"Unpopular opinion but I don’t care about this unless they actually arrest and prosecute the culprits, including Obama."

"You cannot allege a 'treasonous conspiracy' and then do nothing about it. The typical pattern by Republicans since forever is to make these kinds of claims (which I don’t doubt by the way), but to make them on Twitter and Fox News, and never actually bring it to a court of law so that the parties responsible can be held accountable for their crimes. I’m tired of it. Go arrest these people and bring them to justice. Then I’ll care. If you won’t do that then what does any of this matter?"

Writes Matt Walsh, responding to that thread Tulsi Gabbard posted.

Yeah, I'm tired of it too. Of that and a few other things.

"You have a beautiful voice and a beautiful accent. The only problem is I can’t understand a word you’re saying."

“You have a beautiful voice and a beautiful accent. The only problem is I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

Maybe the funniest Trump quote of all time. Instant classic.

pic.twitter.com/OMWCb8s7iI

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) February 5, 2025

I see that Matt Walsh comments: "Maybe the funniest Trump quote of all time. Instant classic." 

I don't think it's funny at all. It's truly awkward when you are on public display in a position where you are under pressure to respond to a person who speaks in a way that you can't understand. I've been in that situation more than once. It's difficult! I probably said something like "I'm terribly sorry, but I couldn't understand you," which led to a repetition and an embarrassing struggle. Trump avoided the problem of spending time on a repetition, and he was quite gentle and gracious. The female reporter wanted to talk about the plight of women in Afghanistan, and that's not a topic for comedy. It also wasn't the topic of that press briefing, so it was good that he didn't veer into the problems of countries other than Israel and its adversaries.

"A picture of young successful happy people at a trendy cocktail party reads as right wing. A picture of a dad in flannel drinking a beer at Texas Roadhouse..."

"... also reads as right wing. Right wing is both cool, hip and metropolitan, and down to earth, older, mature, and working class. This is how you know that conservatism is culturally ascendant. We run the gamut. The only pictures that read as left wing are those of ugly, fat, mentally ill, dysfunctional, friend-less weirdos."

So says Matt Walsh, on X, looking at the "Cruel Kids" New York Magazine cover. 

 

That's one take. The other take is that the photo is cropped to make the event look all white. If you scroll down from that link above, you'll many tweets that should the wider view (and call attention to the text, "Have you noticed that the entire room is white?):

"There is a quite narrow truth at the heart of the film: yes, many grifters have flourished under the guise of 'diversity work,' descending like vultures..."

"... upon guilty—or H.R.-constrained—white people hungry to be lashed for (and then duly absolved of) their supposed racial sins. To hear some of these so-called D.E.I. consultants speak is to want to rip your ears off. They speak a fuzzy, specialist language, meant to be minimally refutable and maximally emotionally manipulative. If this is anti-racism—in fact, it isn’t—you might find yourself quietly resolving to give racism another chance.... A gag that comes up a couple of times during 'Am I Racist?' is Walsh’s encounter with the 2002 book [with the N-word as its title] by the brilliant legal scholar Randall Kennedy. The joke is that it’s hard for a white person to buy the book because of how it’s hard to say the title. Get it? But Walsh never cracks the book. If he were to give Kennedy’s work a try, he might find a probing, refreshing antidote to the thinking set forward by DiAngelo’s simplistic, overly binary, and often quite patronizing work—and a total refutation of the blithe, resentful attitude of quick-twitch cultural reaction that produces a world view like his own."

Writes Vinson Cunningham, in "Is Matt Walsh Trying to Make “Am I Racist?” the “Borat” of the Right?/In his work with the Daily Wire and in a new movie, the conservative podcaster and activist tries to expose the hypocrisies of the left" (The New Yorker)

Cunningham writes out the name of Randall Kennedy's book, but I can't. Here's an Amazon Associates link to it.

Megan McArdle went to see the Matt Walsh movie "Am I Racist?"

You know, so did I, last week, and I didn't even blog about why I wasn't blogging about it. But I'm telling you now because I have the hope that reading McArdle will liberate my thoughts on the subject. 

The headline is "You might not enjoy ‘Am I Racist?’ You should watch it anyway. In the mockumentary, Matt Walsh is concerned that he is racist. Awkward moments follow" (WaPo)(free access link).

Ok, first, I don't agree that it's a mockumentary. I think the word "mockumentary" refers to a scripted (or improv) fictional movie that takes the form of a documentary, like "Spinal Tap" or "Best in Show." It's a great comedy category. I love it. But "Am I Racist?" films real people who are being themselves within a situation that the filmmaker sets up. It's in the category of pranking. The classic example is "Borat." The central character is pretending to be something he isn't, perhaps for sheer comedy, perhaps with a political agenda, and the idea is to extract something revealing from people who are not in on the joke. 

McArdle writes:

Great achievements in the realm of disguise.

Matt Walsh tricking Robin DiAngelo by slightly changing his hair has got me reassessing Clark Kent’s glasses.
pic.twitter.com/2rYnTxup1E

— Nick Dixon (@nickdixoncomic) July 24, 2024

Caption from Nick Dixon (at X): "Matt Walsh tricking Robin DiAngelo by slightly changing his hair has got me reassessing Clark Kent’s glasses."

