America's Self-Appointed Hall Monitors | Wacky Wednesday

Every generation has them.

People who aren't actually responsible for outcomes but seem determined to supervise everyone else's lives.

This week's Wacky Wednesday explores the growing influence of America's self-appointed hall monitors.

From media personalities attempting to manage public life, to institutions losing touch with common sense, to cultural figures abandoning the responsibilities they claim to champion, Chad Law examines the difference between authority and responsibility.

The central question:

Who put you in charge?

And the larger lesson:

America doesn't need more hall monitors.

America needs more builders.

Topics

• UFC Freedom 250 controversy
• Stephen A. Smith and Trump
• Notre Dame H-1B hiring debate
• Fetterman and political hypocrisy
• America 250 celebrations
• Culture and stewardship
• Builders vs. monitors

📞 Listener text line:
252-CHAD-LAW

00:00 The Builders vs. Hall Monitors

02:02 The Role of Authority and Responsibility

11:31 The Hall Monitor in Media and Politics

19:56 Institutional Hall Monitors: A New Breed

28:22 The Rule Book Monitor and Its Implications

35:41 The Builder vs. The Monitor

42:58 Authority vs. Responsibility

50:25 The Builders Among Us

#WackyWednesday #ChadLaw #CommonSenseWithChadLaw

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Transcript

Chad: Every school had one. You know the kid I'm talking about. He wasn't the teacher, he wasn't the principal, he wasn't security, he wasn't a coach or a counselor or anyone's boss. He was 11. And yet somehow he believed he ran the entire building. The hall monitor. He had a badge. And here's the part that tells you everything. He made the badge himself, laminated it at home, probably charged his mom for the lamination. He had a clipboard nobody handed him with a list on it that nobody assigned and a little orange sash he wore like he'd earned it at the beaches of Normandy. And the whistle, ⁓ the whistle. He bought that whistle with his own allowance. Think about that. He spent his own birthday money on the tool of his oppression of you. This kid did not teach a single class, he did not grade a single paper, he could not get you out of detention, and he could not get you into the honor roll. He had zero authority over your actual life. But he could stop you in the hallway. And in his mind, that was the whole job. You remember what he did? He told you where to stand. He told you which door to use. He reminded you out loud in front of everyone that your homework was due, as if you needed the betrayal. And the second a teacher walked by, he'd raise his hand and say, Excuse me, that's not allowed. He didn't want to help. Helping is work. He wanted the feeling of authority without one ounce of the responsibility that's supposed to come with it. He never had to answer for anything. The rule was dumb. That wasn't his problem. He didn't make it. He just enforced it on you. He wanted the whistle. He never actually wanted the job. Now, here's the thing nobody warned us about. That kid grew up. He did not get better. He did not mellow out. He did not discover hobbies. He just upgraded. He traded the homework badge for a blue check mark. He traded the clipboard for a law degree. He traded the orange sash for a courtside seat, a press pass, a verified account, and, well, we'll get to it. In one case, an actual costume. And the hallway? The hallway got bigger. The hallway is now the whole country. You already know this person as an adult because he's everywhere. He's the guy in your group text who tells everyone the time of the dinner. The dinner he is not hosting, did not plan, and is not paying for. He's the one on your HOA board who measures your grass with a ruler. He's the neighbor who's never coached a day in his life, screaming at the umpire. He has no skin in the game, he has no responsibility for the outcome, but by God, he has opinions about where you're allowed to stand. And once you see him, really see him, you can't unsee him. He's on your television, he's in your feed, he's filing lawsuits, he's giving interviews, he's deciding on your behalf. Which parties are allowed to happen and who's allowed to enjoy them? So today we're gonna go find him, all of them, because America didn't get rid of the Hall monitor. America handed him a microphone. I'm Chad Law, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality. And today of all days, I'm the guy still asking follow-up questions, because I've got one for just about everybody in this episode, and it starts with the word who. If you want to find us, the number is 252 Chad Law. That's 252 Chad Law. We are in Rumble, we are on X, we're on Instagram, we're on Substack. Everywhere the algorithm hasn't figured out how to bury us yet. And if you like what we're doing here, you know the deal. If you see us, share us. That's the whole marketing department. It's you. And this is common sense for people who still have questions. For the other 80% wants to focus on the things that matter instead of the 20% that nobody really cares about. So here's how today's gonna go. When I started pulling this week's stories, I thought I had a bunch of unrelated headlines: a sports thing, a lawsuit, a college thing, a political mess, a bunch of musicians throwing a fit. Six, seven different stories, six, seven different worlds, nothing in common. Then I lined them up and I realized, ⁓ this isn't six stories. This is one guy six times. This isn't about a news cycle. This is about a type of person. Because look. In every single one of these stories, somebody who was and not in charge of anything decided they were in charge of everything. Somebody grabbed a whistle, nobody gave them and started blowing it at the rest of us. We've got a sportscaster trying to manage the president's calendar. We've got a university with a problem so funny I had to read it three times. We've got people sprinting to a courthouse to shut down a party. We've got a political party that suddenly cannot find its own rule book. We've got celebrities who spent ten years telling us that art unites the country. And then the country has a birthday. And we've got one story