Here is the full transcript of political commentator and podcast host Matt Walsh’s interview: ‘Loyalty, Leadership, and the Civil War on the Right’, on The Tucker Carlson Show, premiered December 12, 2025.
Brief Notes: Tucker Carlson sits down with commentator Matt Walsh for a blunt, wide‑ranging conversation about the growing “civil war” inside the American right and his refusal to publicly disavow allies under pressure campaigns. Walsh explains how he thinks about loyalty, principle, and bad‑faith demands for denunciations, while also laying out his broader view of leftism, culture, and the moral crises facing the West. The two dig into hot‑button issues including Israel and Gaza, transgender ideology, political violence, demographic change, and the rise of euthanasia in Canada. Walsh also shares his thoughts on where conservatism is headed, whether a real political realignment is underway, and why prayer and personal integrity still matter in the middle of all the chaos.
Introduction
TUCKER CARLSON: Let me commend you on your tightrope walking skills. I don’t check into social media that much, but whenever I do, I’m like, Matt Walsh is an amazing man.
MATT WALSH: Glad you feel that way. Anyway.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, I mean, there’s a lot. The reason I want to talk to you is there’s a lot that I admire about how you’ve handled this, just as a man, leaving aside our opinions, which I don’t even know if they are probably different in some ways, same in other ways, but it’s not even about that.
I know everybody involved personally, or most of them involved in all these dramas on the right, and I think the way that you’ve handled it is just so impressive. So thank you for that. But first, like, what is going on? There is a civil war, probably not too strong on the right, within the Trump coalition. What is it?
The Leadership Vacuum
MATT WALSH: Yeah, I mean, this has been really awful, I think, for everybody. And a lot of this drama obviously goes back a long way. But I think after Charlie was killed, it’s created this kind of vacuum, and it’s a leadership vacuum because Charlie was, I think, the best leader we had on the right.
And the tragic reality is that a lot of the stuff that we said right after he was killed turned out not to be true. Stuff that even I said, like, “Well, you killed Charlie, but you made a million more,” right? “You killed Charlie, you killed one Charlie, but now we have a million more Charlies.”
And I think we said that because we wanted that to be true. And it kind of felt, for a brief amount of time, it felt that way because it felt like everybody was sort of unified and we were coming together and going to the memorial and everybody was there, and it felt like almost this revival, even this religious revival and all these things.
But then I think quickly, reality sets in, and what we have realized and what we’ve seen is that you kill Charlie and now Charlie’s gone. And when you—that’s the thing. When you kill someone, they’re gone, at least in this life. And so we didn’t go from one Charlie to a million Charlies. We went from one Charlie to zero Charlies. And that’s just what happens. That’s why assassinations happen. That’s why people do them.
TUCKER CARLSON: Because they work.
MATT WALSH: Because it works. Yeah, because they work. And that’s been the greatest tragedy about all this. I mean, aside from the human tragedy that an actual human being lost his life and his wife doesn’t have a husband, his kids don’t have a father. I mean, that’s the great tragedy, the human tragedy.
But on a kind of national scale, the tragedy is that the strategy of assassination has been proven effective again, as it has all throughout human history. And so now this guy who was, I think, to an extent that none of us fully realized, was the glue that was holding everything together on the right, holding this whole crazy coalition together.
It turns out it was like one guy who was doing this and his organization, which is still around. I have a lot of respect for TPUSA. And I think they’re doing the absolute best they can in the face of this. I mean, I can’t even imagine being in the spot that they’re in. But he was the leader of the organization. He was the leader of the conservative movement. He was the glue.
And now he’s gone. And it kind of feels like everything’s coming undone, to be honest with you. And there’s all the fighting that’s going on. And for me personally, and I don’t like to—I don’t get into this because first of all, I don’t like talking about myself. I like to talk about the things that I think. I talk about my ideas about things all the time, but I don’t like talking about myself.
TUCKER CARLSON: Good. I like people who don’t like talking about themselves. But with that said, I hope you’ll talk about yourself.
The Pressure to Denounce
MATT WALSH: Well, and also, I don’t want to—I’m not the victim of any of this at all. But I can only speak from my own experiences. And so my experience is that I consider myself a personal friend of many of the people on either side of all of these various disputes, including a friend of yours. And so that’s a very complicated position to be in.
And then what ends up happening is—yes. And there’s people on either side. It’s really not even two sides. It’s—I don’t know how many. It’s fractured to a million pieces, it feels like. And so you’ve got the people on all the different sides of the different disputes who are shouting at me that I need to denounce so-and-so.
But the pressure is beyond it. The pressure is: don’t just disagree, but disavow, denounce, condemn. And my answer has been, and not everybody respects it—you don’t have to respect it—but my answer is, no, I’m not going to do that. And I’m not going to denounce a friend. I’m not ever going to do it, like, ever.
Because to me, loyalty is a principle. Loyalty is a—so when people say, “Well, you need to stand on your principles and come out and say this or that,” well, loyalty is a principle in my mind. It’s one of the most important principles for any person, for a man especially.
And I think that, you know, if you’re not in the middle of it and you’re kind of on the outside, there are a lot of things that go on behind the scenes that you don’t know about. And so when I say that somebody is a friend and I feel personal loyalty to them, that doesn’t just mean that, “Oh, I kind of like that person.”
But for me, anyway, what that means is this is someone who I know personally.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
MATT WALSH: Who I can call on the phone, who I can share a meal with, I’ve shared a meal with. And very often this is someone who has had my back and supported me in ways that you might not see. Not in like a “they’ve paid me off,” but just in a friend way, like, “I’ve got your back, I’m going to support you, I’ll defend you. Hey, everyone’s attacking you for this or that reason. And I got your back.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
MATT WALSH: And so there are a lot of people who’ve done that for me. And once you do that for me, then I feel duty bound that I cannot turn around. I will not turn around and stab you in the back or condemn you. Like, you have my back, I’ll have yours. That’s the idea, okay?
Why Loyalty Is a Principle
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the principle. You said it’s more than an idea, it’s more than an emotional response. It’s a principle. And you said it’s especially important for men. And I just agree with you so strongly when you say that. But I haven’t taken the time to think through why it’s so important to me. Can you explain why that’s a principle and why it’s especially important for men?
MATT WALSH: Well, I think it’s about integrity. I think it’s about having a spine. I mean, if you denounce someone because—especially, again, a friend—because you’ve got a million people screaming in your face and telling you to do it, well, how can that possibly be a principled stand? You’re doing it to get people to stop yelling at you.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
MATT WALSH: That’s why you’re doing it. And actually, even if they’re not your friend, if people are yelling at you, if you do anything because people are yelling at you to do it, then that’s the wrong reason to do something.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
MATT WALSH: It’s the wrong reason even to do the right thing, really. But with a friend, it’s the wrong thing. There’s also just this basic principle of doing to others as you would have them do unto you.
TUCKER CARLSON: And there’s something uniquely repulsive about betrayal, and that’s what that is. That’s why Quisling got executed. That’s why Judas is reviled. Betrayal—someone that you’re responsible for or are in a real relationship with, and then you whip around and undercut the person. That’s worse than, like, an invading army, kind of. It feels that way to me.
MATT WALSH: And I think that’s right. That’s something we all kind of instinctively understand, which is why everyone has such a low opinion of traitors.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
MATT WALSH: You know, traitors are below dirt in terms of how we rank them.
Now, disagreement, on the other hand, is not betrayal. And you can obviously disagree with someone who’s a friend. And if you have a friend who demands that you never disagree with them, well, that’s not really a friend. And the relationship you have with them is not a friend relationship.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a master-slave relationship. Right.
MATT WALSH: It’s a subservient relationship.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
MATT WALSH: And as men, we should not be in those kinds of relationships either. So you can certainly disagree with someone. And so I’m not talking about that. And that’s important, because even what I’m saying right now, I know that Twitter’s going to have fun with it, and they’re going to say, “Oh, you’re saying you can never disagree with a friend.”
Of course you can disagree with a friend. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about what I have personally experienced. If I look in my mentions or email or even people I talk to, they’re saying, “Denounce, condemn, disavow.”
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, that’s—
MATT WALSH: That very specifically, that’s what I’ve heard. And that is the thing that I cannot ever do. And maybe I have a more extreme view of that than most people. I mean—
TUCKER CARLSON: No, you don’t have the most basic human view. Like, what world are we in?
The Axe Murderer Question
MATT WALSH: Well, because someone asked me once—they said, we were talking about this. And they said, “Okay, what if someone you’re really close with, your brother, what if he murders someone? What if he becomes an axe murderer? Well, then you would disavow him and condemn him, wouldn’t you?”
TUCKER CARLSON: No, I’d get him a fake passport. I mean, he’s my brother.
MATT WALSH: Yeah. If my brother was a serial killer and had 40 bodies in his basement, I would not get on camera and disavow or condemn him. I would not do it.
TUCKER CARLSON: Now, who are you saying this to? Someone actually asked you that question?
MATT WALSH: Yes. To be clear, it was not my brother who was trying to make sure I wouldn’t say it. It wasn’t that.
The Limits of Loyalty
MATT WALSH: But just because their point is, yeah, the point they’re trying to make. I understand the point is that, yeah, you’re loyal to people, but it’s to a point. And it could get to a point where something happens that’s so extreme, or they’ve done something that’s so extremely wrong that it changes your calculation.
And my point is that for me, it doesn’t. Now, that doesn’t mean that—so if my brother, going back to my brother being serial killer, which, by the way, he’s not, just to be clear. But if you were, I wouldn’t defend. I wouldn’t get on camera and say, “Actually, it’s okay to be a serial killer.” And in that case, I mean, you know, I can understand the temptation to get him a passport, get him out of town, but I would turn him in because I think that that’s justice and also it’s best for him and his soul that he faced—
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, you’re probably—
MATT WALSH: He faced the consequence, but it wouldn’t be easy to do. But even in the midst of all that, I would not—I wouldn’t get up in public and say I condemn and disavow the way that, you know, what happens on Twitter or on social media in general now, when people are, when someone does something that upsets everyone, it’s like the old—it’s like the mid ages where your head is in the stocks right in the town square and everyone’s coming back by and throwing tomatoes at you.
And I’ve had my head in the stocks many times with the Twitter mob. I’ve been in that spot and probably in times when I’ve deserved it because I’ve said something that really is just stupid. And so everyone is just flinging crap at me and—
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, been there.
MATT WALSH: But my point is that if it’s my friend who’s got their head in the stock, even if they kind of deserve it because they said something stupid or they’re doing something stupid, there’s no scenario ever where I’m going to pick up a tomato and throw it at them. I’m not going to do that.
TUCKER CARLSON: Now.
