‘The Coming Civil War…’: Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro’s Big Dollar Rage Machine is Promoting a Very Dangerous Message

Alex GriffingJul 29th, 2022, 4:50 pm
 

Matt Walsh

In recent weeks, the rage machine at the Daily Wire has kicked into overdrive as hosts like Matt Walsh, Candace Owens, and even founder Ben Shapiro drop culture war screeds hyping a civil war, encouraging the government to take away people’s kids, and coldly describing trans suicide rates as just a reality.

While there is no doubt the debate around trans rights stirs strong emotions on both sides, the issue continues to gain traction on the right and animate the base. Hosts and pundits now seem to be in a race for who can be the most extreme on the issue as rhetoric from trans critics has undeniably taken on new levels of hostility — moving the debate away from a policy discussion to outright attacks on the trans community.

Walsh, who denounced a Fox News segment on a trans teens and his family as “evil lunacy,” has made it clear he cannot live with the other side’s point of view, with rhetoric that only serves to fan the flames of hate in an already deeply divided country.

“I don’t respect them. I have nothing in common with them. I detest everything they believe and stand for,” Walsh wrote on Twitter last week, reacting to the House hearings on abortion.

“They feel the same about me. We simply cannot go on this way,” he concluded ominously.

An hour or so before that bit of schismatic political punditry, Walsh wrote this: “We are [sic] nation divided over whether pregnant men exist. The coming civil war will certainly be the weirdest one in history.”

Walsh, who has more than a million followers on Twitter, has made a name for himself online by focusing his ire at the trans and LGBTQ community, drag queens, and women who would dare use terms like “girl boss.” Walsh, who is regularly described as a troll, had a speech canceled in December 2021 by a Missouri Catholic Church over his “provocative positions on immigration, on communities of color, on Muslims, and on members of the LGBTQ community seemed designed to stir anger and resentment, rather than encourage thoughtful dialogue.”

“His statements are in contradiction to Jesus’ great commandment to love God and love our neighbor,” concluded the St. Francis Xavier College Church.

He writes in his Twitter bio that he is a “theocratic fascist,” which he later claimed is no joke and is a label he clearly tries to live up to in his commentary.

Walsh, who has also published a children’s book and released a documentary bashing the trans community, has a daily podcast on the Daily Wire — once a fairly mainstream conservative news aggregation site that was regularly the top publisher on Facebook.

The Daily Wire’s success on Facebook has been unparalleled in media and is one of the reasons the company claims to have brought in over $100 million in revenue in 2021.

In June, however, engagement dipped and the publisher fell to the 5th most-engaged site on Facebook. Whether or not divisive culture war rhetoric from firebrand hosts is helping or hurting the publisher has yet to be seen. Regardless, the Daily Wire has gone full bore on targeting the trans community and Walsh isn’t the only host to do so. Candace Owens recently used her weekly show to focus on many of the same themes as Walsh and hype a deeply illiberal version of social conservatism.

At the beginning of June, she put out an episode titled, “Why Everyone HATES Pride Month” and argued that parents should have their children taken away from them for going to events with drag queens.

“And you’re seeing right now that adults are getting behind this narrative so they can have a woke T-shirt on and say I love my children. I allowed my child to pick their gender and pick their species,” ranted Owens, who began her show saying pride month should be called “shame month.”

“And they feel proud of themselves because they can go and they can say this on Facebook that they are wonderful, accepting, and loving adults,” Owens continued, mocking parents who one can only imagine often go through a difficult journey when it comes to having a trans child.

“When, in reality, they are underqualified to have children,” she continued, adding, “They should have their children taken away from them because it’s child abuse.”

So, there you have Owens calling for the government to hurt families in probably one of the most profound ways possible — not to mention the impact on the children forced into government-run foster care. Her argument is a full-fledged embrace of using the government to punish ideological enemies and raise their children with the values approved of by Owens – parents’ rights be damned.

In another podcast hit from the Daily Wire, Shapiro took aim at the argument that the trans community should be supported given the high adolescent suicide rate. Here is what Shapiro said:

The generalized point the left tries to make is that if you say that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, a bunch of people who believe they are members of the opposite sex will be so despondent about the fact the biological reality exists and that you are saying it, not even that it exists, that you’re saying it. They’re going to go commit suicide. There’s only one problem with this line of argument. It’s complete nonsense.

While making no mention of the bullying trans kids face and glossing over the statistics, which show some 40% of trans or non-binary teens have attempted to commit suicide, Shapiro goes on to claim acceptance is not the answer.

Shapiro argues that in highly tolerant areas the rate does not go down. “There’s no statistical evidence to suggest that the wildly disparate suicidal ideation rate among LGBT people suddenly corrects itself to meet the norm, meaning people who know what sex they are,” he argues.

There is data showing that in recent years LGBT suicide rates have fallen in the U.S. as visibility has increased and the country has become more open on the topic.

Although, according to a 2020 study, looking at data from 2009 and 2017, LGBT youth are still three times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers.

“Truth matters in a society. If some people are unable to handle truth and this causes them to be more mentally ill or more suicidal, that is not the fault of the truth,” concluded Shapiro on the issue.

“We’re going have to find some different solutions,” he added.

The purpose of Shapiro’s argument, while clearly lacking in empathy for the individuals and families affected by the high suicide rate among trans teens, is fairly clear. He wants to remove a powerful talking point from the other side and claim it’s a red herring. Although the idea that speech doesn’t have any power is pretty rich coming from a talking head who is using words to tamp down empathy for another group of people.

Agree with him or not, this kind of argument is fairly typical in media punditry. But what is Matt Walsh’s end game? Or Candace Owens’s on this issue?

Walsh “low-key shopping a Civil War,” as Molly Jong-Fast put it, over pronouns and declaring absolute intolerance for the other side’s point of view on abortion, one of the few issues where there is actually a popular middle ground in this country, seems to be just spewing hate for hate’s sake — or to simply get more followers on Twitter.

The public’s opinions on trans rights are pretty well established at this point. It’s not a new issue for the country to be grappling with, and from bathrooms to college sports and now schools, it’s something that has been fought over for more than a decade.

Walsh and Owens have both escalated the level of the rhetoric surrounding the issue, however. Especially for a large, influential news source like the Daily Wire, which with its recent hiring of Jordan Peterson, who gleefully dead named a famous trans actor, only seems to be doubling down on this approach.

Peterson went so far recently to suggest that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was fueled by the “degenerate” West and the culture war over these kinds of issues.

What exactly is the point of that kind of rhetoric? What is Peterson’s endgame in making such a ludicrous argument, one that even Vladimir Putin would certainly laugh off? It’s hard to say without knowing him – although there are plenty of possibilities to speculate about.

But, it is clear that this kind of rhetoric and hate is swelling up in the country and the far-right is connecting it with justifications for illiberal policies and stripping individual freedoms. On Wednesday, a school board candidate in Pensacola, Florida said doctors who treat trans kids should be “hanging from the nearest tree” – she was quickly applauded.

Trans rights is a complex issue for many people, especially in the context of education and children. However, the trans community remains one of the most vulnerable groups of people in our society with violence on the rise, and no matter how much Walsh may wish for it, they are not going to just disappear. His rhetoric represents a race to the bottom in terms of inflaming hate, sowing division, and could lead to more real violence  — none of which can possibly be worth the clicks and followers on Twitter.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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Alex Griffing - Senior Editor

Alex Griffing is a Senior Editor at Mediaite. Send tips via email: alexanderg@mediaite.com. Follow him on Twitter: @alexgriffing