I’ve never had much room in my brain to put aside space for thoughts about Matt Walsh, one of the gaggle of jackasses at the Daily Wire conservative dork factory. In a group that includes Michael Knowles, he can’t even be described as “the dumb one.”
I do find it fascinating, though, that the Daily Wire crew, unusual for right-wing pundits, actually do try to display some sort of personality, and in a bizarre sense they actually seem to fit into the Ninja Turtles archetype.
No really, hear me out: I’ve often held that the most solid and natural structure for a team of four characters in fiction or in life is the Ninja Turtles configuration—simply put, the Leader, the Brains, the Dimwit, and the Muscle. Really, just think of any group of four.
It’s just a natural force of things, it’s like gravity. Even if they’re all dimwits, as is the case at the Daily Wire, they’ll still fall roughly into this pattern. There’s little question that Ben Shapiro is supposed to be the leader and Jordan Peterson, who the group very dubiously refers to as the “smartest man in the western hemisphere,” is supposed to be the brains of the operation.
I think the niche that Matt Walsh is trying to carve out is the Muscle. He’s the guy who says the things even his co-hosts are afraid to say, the angry, contemptible one who does what’s necessary, guy who goes on about exterminating the homeless for neighbourhood aesthetics, whose followers phone in bomb threats to children’s hospitals because some of the kids might be transgender. Nobody’s ever threatened to explode children in Ben Shapiro’s name—could you even imagine?
But despite the bluster you just can’t quite bring yourself to be intimidated by Matt Walsh, because his character doesn’t even really stand up as a costume of the ultimate man’s man. Sure he wears his lumberjack shirts and grows out his beard, but look a little closer and the shirts are a little too clean. The beard too prissy and manicured. The lips too… kissable.
There’s something very queer-coded about Matt Walsh. He proves that already being male doesn’t preclude you from being a drag king. He’s a pantomime, someone who very deliberately and carefully wants to present as male but skirts the uncanny valley of masculinity.
And then there’s this:
This is an actual, official piece of Matt Walsh merch that he sells through the Daily Wire online store. People on Twitter have been doing double- and triple-takes at this all day, even the occasional patented Patrick Stewart quadruple-take.
The official “sweet baby” Matt Walsh diaper plushie. The website does specify pretty clearly that it’s for kids.
Now it’s a cliché right about now that “every accusation is a confession” – that is, that Matt Walsh, whose whole entire thing is accusing anyone who’s even slightly gay or gender non-conforming as being a monstrous Jimmy Savile on steroids full on child rapist – might be hiding some kinda weird shit back there in the locked “forbidden thoughts” box he keeps in the basement of his brain, only to perhaps be let out every other night to the horror of his wife and pets.
I’m not going to make that call here, because as bizarre and wretched and intellectually club-footed as Matt “Raphael” Walsh is, I don’t think he’d accidentally reveal a fetish for crawling around the floor naked in an adult diaper by inadvertently mass producing a plush toy of it and then openly selling it to children, inviting them to caress his soft, supple man-flesh and the contours of his trademark kissylips. There must be some kind of context about this baby thing that I’m missing.
So of course I did a search for “Matt Walsh baby”
Yeah, it’s a whole thing. In a similar, but stupider, sense to how Insane Clown Posse fans refer to themselves as Juggalos, Matt “Everloving Blue Eyed Thing” Walsh fans are known as the Sweet Baby Gang for some soul-destroying reason. The internet is awash with this crap. Some of the ugly Walsh baby pictures are overlaid on rainbow flag designs—you know, the flag that so infuriates Matt Walsh that his latest campaign is to attempt to bankrupt any business that displays it.
And yes, a lot of this merchandise is marketed to be used and worn by children.
I had to find out why the hell this is happening and I did eventually trace it back to its origin. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that it’s an attempt to troll people who don’t watch his show religiously, but what might surprise you is that it’s not about grooming kids with weird baby Matt Walsh fetish toys. Well I mean it is that, but that’s incidental. It turns out that, at the time, he was just trying to be racist or something, I think? Mimicking the way he thinks black women speak?
All I’m saying is, Matt “Samantha From Sex And The City” Walsh’s Sweet Baby Gang have sent bomb threats to hospitals for a lot less than this, and if Dylan Mulvaney so much as dressed a single baby in a rainbow flag while it cuddled a Lovecraftian bearded diaper plush fetish toddler, then they would probably bomb threat an entire suburb or province.
I had a look at the Daily Wire’s actual store to see if any of the other knuckleheads were selling weird grooming material. One thing I’ve learned is that these people are just massive dorks. We’re talking second-hand embarrassment on a scale that spills over to third-hand embarrassment. Just a cringe miasma.
Because the Daily Wire crew like to think of themselves as hip young conservatives, not your Dad’s conservatives, these guys know how to joke around and have fun and appeal to kids. In reality they are the people your kids are beating up. And I mean that literally—as grown men, they are being beaten up by your children right now.
Like can we pull up for a second and ask why the bulk of the “Matt Walsh collection”—the things that aren’t diaper fetish beard baby toys—is just a whole bunch of scented candles?
There’s enough here not to understand. Like the leftist tears candle (The candle is made out of tears? What?) But once again, the whole Matt Walsh brand just comes off as 70% awkward and strangely hideous, and 30% tender and lovely. There’s no cigar boxes or beard oils here, just really expensive but dirt-cheap-to-manufacture candles with labels in basic fonts.
Everything in the Daily Wire shop, whether hocked by Walsh or the other blokes who share his brain cell, matches nicely to the classic Triangle of Conservative Grift Chicanery: It’s lazy, it’s useless, and it’s fucking expensive. Like I don’t know what this thing is supposed to be:
But if you want to look as cool as Ben does, it’s going to set you back A HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FOUR DOLLARS NINETY-NINE PLUS POSTAGE AND SHIPPING
Michael Knowles wrote a book that you can buy for 35 bucks. It’s blank.
No, seriously, I’m not doing a bit there—it’s blank, it’s all blank pages, that’s the joke, it’s Reasons to Vote For Democrats and all the pages are blank. It’s 35 bucks.
But then there’s probably my favourite thing here, it’s the Father’s Day Mystery Box!
It’s a $25 box packed with random shit that they couldn’t sell. Because they can’t sell “Lets Go Brandon” merch anymore after Biden successfully co-opted the slogan, and anyone racist enough to buy a Candace Owens poster is too racist to buy a Candace Owens poster.
That’s right, it’s literally the stuff they can’t otherwise get rid of, and at $25 it’s actually less expensive than a blank book by Michael Knowles (which, when you think about it, is still a better book than he could actually write) and the same price as a white candle with “leftist tears” printed on the side of it in Arial Black. But your Dad disowning you after he opens it is priceless.
Walsh probably spends over $80 for a Flannelette shirt which makes him an ageing hipster.