MATT WALSH: I might speak to them privately and say, “Hey, you know what? You kind of have this coming because you need to get it together, you need to get it in line because what you did was wrong.” I’ll speak to someone privately and tell them that. And I have done that. If I disagree with a friend and what they’re doing, I will tell them that. So that’s the basic principle. But again, that’s not—that is all different from disagreement and saying, “I disagree with this person,” or worse.
The Totalitarian Impulse
TUCKER CARLSON: This is intuitively obvious, I think, to normal people. What I’m so struck by is how this doesn’t just remind me of medieval Europe. It reminds me of 2023. This is why Trump got elected. When we say woke or, you know, the crazy left, this is exactly, at least speaking for myself, what I’m talking about.
First of all, it’s identity politics. It’s censorship, the two things I hate in our country. But it’s the same impulse to publicly denounce people, to destroy people. And really what you’re saying when you demand that is it’s not just a breach of loyalty, it’s a transfer of loyalty. You’re saying you need to be more loyal to me and my ideas or the mob than you are to your own friends. It’s demanding control of your loyalty.
And my view has always been, I’m an adult man, I’ll decide who I like and who I don’t. That’s up to me. You’re trying to strip me of my autonomy, of my humanity. No, thanks. And that’s why I got to the point where after many years of disagreeing with the left, I really hated the left because I find that so totalitarian and scary.
I just can’t even believe that less than a year later, the right is doing the same thing. What is going on?
Defining the Enemy
MATT WALSH: Yeah. And going back to the great tragedy, the many tragedies that have grown from the one great tragedy of Charlie’s death. It is that we have, like the left—I still believe I’m old fashioned, so call me old fashioned, but I still believe that the left, that leftism, leftism as an ideology is the enemy. It is the problem. It’s the thing that we’re fighting against. It’s the thing that I’ve always fought against.
It’s why I’m doing any of this. It’s the only reason I’m on camera right now. The only reason that I’m doing any of this. The only reason I got into this, whatever it is that we’re doing, whatever this business is, this fight, it’s the reason I’m in. It is to oppose leftism.
TUCKER CARLSON: What is, how do you define leftism?
MATT WALSH: Well, I would define it—modern leftism is, first of all, moral relativism. It’s the idea that I have my own truth. You know, there is no truth. There’s no truth. I have my own. And so I think, to me, that’s the core of the thing. And I think that if you’re a relativist, then you are a leftist. Doesn’t matter what else you believe.
You could be a relativist and be anti-immigration. You could be relativist and believe in gun rights. Now, I think most relativists don’t end up there, but even if you did, you’re still a leftist because you reject truth. So that’s what it is at its core.
And also leftism, not really also, but as an extension of that, as an outgrowth of that. Leftism opposes civilization and it opposes Western civilization in particular and American identity most particularly of all. It opposes all of the institutions that our civilization depends on and is grounded in, like the institution of the family and the institution of marriage. It rejects all of that. It rejects the fundamental truths that we depend on.
It rejects the fundamental reality, like the reality of, well, men aren’t women and they’re kind of—I think a lot of leftists are trying to, in a really embarrassed kind of way, back away from that one because we beat them on it. You know, it’s a thing when we as conservatives can actually put all this bullsh*t to the side and focus on something. We can win and we beat the—it’s not totally dead, but the trans agenda is on life support and we defeated it. We took it down. We beat it.
We can do that. And it’s a good thing that we did because that was and is wicked and evil and it’s hurting people and killing people.
TUCKER CARLSON: Couldn’t agree more.
The Sanctity of Human Life
MATT WALSH: But they also, they reject the reality of human life. The fact that human life has inherent worth and dignity from the moment of its existence, from the moment of its conception that your life is not—the value of your life is not contingent. That’s another fundamental aspect of leftism. They believe that human life, the value of human life is contingent.
It’s contingent for babies on whether or not their mother wants them. It’s contingent on how much of an inconvenience they cause to their parents. And if it turns out that their mom doesn’t want them and their parents find them inconvenient, then their life has no value. Their life is less than garbage and can be killed and thrown into a dumpster.
And that’s what is still happening in this country every single day. That’s still happening hundreds of thousands every year. Hundreds of thousands of human children are poisoned, stabbed in the heart with poison needles, dismembered, decapitated and thrown into medical waste dumpsters. They don’t even get a burial because—
TUCKER CARLSON: They are treated as less than—or recycled into vaccines.
MATT WALSH: Yes, they are treated as less, having less value than a dog. They have less value than an animal. I mean, there are animals—
TUCKER CARLSON: Who are—
MATT WALSH: From conception, federally protected, like sea turtles and bald eagles and human children have less protection than that.
TUCKER CARLSON: So—
MATT WALSH: And I know you know all this. I’m preaching to the choir. My point is—
TUCKER CARLSON: But I love it. Can’t be said too much, right?
What We’re Conserving
MATT WALSH: My point is that—so that’s happening. That is, to me, that’s the enemy. That is what we’re opposing. And if you’re in favor of that, if you’re among the forces that are pushing this, the destruction of the family, the destruction of human life in the womb, the rejection of reality, of objective truth, of national, of American identity, of Western civilization. If you’re pushing that, then you’re my enemy.
You are my enemy. And I want to destroy your—I want to destroy your ideology. I want to destroy everything you stand for. That’s what I want to do. And if you’re against—but if you’re against them, and that is to say you stand for American identity and for the sanctity of human life and the family and objective truth and reality, the church faith, if you’re on that side, then I consider you to be basically an ally.
And we could disagree vehemently on a lot of other issues we could disagree on. There could be a lot of disagreement. If we agree that, okay, we need to preserve all—as conservatives, what are we conserving? Well, to me, it’s easy. We’re conserving Western civilization. We’re conserving American identity. We’re conserving the sanctity of human life. We’re conserving the family. We’re conserving marriage. That’s what we’re conserving.
And if you agree with me on that, then we’re on the same side, as far as I’m concerned. Now, we might have a lot of disagreements about how to conserve those things.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
MATT WALSH: And those disagreements might be even brutal and bitter at times. But if that is the argument, then we’re all on the same side arguing. If we’re arguing about whether those things should be conserved, well, then if you’re on the other side of that argument, then we’re not on the same side at all. We’re in two different universes.
I don’t even know what universe you’re living in. And the divide, I think, ideologically in this country is so vast and so deep and so unbridgeable that we may as well be living in different universes. We may as well be aliens from different galaxies trying to live on a planet together and it’s just not working out. That’s what it feels like. And so for me, that’s where the fight is. That’s where I want the fight to remain.
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Economics and Human Dignity
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, first of all, that’s the greatest description I’ve heard in a long time. The clearest. It was like music to me hearing that because I agreed with every single word so strongly. You didn’t mention economics. I noticed, which is revealing.
MATT WALSH: I didn’t.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I wouldn’t. And I know you’ve got views on it, I certainly do. But you mentioned what underlies the economic views, which is your view of other human beings.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, because I—so that’s—I’m glad you brought that up because that’s a really important point because I am—when it comes to economics, I’m pretty—I hate to use the term, I’m pretty libertarian when it comes to a lot of economics.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, me too.
The Welfare State and Conservative Principles
MATT WALSH: I would love to see—I don’t think there should be a welfare state at all. I think we should abolish food stamps. I think we should abolish the income tax. I think the income tax is evil. I think it’s terrible. And so that’s how I feel about it.
However, as far as I’m concerned, you could be a conservative and have the exact opposite. You could be a conservative and say, “You know what? I think we should raise the income tax. I think the welfare state is great. I think there should be more of it. I think we should give food stamps to more people. I think we should have universal basic income.” I think all these things, you could have that view as a conservative.
Now, I will vehemently disagree with you. I will argue with you, and I will yell at you and you’ll yell at me, and that will be fine. But if the reason why you want that, it comes down to why do you want that? Why do you think we should have a welfare state?
If your reason is that, “Well, this is the way to support families and this is the way to make sure that we can have more families, that people can have kids,” well, I think you’re wrong. I think actually it destroys the family. But you want the same thing as I do, and so we’re on the same side. I just think that you’re lost. I think you’re trying to find the same destination, but you’re off in the woods somewhere on the path. And I want to wave to you and say, “No, come back over here.”
TUCKER CARLSON: But you’re using the same alphabet. I mean, you’re speaking in the same tongue. You have a common point of reference, which you want the—
MATT WALSH: Same outcome, which is on the left. The reason why they want a lot of that stuff, more control is more control. And because they actually want to destroy the family, they want to make the family irrelevant. They say, “Well, you know, if we have a vast welfare state, everyone’s getting money there, everyone’s on the dole, then you don’t really need the family. You don’t need a father going to work and caring for his family.” And so that’s what they’re trying to get to. That’s their reason for having that view.
Gaza, Identity Politics, and Absolute Standards
TUCKER CARLSON: But who is they? Is the question. And as I heard you explain who you’re fighting against and why, and I nodded along in agreement. I really was the choir to your sermon. I thought you’re describing the people who defend the war in Gaza perfectly. Perfectly.
They don’t believe in absolute standards of truth at all. What they’re committing in Gaza is exactly what they decry correctly when it happens to other people. Can’t kill innocents. They didn’t do anything wrong. Not on purpose. You can period. You’re not allowed to do that, but they defend it fully. So they don’t believe in an absolute standard of behavior at all. They don’t believe in truth. It’s totally dependent upon circumstance.
You’ve even seen people say it out loud. “We raised an entire generation correctly to believe that slaughtering people because of how they were born is the greatest sin,” which it is. I believe that. “And now we’re being hoisted by our own standards.” And my view is no, standards are absolute. It’s either true or it’s not. And it’s universally applicable, or it’s not a real thing. It’s just group—it’s identity politics.
That’s exactly what I hate. And identity politics is the kind of political expression of the worldview that you have just decried and declared war against. And God bless you for doing that. But that is in full flower on the right. And I’m not going to—I don’t want to dignify people by naming them, but people I know who call themselves like MAGA conservatives are defending the murder of innocents.
And by the way, some of them suggest we just move the refugees into the United States because that’s good for the country that they support. But is that good for us? That’s an attack on American identity.
You’re also describing, by the way, in a lot of ways, Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, who are all required to hate. And I’m not supporting him, of course, but this is like the most socially conservative country in Latin America that has banned abortion, banned gay marriage, banned gender transitions, banned usury, banned loaning at crazy interest levels because it destroys people.
I don’t think he’s done a good job running his country. Obviously he hasn’t, but to your point that we should be open to talking to people who share our most basic values, how is he not on that list? “Oh, shut up, you communist.” But I’m not a communist. I’m not going to be bullied by your dumb labels. Not yours, but I’m anticipating the many attacks. I have been attacked for saying that, but it’s just—it’s true.
So what’s the answer? Do you see what I’m saying? So I guess what’s blowing my mind is that I thought I was speaking the same language as a lot of people that I disagreed with on the margins, like about what’s the best way to harness capitalism to help people? I mean, these are real debates.