near the end that is not funny at all. And I'm gonna tell you when we get there so you can brace yourself, because it's where this whole thing is heading if nobody takes the whistles away. Now, I'm not gonna tell you the lesson yet. I want you to feel it the way I felt it, one story at a time, until the pattern just walks right up and taps you on the shoulder. But I'll give you two questions to keep in your back pocket the whole way through. The first question I want you to ask yourself is: who put you in charge? And question two, the one that ends every argument. What exactly are you responsible for? Hold those. You're gonna need them. First stop, let's go to the courthouse. So our first hall monitor doesn't have a badge. He's got a better one. He's got a lawyer. Here's the headline: CBS News. Lawsuit attempts to stop UFC fight at White House on Trump's birthday. Same weekend, you saw the versions of this everywhere. CNN, ESPN, PBS, all of it. All dated around 6th, 7th, and 8th of June. So here's the situation in plain English. The UFC is putting on a fight card. They're calling it Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House on June 14th, which, yes, happens to be the president's 80th birthday. And two residents of Virginia through a group called the Public Integrity Project filed a lawsuit to stop it. To stop the whole thing, the fight, the build, the cage, all of it. Now I want to be fair because we do receipts honestly on this show. Their legal argument is not we hate fun. On paper, it's about process. They say you can't use federal parkland and national monuments to stage a private for-profit event without the right authorization, without Congress signing off, without an environmental review. One of the plaintiffs is a Vietnam-era Air Force veteran, and his actual quote is about the Lincoln Memorial being sacred ground. Now, that may be a real argument. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend a veteran worried about the Lincoln Memorial is a cartoon. He's not. But Here's what I can't get past. Of everything happening in this country right now, all the corruption, the spending, the genuine outrages you could take to the federal judge, the thing you got two people to lawyer up and sprint to a courthouse was a UFC fight on a lawn on a Saturday. And that right there is the tell, ladies and gentlemen. That's the hall monitor behavior with a case number. Because the hall monitor doesn't just disagree with the party. He can't simply just not attend. He has to find a grown-up, a teacher, a principal, or in this case a federal judge, and get the party stopped for everybody. That's the move. That's always the move. They're the fun police. There's a two-inch line in this country between I wouldn't go and you may not go. And the hall monitor lives on the wrong side of it every time. Now let me show you the line because once you see it, you'll see it for the rest of your life. I wouldn't go, that's a free country. I wouldn't go is on you, on your couch with your opinion, which you're entitled to, and I will defend. You think a cage fight on the South Lawn is tacky? Great, don't watch it. Nobody's making you buy the pay-per-view. Now, you may not go? That's a different animal. That's not an opinion anymore. That's a leash. And the second your opinion needs a federal judge to enforce it on me, you've stopped being a citizen with a take and started being a hall monitor with a clipboard. It's the Karen complex, only this time it's a Vietnam vet. And look. I know the difference better than most. I'm a gay conservative who drives an electric hummer. I am a hall monitor magnet from both directions. One crowd tells me I'm not allowed to be conservative, wrong team. The other crowd sees the truck and tells me I'm not allowed to drive that wrong fuel. Neither of them was appointed to anything. Nobody made them either of them the commissioner of Chad, but both of them showed up with the whistle, anyways, because that's the whole impulse. I have decided what you're allowed to enjoy. And I drive the Hummer to both just to watch them short circuit. It's hilarious. But let's go back to these two Karen's in Virginia. Here's the part I'll grant them one more time because we're honest here. There is a real question buried in this lawsuit about monuments and money and who pays for what. If they want to write an op-ed, I'll read it. But that's not what they did. They didn't ride an op-ed, they didn't organize a counter-event, they didn't decline an invitation. They ran to a courthouse to get the whole thing canceled for everyone, including the 20,000 people who did want to go, who were excited, who had nothing to do with the president's birthday and just wanted to watch two grown men settle it in a cage on a Saturday night. That's the tell. The hall monitor never targets the rule, he targets your fun. He cannot simply not attend the party. He has to find a grown-up and get the party stopped. In middle school, the grown-up was the principal. As an adult, the grown-up is a judge. the clipboard got upgraded to a docket. Same kid, just better stationary. And I keep coming back to the name of the event because you can't make it up. They are suing to stop something called Freedom 250. They looked at an event with the word freedom in the title and thought, not on my watch. No freedom here. Somewhere a hall monitor is filing an injunction against the Liberty Bell for just ringing a little bit too loud. So that's hall monitor number one. Badge reads: Department of No Fun, Federal Division. He doesn't want to skip the party. He wants veto power over your party. Now, if the first guy went and got a lawyer to do this hall monitor for ring for him, our next guy didn't bother. Our next guy just grabbed a microphone and tried to run the country's social calendar live on air. Let's go to Madison Square Garden. Here's the headline, this one off Yahoo Sports around June 5th, and you saw the same story on Yard Barker on Fox all over the place that weekend. Stephen A. Smith begs Donald Trump to skip the NBA Finals. Begs. That's their word, not mine. Begs. ⁓ The Knicks, the York Knicks, are in the NBA finals. ⁓ First time at Garden for a Finals in a