Ep. 1711 - Venezuela Has Been Dealt With. Somali Scammers Should Be Next

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America's home for home loans, 866.569.4711. That's 866.569.4711. Or visit americanfinancing.net slash walsh. Today on the Matt Walsh Show, Donald Trump captures the Communist dictator of Venezuela. I'm as non-interventionist as they come, but I think this was a brilliant move. And I'll explain why. Also, as we saw over the break, Somali daycare fraudsters were exposed in a massively viral video. Why can't we handle these people as swiftly and decisively as we handled Maduro? We'll talk about that. Plus, the Communist dictator of New York, Maldonni, extols the virtues of collectivism over individualism. And I have some important advice for fathers as we begin the new year. We'll talk about all that and more today on the Matt Walsh Show. One of the benefits of taking some time off and letting the news of the day unfold for a couple of weeks without responding to it or even hearing about it, is that you gain some perspective. You inoculate yourself from the usual call and response, outrage cycles, the latest true crime style, conspiracy nonsense and all the rest of it. And then when you return, it's easier to take stock of the issues that matter and the ones that don't. And this is clarity that on the right, we've needed for some time now, desperately. And over Christmas and New Year's and a kind of one-two punch, that clarity arrived. We were treated to a contrast that was so stark and so sobering that it's just impossible to ignore. So first there was the Man on the Street video of the Somali daycares and healthcare centers posted by the YouTuber Nick Shirley which you've probably seen along with 200 million other people. Shirley, which you've probably seen along with 200 million other people. And of course, the fact that Somalis are openly scamming Americans is not exactly new information. We've talked about it many times on this show. There have been dozens of reports from outlets like Alphanews, County Highway, the Manhattan Institute and so on documenting and excruciating detail just how widespread the corruption is. Now, federal prosecutors prove that Somalis ripped off hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers as part of the so-called Feeding Our Future scam. And that's just one of their fraudulent organizations where they pretended to feed children in exchange for federal reimbursements. Somalis have also set up fake autism treatment centers on virtually every block, which is another scam that's cost hundreds of millions of dollars in just the past five years. Then there's the adult daycares, the normal daycares, the home health aides, the housing stabilization services and so on. Somalis have scammed all of it. They've scammed everything. In fact, even before Nick Shirley's video came out, the state of Minnesota announced that they were pausing all new licenses for home and community-based human services providers because, quote, the unprecedented increase in provider applications over the past five years far outpaces the increase in people receiving services. So in other words, Somalis were clearly pillaging the treasury and they were not being subtle about it. And really, that's the part of Nick's video that was so significant. I mean, everybody already knew what the Somalis were doing. We all knew that the average Somali has an IQ that hovers around the level of mental retardation, scientifically speaking, that's the case. We all knew that half of the population of Somalia lives on roughly a dollar a day, yes, a dollar a day, something like 70% of the population is below the poverty line. They have an economy so primitive that it's hard to even comprehend it. And we all knew that there was never a universe in which importing hundreds of thousands of these people was ever going to improve this country. Now what was surprising about Nick's footage is how open and obvious the fraud is. I mean, it turns out that if you simply walk up to these Somali establishments and attempt to patronize their business, they'll respond by asking, why? Yes, why? They'll respond with total befuddlement about the mere idea that somebody would want to pay them in exchange for the goods and services they're supposed to be pretending to provide. And meanwhile, they'll collect millions of dollars from taxpayers. They'll park Range Rovers out front, they'll bark at you in some incomprehensible Star Wars language when you ask them why their daycare doesn't have any children inside of it, or why a single building houses more than a dozen clinics that all supposedly serve the same purpose. So we're not talking about a subtle or nefariously brilliant operation here. These are not criminal masterminds. It shouldn't take much to shut it down completely. I mean, you could simply cut all federal funding to the state of Minnesota for starters. That'd be the obvious solution. There's no reason for taxpayers to fund anyone else's daycare in the first place, even if the operations were in fact legitimate. But there are about a million other solutions too. For example, the FBI could set up cameras outside of every daycare, all these Somali daycares, and log the entrance and exit of every single person, and then check those numbers against the billing records. With AI, it wouldn't be especially difficult to do. It would cost like, what, $100 for the camera? Maybe a few thousand dollars to hire someone to program the AI? Why hasn't that already been done? We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fraud here. This is, when you add up all the different scams, this is one of the biggest frauds in American history. And if the American government actually wanted to stop the fraud, it could obviously do so. In fact, they've done it before. Watch. In December of 2021, the FBI installed a surveillance camera overlooking this building just off Lake Street in Minneapolis. At the time, it was Safari Restaurant, which overall took in $12 million in federal child meal payments through Feeding Our Future. Safari's former co-owner, Salim Said, is on trial alongside Amy Bach, the Feeding Our Future executive director. Safari claimed to feed four to six thousand kids a day. Its invoices and meal counts shown to the jury alongside the video. An FBI agent testifying that an average of 40 people came and went during the six weeks it was surveilled. The FBI set up a total of 12 cameras at sites, claiming to serve extraordinary numbers of meals. Another was at a deli in St. Paul, also registered by defendant Salim Said, which claimed 1800 meals per day. The video shown to the jury showed an average of 23 people a day coming and going. Now, the only reason this kind of 24-7 monitoring isn't mandated by law outside of every daycare and health clinic that receives millions of dollars from taxpayers is that we can only conclude the government wants the fraud to continue. That was the lesson of the Nick Shirley video, which dominated social media towards the end of 2025. It wasn't really a revelation in the sense that it didn't reveal some previously unknown conspiracy. It was very important footage. Nick deserves a lot of credit for going out and capturing it, but as important as it was, it was also extraordinarily almost unbelievably frustrating to watch because it raised an obvious question. As Nick went from daycare to daycare, it was impossible not to ask, why are we allowing this? Why is no one monitoring these daycares? Why doesn't the government simply ignore the NGOs and the special interests and the ACLU and the lawyers and shut all this down immediately by force? I mean, why can the FBI send SWAT teams after the January 6th grandmothers but not Somali fraudsters who openly despise this country and all the people in it? At least the white people. Then in the new year, we