Matt Walsh: “The most effective way to undermine our democracy is to let people -- is to let too many people participate in it”
Walsh: “The tyrants in America today are the ones who want more people to vote”
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From the December 7, 2023, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show
MATT WALSH (HOST): The only defense that you could offer of 16 year-olds voting is just by saying that, well, 18 year-olds aren't much better and they can vote. I mean, it's only a two year difference. And you're right. Which is why, you know, actually, the voting age should be, like, 25 instead of 18. You can make an argument for 30 or 35. But I'd be happy if we raised it to 25. And, as I've argued plenty of times in the past, there's real science behind that. You know, that's actually not an arbitrary age. If you lower it to 16, that's an arbitrary -- like, why not just lower it to -- to seven at that point? Why not let infants vote? I don't wanna give Ayanna Pressley any ideas because she'd probably be OK with that. She's also okay with murdering infants, but, hey, the ones that -- that slipped through the cracks, you know, we'll let them vote. So, 25, though, there's real science behind it, and we know that the prefrontal cortex of the brain is not fully developed until the age of 25, and that's the part of your brain that regulates, directs your higher order mental function. And that's where, you know, decision-making, discernment, long-term planning, all of that happens. And the thing is when someone's voting, you want them to be able to think in terms of the long-term. You want them to be discerning. So, when people under the age of 25 vote, these are people who are, like, literally mentally incapable of being fully discerning and thoughtful, or at least are deficient in that area, through no fault of their own. Just -- their brains are not developed yet. It's not their fault. Just -- it's just the way that the brain develops.
And, you know, speaking of mentally impaired, many people in prison are there in part because they are low-IQ, incapable of higher-order reasoning. That's how they ended up in prison in the first place. So, to give them the power to vote would be absurd. Also, you know, even if they are intelligent and all of that, losing participation in society is a just punishment. So, I don't care if the prison population was the smartest and most mature of any population in the country. They still have to be punished, and this is part of it.
So, expanding voting rights in this way is obviously not what you do if you actually care about the future of our country or if you wanna preserve our democracy. I mean, you could say that the most effective way to undermine our democracy is to let people -- is to let too many people participate in it. So, you undermine the democracy by letting too many people into it. Like, democracy is -- it's not some magical thing. OK? Democracy is not magic. It is not exempt from the basic rules of life. And one of the basic rules of life is that too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth. OK? One of the basic rules. No matter what it is, whatever you're trying to accomplish, you can reach a point where there are too many people involved in it. That can happen. Like, there's nothing in existence that is better and more effectively accomplished simply by adding more people regardless of their skill set, regardless of their intelligence. That doesn't -- it doesn't work that way in any aspect of life. Why would it work that way when it comes to deciding the future of the country?
So, no, it's never that you need more people, it's that you need a certain kind of person. And when it comes to voting, you need intelligent, mature, law-abiding adults who are invested in their country's future and have skin in the game. So we need them. Adding more from outside that demographic will just make everything worse.
Ayanna Pressley knows this, by the way. Like, that's the whole point. And this is what may seem like an irony -- that the tyrants in America today are the ones who want more people to vote. And they want more people because they know that as you add more and more people indiscriminately, the average IQ and awareness of the crowd, in aggregate, drops. And as the crowd gets dumber and more ignorant and less aware, the eas[ier] it is for people like Ayanna Pressley to remain in power. That's the whole -- so, you know, we still think of a tyrant as someone who wants to exclude people from voting, wants to disenfranchise and so on. But these days, it works exactly the opposite.