generation. The city is losing its mind in the good way. And the president of the United States, lifelong Knicks fan, born in Queens, gets an invitation from the team's owner to come to Game Three. Now, whatever you think of the man, that's a normal thing. Presidents go to games. ⁓ That's not new. go to big events. ⁓ Now enters Stephen Smith. ⁓ Black Kermit the Frog on his own show unprompted, he goes, and I'm paraphrasing tight here. He's coming to game three. I don't want him here. And then sensing maybe that sounded a little partisan, he adds the magic words. It has nothing to do with politics. Mm-hmm. It never does. When somebody opens with it has nothing to do with politics, buckle up, because the next ninety seconds, at least, will be entirely about politics. His actual reason, and I want to give it to you straight, is logistics, chaos, security, motorcade, streets sealed off. He says the watch parties outside the garden are gonna get shut down for the president's visit. And you know what? Some of that's even true. The security footprint for a sitting president is real. So he's got some facts right for the first time in his life, his little pea brain. But here's what I can't give him. Stephen A. Smith does not work for the NBA, he's not the commissioner, he's not the owner of the Knicks, not even close. That's the guy who actually invited Trump. He doesn't run Madison Square Garden. He's not the Secret Service. He's not the NYPD. He's not in charge of the motorcade, the seating chart, the ticketing, or the president's calendar. He is a man who is paid handsomely to yell about basketball and pretend to know anything about politics. He has a double-digit IQ. And he looked at the single most important Knicks game in 27 years and decided his job that day was to manage the guest list for the United States of America. Who the hell put you in charge of the president's schedule? Your job is yelling about basketball. And to be fair, you're the best in the world at that. Stay in your lane. That lane is a Ferrari, but the lane is basketball. The lane was never deputy director of presidential attendance. Give me a break, Stephen A. Smith. Total Karen. He even said, and I love this. It's the hall monitor showing you his whole hand. He said if it were Barack Obama, he'd tell him to stay home too. Hmm. Stay at the White House. Which in his his mind proves he's fair. In my mind, just proves the hall monitor doesn't care who you are. He'll blow the whistle at anyone. That's not principle. That's just a man who really, really loves to tell people what to do. Thinks he's better and smarter than everyone else. So that's the badge for hall monitor number two, self-appointed commissioner of who's allowed at the garden. Salary zero, authority zero, confidence, ⁓ unlimited. But here, here is where God, who has a tremendous sense of comedy, steps in. Because Trump went to the game anyways, of course he went. He's the first sitting president to ever attend an NBA Finals game. That's a real historical first, and it happened over the objection of a man with no power to object. The hall monitor blew the whistle, and the president walked right past him into the building. But then the Knicks lost. They lost game three with the president in the building and Stephen A. Smith. I want you to sit with me on this, okay? Stephen A. Smith went on air and said, if they lose, he's blaming Trump. He blamed the president of the United States for a basketball game. Not the defense, not the turnovers, not Wembayama, who is seven foot four and from France, and a problem for everybody. No. The loss was the president's fault because he showed up to a building after a man on television asked him not to. That, my friends, is hall monitor care and behavior in its purest, most uncut form. Listen to the logic. I have no authority. I issue a command, anyways. I am ignored because of course I'm ignored. I have no authority. And when the thing I didn't control doesn't go my way. I blame the person who refused to obey the order I had no right to give in the first place. It's not a sports take. That's the entire psychology in one news cycle. And the president, say what you want. He understood the assignment. Somebody asked him about it afterward, and he basically said, you know, Smith keeps talking about running for president himself, and running for president takes a certain aptitude, which is a very polite, very presidential ⁓ way of saying. Stick to basketball, my guy. And here's my common sense point, and I want to slow down for one second because it does actually matter. You know, sports used to be the one room in America where all sat down together, left, right, up, down, for three hours. The only thing that mattered was the team on your chest. It was the last neutral ground, the last hallway in the building where nobody checked your badge at the door. And he's the hall monitor that can't stand it. A space he doesn't supervise and an itch he cannot reach. A room where everyone's just happy together, not asking permission. That's the one thing Stephen A. Smith can't tolerate. So he shows up in the one neutral room we had left and he starts checking badges. Who invited you? Who's allowed here? Who ruined it? He turned the garden into a hall pass for liberals. And here's what started to itch at me. Sitting here looking at these two, because on paper, these are not the same story. One's a federal lawsuit about a cage fight, the other's a sports guy having a meltdown about basketball games. Totally different worlds, different teams. Even one's coming at the president, one probably tells you he's coming at chaos. You'd never file them in the same drawer. But watch what they actually did. One of them couldn't stand that a party was happening, so he tried to shut down the party. The other couldn't stand that the president was coming to a game, so he tried to shut down the guest list. Neither one was in charge of anything. Neither one was invited to decide, and both of them, the second they saw other people about to enjoy something without asking their permission, reached for a whistle. A courthouse and a courtside seat. Same kid, different sash. Two stories and I'm already starting