from Sweden grabbing gold over the United States. 6-5 the final as Sweden celebrates mixed up. I don't understand what I'm watching. Like the puck or whatever you call it, the big rock, the big stone. Didn't even land in the target. So how do you win? I don't know. I don't know why the woman was screaming like that. Pushes the puck down the rank and then starts screaming like a schizophrenic hobo. And you got the guy with the broom. And they're not doing anything. Let's just be real about this, okay? Like the guy with the broom and curling, he's pushing the broom ahead of the puck. That's not doing anything. Don't claim that that person's doing something. That's like when you're cleaning and you give your two-year-old a toy vacuum so he can feel like he's doing something. It's like when you're a kid and your dad's out mowing the lawn and you have your little plastic Fisher-Price lawnmower. Oh, isn't he cute? He thinks he's doing something. And I don't want to hear anyone tell me, oh, no, Matt, you don't understand curling. The broom guy is really important. Yeah, whatever, nerd. I don't understand. I shouldn't have to understand it. that's a game that you play with your friends after you've each had several beers. That's a bar game. Okay. That's not an Olympic sport. You might as well make an Olympic sport at it. What is that game with the, um, I never know what it's called, but I'm really good at it with the, where it's got the, the, the metal circle and then it's on a string and you flick it onto a hook. You know what I'm talking about? Every brewery in the world has one of these. I'm great at it, by the way, I'm like an expert at that game. one of the only things I'm good at, one of my only skills, and I have three skills and that's one of them, you might as well make that an Olympic sport. And here's a general rule, okay? If your sport, quote-unquote, here's a few things that make your sport not a sport. Number one, if your sport, if the only way to know who won is by a judge, this doesn't apply to curling, I realize, but if the only way to know who won the event is by going to a judge, then it's not a sport. So that takes figure skating out. Figure skating is not a sport. It's an art form. It's a physically demanding art form. I'll give it that. It's not a sport. Okay, now you can have judges, like in boxing has a judge, but there's also a way that you can win without a judge. Just knock somebody out. Pretty straightforward. So that, not a sport. At least curling passes that test. but if your sport can be played at the highest level by middle-aged men with beer bellies, then it's not a sport and it doesn't belong in the Olympics. That's the rule. That should be the rule. If I was the head of the Olympic committee, that would be the rule. Like if I, as a 39 year old man, if I am not too old to take up your sport today and play it competitively, then it's not a sport and it should not be in the Olympics. that that should be the rule especially now especially if if after all that like we put up with your dumb little game that you want to play at the olympics and you get to have a gold medal for playing your your your bar game we put up with that for years and everyone applauds you politely like you go out in public and you say oh i'm an olympic gold medalist i was like really Wow, that's impressive. What do you do? Oh, I'm a curler. And everyone goes, oh, yeah. Oh, no, really cool, man. Awesome. We put up with that for years, and then you come out and you stab us in the back on the world stage on top of it. Let's just be done with it. That's my point. And we will leave it there for today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. they told you america invented slavery they told you the indians were peaceful they told you colonialism was evil and that joseph mccarthy was a bad guy and guess what they lied for half a century generations of american school children have been taught to hate our history hate our country and hate themselves time to set the record straight And since no one else is going to do it, I will. Who sold us the slaves? What were India and Africa like before Europeans arrived? What caused white flight? Some of the most well-known stories from American history are designed to demoralize you. The Trail of Tears, the Smallpox Blanketsmith, the Red Scare. It's all baseless. It's time for a lesson on what they're not teaching in public schools. On the real history of slavery, of colonialism, of the Indians, of America, and the world. It's time for Real History with Matt Walsh. Now streaming only on Daily Wire Plus.