The clip comes from this trailer for Matt Walsh''s new movie "Am I Racist?"

"The short time line around [Oliver] Anthony’s virality and the seemingly synchronized way in which right-wing pundits, such as Matt Walsh and Jack Posobiec, have tweeted enthusiastically..."

"... and almost apocalyptically about 'Rich Men North of Richmond' have turned the singer into a messianic or conspiratorial figure. Depending on your politics, he is either a voice sent from Heaven to express the anger of the white working class, or he is a wholly constructed viral creation who has arrived to serve up resentment with a thick, folksy lacquering of Americana.... Whether this gambit will work or if Anthony is in on the trick is anyone’s guess. He has said that his political views are 'pretty dead center,' and he does seem to rail against both Republicans and Democrats, but, until his big break last week, his songs were mostly apolitical small-town anthems that sounded like they were written with a fountain pen dipped in Merle Haggard’s ashes.... I should say here that I am not immune to these charms. When I first heard Townes Van Zandt, I felt that some truth had been revealed about how life can break and drag, but in a glamorous way.... The markers of authenticity—the wood-panelled kitchen, the woman who alternates between cleaning dishes and smoking a cigarette, the grizzled Black man who, himself, also stands in for authenticity—could be pulled apart and declared problematic by any freshman in a critical-studies class. But they also work...."

Writes Jay Caspian Kang in "A Close Listen to 'Rich Men North of Richmond' The viral country song by Oliver Anthony has been embraced by right-wing pundits" (The New Yorker).

Read the lyrics here (at Genius). Here's the song:

"Streisand effect" is what I said when I saw these 2 stories featured at Memeorandum this morning.

Here:

 

And I now see it's what Elon Musk was saying last night:

Definitely world champion Streisand Effect! This is being covered almost everywhere on Earth.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 3, 2023

I watched the video yesterday, and I'm laughing at "the vicious and intellectually dull Matt Walsh." Walsh is using a style of deadpan interviewing that disarms interviewees because they might assume he's intellectually dull, but that's not an intellectually dull thing to do. It's intellectually dull to think it's intellectually dull.

AND: From "Musk’s response to an anti-trans video sparks 24 hours of chaos at Twitter/A conservative pressure movement built against Twitter's CEO, resulting in high-level departures from the company":

"Whatever you think of [Dylan] Mulvaney’s transition, or her rather cloying girlishness... [s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty, but in whimsy and joy."

"Where Matt Walsh offers enemies, Dylan Mulvaney aspires to exuberance. She suggests the possibility of making yourself, and the world, into something better, while [Matt] Walsh promises, at best, only the dour satisfaction of being right about how terrible everything is. It isn’t surprising that the kids are choosing Mulvaney over that. But Walsh is right, his followers cry. Even if he were, it wouldn’t justify his tactics. In the court of public opinion, truth is not necessarily a sufficient defense."

Writes Megan McArdle in "For conservatives, Dylan Mulvaney should be a role model" (WaPo).

Also: "Conservatives... understand that bullying has cost progressivism a lot of support among moderates, including on issues surrounding transgenderism, where successful efforts to stifle public discussion of basic questions — such as 'What Is a Woman'? — have led to resentment and backlash rather than consensus...."

ADDED: I've got a new post based on some of the comments in this post. Writing that new post, I noticed my use of brackets in the post title above — "[s]he traffics not in anger or cruelty" — makes it seem as though McArdle might have used the masculine pronoun "he." No, she had "She," and I needed to switch to a lower-case "S." I just deploying brackets in the conventional way editors do when cutting down a quote. Nothing substantive.

What does a man want? A wife and children who are happy to see him at the end of the day?

Recently, Matt Walsh tweeted: 

All a man wants is to come home from a long day at work to a grateful wife and children who are glad to see him, and dinner cooking on the stove. This is literally all it takes to make a man happy. We are simple. Give us this and you will have given us nearly everything we need.

That prompted David French to write "Men Need Purpose More Than 'Respect'" (NYT). 

French ties Walsh's statement about the joy of family life to "the demand for respect," which, he tells us is "a hallmark of much right-wing discourse about masculinity." If it's "right-wing," most NYT readers are going to think, okay, then, it's bad, so just tell us why it is bad.

At first, French gives an answer that's like the answer I came up with when I was a teenager and my father let me know he wanted respect: "[A] demand for respect or honor should be conditioned on being respectable or honorable."

He continues:

"I have observed a change, or really a narrowing, in the public behavior of people who use Twitter or other social media a lot...."

"When I compare Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and Ye, I see a convergence of personalities that were once distinct. The garish celebrity playboy, the obsessive engineer and the young artist, as different from one another as they could be, have all veered not in the direction of becoming grumpy old men, but into being bratty little boys in a schoolyard.... I believe 'Twitter poisoning' is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.... Behavioral changes occur as a side effect of something called operant conditioning...."

From "Trump, Musk and Kanye Are Twitter Poisoned" by Jaron Lanier (NYT). Lanier is a computer scientist and author of “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.”