to think they may be the same story. Let's see if it holds. So far our hall monitors have been people, individuals, a guy with a lawyer, a guy with a microphone, and you might be sitting there thinking, okay, Chad, sure. Every crowd's got a couple of busybodies. That's not new. That's just people. But here's where it gets interesting. Because the hall monitor isn't just a person. He's a personality type. And a personality type can wear a lot of costumes. It can be a guy, it can be a crowd, and this is the one that should scare you a little, it can be an entire institution. Because at least Stephen A. Smith knows he's doing it. The next hall monitor I want to show you has no idea. It's so deep inside the building it can't even hear itself talking. Let's go to college. Here's the headline. This one was first reported by the College Fix, then picked up by the Daily Caller News Foundation and outlets like BizPac Review around the 8th. And the headline is: and I had to read it three times to make sure I wasn't being pranked: a university is seeking to hire a foreign worker under the H1B Visa program to teach English. To teach English! The school is Notre Dame, top-rated private university in Indiana. The posting classifies the job under the Department of Labor's category, and I'm quoting the category name because the category name is the whole joke here. English language and literature teachers. Salaries about $87,000, which is, and this is a beautiful detail, just barely above the federal average for the category. Like someone ran the math to the dollar. Three-year gig, Notre Dame, for the record, didn't respond when asked about it. Now, let me say the thing the headline says without saying it. This is an American university in America, where the language is English. Looking abroad, invoking a specialty worker visa, a program that exists for skills we supposedly can't find here, to locate a human being who can teach English? In the country that invented y'all, in a nation where the stop signs are already fluent? I mean, Jesus. Somewhere out there, a satire writer just stood up, took off his headset, and walked into the ocean. Because what's the job? You can't compete with the real thing. Reality took his gig. Reality does the bit better now. Seriously. And I want to be careful here because this is important. I'm not mad at the immigrant, let me say that clearly. There is some person overseas, probably with a doctorate in English literature, who can quote more Shakespeare than the entire faculty lounge, and good for them. This isn't really about them. They saw a door and walked through it. That's the American story, God bless. The target here is not the teacher, the target is the building. Because somebody, actually, no, not somebody, that's the whole point. It wasn't somebody, it was a process, a form, a category, a workflow, a committee, probably, and a portal and an HR system and a compliance checklist, and it moved step by step, box by box, all the way to the finish line. And at no point did a single human being in the chain stop, look up, and go, wait, we're importing an English teacher to America? Do we hear ourselves? That's the recurring question for this whole species. How did nobody in the room hear themselves say it out loud? And the answer is because nobody was actually in the room. The form was in the room, the system was in the room, the category was in the room, the people were just clicking next. This is a new hall monitor. He doesn't have a whistle, he's got a clipboard, a really thick clipboard. He's the credential monitor, and the credential monitor doesn't ask, is this good or does this make sense? Or is this person any good at the actual job? He just asks, did they fill out the form correctly? Is the box checked? Is the category code valid? Competence is unverifiable, but a checked box, a checked box he can trust. And here's the common sense part in this one, I know in my bones. I came up in a business with the most honest performance review on earth. I was a hairdresser. You know what my credential was? The mirror. There was no form. We had no category code. There was literally a human being in a chair, and at the end they looked in the mirror and the verdict was instant and it was total. Good cut, they came back. They told their friends, they tipped. Bad cut, you watched their soul leave their body in real time and they never book again. No piece of paper ever saved a bad haircut. No certificate ever talked a customer out of what they could see with their own eyes. The market graded me every single day on the spot, no appeal. And that's the thing, the credential monitor is completely lost. He's so deep in the system that he trusts the paperwork describing reality more than he trusts his own reality. He'd rather have a perfect form for the wrong hire than a messy handshake for the right one. So now we've upgraded. First stories, the hall monitors were telling you what you're allowed to enjoy. This one's bigger. This one isn't policing your fun. This one is so lost in process it can't see what's true anymore. The institution stopped asking, is this real? And started asking, is this filled out correctly? And if you think a university losing track of reality is funny, and it is, wait until you see what happened when an entire political party does it on purpose. So this next one, this is my favorite species, because this is the one everyone recognize and nobody admits they do. There's a Senate race up in Maine. It actually closed last night. The Democratic candidate, the presumptive nominee, the front runner, is a guy named Graham Plantner, combat veteran, oyster farmer, running as a populist against Susan Collins. ⁓ And his has been, let's say, eventful. He's been carrying some baggage, a lot of baggage, There's a tattoo that, by multiple accounts, resembles a Nazi SS symbol. He says he didn't know what it meant. He apologized for old post. He's since covered it. There's a New York Times report about how he treated women in past relationships. There are reports of ⁓ explicit messages sent while married. It's a whole situation. The point isn't to litigate the guy, the point is what happened around him. Because here's