saw exactly what the federal government can achieve when it decides, contrary to the advice of experts and the norms that are supposedly so sacrosanct, to actually take decisive action for the benefit of American citizens. It turns out that indeed the U.S. government is capable of using its overwhelming power within our own hemisphere to advance our interests in a direct and tangible way. There's nothing that stands in our way. There's no military or militia that's powerful enough to stop us. There's no international law that holds us back because international law is fake. The only laws that exist are rules that are written and codified by and enforced by a legitimate governing authority and enforced with violence if necessary. That's it. Those are the only laws. That's what a law is by definition. Nothing else is just a suggestion. That's why Donald Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine or the Donro Doctrine, as he called it at his press conference after the U.S. attack on Venezuela. That's also why Trump invoked Manifest Destiny during his inaugural dress last year. This administration understands that America first means that America should rule over the Western Hemisphere and use its power to advance the interests of our people. We have the power to do that, and so we should. We're not beholden to the approval of the United Nations or to the Somalis in Minnesota or to any other group that would happily eradicate all white people from the planet if they ever gained any kind of military superiority whatsoever. We're also not beholden to precedent. We don't have to let our military go to waste idling and hangers and bases all over the world because of the failures of past wars. You often hear this argument that because the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, or Quagmires, that we should never again use them to topple a foreign regime or wage war over natural resources. That was the implication of Thomas Massie's remarks recently, which I'm going to play because in general I respect Thomas Massie. He's a Republican. He's not a mindless MSNBC drone repeating DNC talking points. But here's what he said about this. Listen. If it were about drugs, we'd bomb Mexico or China or Colombia, and the president would not have pardoned one Orlando Hernandez. This is about oil and regime change. Well, yeah, this is about oil and regime change. Donald Trump has come out and said that many times. And there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. You know, wars over natural, over resources are as old as human civilization itself. I mean, there's like reflexive assumption that it's never valid for a war to be at least in part motivated by the need for resources is absurd. That's like one of the only reasons why wars are fought. Now, specifically, though, you know, this is not about just going in and quote unquote stealing oil from some poorness and people. This I'll tell you what this is about. This is about the oil infrastructure and the oil rights that the socialist in Venezuela, led by Hugo Chavez, seized from the U.S. two decades ago without fair compensation. The Venezuelans brought in companies like ExxonMobil and Conoco Phillips in order to construct the facilities, including pipelines and factories that were necessary to extract and sell the oil in Venezuela. We're talking about some of the most valuable oil deposits in the entire world. We're talking about trillions of dollars worth of oil. Americans were entitled to a share of the profits in exchange for investing billions of dollars into it. But the Venezuelans broke the deal after the fact. They compensated the Americans for the book value of the infrastructure, but not the value it was creating. And in doing so, Venezuela spiked gas prices and stole billions, really trillions of dollars from the U.S., not to mention an invaluable strategic resource. The Venezuelans also proceeded to introduce a tremendous degree of inefficiency to the whole process because they have no idea how to maintain the infrastructure that they see. So now Venezuela is responsible for producing roughly 1% of the world's oil. In the 1970s, before they nationalized the oil industry, they supplied nearly 10%. So it is the duty of the American government, especially in our hemisphere, to protect the property rights of American citizens and American companies. It's also the duty of the American government, when possible, to ensure that natural resources in this hemisphere are used for the benefit of American citizens, especially natural resources that are only being extracted because of us, because of our infrastructure that belongs to us. And that's why when Thomas Massey and the left complain about how we're going to war for oil and how this is about regime change, well, the appropriate response is okay. I mean, it's not much of a war. It lasted 90 minutes. So I think we could, I could take some exception to the going to war part of that. But to say that oil is a big part of this, like oil is the lifeblood of civilization. What are you talking about? And it was stolen from us. And it's being used and squandered by this tin pot communist dictator. It's like, why shouldn't we seize that back for the benefit of our people? Why shouldn't we do it? The assumption, the answer that most people would give prior to this as well, but there's no way to do that without creating this huge quagmire that goes on for decades and thousands of American lives are lost. And that's a reasonable assumption given our recent history. But if you can do it efficiently without a single American life lost and it doesn't turn into a 20 year quagmire, why not do it? It doesn't mean it's going to be a replay of the Iraq war. It doesn't mean that we're going to have ground troops in Venezuela for 20 years. It doesn't mean that Venezuelans are identical to jihadis in Fallujah. It means that we're doing what's necessary to advance the interests of our own people. Venezuelans managed to go from extreme wealth to eating zoo animals for food in the span of about 20 years, all while sitting on some of the most lucrative oil reserves on the planet. Even if they hadn't stolen the oil from us, which they did, you could still make a very strong argument that the U.S. has the moral right, even responsibility to seize control over the vital resources that these people are squandering, and even worse, allowing to be exploited by our global adversaries. That's to say nothing of the drugs that are trafficked into our country, which are killing Americans. All these facts make this very different from interventionism in the Middle East. This is our hemisphere. This is our region of the world. This was a 90 minute military mission, not a 20 year mission. There is a clear benefit to the American people in the case of the Venezuela operation, whereas there was no discernible benefit to the American people in Iraq or Afghanistan. And on top of that, Venezuela doesn't have Islamic militants that have the will and the ability to wage any kind of meaningful counter strike, which is why they haven't. So it's a very different situation by just about every measure. And more generally, no American should oppose having a country like Venezuela turned into basically a vassal state subordinate to the United States. That's the way of the world. That's what we should do with inferior countries in our region of the world who cause problems for us, especially when those inferior countries are run by communist dictators. It just has to be done the right way so that we are the beneficiaries of the arrangement, and it's not a quagmire that costs us billions of dollars in thousands of American lives. Having more control over global oil supplies will also put us in a better position against our adversaries like Russia and prove our negotiating position with Canada, which is run by