And then I realized with the war in Gaza that these are people who don’t believe in Western civilization. Because Western civilization can be boiled down to one concept, and that’s the individual. If someone does something wrong, we punish that person. We don’t kill his kids.
Why do we do that? Why is that our standard? Because we believe that God created every person as an individual and every person will stand before God alone to account for his life. He’s not responsible for what his children do, what his ancestors did, what his forebears might do. He’s responsible for himself.
Because we believe in the individual soul, not the collective soul. And that’s what makes our civilization unique in the history of the world. And it derives from Christianity, from the Christian belief of the individual soul. And I see all these people who clearly don’t believe that. So how are we on the same side?
The Israel Question and Refusing to Be Told What to Think
MATT WALSH: Well, I think, I mean, so this is where we can be friends on the same side and disagree. Because I wouldn’t agree with everything you just laid out there. I think that—I think last time we talked, we talked a little bit about Israel. And my take at the time was I really don’t care, right? I just don’t care. I honestly don’t care.
TUCKER CARLSON: I want that take bad, don’t want to care.
MATT WALSH: I don’t want anything to do with this. And that’s still my take. That’s always been my take. It upsets people on both—this is one legitimately on both sides of the Israel issue. People get mad at me for that because they say that, well, if they’re very pro Israel, they say, “Well, you’re being a coward and you need to stand up and support Israel and talk about how Israel’s are greatest, most important ally and all this stuff.”
TUCKER CARLSON: And—
MATT WALSH: But then on the other side, very much it’s, “Well, no, Israel’s the Great Satan. They’re the most evil country in the world. They’re responsible for everything bad that happens.” And which is something that I think some people legitimately really do believe at some level. A lot of people believe that, right?
And so then they say to me, “Well, you need to stand up and say that.” And again, my response to that is, first of all, don’t tell me what to say, okay? I have my own mind.
TUCKER CARLSON: Amen.
MATT WALSH: So don’t tell me what to say. I will say what I want to say. And I can only speak for my own opinion. This is my view, and I think we’ll get back to it. But not to get sidetracked, this is one thing, by the way, that’s making political conversation in this country impossible is that all anyone ever does anymore is impugn the motives behind the argument that you’re making.
So you make an argument and then everyone goes, “Well, you’re only saying that because—” And it’s like, first of all, even if it’s true that I’m making this argument for some dishonest reason, well, is the argument right or not? Because if the argument is right, the argument’s still right even if I’m the worst guy in the world saying it.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s also like arguing with a woman. They tell you what you think, and it’s like, no, I’m actually telling you what—
MATT WALSH: Right. And, well, here’s why you’re really saying that. Well, for me, the only person who can speak to your motives is you.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
MATT WALSH: And so if I ask you, “Well, why are you saying that?” And you tell me I have no choice but to just accept that because I’m not in your mind. You’re the only author, you are the only authority of what is in your mind. You’re the only one on the planet. The only other authority, the only greater authority is God. And I can’t really ask him. So I can only go to you on that. And so you’re describing my life.
TUCKER CARLSON: But, yes, I agree with you. So—
MATT WALSH: So for me, on Israel, when I say I don’t care and everyone on both sides goes, “Well, you’re saying that because—” No, I’m saying that because that’s what I think I’m saying. And I always have. Which is why, by the way, you can go through my catalog. I’ve been blabbering my opinions publicly for a while now.
And not, as you know, I haven’t been in the business as long as you, but I’ve been, you know, at least 10 years on the record. And if you go through that before, I worked at the Daily Wire, and while I was there, when I was independent, I was an independent blogger, just churning out content.
And you can go through all that, and here’s what you’ll find. You’ll find that I almost never, ever talked about Israel. And when I did talk about it on the rare, like, once every five years if it came up, my take was, I don’t really care about this. I don’t care about this country. It’s not my country. You know, if you’re in America, if you’re an American politician, you should care about America first. And that’s it. That’s always been my take, so that’s always been my take, by the way.
TUCKER CARLSON: Me too. Believe it or not, up until the last year, I don’t—in 35 years, I don’t think I’ve talked about Israel 10 times.
So here’s the point. It’s not actually about Israel. It’s about the components of the American right who are defending mass murder. And I mean that murder, killing people who didn’t do anything wrong in Gaza. That’s it. It’s not Israel, it’s what about the parts of this coalition that as you noted, Charlie really did keep together that are now fracturing.
But one of the reasons they’re fracturing is because they have different views, different worldviews. And that is obvious when you hear how they respond to the murder of kids and women in Gaza. So it’s Americans responding to that. Are you really conservative? How are you not the leftist that you just described? If you’re like, “Well, they’re basically all Hamas, including the kids.” That is collective punishment. That’s blood guilt. That’s the opposite of what you described. How can I be on the same side as someone with that attitude?
MATT WALSH: Well, here’s what I would say. I think that if somebody is making the argument that we or Israel can kill as many Palestinians as they want, can kill children because their lives have no value because they’re Palestinian, if you’re making that argument, then that is a leftist argument.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. It’s a leftist argument.
The Moral Complexity of War and Civilian Casualties
MATT WALSH: However, however, however, I think that there are plenty of people who would defend and have defended Israel’s actions in Gaza and even our involvement, which I don’t agree with us being involved at all. But people have had that view, but not on that basis.
What they would say is, you know, they would say, oh, well, it’s not true that we’re killing children. It’s not. Or it’s really tragic. But it’s, you know, there’s no other way to fight the war. It’s not intentional. We’re actually targeting the terrorists. And this is, these are casualties that happen, like in any war. It’s very bad. You try to minimize them, but we don’t want that to happen.
They could say, you know, many arguments along those lines, just also arguments that just kind of reject the premise. Like your premise is that they’re doing mass murder of people in Gaza. I think that there are conservatives who would just reject that premise and say that’s not actually happening.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, but if you just, I think the undisputed fact there are tens of thousands. We can certainly say tens of thousands of women and children killed in Gaza. And so there are really two arguments you can make.
One is that that happens in war. Collateral damage, which is true. It’s 100% true that that always happens in war. It hasn’t happened at this scale in 80 years. But in the West. But it does happen, and the United States has done a lot of it. We dropped the atom bombs.
Okay, so, like, Israel’s not the only country that’s done this. But what are you sad about it? Do you think it’s bad? Would you be willing to say, holy sh*t, I can’t believe we killed 70,000 non combatants? That’s the acid test. Can you admit that that’s horrible? It’s horrible. It’s a moral crime.
It was a moral crime when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. It’s not even a close call, in my view. It’s not an endorsement of the Imperial Japanese government, but it’s like, that’s just bad. If you can’t say that, then you are endorsing collective punishment, aren’t you?
The Hiroshima Debate and Moral Arguments
MATT WALSH: Well, I think it goes back to what argument are you making? So, like using Hiroshima, for example. And I’ll be honest, I’ve kind of been on both sides of that. I think there’s interesting arguments on both sides.
I think a morally untenable argument would be, well, yeah, just kill as many as you need to. They don’t matter. They were Japanese, they were the enemy. Just kill them. Like that’s morally untenable, obviously. And based on that argument, well, then we could just nuke if you get into a war. Just like nuke the entire country, kill everybody. And why not? And that obviously, is that, that is rejecting the value of human life, which is not, which is an unconservative view. It’s also just deeply immoral.
But the other side of the argument, for, like the atom bomb, for example, would say, well, this was the best way to preserve human life, that these were legitimate military targets and the way to preserve human life ultimately was this way. If we had not done it then millions more people would have died, millions more Japanese would have died. And that’s the argument.
Now, like I said, I can see the argument for that now. That runs into the charge of ends justify the means.
TUCKER CARLSON: It doesn’t run into the charge. It’s an expression of ends justify.
MATT WALSH: Well, there’s, there’s all. Yeah, there’s, there’s.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like the perfect articulation of. It’s like, if I could save millions by shooting your children, it’s okay to shoot your children.
MATT WALSH: But I think there’s a difference. Like, there’s ends justify the means. Now we’re getting into philosophical. I’m not a philosopher. There’s end justify the means. There’s also the kind of the principle of double effect, which is different.
And double effect is, well, so I understand it. You can do something that you know will have a negative effect, but your intentions are good and you’re doing it in order to bring about a good result.
TUCKER CARLSON: This was the argument that Hitler and Stalin made. If you take a look at Stalin’s personal correspondence and diaries, which, by the way, are available, it was super interesting. He was an idealist. Like, he really believed he was ushering in a new era of man.
And, like, you had to kill a lot of Ukrainians to do that, and Georgians and Russians, by the way, a lot of Christians. You had to murder a lot of priests to get there. But by the end, you would have utopia. Hitler felt that way. It’s like, if we only get the Jews out, everything will be great.
But we are against them because we don’t share that view. We believe in human life. Like, it’s not okay to kill an innocent person.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, I think, yeah, that argument. Well, it’s not, yeah, it’s not okay to intentionally and deliberately kill an innocent person. I think that, you know, in war, innocent people do die. I think that there can, there are a lot of wars that have been unjust.
TUCKER CARLSON: There are.
MATT WALSH: There is such a thing as a.
TUCKER CARLSON: Just war, for sure.
MATT WALSH: There’s such thing as a necessary war. And if we can agree on that, then we have to accept that in any war innocent people will die. It’s a terrible tragedy.
So now, but the argument that I was just playing out for dropping the atom bomb, it’s true, like that, that can be terribly abused. My only point is, and I’m not even taking a position on that because I honest, my, my honest view is like, I kind of feel like I have, I have an opinion of it and then I express it and someone comes in and they just eviscerate my argument on it. And then I think, well, you might be right. And then I hear. So like that’s kind of where super.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, I should just say, I hope I don’t sound self righteous. My views have changed. If you went through my corpus of opinions, it would be a Jackson Pollock painting. It would just be splashes of everything. So like, my views are evolving in real time. But I’ve been forced to think about it because of what’s happening in Gaza.
Wrong for the Right Reasons
MATT WALSH: It’s like, I don’t feel like I have a choice. My only, my, my point about that is whatever is the correct view. Well, let’s just accept for the sake of argument, like, I’ll take your view that dropping the atom bomb was morally wrong.
I still think that somebody could be wrong about that, but for the right reasons. And so they’re still kind of on my side. Because the wrong, if you’re correct in your argument, then the wrong for the right reasons position is, yeah, we cherish human life. This was the best way ultimately to preserve human life.
And again, you could say, well, that’s wrong, but someone could have that view. And the reason why they have it is because they truly believe in the sanctity of human life. And they just honestly believe that that was the best way to preserve.
TUCKER CARLSON: That was my opinion until recently as a lifelong adamant pro lifer. So I, I mean, I want to give myself the benefit of the doubt, you know, I’m not for dead kids.