the headline that made me spit out my coffee. James Carville, the degenerate raging Cajun himself, the most quoted Democratic strategist alive, goes on CNN, sits across from Jake Tapper, and Tapper asks him the honest question. He basically says: a Republican would tell you if a Republican combat vet had a Nazi-style tattoo, you Democrats would not be this forgiving. And Carvel, Carvel says, and I'm quoting him as closely as I can. It's true, I would say you're exactly right. He admitted it on camera to the country out loud. The whistle only blows one direction, and the head referee walked onto the field and announced it into the microphone. Nobody noticed. And then, because of course he endorsed the guy anyways, he went on to say, Hey, if Roosevelt and Churchill could work with Stalin to win the war, he can overlook a tattoo. Which is a sentence. That's a sentence a human being said. He compared a Senate primary in Maine to the defeat of the Third Reich and cast himself as Churchill and the Tattoo as a minor scheduling conflict. Now, this is the rule book monitor. And the rule book monitor is the most dangerous species in the building because he doesn't oppose rules. He loves rules. He loves rules the way a fisherman loves a net, as a thing you throw on other people. Here's how you spot him. The rulebook monitor carries a rule book, a thick one, leather-bound, looks very official. But the pages, the pages are in one of those three ring binders, the kind where you can pop the rings open and pull a page right out. And when the rules about the other team, ⁓ he reads it word for word, chapter and verse, no exceptions, zero tolerance, decency, accountability, our democracy. And the second the rule lands on his own guy, pop, out comes the page. Well, now let's not rush to judgment. Context matters, process matters. Have we considered the four combat deployments? Have we considered Stalin? The rule book has a party registration page, and it's the first one that comes out of the binder. Now, I want to stop right here because I've let this turn into haha, look at the Democrats. Then I'm a hall monitor too. I'm just blowing my own whistle at the other hallway. And this show doesn't do that. So let me put the rule book in both hands because that's the honest version. That's the thing I need you to see, and it's the whole episode, it's the whole reason this show exists. See, the rule book monitor is not a Democrat, the rule book monitor is not a Republican. The rule book monitor is a human being who has confused having rules with having principles. And those are not the same thing. A principle is a rule you keep when it costs you something. A rule you only enforce on your enemies isn't a principle at all. It's a weapon you're pretending is a principle. America doesn't hate rules. America's got plenty of rules. What America hates is fake rules. Rules with a removable page out of the binder. And here's the twist I honestly did not expect. And it's the most hopeful thing in this whole episode. In the middle of all this, one guy on the left did the opposite. John Fetterman, Uncle Fester, Senator from Pennsylvania, hoodie, shorts, the whole thing. You guys know, looked at his own party's candidate and refused to pop the page. He went after him. Called him out over the tattoo. Basically said, if you're if you've got a clear Nazi tattoo, people are gonna draw a conclusion. Dared him to release his own messages. His own team's guy, days before the primary with control of the Senate, maybe hanging on this seat. Now you can like Fetterman or not. I don't. I can't stand the guy. Doesn't matter. What he did right there is the rarest thing in American public life. He read the rule the same way with his own guy standing in front of him as he would have read it with the other guy standing there. He's the one ref in the building who blew the whistle on his own bench while his own crowd booed him for it. And of course, of course, Plantner turned around and called him a name at a town hall, because that's what happens to a guy who won't pop the page. The hall monitors turn on the principles first, always. So look at what we've got now. He started with a guy and a lawyer, then a guy and a microphone, then a whole university that lost track of reality inside its own paperwork, and now an entire political establishment, both establishments, carrying around rule books with pages they pop the second the rule gets inconvenient. These don't look like the same story: a cage fight, a basketball game, an English department, a Senate race. Again, four different worlds, four different costumes. But it's four versions of one person. The guy who was never put in charge and decided that the rules, the reality, the whole hallway run through him. Different species, same animal. And I'd love to tell you that's where it stops. That's where it stays funny. that it stays at lawsuits and ego and paperwork. Well, sadly, it does not. ⁓ ⁓ Our hall monitors were regulating fun in the beginning, where you can go, what you're allowed to cheer for. Then they got bigger. They regulating reality. What's true? What's in the form? Which rule counts today. And I figured that was the top of the ladder. Reality's pretty high up there. It's not the top. There's one more rung. Because above fun and above facts, there's the thing that actually holds a country together. The songs, the stories, the stuff we create and make together, culture. But the hall monitors comin' for that too. So we know America's turning 250, quarter of a millennium. That's a real number. Most countries don't make it. We're throwing a party, a big one, all summer all over the country. And one of the events is a thing called the Great American State Fair on the National Mall in Washington. Concerts, exhibits, all 50 states, the whole spread. It's run by an organization called Freedom 250. Yeah. That Freedom 250, same umbrella Hold that thought because it does matter. So here's the headline, and you saw versions of this all over the last couple of weeks and in May. CNN, NBC, NBR, the AP, Time magazine, a whole lineup of artists got announced for the concerts, ⁓ and then one after another. ⁓ A bunch of them pulled out. Brett