another hostile socialist government. Under my China's ambitions because they don't have vast oil reserves, meanwhile Cuba's communist government has been propped up by oil money from Venezuela, which is why Cubans were guarding Maduro at his residence when Delta Force got there. Looks like Cuba's communist government is about to fall. Colombia's socialist leader may not be in power for very long based on how Trump is talking lately. In other words, we have a real chance after the attack on Venezuela to at least severely undermine communists throughout the hemisphere, our neighbors. And unquestionably, that's a good thing, especially since, as you've probably noticed, communism is on the rise domestically. New York just installed a Muslim socialist who explicitly endorsed collectivism when he was inaugurated. It's now more urgent than it's been at any point in memory to directly combat communism in our hemisphere. Even aside from the oil, that's also worth it. Now I will concede that at this point, we can't definitively say whether this attack will turn out the way the Trump administration expects or whether we'll begin nation-building in Venezuela. No one can say with certainty one way or the other exactly what will happen next. And when Donald Trump, who was clearly going on zero hours of sleep, said that the United States will run the country of Venezuela, he admittedly and probably unintentionally raised the possibility of another nightmarish, never-ending occupation, which is not what we want. But at the moment, we should give Trump the benefit of the doubt here. And I think on foreign policy stuff, he's earned that because he's got an established pattern, which is that he doesn't get us into these decades-long disasters. Now first of all, last night, Venezuela's new president said that she wants to work with the U.S., not that she has much choice. Other administration officials, including Marco Rubio, have suggested that that's the approach we're going to take. And additionally, there are no indications that we're staging for any kind of occupation. It appears that we're going to pressure Venezuela to open up the oil fields to the United States under the threat of more decapitation strikes and doesn't seem like any more action will be necessary. Venezuela is clearly incapable of resisting the U.S. military in any meaningful way, which is enough to make you wonder if we couldn't have taken a similar approach to Afghanistan and Iraq rather than sacrifice thousands of American troops in a profoundly misguided campaign to sell Muslims on the wonders of democracy and equal rights. Maybe instead, we could have simply demolished their government, crippled their ability to oppose us, and moved on within a week. Who knows? Maybe that could have worked. At any event, as for Venezuela, it doesn't appear that we have any reason to engage in nation-building, and we shouldn't, especially since Maduro wasn't especially popular in the first place. Also as we should all know by now, Donald Trump will often use words very loosely in a way that we're not meant to take literally, especially to give himself more leverage in a negotiation. So when he says that he'll run Venezuela, you know, you got to keep that in mind. A year ago, for example, Trump said that we'll take over Gaza and that we'll own it. Those were his words. And there was a flurry of articles at the time about how Trump was going to send troops to occupy Gaza and how it would be just like Iraq and all the rest of it. But especially with the benefit of hindsight, we can safely say that Trump didn't literally mean that we'd make Gaza the 51st state. He meant that we'd bring some order to the situation over there, and there's every reason to believe that with Venezuela. He's basically saying the same thing. There's also reason to believe that there could be many additional benefits to converting Venezuela into a client state of the U.S. beyond securing oil reserves for the U.S., which isn't to say that we make it an actual state, obviously, with voting rights and all the rest of it. But here's just one possibility. Venezuela could receive immigrants and refugees who can't be deported to their home countries, which is an arrangement we currently have with El Salvador and Panama, which itself, by the way, was subject to a successful U.S. coup during the first Bush administration. It's been a reliable ally ever since. And if we were to do that, that would be an unequivocal positive development for the United States and every American citizen living here. I haven't seen anyone make that suggestion, but it's the kind of policy that we should be talking about. It's what we voted for in the last election. We didn't vote for inane podcast drama. We voted for observable, significant improvements in the day-to-day lives of Americans. And right now, one of the biggest obstacles to deporting illegal aliens is that many countries won't accept them. Well, Venezuela can now be a top destination for these illegal aliens. In other words, rather than us accepting the undesirables from these third-world hell-holes, we should make them accept the undesirables from us. That's the way it should go. As the most powerful country in the world, that's the way it should go. No, we're not going to make the sacrifice and sacrifice the well-being of Americans for you. That's not the way this works. We're the powerful country. Speaking of podcast drama, you may have noticed that some self-described right-wingers are coming out against the attack on Venezuela. On the theory, in some cases, as I've seen floating around, as I'm sure you have also, that Israel is somehow involved. And the idea, I guess, is that if not for Israel, then no wars would ever be fought. And we'd all live in utopian harmony. So the idea is that the shadowy Jewish cabal is pulling the strings, as usual. And a mildly less deranged version of this sentiment is that Venezuela is the victim of godless globalists because they supposedly have some vaguely conservative values or whatever. Never mind the fact that Venezuela doesn't allow freedom of speech or free markets. Never mind the fact that Venezuela's government routinely intimidates Christians, abolish the right to private property, which is one of the most fundamental rights for any functioning society. We're meant to conclude that somehow Venezuela is really a conservative place, and that's why the sinister globalists wanted to take them down. And it's a contrarian take for the sake of being contrarian. And it's intended to make you think that the United States isn't exceptional and that we can't simply do things that meaningfully make the world, more importantly, this country, a better place to live, which should always be the number one objective of our leaders, is to make this country, is to do things that will help this country and its people. But we can do those things. And we are exceptional. That's what being America first actually means. And I've said seven, eight times, I'm not just America first, I'm an American chauvinist. I make no bones about it. What does that mean? It means I think I put my country first, and my country is better than every other country. And our needs and what we need to do, that supersedes anyone else. Now, if you live in another country, that's not how you feel about it. You put your own country first. Fine. You should as a patriot of your own country. But it just so happens that we have the same attitude, or at least we should, and we're a lot more powerful and important than you are. And in a matter of hours, we can put an immediate end to some of the biggest problems facing this country, problems that no administration has bothered to solve. We could shut down every single Somali fraudster and deport them all back to Somalia. We can do that. Then we could tell the leaders of Somalia, to the extent