I guess what has really brought this to the fore is a guy called Randy Fine, who’s a congressman from Florida who, you know, I disagree with on a lot. I don’t think I disagree with him on anything, actually. He spent his career in the gambling business exploiting people, and now he got some kind of clever way to find a Senate, a House seat in Florida. Everything about it I disapprove of.
And of course I don’t like his foreign policy views, but there are a lot of people like that and I’m not mad at them. What makes him unusual is that he said out loud what I think a lot of people think, which is like, it’s hilarious to see a picture of a dead child in Gaza.
Somebody tweeted him, I know you’re online, you’ve seen this, a picture of a dead baby in Gaza. And he laughed at it and said, someone said, how can you sleep at night? You know, getting self righteous with him. Okay. Being high handed. Like the anti war left is how can you sleep? But I get it, they’re annoying.
But like, it is like, his response was very well, thank you. Thanks for the pick. If that’s your gut reaction to a picture of a dead baby, we are not on the same side in any way. On the deepest level, we’re not on the same side. I’m a father. Like, I’m not, how can I laugh at that? I can’t.
And that to me revealed what I think a lot of people think who I know very well who call themselves conservatives, which is just like, these are not human beings. Well, if you’ve got that attitude, how can you, how can you really care about me or my country or my children? Like, I don’t think you can.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, I think that I certainly would agree with you on that. If you, if you think that dead kids are funny, then we’re not, we’re not just on the same side. But this goes back to, I don’t think we’re living in the same universe.
TUCKER CARLSON: You’re the leftists that you described.
MATT WALSH: Yeah. Because you fundamentally cannot value human life. If you could ever see it as funny that a child was dead. I think so. So for sure. And I think that there are people that we would call neocons that are definitely not conservative by any stretch.
My only point to you is that I think there are plenty of people who are on the other side of the, of the argument who are Conservative. And they just don’t, they don’t agree with the premise that you’re laying out. They don’t. And they do want to preserve human life. They think this is the way to do it. They could be wrong, but people can be wrong about.
TUCKER CARLSON: Or they haven’t thought about it, or the partisan system. I’ll speak for myself. I didn’t think about it at all. And all the people getting mad about Hiroshima hated America. It was just a fact. And they wanted to say that all American military expeditions were immoral because America was fundamentally immoral. That’s the point they were making.
They wanted us to hate ourselves. They taught us a history that convinced our kids to hate themselves and to hate their own country, and that’s all evil. And we’re watching the results of it now.
So I was like, man, there’s no way I’m on their side. Like, they hate everything that I love, including my nation. So I just was like, if you’re for it, I’m not for it. And because I’m a child that way. Like, I just react against things. But now I’m feeling like I got misled into supporting an awful lot of violence. Like, a lot of violence. And how is that good?
Politicians and the Hunger for Power
MATT WALSH: Yeah, I think. Well, so there’s two things. First of all, there’s a, maybe there’s a whole other category we should be talking about, because we’re talking about, oh, left, right, conservative, liberal. Then you have, you also have, though, politicians who often, not always, but often are neither. And they don’t have it. They don’t have an ideology for sure. And their ideology is control and power. And, and that’s what they care about.
TUCKER CARLSON: What percentage would you say fall into that category?
MATT WALSH: 95%.
TUCKER CARLSON: It feels that way, doesn’t it?
MATT WALSH: Well, I would, I’ll amend that. I think it’s, it used to be 95%. I want control and power. I think now it’s more like, this is even worse now. It’s like 70% want control and power, and then you’ve got another 20% who, they’re just there because they want attention. Like the Jasmine Crocketts.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right?
MATT WALSH: They’re just there because they want to be influencers, like Jasmine Crockett.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m so grateful for her. She amuses me every day.
MATT WALSH: But if you were to go to Jasmine Crockett and say, okay, here’s two buttons. Press one button and you’re the President, United States, press the other button and you have 50 million Instagram followers and your Instagram, she is pressing The Instagram button. 100%. But it’s a, that’s a different, like, species of politician we’ve seen before.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, it’s so true.
MATT WALSH: Because up to this point, every single politician, like, I can be president. I’ll take that over, you know, if it’s like, press this button, you can be president, but as a consequence, your whole family dies. They’re pressing the button. Oh, yeah. A lot of these people.
And now it’s a little bit, there’s, there are people who, they’re politicians. They’re not even really hungry for power. They just want attention, which I think in some ways is somehow even worse.
But anyway, they just want power category. I think that does describe a lot of the people we would call, like, neocons. Lindsey Graham.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MATT WALSH: Is for sure in this category. You know, I don’t know where it was. He gave a speech recently. He was talking about, I think it was him bragging about how we ran out of bombs or something like that. I think I have the right person here.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
The Moral Case for Violence and Justice
MATT WALSH: And so it’s like, okay, well, you obviously do not take human life seriously. If you just think it’s like you just want to run out of the bombs. And for someone like him, this is not someone who’s a conservative at all. For someone like him, he doesn’t—I don’t think that he’s passionately in favor of like abortion or destroying the family.
TUCKER CARLSON: He just doesn’t care. Doesn’t matter.
MATT WALSH: Right. It doesn’t matter to him. So that, I think that’s the other category that exists. That’s really—
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s really smart. That’s really smart. It’s like post-ideological. It’s even kind of post-power. It’s just pure narcissism.
MATT WALSH: Yeah. Although I—I’m actually glad you brought it up because I wanted to talk to you about this. In defense of violence. If I could, because I’ve heard you talk about this and my views are—
TUCKER CARLSON: By the way, changing even during this conversation. Like, this is all new to me, so I don’t—
MATT WALSH: So, because I’m actually, I think in some ways we should have a lot more violence in society. I’m sort of pro-violence in a certain context. I think that violence can be a necessary tool for justice. I just believe that now it can be really misused and it very often is, and I think it very often is these days. But it is a necessary tool for justice.
And so what I’m really mostly talking about are evil people who’ve committed terrible crimes against the innocent. And I think that through a legal means, I’m talking about, you know, I’m—
TUCKER CARLSON: Talking about extrajudicial lynchings or anything.
MATT WALSH: I’m talking about legal means for those kinds of people. We should be using violence a lot more because I think that it’s just—I just think that it’s justice. What is justice? Justice is giving to someone what they’re owed. You know, giving to anything, what is putting things in the right place, basically, I would say, is justice.
So giving someone what they’re owed is justice. So if you owe me five dollars, it’s justice that you give me five dollars, that’s a matter of justice. And if you give me three dollars and you owe me five, that’s an injustice that has occurred.
Now if I slap your wife in front of you, I’m owed something else. I’m not owed five dollars, but I am owed something. Now, like, it is right that I receive something and that I would say is a slap, right? It’s, you slap my wife, I’ll punch you ten times in the face instead. Like, that’s, that is a just response. That is justice.
And I think what we have these days, you got a lot of people walking around doing this assault, like literally assaulting women, you know, and they don’t receive what they’re owed. And what they’re owed is harsh and I think sometimes violent, but just punishment. And so that’s my one kind of caveat.
Balancing Justice with the Sermon on the Mount
TUCKER CARLSON: You know, it’s hard to disagree with that. It’s, I mean, of course, viscerally, I agree with you. And all of this is just aimed at whites, obviously, because what you’re talking about is a racial dynamic where non-whites who commit crimes just aren’t punished as harshly as whites who commit crimes. So it’s a racial double standard designed to like, destroy the country, which it’s doing.
And I feel that every person feels that, like the need for justice. And sometimes that is—that expression is physical. How do you balance that against, like, the Sermon on the Mount, which I happen to have read this morning, where Jesus is like, well, the law is eye for an eye, tooth for tooth. But I tell you, turn the other cheek and he takes your shirt, give him your cloak.
MATT WALSH: I’ll tell you because I’ve thought a lot about this. Hopefully all Christians have thought about the Sermon on the Mount a lot. It’s only the most important public address.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s ever been mind-blowing. Whenever people are like, oh, Jesus was a great person, great teacher. You read that and you’re like, either he was God or this whole thing is insane. Because this is not, it’s not intuitive wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, that’s the C.S. Lewis, the trilemma. Lunatic, liar or Lord, you know, those are the only options. But anyway, so, yeah, of course I, as all Christians should, I’ve thought a lot about this and how do you—because I also recognize in myself I’m talking about how violence can be just. And I really believe that. But I also, I have a vengeful streak in me. I fully recognize that.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, me too.
MATT WALSH: And when I see evil people, I actually do sometimes hate them. And hate means, like, I don’t just want justice for you, I want you to suffer.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
MATT WALSH: And I want you to burn in hell and that—and as Christians, we should never want that. We should never want anyone to be damned. And sometimes I find that feeling in myself. I pray about it. I just have to be honest that I do feel that way about really bad people.
But how do you square this? I think that—so turn the other cheek. I think it’s very important to notice that Jesus is saying, if someone slaps you, turn the other cheek.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MATT WALSH: What he does not say is if someone slaps your wife or someone slaps your child, or someone slaps an innocent woman on the subway, turn the other cheek. Because turning the other cheek in that situation is not you being the bigger man, it’s you being a coward. And so that’s how I square it.
And that’s how I can also square Jesus having these kinds of, you know, quote-unquote, anti-violence statements that he made with—also famously, he goes into the temple and fashions a whip. I mean, that’s what scripture says. It’s not even like he grabbed one. This was premeditated. This was first degree, like. And so he fashions a whip and he starts beating these people to get them out of the temple. And that is violent.
I mean, think about—it’s easy to read these stories and you just read it as a story we’ve heard a million times, heard in Sunday school as a child. It gets kind of sanitized. Well, imagine actually seeing this happen. I mean, imagine actually seeing it in real life that you’re there and somebody has a whip and they are throwing down tables, beating people with whips. I mean, there’s going to be blood. It’s going to be a very brutal scene in the temple of all places, in the temple.
And yet this was Jesus Christ who did it. This was our Lord and Savior who did this act. And so it was and had to be a moral act. And so what that tells us is that, you know, violence is sometimes necessary. Now, the rejoinder to that is, well, that was, you know, God made flesh who used violence. And that doesn’t mean that you can do it.
The State’s Authority and Its Failure
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, there’s also a theme that runs throughout the New Testament where Jesus and his disciple Paul draw very clean distinction between you as a Christian and the state. So the state is held to different—the state operates by a different code. Right. Render unto God what’s God’s, render unto Caesar what’s Caesar’s. I don’t know. I’m the opposite of a theologian. I really—
MATT WALSH: I really don’t know what happens when the state—and we’re experiencing this right now, because I think that is kind of the answer. The state has authority from God. Now, it doesn’t—like that’s, it’s hard sometimes, especially for conservatives to accept that. But that’s scriptural. The state has authority from God.
