Matt Walsh rants against Native American reservations: “You got conquered. OK? It happens.”
Walsh: “The whole Indian reservation thing is absurd. Like, can we just be -- can we be done with this?”
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Citation
From the May 15, 2024, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show
MATT WALSH (HOST): The very fact that they supposedly have the authority to ban the governor of South Dakota from entering wide swaths of South Dakota is just ridiculous. I mean, it's just -- it's a farce. OK? The whole thing. The whole Indian reservation thing is absurd. Like, can we just be -- can we be done with this? What -- what -- what are we doing? What are we doing, exactly?
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These are largely miserable places full of crime and alcoholism and drugs and everything else. They can't even stand on their own two feet without billions in federal funding, federal funding for, quote, unquote, their land. How's it their land? Like, why do they get to keep the land? Because -- I was talking about this earlier and someone said, well, they deserve their own land. Really? Why do they deserve their land? Why do the losers of a war get to keep land that they couldn't successfully defend? This is what everyone needs to get through their heads. OK? The native tribes were -- are the losers of a war. They lost. They lost the war. You lost. That's it. Like, enough with the childish nonsense. These are not innocent victims. They are the losers of a war. It's called the Indian Wars. It went on for centuries. And it's where one warfaring society, Western society, went toe-to-toe with another warfaring society, the native tribes. There were no peaceful doves on either side. This was a time when you had to fight for whatever land you wanted, and that's how it worked all over the world. The law of conquest was observed by all people everywhere. And these two groups who, of course, were divided into many different factions and, just particularly on the native side, factions that warred with each other all the time and would not have recognized themselves as belonging to one society. In fact, they didn't really. It was not one coherent society. So I'm using that -- the term very loosely and broadly.
But, anyway, you had these two -- in the broadest sense, two groups who fought with each other and killed each other for hundreds of years. And it doesn't matter -- it doesn't matter how you feel about that now. It doesn't matter. He said, well, they shouldn't have done that. They shouldn't have done that. What do you mean they shouldn't have done it? Who cares what you think they should have or shouldn't have done? This was history. OK? You can't go anywhere on the planet that is -- that this is not -- that's not soaked in blood. Like, unless you go to Antarctica. OK? Everywhere else you go, who's ever there, they got there because they killed the people that were there before. OK? Everywhere. Get over it. It's just the way the world works. It always has worked this way. And the natives lost. They lost the war.
These were violent people. They fought. They fought bravely in many cases. And it's better -- you know, if you're gonna admire them at all, admire them not because they were -- they were innocent people who had their land taken from them. These were brutally, brutally violent people. But, you know -- and still, in many cases, fought quite bravely. The other side fought bravely too. They lost. They just lost. And you got conquered. OK? It happens. It's happened all over the world. And so, it's not your land anymore. Like, in what way? The -- these tribes fought many wars to take the land that they occupied. They killed many people to take that land themselves. They spilled gallons of blood. OK? And to -- they slaughtered. They slaughtered -- without mercy, they slaughtered people to take the land that they were on when the Europeans and later Americans showed up. And -- and then it's -- it's live by the sword, die by the sword. You kill to get this land. Now someone else is showing up, and they want it. Well, you gotta go to war again. They understood that. Everyone understood that. Everyone at the time understood that this is the way it works.
And it was useless to say, well, would you please not. Hey, guys. Would you --- we would rather -- I know we killed a bunch of people and scalped them and raped their women and stole their children in order to take the land that we're on right now, but we would really like to stop it here. We would like to stop the line of bloodshed here so that -- because we wanna kill everyone and not be killed ourselves. And so would you all please just let us have all of this land? We can't defend it, but just let us have it out of the kindness of your hearts, please. They didn't say that, because it'll be -- it's pointless. You can't say that. That's not how it works. So, when the white man showed up, it was, OK. We gotta fight. And they fought, and they lost. And now we do the Indian reservation thing, and we've been just like -- it's like we're all -- it's like a pageant. It's like this -- there's so much in modern societies like this. We're all just playing pretend. And meanwhile, you have these, quote, unquote, reservations. They can't -- they wouldn't exist without federal funding. They wouldn't exist without us. And they were only given this land. It's not actually their -- theirs, because they lost it. OK? And we should start saying that, and we should stop being ashamed of saying that.