Michaels, The Commodores, Martina McBride, Morris Day, and The Time, Young MC, out, out, and out. And I want to be straight with you about their reason, because we do this honestly. Their stated reason is not. We hate America. Their reason is they say they were misled. They were told it was nonpartisan, and they figured out it was tied to the president politically, and they felt like it was a bait and switch. The organizers say no, it's nonpartisan. Everybody's welcome. And honestly, I can't fully referee that one. Maybe they got snookered on the politics, that's a real possibility, and I'm not gonna pretend I was in the room. So I'm not mad they skipped a specific event they felt lied to them about, But if that were the whole story, there'd be no story. Here's the part that gets me. It's the same crowd, not these exact five people, but the broader world they come from that has spent my entire adult life lecturing the rest of us about what culture is for. You've heard the sermon. Art heals, music brings us together. Culture is what unites a divided nation. Artists have a responsibility to show up, to use the platform, to help the country find itself. They'll give you that speech at an award show. They'll give it to you in a Super Bowl halftime press release. They'll give it to you unprompted at length in an acceptance speech for an award they gave themselves. And the country, the actual country, all of it, has a 250th birthday. The single biggest opportunity in any of our lifetimes to do the exact thing they say they're for. Heal, unite, bring people together, stand on the mall and remind a divided nation that we're still one people. The job they've been auditioning for their whole careers. And the answer suddenly is, ⁓ not like that. Unity, yes, but only the unity where everyone already agrees with me. Healing, yes, but only if the right people are in charge of the bandages. That's the cultural monitor. And the cultural monitor is a fascinating species because he wants the microphone desperately, and he does not want the responsibility that's clipped to the bottom of it. He wants the stage, the lights, the influence, the moral authority of the artist. He just doesn't want the part where you actually have to show up and do the unifying thing when it's hard, when the crowds mixed, when some of them voted wrong, when it would actually cost you something, right? And here's the thing I know from the inside a little. I've spent years around branding, around marketing, around building an audience from nothing. And I'll tell you the dirty secret of every microphone. The microphone is not a reward. The microphone is a job. The second they hand it to you, you owe somebody something. You owe the room a reason they showed up. A real performer knows that in his bones. You walk out in front of a mixed crowd, people who love you, people who can't stand you, people who just came for a good night. And the gig, the whole gig is to make all of them feel for two hours like they're in the same country. That's the job. That's always been the job. Sinatra did it, Cash did it, Dolly Parton does it in her sleep. That woman could play a biker bar and a Sunday school in the same afternoon and have both of them crying. But you see, the cultural monitor can't do that anymore. Or won't. He's decided the audience has to pass a screening first. He wants to be a steward. Stewards unite people, but only of the people who already agree. Which isn't stewardship. That's a fan club with a cover charge. So here's the recurring question for this one, and it's the generalist and the whole show, because I mean it. If you wanted the microphone, and you did, you fought for it, you built a whole life around getting it, why don't you want the responsibility that comes with it? You said art heals, okay? Then do your job. Sing the song, play the set, stand on the mall, make the country feel human for one night. Steward something. That's all you have a responsibility ever meant. It meant when it's hard, not when it's easy and everyone agrees. And if you notice something, I mean it just clicked for me. Earlier, somebody ran to a courthouse to shut down the Freedom 250 fight. Then later, somebody walked off stage at the Freedom 250 fair. Same event, same word, freedom. One crowd tried to stop other people from enjoying it, the other crowd refused to help make it. Two completely different reactions, same instinct underneath. Not I'll build something. No. Not, I'll throw a better party. Just not on my watch. And that's the quiet danger nobody names. See, the hall monitor doesn't build the school, he doesn't teach it, he doesn't fix the roof or fund the library. He patrols the hallway someone else built. He needs the builders. He's a parasite on the builders. And the trouble starts, the real trouble, when there start to be more monitors than builders. Supervising the culture becomes more powerful, more rewarded, more visible than making the culture. When the loudest voice in the room is never the person who made the thing, it's always the person standing next to it, telling you you're holding it wrong. Now, I've kept this light for most of an hour. Lawsuits, basketball, a college that forgot what country it's in. We've been laughing. I need to change the temperature for the last story for Wacky Wednesday. Because I think the laughing has actually been the argument. I think it's easy to laugh because so far the hall monitor's been mostly harmless. Annoying, ego, paperwork. You can laugh at a man who blames the president for a basketball game. That's the stupidity that is Stephen A. Smith. But I told you at the top there was one story in here that isn't funny, and I'd tell you when we got there so you could brace yourself. We're there. So brace yourself. Let me show you what's at the very top of this ladder. What the hell monitor becomes when nobody ever takes the whistle away from them? This weekend in San Antonio there was an event, a TPUSA Women's Summit. The organization is run now by Erica Kirk. She runs it because her husband, Charlie Kirk, was shot and killed last September at an event in front of people. He was thirty one. He left two kids. Whatever you thought of his