Daily Wire's Matt Walsh says America's Founding Fathers would “violently overthrow” the present-day government
Walsh: “How would Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers respond to our government right now? And, obviously, the answer is they would violently overthrow it.”
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From the August 4, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show
MATT WALSH (HOST): Thomas Jefferson did rebel against the government. That's how our country was formed. And, well, we know that, Al doesn't, apparently. But it does raise an interesting question, actually. I mean, inadvertently, he raises an interesting question that I -- I think about a lot, which is, how would Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers respond to our government right now? And, obviously, the answer is they would violently overthrow it. Like, if our Founding Fathers were on the scene right now, January 6th would be a -- would be a walk in the park. It would be a picnic compared to what they would do. And they wouldn't even think about it. Like, if Thomas Jefferson came back from the dead and looked at our government now, he would turn to us, the citizens, and say, what are you people doing? You haven't invaded Washington yet and killed all these people? What are you waiting for? What's the problem here? What's the holdup, folks? I'm not advocating for that. I'm just telling you what Jefferson would say. Okay?
Just taxes alone. Alright? Not even taking everything else into account -- the giant behemoth central government which is, by the way, far larger and more powerful and more invasive than the government that the Founders rebelled against. Okay? They had significantly more freedom than we do now. It's not even close, actually. But just the taxes, okay? These guys rebelled over a tax on tea -- and it -- there was more to it than that -- but the tax on tea was a big part of it. So, think about that. A tax on tea. Well, we have -- we have taxes on tea. You know, if you go buy a Snapple or something, it's gonna be taxed. But we have a tax on literally everything. You wake up in the morning and you turn on your light, and you're already getting taxed, okay? You can't even get out of your bedroom before the taxes set in. You go into your kitchen and you pour your taxed coffee into your taxed mug, or if you prefer tea, that'll be taxed too. And you get in your car, which is taxed, and it's running on gasoline, which is taxed. And you get onto the highway that you pay a toll to even get on the highway in the first place, and you go to work. And you're getting taxed just to work. Your income is taxed before you even get your hands on it. The government comes in and takes whatever it wants and gives you the -- the -- the remainder, gives you the leftover. You know, they give you an -- the government gives you an allowance of your own income because they get their hands on it first through the magic of the withholding system.
Thomas Jefferson would not even consider putting up with this. It wouldn't be -- there'd be nothing to talk about. He'd be calling for an armed rebellion and insisting that the IRS building be -- be torched to the ground. That's what he would say. Like, that's the lineage of our country. Those are -- these are the men who founded our country. That's the attitude they had. They weren't shy about violence, obviously. And they were much more, perhaps, we would say liberal in its application -- liberal, understood it in a different way -- than we are today. Just the fact of the matter.
And you can -- if you study that era of history and you look at the things that they were upset about and that they were complaining about, it's almost jarring in a way when you -- if you haven't studied much about America's founding and the Revolutionary War and all that, and you go back and you read it now, from the modern perspective, you think, what was the problem? Really? You were upset about that? That was the tyranny? That was the tyranny compared to this? We got locked in our homes for two years. They forced us all to wear muzzles. They're -- forcibly injected chemicals into our body. And you guys are upset about that? Means either that they were incredibly petty and our country was founded on pettiness or we have developed an incredible tolerance for a level of tyranny and oppression that would have been unthinkable to the men who founded this country. And so, it's one of those two, and I think it's more the second.