Now, it can reject its mandate. It can do things that are evil, obviously, and it can do things that we should reject and in some cases, even rebel against in the most extreme cases. So we know all that is true. But the state as, like, an institution, generally speaking, has authority. This is God-ordained. This is what God wants. He doesn’t want us all to live as—he doesn’t want anarchy, you know, where there’s no one in charge.
But so the state has that authority. What happens when the state refuses to exercise that authority? Right, and what happens when it refuses to enact justice and it refuses to protect the innocent? What happens then?
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you overthrow the state.
MATT WALSH: Yeah. At what point—at what point morally can the average citizen say, well, the state is not doing this, and so I have no choice but to do it. If I don’t do it, then it won’t be done. And I think we’re getting perilously close to a point where people en masse start saying that.
They start saying, the state is not doing this. They’re not defending my family. They are not defending my community. My community is unlivable. These violent psychopaths who’ve been arrested forty times are running through the street assaulting women, assaulting children, and I cannot live this way anymore. And I won’t live this way. And I think we’re getting perilously close to a point where en masse, people start saying that.
TUCKER CARLSON: And when they start saying that, perilously or blessedly close?
MATT WALSH: Well, perilously, because that’s not—I would prefer that’s not the best option. The best option is the state does its job when the other option is ultimately chaos. I mean, that’s where it leads. And but that’s where we are. I think, right now, you have, like, the best version of that are people who have benevolent intentions and know what they’re doing and are good, decent people, and they step up in an extreme situation because nobody else will.
And they do the thing that the state won’t do, but they don’t go overboard, and they don’t become, you know, Batman. And so, like Daniel Penny, for example. I mean, Daniel Penny is an example of someone who said, okay, I got to step in. I got to do the right thing. This guy should not be out here. He should not be allowed on this subway. There should be some kind of cop here to arrest him. No one is doing it. I’m going to step up. And I’m glad that he did. He was right to do it. And so that’s the best version. The best version of people stepping in where the state has failed is—
The Daniel Penny Case and the Inversion of Justice
TUCKER CARLSON: Did he get a Presidential Medal of Freedom? What happened to Daniel Penny?
MATT WALSH: That’s a very good question. Well, they tried to throw him in prison.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, I know it’s a rhetorical question, but it’s like, if you see heroism like that and it goes unrewarded, in fact, if it’s punished, then you have a total inversion of justice.
MATT WALSH: And then—
TUCKER CARLSON: And then how is the state legitimate at that point?
MATT WALSH: Right? And by design, when people like that become punished or punished as they—I mean, they tried to put him in prison, thank God they were not successful, but they, you know, they tried to destroy his life. Everybody else looks at that, and I think by design has this demoralizing effect because everybody else looks at that and they say, well, I don’t want that to happen.
And now I think—I mean, I don’t ride the subway because I value my life. But if I were on the subway and I saw something like that happening, I’d be thinking to myself, I hope I would step in. But I’d also be thinking, well, I got a family at home, I got a wife, and if I step in and I go to prison, so now I can’t be there for my wife and children. And so is it right for me to step up and protect these strangers if the consequence is now I can’t protect my own wife and children?
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.
MATT WALSH: I don’t know. And I don’t even know what the right answer is. I don’t know. I can’t even say for sure if I’m, if I’m looking at that happening and I’m in Daniel Penny’s shoes and I got a wife and children at home. I think the right thing is for me to step up and do what he did. But I’m not even sure if it’s the right thing because I got a wife and kids and now I got to call them. I got to call my wife and say, hey, by the way, I might be going to prison forever. Good luck. You know, I don’t know. It’s, it’s, it puts it, it creates a lose-lose unwinnable situation.
TUCKER CARLSON: Even now, you feel that even after the last election, and clearly there’s a reaction against the kind of government that we had, you still would feel like no one in authority would support you. And—
MATT WALSH: Yeah, generally, I think the rot—well, first of all, this is a—I mean, when we talk about the state in general failing to do the basic things to preserve civilization, this is a wide problem. It goes to the state level. It’s the local level, cities. And has all of that been fixed? Like, definitely not. I mean, not even close.
The Decline of Everyday American Life
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, so that was kind of the broad. That was exactly the question I’m asking. And I don’t even know if I have. You sent out an amazing tweet recently. Oh, it’s right here. December 4th. I want to read it.
“It’s an empirical fact that basically everything in our day to day lives has gotten worse over the years. The quality of everything—food, clothing, entertainment, air travel, roads, traffic, infrastructure, housing, et cetera—has declined in observable ways.”
You’re a nice writer, by the way.
MATT WALSH: Thank you.
TUCKER CARLSON: There’s not enough good writing on Twitter.
“Even newer inventions, search engines, social media, smartphones, have gone downhill drastically. This isn’t just a random old man yells at clouds complaint. It’s true. It’s happening. The decline can be measured. Everyone sees it, everyone feels it. Meanwhile, political pundits and podcast hosts, speaking of things that are getting worse, focus on anything and everything except these practical real life problems that actually affect our quality of life.”
So I have like eight questions there, and I’m going to ask you about your core observation. Is it getting worse? Clearly it is. Why are podcast hosts and pundits ignoring this physical reality?
MATT WALSH: I don’t know. I think that it’s a wide group of people. I think they have different motivations. I think for, well, there’s the most obvious answer is that for a lot of these people, pundits, podcast hosts, cable news, you know, all the media in general.
TUCKER CARLSON: A lot.
MATT WALSH: A lot of them, I think, are insulated from a lot of this stuff. They don’t live in this world.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, that’s right.
The Restaurant Food Problem
MATT WALSH: And things like, so, for example, we’re talking about things that are getting worse. One thing, and it seems small, but it’s not. One thing that’s really getting worse is restaurant food. Okay? Restaurant. The food at most restaurants, I’m talking about, like chain restaurants, you go to Applebee’s or Chili’s or whatever, you order a pizza from one of these places, especially one of these chain places, and the food is worse.
And that’s not just, again, it’s not old man. I am an old man yelling at clouds. But that’s not what this is. It is true. It’s a real thing that’s happening. And you can trace it. You can look at, okay, starting in the early 2000s, all these places started getting bought up by private equity companies.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MATT WALSH: And so now they’re run by people who don’t care about the product or even know anything about it. So that’s happening also. It used to be that you go to these places and it’s a bunch of like, teenagers and college kids that are working there and they’re just working there to make some money to pay for college or whatever. And that’s happening less now.
And now you’ve got adults, you know, very, an increasing number of, like, people with substance abuse problems, people who, you know, they’re in their late 20s and they’re still, you know, they’re doing a job that a 16 year old used to do because their life isn’t working out exactly as it should. That’s its own problems. Like, why is that happening? Right.
But the effect of that is that even a lot of the people, not all of them at all, but a lot of the people in the establishments that are working there on the ground don’t really care that much about the product. And you can see why they don’t care. They’re getting paid crap wages. They’ve got a difficult life. They’re working for people who don’t care about it.
So the guy who runs this, if I’m working at Applebee’s, and I’m a waiter, and I’m looking at it like, okay, the guy who runs this place doesn’t know anything about this. He doesn’t care. I’m getting paid nothing. Why do I care? You know? So I don’t care. And so that’s happening.
And then the quality of the food. It used to be that most these places made their food fresh. Now no place makes food fresh anymore. They all buy frozen food. There are a couple of food distributors. Sysco is one of them, that the vast majority of the food that you eat at a Chili’s or Applebee’s or whatever is distributed. It comes off the same truck. It’s the same frozen food that comes off of the same truck and that is served in all these places, which is why all the food sucks.
And it all tastes the same, because it’s literally the same. People don’t know that. Even pizza places, again, everything’s frozen. There’s one, I forget the name of it. There’s one cheese distributor that distributes most of the cheese at all these different places. And that’s like the crucial element of a pizza. And it’s literally the same. It’s the same thing, but they’re just pretending that it’s not. So my point is that this is a small thing, by the way.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not a small thing.
MATT WALSH: Right. So it’s not important. Yes, it’s quality of life. It’s your diet. It’s what you eat. It’s, and that stuff really matters.
Now, podcast hosts and pundits, a lot of them, why don’t they care? Well, there’s two reasons. Number one, they’re not eating at these places. And if you have money, then you don’t have to worry about that, because you can go to expensive places where the steak costs $85, and it’s not going to hurt you much because you got a lot of money.
And if you have a lot of money, then you don’t notice any of this, because at the really fancy restaurants where people spend a lot of money, most of those places are still making fresh food. And the service is a lot better because they’re paying better wages to the waiters. Like, now you’ve got older waiters and waitresses, but they’re older, who have kind of climbed up the ladder. They’re really good at this. They get paid better wages. They care about it.
Like, you go into one of these fancy places, and I like eating. I mean, who doesn’t like eating at these kind of restaurants. The food is good, but you go into it and one of the first things you notice before you even get to the quality of the food is that everyone, at least in the good places, everyone that you interact with, starting at the hostess stand, seems to be really happy that you’re there and they care that you’re having a good experience.
That is not how it works when you go to Chili’s, you know, so anyway, these podcasts, these people that I’m talking about, they’re in those places. And so they’re not in the places where the quality is falling off, falling off a cliff.
And then also I think that, and this is something we all do, and I do it too. You get caught in this. We’re dealing with, like, national issues all the time. We’re dealing with politics and what’s happening in Washington and the president and geopolitics and what’s happening. We’re dealing with these massive, big things all the time. If you’re a pundit, if you do commentary, and so you can fall into this line of thinking that.
TUCKER CARLSON: The things.
MATT WALSH: That actually impact someone’s physical, everyday life, those things are just too small to worry about.
The Disconnect Between Pundits and Reality
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, politicians wind up at this exact place.
MATT WALSH: And it’s true that because I run into this when I start talking about this stuff, I will hear this criticism from people. They’ll say, why are you talking about this? I did a, I did a whole video on my, on my channel few weeks ago. I did like a 30 minute monologue on why does restaurant food suck?
And there are two interesting things that happen after I talked about this issue. One is that I did get a lot of criticism from people saying, everything’s happening in the world. You’re talking about Applebee’s. Like, why are you talking about this? You know, it’s like, how out of touch are you? When really it’s the opposite. It’s like, no, this is, this is the stuff that’s happening in people’s lives.
But so that I got that criticism. But then what I also noticed is that a lot of people watch that video. It was like one of the more successful terms of traffic videos that I’ve done in a while. And it was just about food at Applebee’s. And why is that? It’s because, again, this is like this, this is your life. This is what’s happening in your actual life, and it matters. It touches you and it touches your family.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. And this is one thing I notice about a lot of people in the world that I have always lived in is they either spend time, and this is true for me, I’ll admit it. They either spend time in very rich places or in very rural like low income places. But there’s no time spent in the middle, which is where the overwhelming majority of Americans live.