politics, and people thought a lot of things, that's the fact underneath everything that comes next. A man was murdered, and his widow took over his life's work, and she has to go out in public and keep going. And this past weekend, outside her event, a protester showed up. And I'm gonna describe what happened plainly because I don't think it needs any help from me. This guy was wearing a costume, a paper mache head made to look like Charlie Kirk. He had on a white shirt, reportedly like the one Kirk was wearing the day he was killed, and in front of the crowd this person dropped to the ground, acted it out. Reenacted the murder, killing of the man whose widow was a few feet away inside, about to speak, and the reporting describes people around there chanting that he deserved to die. I don't have a joke. I told you I wouldn't, and I don't. And if I did, I'd want you to turn this off. Now, Turning Point called the protester a radical leftist. That's their characterization. I'll be straight. Nobody's confirmed who this person was or what they believe, so I'm not gonna hang it on a movement. I don't actually care what team issued the costume, because the team isn't the story, the behavior is the story. And I need you to see how it connects because it does, and it's the whole point of tonight. Go back to our hall monitor, the kid in the hallway. What did he want? He wanted to control the space. He wanted to decide who belonged, who was allowed, who was in trouble. He never had any real power, so the power he could get, he got by stopping you, by correcting you, by making you smaller in front of everyone. That's the seed. That's the whole seed. The need to supervise other people because you have decided you're the authority over them. Now follow that seed all the way up the ladder with nobody ever pruning it. It starts as, you can't stand there. Then you can't say that. Then you can't be in this building. And at the very top, at the place this thing goes, after it never gets checked, it becomes, you don't get to exist, and I'm gonna act out your death in a costume on a sidewalk while a crowd cheers. That's not a hall monitor anymore. That's a hall monitor who just lost the hallway and built himself a theater. Where he's the judge, the jury, the director, and the star, and the other human being isn't even a person anymore. He's a prop, a paper mache head. That's the obsessive monitor. And here's what I want you to notice because this is the actual lesson, and I'm only gonna say it once. Every species we met tonight had the same blind spot. None of them were building anything. The lawyer didn't throw a better, more peaceful party, the sportscaster didn't coach a better team, the university didn't make a better teacher, the strategist didn't field a cleaner candidate, the artist didn't put on a better show. And this, this is the bottom of that same well. The man in the costume didn't make anything either. He didn't build, he didn't fix, he didn't create, he didn't persuade, he just supervised another human being's right to exist and decided the answer was no. The difference between the cage fight lawsuit and the costume on the sidewalk is not a difference of kind. It's a difference of degree. It's the same instinct. I am the authority over you. I never asked your permission to be, and I never will, just with every guardrail One of them files a motion, the other one builds a theater. Same kid, no whistle left, just the costume. Erica Kirk, for what it's worth, she was inside, somebody heckled her too, and she stopped and said she'd pray for them. Which it's its own kind of answer to all of this. The builder in the middle of the monitors doing the harder thing. Sit with that for just a second. Because that contrast to the person making something surrounded by people who only know how to stop things, that's the whole episode. So here's the question I've been chewing on all week, and it's the real one. Not why are these people annoying? We know why they're annoying. The real question is, why does America keep producing them? Why do we make so many of these? Why are there so many people who want the whistle and not one of them wants the actual job? And I think I finally landed on it. It's because the tool roles are open to anyone, and only one of them is hard. There are basically two kinds of people in any room: there's the builder and there's the monitor. And the difference between them isn't intelligence, it isn't politics, it isn't which team they're on. The difference is what they're attracted to. The builder is attracted to responsibility, the monitor is attracted to control. And those sound like the same thing, but in fact, folks, they are opposites. The builder makes something. He starts the business, he coaches the team, he writes the song, he raises the kid, he throws the party, he runs the event, he puts his name on the thing and his money on the thing and his reputation on the thing. And here's the part nobody wants. When it fails, it's his. He eats it. The builder lives downstream of his own decisions. That's what responsibility actually is. It's not a feeling, it's exposure. It's if this goes wrong, it goes wrong on me. The monitor doesn't want that ever. The monitor wants the other thing, the influence without the exposure. He wants to weigh in without ever being on the hook. He wants to approve and deny, instruct and correct, supervise and regulate. And then when it goes sideways, he wants to be standing off to the side going, Well, I never would have done it in that way. He gets all the authority of being involved and none of the risk of being responsible. That's the trade, folks. That's the whole appeal. The whistle is power with the liability removed. And I want to be honest with you because this is the part that matters. It is so tempting. It is so much easier to be a monitor. The builder might be wrong out loud in public with his name on it. The monitor is never wrong because the monitor never actually does anything you can grade. You cannot fail at things you refuse to attempt. So you criticize the people in the arena from a seat where you can never lose. It's safe, it feels like contribution, and it produces absolutely