On April 21st, 2016 "conservative" commentator Matt Walsh wrote the following to his audience “[i]f you vote to place Trump in the general election, the inevitable landslide defeat, and the 8 year reign of Queen Hillary, will be on your shoulders.”
Now that the election is over, it is time for Walsh, and others like him, to be held accountable for their rank hypocrisy and irresponsible small-mindedness. Regarding Walsh in particular, there are many red flags indicating character issues, as well as his obvious lack of objectivity (and abysmal failure at predicting the election results). Matt Walsh is not someone conservatives, Christians, and especially advocates of the Second Amendment should hold in any regard, because he betrayed and worked against our interests, and I will demonstrate through evidence that Walsh tried to destroy, that he is as bad as a rapist in his own words.
The small-mindedness of Walsh can be observed by his behavior regarding almost any of his posts on Facebook or Twitter. You will notice that Walsh often posts multiple comments on his own posts. I have personally seen him demean commenters who disagree with him on twitter for how many followers they have (if they only have three followers, why is a guy with a million replying to them at all). An intellectual leader should be able to either engage the actual ideas, or have the restraint to not respond in kind to mindless insults. Behaving like a troll on his own threads, where everyone can see it, shows that Walsh either does not understand how small this behavior looks to most people, or he does not care. Donald Trump has been criticized by some for an alleged lack of decorum because he will criticize people’s failure in harsh terms even in their presence. Someone who behaves like Walsh does has no room to criticize Trump without becoming a hypocrite.
Walsh betrayed the “conservative movement” and behaved in an extremely irresponsible manner by conspiring with Amanda Carpenter to blacklist conservatives who supported Donald Trump. (http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/03/18/gop-smart-set-plots-blacklist-of-trump-supporters/) He listed, among others, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Sarah Palin, Fox News, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, Jeff Sessions, The Drudge Report, Breitbart, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress. This behavior additionally exposes Walsh to be both petty and extremely vindictive. He tweeted on March 5, 2016 regarding these individuals “Trump shills who sold the movement out and bowed before Trump: we will never forget, and we don't want you back.”
This kind of hardline rhetoric should be completely unacceptable to supporters of the 2nd Amendment. Anyone with two licks of sense knows that Hillary Clinton does not believe in or support the right of citizens to bear and keep arms. The Wikileaks emails, and undercover videos of staffers, confirming her disdain for the Second Amendment as well as plans to circumvent the U.S. Congress to create liability for gun manufacturers with executive orders. Regarding Hillary being potentially worse than Trump, Walsh stated as follows:
“I’m not going to get into the game of measuring the precise anticipated disaster and choosing whichever one I think will be slightly less cataclysmic than the other. I’m not going to do that because it’s pointless and arbitrary . . .”
So Walsh, who likes to flaunt his gun ownership, thinks that the difference between Trump and Hillary’s stances on the Second Amendment are “pointless and arbitrary” considerations. Additionally, among those who follow anything but the MSM, it is well known that Hillary has been provoking Russia via Syria. Is it “pointless and arbitrary” to protect your children from the prospect of war with a nuclear power? That Walsh would imply these issues are “pointless and arbitrary” is further evidence of a shallow intellect and a person who lets his emotions turn off his higher reasoning when he does not get his way. This would be bad enough, but there is reason to believe that Walsh’s lack of character is not limited to temper tantrums and vendettas.
On March 24, 2016, Walsh posted the following tweet in response to the National Enquirer breaking the story about Ted Cruz allegedly having affairs multiple women. While the Cruz campaign tried to hang this story on Trump, it was later revealed that the Rubio campaign had passed along the story. There certainly appeared to be a lot of smoke to that potential fire, with a Cruz PAC sending Carly Fiorina $500K for no reason, and aforementioned Amanda Carpenter tweeting about “Cruz Daddy” in the waking morning hours. Regarding this revelation Walsh decided to reevaluate his “pointless and arbitrary” standard of comparing one candidates behavior he did not support to another’s, and tweeted this, which he deleted less than 10 minutes later:
The problem is, at the time Walsh posted this tweet, Ivana Trump had already publicly denied that rape occurred, so this was not an unconfirmed rumor, but a debunked one. According to Eliza Collins of Politico on July 28, 2015, Ivana Trump told CNN “The story is totally without merit.” Ivana Trump’s made that statement one year prior to Walsh’s tweet.
The material used to spark this outrageous allegation came from divorce proceedings. As a lawyer, I warn people about the lengths they go to in order to make their spouse look bad in family law proceedings. If your spouse becomes unemployable, s/he is going to have a hard time paying court ordered support. An ethical journalist (which I assume Walsh purports to be) does not allege truth behind a rape allegation after it has been publicly denied by the alleged victim. Once the alleged victim denies it, a person who is paid to analyze information, knows it didn’t happen. But let’s not hold Walsh to my standard; let’s hold him to his own standard.
On December 9, 2014 Walsh wrote the following in an article titled False Rape Accusations Are Just as Evil as Rape Itself: “rape accusation are more than just ‘slander.’ They have the potential to completely ruin a man.”(http://themattwalshblog.com/2014/12/09/false-rape-accusations-just-evil-rape/) He goes on to say that the intent of a rape hoaxer is to ruin man, even if that is not achieved. So what are we to determine was Walsh’s intent in making tweeting this? Now to be fair to Walsh, he was talking about women who make false allegations of being actual victims, but that distinction does not help Walsh much. Even by the Supreme Court’s enormous standard of actionable defamation for public figures ‘knowledge that the claim is false at the time of making’ or some of the follow on standards ‘purposeful avoidance of the truth,’ his comment would be potentially actionable. His tweet represents cavalier attitude about putting vile things in print that is at least as bad as any reason he gave for his irrational hatred of all things Trump. I merely say Walsh is a hypocrite, but if I am wrong about him, and as a non-hypocrite he holds himself to his own standards (that false rape accusations are just as evil as rape) by those standards he is something much worse.
Walsh has been wrong in all his Trump predictions, and it is time for him to stop his pontificating and start eating crow and following it with a big slice of humble pie. He owes every person on the Walsh/Carpenter blacklist, and President Elect Donald Trump, a written public apology. If he cannot muster that, it is Walsh who should be blacklisted; not only by those of us who think our right to bear arms is more than a “pointless and arbitrary” concern but also by those who simply value character.