that Somalia has leaders, that if they don't stop sending scam artists to our country to bill our taxpayers and send the money back to their country, Delta Force will be paying them a little visit next. We can do that. We can also require Mexico to stop the flow of fentanyl into this country and tell them that if you don't do that, we're going to go to war with the cartels ourselves inside your country. You won't do the job, we'll do it for you, and you're not going to like it. And you're going to complain about it and say, we don't want you to do that, we don't give you permission, so what? Do something about it. That's the attitude we could have. Oh, we can't go in and fight the cartels. Mexico doesn't want us to. Who cares what Mexico wants? They've been a major problem for us for decades. Thousands of Americans have died because of them. And so who cares what they want? Do something about it. Try to stop us. You can't. We could demand that Canada give us more trade concessions, restore freedom of speech, end the church burnings, stop its rampant discrimination against white men, or else we can destroy their entire economy overnight, especially now that we have access to Venezuelan oil and don't need cannabis. We can denaturalize and deport foreign infiltrators like Zoran Mamdani and Ilhan Omar who lied about their communist sympathies when they became American citizens. We can spend our money in ways that benefit Americans instead of foreigners who hate us. And those are the two options we have. We can choose Minneapolis-style dysfunction and never-ending decay on the one hand. We can let invaders sabotage us using our norms as a shield. Or we can use Venezuela as the model, what we just did in Venezuela as the model. We can go in, do what needs to be done, and just put an end to it. An entire generation of Americans, including conservatives, has been conditioned to believe that the latter option is impossible, but it's not. All that's necessary, all that was ever necessary, was decisive action before any response was even possible. That's what we just saw in Venezuela. And it's what we need to see in this country and across the hemisphere. Foreign invaders and their NGO lawyers need to recognize that the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny are infinitely more valid than whatever international law they want to hide behind as they rip us off in plain sight. That's because unlike the UN Declaration of Human Rights or whatever else, someone is capable of enforcing Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine. And that someone is the United States of America. Now let's get to our five headlines. If you've ever been fortunate enough to taste fresh fish directly from the source, you know that there is a massive quality difference from what you get packaged at your local grocery store. Getting fresh fish, though, is not easy, and that's why I'm excited about our new sponsor, Wild Alaskan Company. I was skeptical about a subscription box for seafood, but I was very pleasantly surprised to see what came in my first box. They had perfectly portioned sockeye salmon and Pacific halibut individually wrapped, ready to go. 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Go to equipfoods.com slash Matt Walsh. Use code Matt Walsh at checkout. Well, I hope you had a good Christmas and New Year's. My Christmas was very good. We only had to go to the emergency room twice over Christmas break. So that's pretty good, pretty good for us. And the first trip, I'll tell you, was on Christmas night. So I was in the emergency room on Christmas night. My 12-year-old son had an allergic reaction to lobster. And here's the thing. Well, first of all, we didn't know about the allergies. Had crab in the past and was fine. So apparently not all shellfish is the same. And so this allergy just popped up out of nowhere. But second, you might be asking yourself or saying to yourself, why the hell were you guys eating lobster for Christmas dinner? What kind of Christmas dinner would have lobster? And to that I say, yeah, exactly. I agree. I totally agree. I mean, you're preaching to the choir. This was a family debate, heated family debate for weeks, really years. I mean, this has been going on for years. This war that has been, we've been waging against each other because some members of the extended family, I'm not going to call them out, my in-laws, insist that lobster is like the ideal Christmas dinner. That's what they insist. But me, because I'm not a heretic and not a communist, I say that Christmas dinner is supposed to be ham or turkey or both ideally. Right? You don't eat sea insects on Christmas. And that's what lobsters are. They're the insects of the ocean. You shouldn't eat them at all, but especially not on Christmas, of all things. It's like sacrilegious. God made lobsters, made them hideous looking like alien creatures, covered them in a hard shell, gave them massive claws and threw them to the bottom of the ocean. He made lobsters and looked at them and said, these things are ugly and just chucked them to the bottom of the ocean. Pretty clear sign we're not supposed to eat them. I don't know. Like I'd say just take the hint. Okay? It's like, you had to travel down to the bottom of the ocean to find these alien creatures. We're not supposed to eat them. So especially not on Christmas, of all things. Of all things. To eat lobster on Christmas. Who does that? So anyway, that was the debate. I lost the debate. We ended up with a compromise where we had the normal Christmas dinner, but we had a few lobsters for those who wanted to eat them. And my son had a couple bites of it and his face inflated like a blimp. He looked like a Macy's Day. He's like a Snoopy Macy's Day balloon. And again, Ben Adriel kept getting worse. Looked pretty bad. So we had to take the emergency room and all because of the God forsaken lobsters. This was God's punishment for besmirching our Christmas table with those hideous creatures. So the good news is that ultimately I won the debate. Ultimately I could come home from the hospital and say, see, I told you so. No more lobster on Christmas and he's fine. He did. It was fine. And then the second trip, he was the same kid. We were out. He was ice skating, face planted, fractures, needed stitches, concussion. It was real bad. But no surgery needed and he's feeling fine after that. So those were within about three days of each other. Two trips to the emergency room. One survived and restful break as always and we're ready for 2026. We're ready to go. Now I want to start by actually going back a few days. We have a couple of things from earlier last week that I want to talk about. And this one we referenced in the opening. You've almost certainly seen it. Now infamous moment. There was a lot from Mondani's inauguration in New York that we could discuss. None of it was good. But this line about collectivism got the most attention. I think rightfully so. And if you haven't seen it somehow, let's play that for you. We will draw this city closer together. We will replace the fragility of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. If our campaign demonstrated that the people of New York yearn for solidarity then let this government foster it. Because no matter what you eat, how you pray or where you come from, the words that most define us are the two we all share, New Yorkers. The warmth of collectivism. Now honestly the first time I saw that clip and I was mostly tuned out over the break but I did a few things crossed my view that I saw and this was one of them. And the first time I saw it I thought it was like AI because it's so on the nose. The warmth of collectivism. That's something straight out of like a dystopian horror film. I mean isn't that basic, I'm sure other people have pointed this out, isn't that the premise of the Vince