So it’s like only rich people, only poor people, but no middle class people. So they have a sense of like, you know, a lot of rich people have summer houses. So they sort of get, you know, if you’re on Nantucket, right, and you go there in the winter and everyone’s on drugs, you’re like, oh wow, you know, fentanyl is a huge problem in our country.
But there’s no Applebee’s. There’s no Applebee’s in Cambridge, Mass. There’s no Applebee’s in Nantucket. There’s no, do you see what I’m saying? You just, you do get a very, I am so guilty of this, in fact so guilty that I really got to my way to like understand, you know. But there’s no sense of like normalcy.
MATT WALSH: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s also in the same way that like the richest people, Bill Gates for example, are totally focused on curing Africa and Congo, I mean curing malaria, polio. They’re obsessed with the problems of the poorest while living the lives of the richest. But like the bulk of the population is invisible to them.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, I think that’s right. I was having a conversation with someone recently who’s in the business and I don’t know, I mentioned in passing, I remember why I just mentioned a passing. I just been out, I just was coming, I just had been to Walmart, I was pick, I was buying something, whatever. I went to Walmart and this person was shocked that I’d gone to Walmart and they said I haven’t been in a Walmart in 20 years because there’s.
The Walmart Reality
TUCKER CARLSON: No whites in Walmart. That’s the other thing. They’re like, they’re, you drive into like middle America, there are nowhere. I don’t know what happened. All the whites, but we like to say that, I just notice it like we’re all, there’s no whites like a rest area on the highway anymore. And in Walmart I go to buy sporting clays. It’s my only shopping trip of the year usually. And it’s like where are the white people?
MATT WALSH: That’s part of the thing. I mean it’s a small thing, but it’s just, it’s emblematic of the problem.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like, well there’s just been total demographic change.
MATT WALSH: But as a commentator, if you have never been in a Walmart or, you know, it’s like, well, then that’s America. I mean, that’s middle America.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I totally agree.
MATT WALSH: So it’s just, there’s a basic, I’m not saying you got to go and walk around a Walmart like a safari trip just to understand America. I’m just saying that it’s just like that’s, yeah, that’s what’s going on in America. Is it a place like that? And if you’re just never there at all to your point about either you’re out in the sticks or you’re in the really wealthy areas, then you’re not really in touch with what’s actually happening in America.
And one of those things is, yeah, when you go, you do notice this when you go to the places where everybody goes. Walmart is one of those places. The DMV is one of those places, like a place where everybody has to go.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MATT WALSH: Unless they’re very, very, very rich.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
MATT WALSH: Or very, very, very poor. When you go to those places, you do notice. You start noticing things. And one of those things is like, yeah, it’s like, it looks a lot different now. It’s, it’s, it’s, yeah. Not nearly as many white people as there used to be. You start noticing those kinds of things.
Demographic Change and the Pressure Not to Notice
TUCKER CARLSON: Like, yeah, I’ve never been a bigot. It’s prohibited by my religion. But I also think there’s overwhelming pressure not to notice obvious things. And I try to keep myself alert just to notice what my eyes tell me. And that’s the biggest change. That’s an incredibly fast change. Incredibly, incredibly fast change.
It’s not an accidental change. It was an intentional change to reduce the white population in the United States. And I’ve kind of never seen anybody more passively accept it. And I wonder, like, are we getting to a point where we can say that and notice it? And why is that good exactly?
MATT WALSH: Well, for every other, it’s funny because certainly for every other race on the planet, if we were to look and see that in their native countries, they are dwindling and disappearing, everyone, it would be nothing controversial about saying, well, this is bad. No one would say, well, why is it bad?
TUCKER CARLSON: You know, I’m not even saying it’s bad. I’m just saying it’s so profound and abrupt.
MATT WALSH: Well, and I will say I think it’s bad.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
Demographic Replacement and Indigenous Identity
MATT WALSH: I think if you go to Nigeria, if I were to go to Nigeria and notice that all the Nigerians are disappearing, I would say, what’s going on here?
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, like everyone’s Chinese all of a sudden, right?
MATT WALSH: That’s bad. And if I said that, no one, I don’t think anyone would even ask, well, why is it bad? What do you mean why is it bad? It’s Nigeria. There should be Nigerians in Nigeria. And it’s bad if some other group comes and takes it over.
And I think for any other race or demographic on the planet, you can say that. For white people, we’re the one race, the one demographic where it’s not even just that you can’t notice that this replacement is happening. It’s that in fact we’re at the point now where you should notice it and celebrate it. It should be seen as a good thing.
TUCKER CARLSON: Isn’t that evil? Isn’t anyone who tells me that I’m not allowed to notice or scolds me for noticing, isn’t that person my enemy? I mean, how could you justify that? What does that say about your motives?
MATT WALSH: Yeah, I think so. And also, I said it’s every other demographic on the planet. Any other species on the planet.
TUCKER CARLSON: Where are all the condors?
MATT WALSH: Right, exactly. If we look, we get these panics all the time. Oh, all the Amazonian horned owls are disappearing or whatever and they’re going away. We have to preserve them. No one even stops and asks, why do we need Amazonian horned owls? We’ve got a million other owls. Why do we need these owls?
And it’s just seen as, well, they’re a species that existed. They should continue to exist. And so for every other demographic and species of living being, we can all agree that if those people disappear that it’s bad. And white people, only one where we can’t say that.
And part of the reason for that I think is, well, there’s a lot of anti-white sentiment. But also, so I use the example of Nigeria. Everyone recognizes that Nigerians or black are the native inhabitants of Nigeria. And so if the native inhabitants go away, we see that as a bad thing.
The Amazonian horned owl is a native inhabitant of the, I don’t think that exists, I’m just, whatever. But they’re a native inhabitant of the Amazon and so they should be there. With white peoples, it’s a really interesting thing where what we’re told is that white people are not native anywhere. We are not indigenous to anywhere.
Which is why, and I’m not making this up, there’s nowhere in the world you can go where the people who are officially recognized as the indigenous habitants are white. Nowhere. White people do not.
TUCKER CARLSON: Is that not genocidal intent?
MATT WALSH: Well, that’s my point. So it’s, okay, so we’re not indigenous anywhere. So where are we supposed to be? Because the other part is we’re supposed to be dead, apparently.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
Reclaiming Native American Identity
MATT WALSH: Because we’re told that, okay, the indigenous habitants and the, what’s implied every time we talk about indigenous people or just outright said is that, well, this land is really theirs and so you shouldn’t be here. And so what we’re saying to white people everywhere is that you shouldn’t be here.
Well, where should we be? You want us to go to Mars? I mean, are we going to Jupiter? Where are we supposed to be? Or are we just going to throw us into the ocean? And I think the answer is that we really shouldn’t be anywhere.
Which is why we should not be embarrassed or afraid to say that the Native, Native Americans are white people of European descent. That is true. The people that we call Native Americans now are not Native Americans. And the reason they’re not Native Americans is because they did not form a country called America.
They are not native. America is a country. It’s not just a place. It’s not just a plot of land. It is a country. And before America was formed as a nation, this place was not America. Because America didn’t exist. America existed when it was formed.
And so if someone can trace their lineage back to the Comanche on the Great Plains, well, that doesn’t make you a, you weren’t native to America. You’re native to Comancheria. You’re native to this. You’re not native to the country of America.
The people who are native to the nation of America, the people who formed this nation were by and large, almost exclusively white people of European descent. They are the natives of this country. They’re the ones who formed this country. That doesn’t mean that other people aren’t allowed to live here. It just means that they’re the natives.
And again, anywhere else in the world, there’s nothing controversial about pointing that out. And we’re the only place where we’re not allowed to say that. But I’ve been on this. I’ve been preaching this for a while now. I think we need, and not just as a gimmick, I really believe we should reclaim the title of Native American and not to denigrate the people that we call natives, who I think that they’re, it’s really interesting to read about their cultures and their history.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, they’re amazing people, but not native to here.
MATT WALSH: They’re not native to America. And they also were, by the way, they’re also not native in the strictest sense to this hemisphere. They didn’t sprout out of the ground. They came here at some point in the past from Asia. From Asia.
They fought brutally with each other over the land. All of the so-called natives that were here and had claimed land, when Europeans first started showing up in the late 1400s, early 1500s, all of those people were on that land because they brutally killed who’d been on it before. And they raped their women and took their children as slaves.
TUCKER CARLSON: One wave of conquest supplanted the next. Exactly.
MATT WALSH: And the law of conquest is what determined.
The Coordinated Attack on White People
TUCKER CARLSON: No, of course, factually true. And by the way, it’s been suppressed for many decades by anthropologists and archaeologists, by the official policy of the US government. But cracking the human genome made it impossible to deny the origin of the American Indians, which was Asia.
It’s fine. I mean, I really like the Native Americans. I do too, personally. Yeah, I’m not against them at all. I feel so bad for them. But you’re absolutely 100% right.
I just find it so interesting, the coordinated effort to exterminate white people, which is in full flower now. But it’s so, you know, it’s 1945 is when it started, but it was every part of our society.
I mean, I remember at Fox News in the most gentle way trying to say, you know, maybe all lives do matter or we shouldn’t attack whites because they’re white. Man, that was like the worst argument I ever got in with a senior executive at the network. Like, that’s racist. No, it’s actually an argument against racism.
It’s like everybody on all sides was so brainwashed in just accepting this. And then of course it happened. And so I wonder, does it ever let up? It didn’t let up in Zimbabwe or South Africa. You take the power, kill a bunch of whites, suppress them, and then 30 years later, you’re still blaming them for everything. Will that happen here when this becomes majority non-white?
MATT WALSH: All indications are that it will continue. I mean, so how do you respond to it?
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the right way to respond? You don’t want some kind of race war. I don’t want to wake up every day thinking about my whiteness. I’m not interested in my whiteness. Just be honest. I don’t like thinking in those terms. Sorry, call me a boomer, which I’m not, but I just don’t want to. I want to see people as people.
But how do you respond to that? Because you can’t allow that. You can’t allow people to attack your kids because of their skin color. What the f*?
MATT WALSH: Right, exactly. I think you respond to it and I think there has been some progress actually in this regard. Probably significant amount.
TUCKER CARLSON: You’ve been a big part of that by the way, on the right. So thank you.
Conservative Victories and the Power of Labels
MATT WALSH: Well, I mean, I think a lot. I think this is one of the things, like I said before, there are some victories that conservatives have had. I know some of the more doomer-minded conservatives say, what do we conserve? We haven’t conserved anything. Well, I’m not saying it’s been a, you know, I’m not saying it’s been, we’ve been batting a thousand, but I think we have succeeded.
TUCKER CARLSON: I think they’re referring, well, maybe this was what I think, but I do think they’re mostly referring to conservative institutions.
MATT WALSH: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Which I would agree with. A Republican Congress or some Republican think tank, those clearly haven’t achieved a lot.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, I would agree with that. But so one success that I think that you’re starting to see recently is that the left used to get a lot of mileage out of obviously not engaging with arguments but just labeling them. They would just label the argument.