nothing. And here's the cruel little twist in how this all works. The monitor usually gets more attention than the builder. Of course he does. He's louder. He's got nothing else to do. The builder's busy. He's in the shop. He's at practice. He's on the mall, actually setting up the stage. The monitor's got all day because supervising is part-time work and building is not. So the guy who made the thing is quiet and exhausted, and the guy standing next to it, telling you it's wrong, has a podcast, a lawsuit, and a costume. And we hand the microphone to the loud one every time. That's the tension this whole country runs on, and almost nobody names it. America works when it works because of builders. People who take the risk, people who are willing to be responsible for an outcome. And the monitors need them desperately. You see, the monitor cannot exist without a builder to monitor. He's a Ramora. He needs the shark. He needs somebody to build the hallway before he can patrol it. So I'll tell you what this whole episode has really been walking towards, and it's not partisan because I showed you tonight the whistle gets blown from every direction by every team in every costume. The problem was never disagreement in this country. Disagreement is great. Disagreement is two builders arguing about how to build the thing. I'll take it all day long. The problem is self-appointed authority. People who want to run the hallway they never built, grade the work they never attempted, and supervise the lives they were never asked to supervise. People who want to be in charge of everything and responsible for nothing. And to every one of them, the lawyer, the loudmouth, the institution, the strategist, the celebrity, the answer is the same three words it's been all night. You want the microphone? You want the authority? You want to say in how the rest of us live? Fine. Then do your job. Build something. Risk something. Put your name on something. Be responsible for one single outcome. And if you won't, Then put the whistle down and get the adults back to work. Because that's all that this really is. It's a whole country full of people who learned they could get the feeling of being in charge without ever having to be in charge. And what we're short on isn't opinions. God knows we're not short on opinions. What we're short on is grown-ups. America doesn't need more home monitors. America needs more adults in the room. And that brings me to tonight's Reagan reminder. And funny enough, I almost passed this one by because most people don't even know it. Everyone knows the actor, the governor. But before any of that, long before, there was a teenager in Dixon, Illinois, who sat in a lifeguard chair on the Rock River. Seven summers he was a lifeguard. And here's the number that stuck with me. Over those seven summers, Reagan is credited with pulling 77 people out of that river. 77. He kept a log, he notched it. People drowning, going under, panicking in the current, and a kid kept going in after them. Now think about what a lifeguard actually is in the language of tonight. A lifeguard has a whistle, he's got the chair, he's got the elevated seat, he's got the authority. He could spend the whole summer blowing that whistle. No running, no diving. You're too far out. That's hall monitor heaven. The whistle, the chair, the perfect view, and you never have to get wet. He could have supervised that river for seven years and never once gotten his feet in it. But that's not what the job is. The job. The actual job is that when someone's going under, you come down off the chair and you get into the water, you put yourself in the river, you take the risk, you become responsible for getting them out. 77 times that kid chose the water over the chair. He didn't decide who deserves saving. He didn't check which way they voted before he swam out. You're drowning, he's coming. That was the whole policy. That's a builder. Before the politics, before the party, before any of it. That was a person who understood that authority and responsibility are supposed to be the same job. The whistle and the water come together, or they don't count. And maybe that's why a country eventually handed him the biggest chair we've got. Because we could tell he'd actually get in the river to save people. 77 people went home to their families because the lifeguard didn't think the chair was the point. That's the Reagan reminder. The chair was never the point. The water was the point. The responsibility was the point. So this is where I'll leave you tonight. I know it's easy to look at a week like this, the lawsuits, the meltdowns, the costumes on the sidewalk and decide everything's broken. But I don't believe that. I'm the last optimist in politics, remember? I get paid to find the door. So let me show it to you. For every hall monitor I showed you tonight, there are a thousand people you'll never see who got in the water this week. The person who opened the business, coached the team, threw the party anyway, took over her husband's life worked, and walked out on that stage. The builders are still out there. There's way more of them than there are of the other kind. They're just quieter because they're busy. That's the good news. The country's still mostly built by grown-ups. We just gotta stop handing the microphone to the kid with the homemade badge. So this week, here's the whole assignment: be the builder, get in the water. And if somebody who's never built a thing in their life tries to tell you you're holding it wrong, you know the two questions now. Who put you in charge? And what exactly are you responsible for? If you want to find us, the numbers 252 Chad Law, that's 252 Chad Law. We're on Rumble X, Instagram, and Substack, all the places the monitors haven't figured out how to shut down yet. And you are the whole marketing department and you know the deal. If you see us, share us. I'm Chad Law. Go build something. And this and that, America, was common sense. If you're on Rumble, stick around for the exclusive Rumble Post Show QA, where I answer all the texts that came into the hotline during this show. Give us about ten seconds while we reset the studio and come back to the phones.