Gilligan show, Pluribus, isn't that basically that? And what made it kind of unbelievable isn't the substance. Obviously I know that Mamdani is a collectivist but rather the fact that he's actually extolling the virtues of collectivism explicitly. And usually collectivists promote collectivism while stridently denying that that's what they're doing. But he just came out and said it. He just came right out and said it. I think there's a couple of points we made here. The first is the one that everyone has made in response to this which is that this is as anti-American as it can possibly get. I mean this is the mayor of New York, our biggest, the most important, most iconic city using his inaugural address to launch an assault on the most quintessential American value. You know rugged individualism as Mamdani would define it, right? Built this country. There's no question about it. It built the city that he's now in charge of. That's why we've never had a politician at his level as far as I know actually come out and by name condemn individualism for the sake of collectivism. It's like coming out and attacking bald eagles or apple pie or football or something as a politician. It's like anti-American to its core. There's another point which is that which I haven't seen made which is that this collectivism versus individualism thing is really a false frame. You know Mamdani is attacking a certain thing and that thing that he's attacking is very American and very good but the individualism that he's talking about it's not purely individualistic, right? So when we talk about individualism we don't mean just the individual by himself necessarily and the collectivism that he's promoting isn't purely collectivist either. So what I mean is that the individualism that built America is not one where the single soul atomized individual reigns supreme and his desires come before the needs of the larger group all the time. That's not what it is. It's an individualism where the individual identifies with and serves and often subordinates his desires for the sake of his family and his faith, right? You can certainly argue that individualism is not the best or most apt label for that but whatever you want to call it it's what built America and that's what Mamdani is attacking. When you think about the kind of classic quintessential American rugged individualism well that's the pioneer, right? The homesteader, the guy out on the frontier in the 1800s building a life from scratch, expanding his own horizons and the American horizon at the same time. And so when you think about rugged individuals I'm like that's the image that pops into your mind and that's what he's going after. He's going after that which again is like right at the core of American identity but that guy was not out there by himself usually doing all that stuff by himself or for himself. He was out there with his family. He was building a home for them and he was driven by his faith in God. Those were his concerns. That's what he cares about and everything else comes second or doesn't factor into the equation at all. Now on the other hand when Mamdani talks about collectivism he doesn't really mean collectivism in the strict dictionary definition which is I guess like the giving a group, giving the group priority over the individual is the most basic probably dictionary definition of collectivism. That's not exactly what he means because there are some important caveats to that because while these leftists might promote collectivism they also in most other contexts will constantly talk about the desires and alleged rights of the individual and how nothing can ever come before that. They worship the self, the individual self. These are the same, so this is the confusing thing when you think about well they're collectivists so the desires of the group come before the individual. That's what it supposedly means. Yet these are the same people who will tell you that the sexual fantasies of a trans identified male should have primacy, should be such a priority that all of society should be reorganized around it. If you're a trans identified male then what the left would say is that what you want, your desires, your perception of yourself and of reality should come before anything and everything. Everybody should reorganize themselves around you. That's not exactly collectivism. It's also not rugged individualism. We have to change our language, change the bathrooms, change the sports teams, change everything for the sake of the sexual fantasies of this small group of fetishes. So if he was being a collectivist in the purest sense of the term then he'd be saying to those trans people, well no, it's not all about you. It's about the collective and guess what? Giving you what you want is going to hurt the collective and so we're not going to do it. They don't say that though. So the answer is that Mamdani and all leftists don't really believe in giving a group priority over each individual in that group. They believe in giving certain subgroups priority over the larger group. That's really what they're talking about. So if you're in a protected class, if you're black or gay or trans or a woman, then your needs and desires and entitlements reign supreme. If you're a white male then your individual wants and needs are totally irrelevant. That's when the collectivism really kicks in. I guess that's what we're getting to. If collectivism means that the needs of the individual are subordinate to the group, well that they only really apply that totally to a straight white male. In that case, then what you want, your rights and everything, that doesn't matter at all. What matters is the group and when he says the group, he doesn't mean the whole group, he doesn't mean everybody. He means the certain protected classes. And so that's what he's really talking about, which is a kind of collectivism. It's just the most deranged kind of collectivism that you can have basically. This episode is brought to you by PrizePix. Whether you're starting a new routine or making player picks for the first time, trying something new can be hard, but in life and on PrizePix, it always feels good to be right with high pressure playoff matchups every weekend and elite hoops action almost every night. The action never stops and PrizePix lets you take control. Using PrizePix has made watching games so much more engaging. Plus, it was really simple to get started. I was able to easily pick my favorite players and see if they hit their projections. No draft required. And here's something cool. PrizePix now has early payouts. So if your player gets off to a hot start, you can cash out those winnings before the game even finishes. And they've added a new social feed feature where you can find your community, share picks with your friends and copy lineups from winners with a single click. PrizePix puts their users first so all withdrawals are fast and secure. They accept most major payment methods, making deposits into your account quick and easy this sport season. Download the PrizePix app today and use CodeWalls to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's CodeWalls to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. PrizePix, it's good to be right. Here's another thing we missed a few days ago, which I can't let it go. I can't let it slide. This is our dear friend, Wajahat Ali, trying to explain how Islam influenced the founding of our country, the deep influence that it had on our founding fathers. Although his timeline seems to be a little bit confused. Listen. What people don't know is Thomas Jefferson, a founding father, actually bought his grant from England, purchased it in 1965 as a law student. And he had all these different texts from different religious communities. He himself wasn't that religious, in fact, didn't really care for Islam. But