And so they would say their way of engaging with argument is say, well, argument’s not wrong or right. I don’t care about that. The argument is an “ist” or “ism.” The argument is racist. The argument is, you know, whatever, bigoted, Islamophobic, whatever, anti-Semitic.
So they used to get a lot of mileage out of that. And I think what’s happening now is that people are saying, well, I don’t care about the labels. You can say whatever label you want. It just doesn’t mean anything to me. And the reason it doesn’t mean anything to me is it’s not my fault, it’s your fault. When you decided that everything fits under that label, the label doesn’t mean anything anymore.
TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.
MATT WALSH: And I think that’s made people more fearless. There was a time, I mean, look, you go back, 2000, well, certainly 2000. But even going back to 2020, in the throes of the Floydist era, and for a lot of people, being called racist was, it’s like the worst thing in the world. They were terrified of it.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh yeah.
MATT WALSH: Being called racist was, for a lot of people, that was worse than being called a child molester. I mean, they would rather be called anything but racist. And there’s all this fear. And I think the race hustlers got a lot of mileage out of that fear. I think that fear is starting to dissipate.
The Double Standard on Racial Hatred
TUCKER CARLSON: And yet I still haven’t seen many people, especially people who spend a lot of time claiming bias against them, coming out and making unequivocal statements against anti-white hate. Like that’s the one category I haven’t seen a lot of people say that.
No, hating whites is every bit as hating blacks or hating Jews or hating Asians or whatever. Hating a group is immoral. I have seen very few people say that. Bari Weiss is not big on that.
Why can’t we just say that it’s all the same, it’s all species of the same evil? That’s my opinion. I think that’s the Christian view. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s certainly my opinion and it makes, it’s a coherent argument. But I never see anybody say that.
MATT WALSH: Well, I think a lot of that is programming that’s been going on for a long time. The way a lot of people are programmed is that to speak specifically in defense of white people as a group, to say anything positive about white people as a group is just automatically racist.
And I think that this, and it’s obviously bonkers, right? It’s absurd, but it’s ingrained deeply. I mean, this goes back to, I can remember this kind of conditioning in public school in the 90s. I went to public school. I can, you know, we talk about wokeness like it just started in 2015. It didn’t. And maybe it was worse in 2015 than it was in 1993. I can remember it in 1993.
And I can remember being in school and the only time that if we ever talked about our ancestors or the people who founded this country or anything like that, it was either in an expressly negative way, let’s talk about all the terrible things they did. Or if we are going to acknowledge anything good they did, we have to couch it by first saying, well, here’s a lot of bad things they did. They also did this, but also the bad. And so that’s been going on for such a long time.
TUCKER CARLSON: But these were, in retrospect, these were the first moves. These are the shock troops of a total takeover and change in the country. This was preparation for what we got under Biden, where it’s just, let’s just totally transform the demographics of the country in four years and then no one will feel free to say anything about it. Because racism.
MATT WALSH: Right.
The Global Demographic Shift
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, it feels that way to me. I don’t know if it was a strategy or intentional, but it was certainly a coordinated effort, maybe unconsciously, but like, it wasn’t an accident. And it happened in every white majority country. And that’s why there won’t be any white majority countries really soon.
And so, like, what was that? I kind of wish I wasn’t white in saying this because it’s not selfish. It’s, first of all, it’s curiosity. Like, what the hell? You almost never see anything happen globally that’s that similar in countries that aren’t that similar. Like the United States is not that similar to the UK or Canada or New Zealand, Australia. But exactly the same thing happened in all of those places.
MATT WALSH: Much worse than a lot of those places.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Oh, if you visit those places, it’ll just break your heart because the people are broken.
MATT WALSH: But in Canada, they are.
TUCKER CARLSON: Canada is not even a country.
MATT WALSH: It’s not even a country. And they are overwhelmed with guilt. They are.
Canada’s MAID Program: State-Sanctioned Murder
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they’re murdering. The government is murdering tens of thousands of its citizens every year. They’re almost all white. And now they’re going to be doing it to kids. And by the way, under the MAID program, they’re harvesting the organs. They’re harvesting the organs from the Canadians they kill.
So it’s like the darkest thing. That’s like, I would feel much freer and safer living in China than Canada. I can’t believe I’m saying that. I actually love Canada, but that’s happening and no one’s saying a word about it.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, well, that in particular is one of those things that it’s so dark and so depraved that when you talk about it, I think a lot of people, especially in America, they think you’re making it up or you’re exaggerating.
TUCKER CARLSON: I almost don’t talk about it very often because I don’t think anyone believes it. But I live right near Canada and I know, and I’m like the only American who really sincerely loves Canada because it’s just so beautiful. Not the only. But not many people care about Canada. I do. So I know a lot of Canadians. And that’s absolutely. You look it up on the internet. It’s there.
MATT WALSH: It’s becoming one of the leading causes of death. Oh, it is. One of the leading causes of death is assisted suicide.
TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, just the government killing you and not because you have ALS, but because you can’t pay your rent and then extending it to children and then harvesting the organs and the blood. I mean, I feel like they’re a way bigger threat to the United States than Venezuela.
I would be open to an argument in favor of invading and occupying Canada on human rights grounds. I’m not joking even a tiny bit. I think it’s one of the darkest countries in the world and it’s such a great country with such great people. I don’t know how we can allow this to happen without at least saying something about. I’m not actually arguing for military action, but like maybe threatening it. They’re way worse than Maduro. Way worse than Maduro. Way worse. So like. But I’m sure I’ll be scolded for.
MATT WALSH: How can you say that?
TUCKER CARLSON: Because it’s true. Yeah.
MATT WALSH: Well, the MAID program alone is one of the most evil things happening in the world, period.
TUCKER CARLSON: Murdering your citizens and harvesting their organs on a greater scale than China does. Really. And it’s right there.
The Slippery Slope of Euthanasia
MATT WALSH: I think one of the things that’s happening. Why are people ignoring this in America? Well, one thing, it’s people. It’s like not your country. So you think it doesn’t affect you. I think it does affect us because also, also like when you look at Canada and Europe and these guys that we’re on the same kind of crazy train. They’re just a few train cars up.
And so, and so we. That’s why you got to pay attention to where they are, because we’re going to be there. So that’s. That’s one.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, thank you.
MATT WALSH: But I think that also for some conservatives in this country, there’s some embarrassment about this because they, I think there are plenty of conservatives who’ve been at least indifferent to the issue of euthanasia and have even kind of. I’ve had many arguments with so called conservatives actually over the years. Not as much now because you see what’s happening with MAID, but over the years with saying that. Well, you know, because they get hung up on this. Well, it’s a personal choice.
And they just think as conservatives, you just, you cannot oppose a personal choice, you just. You can’t do it. And it’s kind of a libertarian instinct gone way haywire in my mind. And so there. But now you can see now those of us who have always been against.
TUCKER CARLSON: So a desperate person has free will. Is that what they’re saying?
MATT WALSH: And that’s the problem.
TUCKER CARLSON: These are children. They don’t know what they’re talking about.
MATT WALSH: And also, so those of us, those of us who are opposed to it, we have been saying for years, like, this is where it’s going to go. Okay, yeah, right now they are. And the other argument for euthanasia was, well, these are people who are in terrible pain and they’re a death’s door. They’ve only got days or at most weeks to live anyway. They’re in horrible pain. You have no idea what it’s like. And so they should be able to. They should be able to have a way out.
TUCKER CARLSON: And.
MATT WALSH: From an emotional level, I get what you’re saying. Totally disagree with it. I get what you’re saying. Our argument was, there’s a few arguments, but the big one was, okay, that’s what we’re doing. It’s already evil to do that, even with someone who’s terminally ill. They’re doing that now, though. It will not stop there, because it never stops there.
And once you give the state and the medical establishment the authority to kill, they will not stop. It always starts with the most justifiable version of it that they can muster, which is still totally unjustifiable in my view, but they always start with the most justifiable version. And then next it’s like, okay, yeah, but, yeah, we should include people who. Maybe they’re not terminally ill, but they’re chronically ill and they’re a lot of pain.
And, okay, now we’ve included them. Well, what about. What about mental illnesses? Well, what about this person over there? He’s homeless. Yeah, he’s not terminally ill, but his life has no meaning. And he’s terrible. He lives on the street. And then, you know, step, step, step, step. Eventually you’re killing kids, too.
Historical Parallels: The Nazi Euthanasia Program
TUCKER CARLSON: But we’ve seen this. We’ve seen this. And by the way, I grew. I’m older than you. And so they were still teaching this in schools when I was a kid. But the Nazi experiment began with euthanasia, famously. And it wasn’t just on a small scale. It was like hundreds of thousands of people killed.
And it began, well, Down syndrome. Like, how could your life be worth living? And then it wound up with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Warsaw Ghetto, like, this was a very clear, much written about continuum that began with murdering the weakest. And then again, you know, it ended where it famously ended, which was with mass murder.
But Hitler was famous for his euthanasia program. He was also famous for, like, rounding people up and moving them to new places, like is now openly being discussed in Gaza. It’s like the whole thing is so bonkers. And it just tells you that human evil is not specific to any group or time or place. It resides in every person.
Every person is capable of this kind of behavior, justifying this kind of behavior, and we should all be on guard against it. But like, Hitler was very famous for euthanasia. Did you even learn that in school?
MATT WALSH: No, certainly not.
TUCKER CARLSON: So funny. Things change. I was in first grade in 1975 and that was like a feature of it. You know, he was bad because he killed people on the basis of, like, their DNA. That’s not allowed. And he killed the weakest. Not allowed. And I guess they stopped teaching that.
Death as Treatment: The Corruption of Medicine
MATT WALSH: And the other thing is when you give, when you give the medical establishment, when you accept the idea that death is a treatment.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MATT WALSH: You have opened the darkest door imaginable.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
MATT WALSH: And this is what’s so frustrating is that what is often, what are often decried as slippery slope arguments, people talk about, oh, it’s a fallacy, slippery slope. First of all, slippery slope is not a fallacy. That’s not, it’s not a fallacious way of making an argument.
All we’re trying to show you is that, okay, here’s a door you’ve opened. Okay, you’ve made an argument to justify something. And what I’m trying to tell you is that I can take that argument intact and use it to justify this thing over here that we both agree is horrific. And so if I can do that, what that tells me is that what it should tell you is that either your argument is bad or the thing you’re arguing for is bad, or both. And so that’s what the slippery slope thing is.
And that was the point with euthanasia. Once you allow the medical establishment to use death, murder, as a form of medical treatment, you’ve completely flipped it on its head. Because the whole point of medicine is to heal and treat and so to avoid death and pain, like, that’s the point of it. And now you flipped it upside down and you’ve said that death is the treatment. And so now you’ve just destroyed the whole thing. You’ve destroyed it.