reading the Quran and embracing DEI made him more open to religious tolerance and pluralism. And his Quran is now part of the Library of Congress. And his Quran, in part, and all the religious texts that he used, inspired him to write about religious liberty. Which is why we have in the Constitution the establishment. Yes, Thomas Jefferson bought his Quran in 1965. He drove down to the store in his Ford Thunderbird, right? And listening to some Bob Dylan purchased the Quran. That was in 1965. And then in 1995, a lot of people don't know, he went and bought his first Limp Biscuit album and a Tamagotchi. It was the same shopping trip. So Thomas Jefferson lived to be about 236 years old, if you didn't know that. He cut the seed oils out of his diet and he lived for two centuries, which is basically what everybody who doesn't eat seed oils expects to happen. Okay, even if we give Wajahat the benefit of the doubt, which I'm not sure he deserves, and assume that he misspoke and meant to say, 1765, still his claim is very retarded. It's only slightly less retarded. And it's only very slightly less anachronistic to say. Because Thomas Jefferson did not learn anything about religious tolerance from reading the Quran. The Quran had no influence over the founding of this country at all, even a little bit, even a little bit. And it's interesting to me that these anti-American leftists, like, they can't accept that. They hate this country. They think that it's fundamentally racist, that it's bigoted based on slavery and subjugation and all the rest of it. And yet they also want to insist that the founding fathers were ideologically indistinguishable from some green-haired Antifa member in Portland. So people like Wajahat, they come here, complain about America, dump on it constantly, criticize it, tear it down, while also trying to take credit for it, which is totally schizophrenic. And here's what we know for sure. The founding fathers may have expressed some measure of tolerance for Islam. They also criticized it. Thomas Jefferson went to war against Muslims in the Barbary War. But they did express at various points some measure of tolerance. That's true. But here's the important point. Our founding fathers, when they talked about tolerance of, and they wouldn't necessarily use that term, but when they talk about being tolerant of Islam, if you can find any quotes to that end, they were talking about Islam from afar. They saw Islam as an exotic thing far away, a religion for people thousands of miles away, for people that are inaccessible, especially in the 17th and 1800s. And we are inaccessible to them. The idea that Muslims would ever come here in large groups and would one day be millions of them here, and they'd set up enclaves in the United States, like that was just not in the realm of possibility at the time. The idea that we would have elected officials who are Muslims. The idea that Muslims would take over entire American towns. The idea that the Muslim call to prayer would be heard wafting through the streets at five in the morning in American cities. None of that was anticipated. None of that was foreseen. It was unthinkable at the time. And it would remain unthinkable for like 150 years after Thomas Jefferson died. And there's really no question that if any of them could have seen that coming, they would have had, their tolerance would have been greatly diminished if they could have seen that coming. This episode is sponsored by pre-born ministries. During this Sanctity of Life month, we remember the over 67 million babies whose lives have been lost to abortion since Roe Vwayde. But most people don't realize that since Roe was overturned. The situation has actually gotten more complicated. Today, the abortion pill makes up more than 60% of all abortions, which means it's accessible around the clock. But there's hope in all of this. Pre-born has saved over 400,000 babies from abortion. And right now they're saving more than 200 babies every single day. But a woman who's considering abortion hears her baby's heartbeat and sees that ultrasound image. She's twice as likely to choose life. For just $28, you can sponsor one ultrasound and give a mother the chance to meet her baby for the first time. Every dollar you give goes directly to saving lives. To help dial pound 250 and say the keyword baby, that's pound 250, keyword baby. Or you can donate securely online at preborn.com slash Walsh. Again, it's preborn.com slash Walsh. Finally, I want to close with this last thought, some words of encouragement. Encouragement in my own way for parents, especially fathers, as we begin the new year. I recently saw a viral post from a man named Justin Murphy who tells us in his bio that he's a writer, a PhD, and a creative director, whatever that means, for some Silicon Valley company that I've never heard of. And Justin decided to ring in the new year by publicly airing his deepest parenting anxieties and personal insecurities in a tweet that has now been viewed around 3 million times. And here's what he wrote. I'll read the whole thing. It's pretty long, but here's what he wrote. So just bear with me. Am I just a monster? It's been four years since I became a father and I'm beginning to fear for my soul. The truth is, I just don't like being around kids for very long. Historically, this is not uncommon among fathers, but today it feels almost illegal. It's causing me a lot of confusion and anguish. The ideal amount of time I would like to spend playing with my kids is probably around 70 to 140 minutes a week, roughly 10 minutes each day, maybe two times a day, taking breaks from work. My feelings of love toward them are perfectly strong, but if I have to watch them or entertain them for more than about 10 minutes, my blood starts to boil. I just want to be working or accomplishing something. I try to be grateful, but it doesn't work. It's 9 a.m. this morning, Saturday, January 3rd. It's a sunny warm day here in Austin and my four-year-old son is begging me to play catch in the street. I was drinking coffee, still waking up, so I didn't really feel like it, but at his age, his desire to play is insatiable. He begged and begged, so I conceded and with a smile. I have no problem being a kind and loving father. The problem is only that I do not enjoy it. It's not that I'm trying to maximize my personal pleasure. It just seems wrong that I experienced so little delight when my dad and friends all claimed to experience so much. It was beautiful. We live on a picturesque tree-lined block. I'm even relatively relaxed from the holiday rest. Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic peak experience, yet for every single minute on the inside, I just don't want to be there. I want to be drinking my coffee in peace. Then I feel guilty and absurdly ungrateful and ashamed when we're done. I know that when he's a teenager, I'll long to have those days back. Back, I have all this perspective rationally, and I've been very patient and steadfast trying to digest it, but nothing fixes me emotionally. Am I a terrible person? Or is my feeling within a certain range of historically normal and its modern parenting norms that are off? Whether it's my fault or not, I don't even care. I just want to figure this out. Something is wrong, and I no longer have the excuse of being new to this. Okay, so to recap, Justin, the PhD Silicon Valley guy, says that he feels like a monster because he doesn't enjoy spending time with his son. And in his ideal scenario, he would be around his kid for like 10 minutes a day. Anything more than that, and he boils with rage at how boring and unfulfilling the experience feels to him. He doesn't feel fulfilled or enthralled by parenting, and he feels really bad that he feels that way, or doesn't feel that way. Every minute he's with his son, he feels like he just wants to be someplace else, and that makes him feel guilty, and he wants to know if this is normal. Now, there are a lot of comments responding to this confession or whatever it's supposed to be. Some of them are critical, some of them are supportive, reassuring Justin that he's not a monster. And they're right, he's not a monster. He's just weak and selfish, and he talks too much. He has the same problem that plagues millions of people in our society. He has a lot of company, though it isn't a very good company. So let me offer two pieces of advice to Justin, and to any man who resonates with this X-posts slash diary entry, or whatever it's supposed to be, these are two of the most crucial lessons that I have learned from my experience parenting six kids. So number one, stop obsessing over how you feel. Spend time with your son. Stop worrying about how you feel about spending time with him, because it doesn't really matter how you feel about it. You should play catch with your son, not because it's the most thrilling experience in the world, but because he's your son, and you're his father. And that is what a father is supposed to do. Now, your primary role in your child's life is not to be his playmate, but playing with him, teaching him, being present, showing him how to throw and catch a ball, these kinds of things. That matters. And they're not meant to be exhilarating experiences. You know, he's four years old. Four-year-olds suck at playing catch. Like, he can't catch, he can't throw. Now, if you play with him now, then in a few years, it will be more fun. Right in a few years, he can go long, you can hit him on the deep fade, and it's a lot more fun that way. But for now, you're tossing a ball underhanded to a toddler standing nine feet away who drops it 80% of the time. So now you know how Lamar Jackson feels, but that's a different story. I won't get into it. The enjoyment you get from this experience is not the thrill of playing a sport against high-level competition. It's not the relaxation of lounging on the sofa and sipping a coffee and piece. It's not going to be fun in either of those senses of the term. And the problem is that prior to having kids, those are the only kinds of fun that a person can experience. Like in your pre-parenting life, a fun thing, right? If you call something fun and you're not a parent, what you're saying is that either the fun thing is relaxing or it's exciting. That's what you mean by fun. Relaxing or exciting. Because the only fun things are one of those two. But spending time with your children, especially young children, well, it's rarely going to fit either bill. It certainly isn't relaxing, most of the time. And it's usually not very exciting. People like Justin, they become parents and they expect or hope that it will be fun in the way that things were fun before they had kids. And because it's not fun in that way, they become miserable and angry and they're blood boils, as Justin put it. Now, keep in mind that people these days are also dopamine addicts who need constant stimulation in order to feel like they're enjoying anything. And parenting does not offer that kind of enjoyment most of the time. So that's part of the problem here. But there is a third kind of fun that is available to you if you can manage to take your head out of your ass long enough to experience it. It's the fun that comes from teaching, from guiding, from fulfilling your fatherly obligation and doing what you should be doing. It's the fun of watching your children learn and grow. It's the fun of seeing that they're having fun. You know, it's the fun of glimpsing the world through their eyes, if only briefly. And another word for this kind of fun is contentment. Now, I've never had a game of catch with a four-year-old that was thrilling or relaxing. I've never felt that kind of fun in that context. But I have felt, as someone who's played catch many times with kids of all ages, I have felt a great deal of contentment. Where I knew that I was where I should be doing what I should be doing with people I love in a place where I belong. And that is something better than fun. That's happiness. It's a very adult kind of happiness, which is hard for overgrown adolescents like Justin to experience. You'll never feel that contentment or any other positive emotion if you spend all of your time with your child dwelling on how you feel about spending time with your child. Now, the truth is that sometimes you'll feel annoyed, sometimes you'll feel tired, sometimes you'll feel bored. You'll also feel contentment, you'll feel joy, you'll feel a deep sense of love and belonging. You'll feel all of those things, the good and the bad, at the same time, sometimes. That's just called being a conscious human. You feel a lot of things all the time. The only way to respond to that as a man, if you want to be productive and stable and reliable, is to stop worrying about your feelings. Feel however you feel. It doesn't matter. What matters is what you do. The only other option is to get stuck in a doom loop of constantly contemplating your feelings and your feelings about your feelings and your feelings about how you feel about how you feel about your feelings. And on and on and on. Down the rabbit hole of your own self-obsession, meanwhile, all your son wants is for you to walk outside and throw a football around for a few minutes. And you're not even present in the moment because you're just thinking in your head all the time, I don't know how I feel about it. Well, I feel bad that I feel this way. Well, I don't know how I should feel about how I feel. Just put that to the side and just throw the damn ball. OK? And that brings us to the second piece of advice, which is even more important, which is this. And this is something everyone can take with them as we go into the make this one of your 2026 New Year's resolutions. Stop revealing your most intimate feelings and deeply personal anxieties on the Internet. OK, the Internet is not a place for you as a grown man to spill your guts and open up your heart for the world to see. None of us out here in the world can do anything about or with these personal details that you've revealed, except judge you harshly for them, which we will. You can't blame us. I mean, you could tell us this stuff about yourself and say, don't judge me. Well, sorry, I'm judging you. I can't help but I can't help but form a perspective on this information. I'm a person with a brain. I have a perspective on anything. And so you've given me this information about you. I'm going to form a perspective on it. My perspective is not flattering to you. Like most of us never heard of you before this post. We'll never hear of you again. We now know only one thing about you. And it's the only thing we'll ever know, which is that you're the guy who gets pissed off if he has to be around his own kid for more than 10 minutes. That's all you will ever be to us forever now, which is why you should not have opened up in the first place. In fact, and here's the thing that will be really hard for most people to hear. There are a lot of feelings, worries and anxieties that you shouldn't share with anyone, even in your private life. OK, this is a good example. If you don't like being around your kid, that is the kind of inner struggle that you actually should not reveal to a single soul in the world. Again, I realize this is way outside of a modern orthodoxy. The idea that there should be any feeling that you just never tell anyone. Like I could never tell anyone. Yeah, you should just never tell anyone that. What am I going to do with this feeling? I don't know. Just forget about it. You shouldn't tell strangers that for the reasons I've already described. You shouldn't tell your wife. Because now all you've done is saddled her with this knowledge about you. She can't do anything with the information either except think less of you because of it, which she will. OK, it's not because she doesn't love you. But if you go to your wife and say, you know, honey, I'm really struggling. I just really hate being around our kid. I can't be around our son for more than 10 minutes without my blood boiling. Don't you feel sorry for me? No, now she thinks less of you and she always will. Like she can't not be able to get that out of her head. She might pretend to be sympathetic or maybe she won't even pretend. What do you want? She's going to pat you on the head. She'll pat you on the head and say, oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. It's hard for you to just be around our child we created together. But she's going to think less of you. And same goes for anyone else that you devolved this information to. Now, you could tell a close male confidant. I mean, that's your best option if you're going to tell anyone. But that's not going to solve your problem either. Because your problem. Like if you can't be around your kid for more than 10 minutes. At the age of four, which by the way, isn't even like a hard age. Like being a four year olds are easy to deal with. And if you can't be around them from the time like that, the problem is that you are very selfish and very weak. And nobody can fix that problem for you. Nobody can do anything about it. Nothing. You just need to get over yourself. That is the only solution. And nobody can implement that solution but you. You could go talk to a therapist. You could spend 10 years in therapy. It won't get you past square one. The problem is that you're being weak and selfish. Get the hell over yourself. That's it. I want another solution. I need to get to the bottom of these feelings. I just got to the bottom of them for you. You're weak and selfish. Stop being that way. I don't know what else to tell you. Now people these days, even grown men, they walk around every day desperately looking for someone who will fix their feelings for them. Billions of dollars have been spent on drugs and therapy for this purpose with the truth that nobody will tell these people. Partly because it would cut off the cash flow is that nobody can fix your feelings. The best thing you can do about them, the only thing you can do about them really, most of the time, is shut the hell up about them and go live your life. Now I realize that this sounds harsh. I realize that it goes against everything we're programmed to believe. The world tells us that we should be honest about our feelings. We should open up. We should be vulnerable. We should talk it out. But the cold hard reality is that most of your feelings, you should keep to yourself. You shouldn't make them anyone else's burden or business. They are your feelings. We can't help you with them. I'm sorry. Again, nobody, not one person on this earth, can solve your feelings for you or make you feel differently than you do or do anything about your feelings at all. Now it's not to say that you should never divulge any of your feelings about anything. Obviously, that's not the case. And it's not to say that you shouldn't seek help if you're in a truly dire state. It's only to say what is true, which is that you should keep most of that stuff to yourself and your feelings are not a problem that anyone else can solve. Like most of the time when you complain about your feelings to someone, whether it's a stranger or your spouse or your therapist or anyone else, they'll pretend to care, but deep down, they find yourself pitting whining to be extremely annoying and off-putting. You know, when you sit there, hours on end, I feel this way, this is how I feel. This is how I feel, but I feel like this when I'm doing this. I was playing catch with my son, but this is how I felt about it. It was so hard to feel this way. Anyone that you talk to about that? Like they might say, oh, I'm so sorry, you feel that way. In their head, they're thinking, dear God, man, shut up and stop. I got my own problems. Every single person you tell that to, that is what they're all thinking. It's just that none of them except me will tell you that. And if you complain about your feelings a lot, then this annoyance will grow into contempt. And eventually they'll stop hiding it, which is why one of the worst pieces of marriage advice people get these days, is men get it, oh, open up to your wife, tell her how you feel all the time. Constantly complain about your feelings to your wife, and she will, it will not be long until she feels content for you. And rightly so, by the way. You're supposed to be a man, and here you are just like unloading your emotional baggage constantly, just whining, whining, whining about everything. Whining about how you felt when you played catch with your son. Like, how is your wife supposed to feel about that? I don't know how else she could feel, other than resentment. All you can do with your feelings, feelings like the one you described, is put them to the side and do your duty. Okay, what would your, if your grandfather is still alive, and you went to him and said, grand, granddad, I was playing catch with my son, and I just felt, I just don't feel, I'm not into it, I just feel, what would he say to you? He would look at you like you're, he would look at you with disgust, and say like, pull yourself together, what are you crying about? You know, carry your emotions quietly, like a man, and do what you're supposed to do. And here's the good news, especially for fathers starting a new year. Okay, if you do this, if you stop living as a slave to your feelings, you will actually feel better. Not immediately, not on command, but slowly, naturally as a byproduct of living rightly instead of this endless, pointless, naval gazing. Purpose precedes pleasure, meaning comes before happiness. Your son doesn't need you to be endlessly delighted by every second you spend in his presence, and you're not going to be, but he needs you to be present. And one day, sooner than you think, he won't ask you to play catch anymore, and when that day comes, you won't remember how bored you felt. You'll remember whether you were there and so will he. So stop whining, stop interrogating your emotions, stop staring into the mirror trying to crack the code of your own inner experience. Just pick up the ball and go play catch with your son. It really is that simple. So that's my encouragement as we enter the new year, and that will do it for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. Have a great day. Godspeed. What was it like, Merlin, to be alone with God? Is that who you think I was alone with? Merlin, I knew your father. I am yet convinced that he was not of this world. I am yet convinced that he was not of this world. All men know of the great Taliesin. Who am I, Father, that the God should war for my soul? Princess Gareth, savior of our people. I know what the bull god offered you. I was offered the same. And? There is a new part at work in the world. I've seen it. A god who's actually the one who's the one who's the one who's the one who's the one I've seen it. A god who sacrifices what he loves for us. We are each given only one life, singer. No. We're given another. I learned of Yezoo the Christ, and I have become his follower. He's waiting on a miracle, and I think you can give him one. Trust in Yezoo. He is the only hope for men like us. Fate of Britain never rests in the hands of the great light. Great light, great darkness. Such things mattered to me then. What matters to you now, Mistress of Lies? You, nephew. The sword of the High King. How many lives must be lost before you accept the power? You were born to wield. So cling to the promises of a god who has abandoned you. I cannot take up that sword again. You know what you must do. Great light, forgive me. The time has come to be reborn.