TUCKER CARLSON: And I think that almost all obstetricians are required to commit abortion during their training.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, well, that’s right.
TUCKER CARLSON: So then you wind up with an entire medical core. That’s evil.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Like there are a lot of evil doctors. Not just a few, but a lot evil and.
MATT WALSH: Or I mean, this is the same thing, but they have to be very indifferent to human life, which is evil.
The Medical Establishment’s Moral Collapse
TUCKER CARLSON: So. But did you realize. I did. I certainly didn’t realize it really was the COVID vaccine. And the lack of COVID treat, the intentional lack of COVID letting people die rather than treating their symptoms, which happened extensively across the United States. That sounds like these people aren’t just wrong. They’re like the worst people.
The physicians are the worst people in the country. And for all the nurses, sweet nurses, I love nurses, sorry. Who like stood up and like, this is wrong. Almost no doctors did. A few, a few. Mary, Tally Bowden and people like that. But like not a lot. And I was just like, our doctors are evil. Not just mistaken. They’re bad. Do you feel that?
MATT WALSH: I think a lot of them are. I mean, certainly, obviously not all of.
TUCKER CARLSON: Them, but not all of them. Right.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, but.
TUCKER CARLSON: But like not 5%. Right? Exactly. We’re like 70%.
MATT WALSH: Well, and how about also there’s abortion, euthanasia, COVID. But then also something that I don’t think we should just drop and move on from. Because speaking of justice, there has not been justice for this, which is that for years we had the entire medical establishment unanimously almost telling us that the best thing to do with a young boy who’s a little bit confused about his identity is to castrate them.
And they were doing that. They were doing that to thousands of kids. They were chopping the breasts. They’re still doing it in some places, but it was certainly happening at scale for a long time. They’re chopping the breasts off of 15 year old girls. And to your point, it was not just like a few doctors. There’s a lot of doctors that were involved in it, a lot more doctors supported it and a lot of other doctors who maybe didn’t like it, but they didn’t say a word, they did not speak up against it.
This is some of the most insane, barbaric, Frankenstein bullsh*t that the world has ever seen. Completely unjustifiable. No one can argue in defense of it. It’s one of the craziest things that’s ever happened in the history of the planet.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s hard to hear this even, because you’re right.
MATT WALSH: Right. And it just went on and the way that the advocates for this, the way that they argued in favor of it, because obviously they couldn’t make any substantive argument for castrating kids. What they would always say is, well, look at all these medical establishments. Every single one of them is in favor of it. And they were right. They all were, all of them.
The Problem of Evil and Moral Cowardice
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s so crazy is that, you know, female genital mutilation, which is universal in a few countries—I think Somalia is one of them—was very frowned upon by feminists and also by me as a lover of women. And it was a feature of debate on cable news shows, like, most of my life as a cable news debater. FGM, you know, we’d do a segment on FGM or whatever. Can you believe they’re doing this? And like, nobody would defend it. You know, we’d look far and wide. Who will defend female genital mutilation? A clitorectomy? Like, who would defend that?
And, you know, our bookers tried really hard, but there weren’t many. All of a sudden, no one mentioned it again. And that’s because they started doing it. And it’s just a reminder that you don’t have to be Somali or a Nazi or any specific group to participate in evil. Like, this is a human problem. And the second they stop talking about how what other people did is bad, it’s probably a tip that they’re going to start doing it themselves.
MATT WALSH: And it’s also a lesson that it’s very easy. I mean, look, nobody wants to admit it now, but at the height of the trans madness—and I don’t mean to talk about it totally in the past tense, like it’s over. It’s not, but we are past the height of it, thank God. But at the height of it, no one wants to admit it now, but almost everyone on the left supported it vocally. And most people on the right told themselves or insisted that it’s not worth saying anything about. It’s not that big of a deal.
TUCKER CARLSON: Totally right. That’s exactly—
MATT WALSH: This is a cultural war sideshow. And so what that tells us is that it’s actually very easy for people to convince themselves to go along with the worst evils that are even conceivable.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, that’s totally right.
MATT WALSH: It’s very easy to convince yourself.
TUCKER CARLSON: And partisanship is not a good guide to that. As you just said yourself, a lot of people that are on our side, like, I don’t want to deal with that.
MATT WALSH: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s—
MATT WALSH: Well, because what you have are—I mean, usually this is not how it always works out, but you’ve got the really evil thing being promoted, facilitated by the left, whether it’s abortion or euthanasia, whatever else. And then you’ve got cowardice on the right, refusing to speak up against it until it’s very safe to do so. And then everybody does.
And that’s why it’s also been on the trans issue. It’s been interesting over the last like year, year and a half to have people coming out of the woodwork, very boldly saying, you know, men shouldn’t be in women’s sports. Like, yeah, thanks for that. We could have used that six years ago.
The Power of Independent Commentary
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, because this was one of those issues where you and a few other people just changed it. It wasn’t Congress. You made your movie and you wouldn’t stop talking about it. And there were a few others, but they were all in the commentariat. They were all like in the pundit class. It was not—there was no US Senator who led the charge against this. Some followed in the end, but it came from outside the system, I guess is what I’m saying.
So that kind of shows, among other things, that the commentariat, which is insufferable even as I say this, part of it does matter. Matters actually. The opinions you see on all these podcasts, like, they over time do change things clearly. So to circle back to where we began, how is this current conflict, the intra‑right conflict, resolved?
MATT WALSH: I don’t know. If I knew how to do it, I would do it. If I knew how to solve it, if I knew how to bridge the divide and get everyone on the same side again, I would do it. I’ve tried in my own way. I know I have not been successful. I have tried.
TUCKER CARLSON: You’re like the last person with a foot in each world.
MATT WALSH: It’s interesting and I value that. Like, this isn’t for me. So people have to understand. I try not to take it personally, the insults. I mean, when you’re in this world, you get insulted all the time and you have to have thick skin. There are certain attacks against me that I should not admit this, but I will, that do bother me. Like they do.
TUCKER CARLSON: Like what? Okay, you opened it. You opened the door.
MATT WALSH: Well, charges of—well, when people say things that just aren’t true. It happens all the time. And it’s the one thing I should be the most used to, I guess. But it just pisses me off, really. It does.
TUCKER CARLSON: Because I’m the opposite. It’s only the true attacks that upset me.
MATT WALSH: I don’t know. Yeah, it shouldn’t. But when people are—I see someone, you know, make a claim. Especially if it’s someone—it doesn’t have to be, but especially if it’s someone who I kind of know—saying something that’s not true. You’re ascribing motives to me that are just the exact opposite of what is actually true. And you’re not even asking me. You’re not reaching out. You’re not giving me a chance to speak for myself.
TUCKER CARLSON: Who did that to you?
Loyalty and Betrayal
MATT WALSH: And here’s the thing. I talked about loyalty before. I’m so devoted to it that I have people I consider friends who have been attacking me publicly. And I still don’t want to attack—
TUCKER CARLSON: Welcome to my world.
MATT WALSH: I still don’t want to—
TUCKER CARLSON: There’s a connection between the degree to which you’ve helped someone and the vehemence of the attack. I’ve noticed that in just in my life. I’m not whining. And I agree with you. I hate being attacked. I’m being threatened. Someone shot at my house. Like, I’m never going to say that. Okay, though it’s true.
But I have noticed that a lot of people I’ve helped are like on the front lines of attacking me or calling me names they know aren’t true. Nazi. And I feel like there’s a connection. It’s not random. It’s like, if you’ve helped someone, maybe they resent you for it.
MATT WALSH: I don’t—yeah, there might be some of that. I mean, there’s a lot of things. First of all, everybody’s very emotional.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MATT WALSH: And I try to keep that in mind, too. I try not to do the thing that pisses me off so much when people do it to me, which is ascribing motives and saying, “Yeah, you’re really doing this because of this.” And I think sometimes people do—a lot of people do have ulterior motives, clearly. And people are scheming and they’re playing games.
And also, by the way, we live in a space—this is a business, and people do this for a living. And so there’s also just competitiveness.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, it’s right.
MATT WALSH: And that happens. But then at the same time, people also get just pissed off and they get emotional.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s definitely true.
MATT WALSH: And that’s happening on all—so I recognize that. Some of the people that go after me publicly I consider friends. And I’m like, you have my phone number. You could call me. And I try to understand. Maybe it’s for my own sanity. I try to be as charitable as possible and think, well, they’re just wrong, but they’re really angry. And they’ve got this whole story about me that’s not correct, but that’s what’s happening. They’re just pissed off. And I’ve been pissed off before and said things I regret. So I think a lot of that’s happened.
To go back to the question of what to do about it—well, I guess I don’t know why I’m going back to it, because I don’t have the answer. But I think the only thing that can be done is for all of us, if you’re on the right, to go back to some of the basics that we talked about at the beginning of the conversation. Like, what is it that we want? What is it that we actually want?
Defining Conservatism
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s the real catechism here? What does it mean to be on the right?
MATT WALSH: Exactly. What are we—it’s the classic question about conservatives. What are you trying to conserve? It’s a good question. You should be able to answer that. You should be able to answer that. What are you trying to conserve? And everybody needs to ask themselves that and come up with an answer. Come up, write your list. Write it out if you have to. Whatever. Come up with your—
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m going to do this. This is my calling right here.
MATT WALSH: And everyone should have their list. And then we should compare notes, and if our lists match up—like, we want the same things, we’re trying to conserve and preserve the same things—then the only way forward is with that. For us to realize that, reorient towards that, make that the goal. And remember that even when we disagree, we’re going to have disagreements, but we’re only disagreeing about how to do this thing that we both want done. And I think that’s the way forward.
Now, on the other hand, maybe you start looking at your list and you realize that I actually don’t even want the same things as these people. Okay, well, then we’re not on the same side. And that’s very clarifying, too. I think that there are people—
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s happening in my mind. I’m like, we don’t have anything in common, actually. I thought we did, but we don’t. Is that happening to you?
MATT WALSH: There’s certainly some of that. I think that there are definitely people who just don’t want the same things at all. They don’t have the same fundamental goals. I think that’s certainly happening. And that’s part of the clarifying. That’s part of the—
TUCKER CARLSON: Is that bad or good?
MATT WALSH: Well, clarity is good.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MATT WALSH: I think we need clarity. But for me, like I said, the only person—and I believe this wholly. I try to live by it. The only person who can speak to your intentions is you. The only person who can tell anyone what’s in your mind is you. And so if someone says to me—
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s why I try to interview people.
MATT WALSH: Exactly.
TUCKER CARLSON: You’re allowed to speak for yourself.
MATT WALSH: And so I’ve given my list of what it is that I want to conserve and preserve.
TUCKER CARLSON: Can you just—can you in an abbreviated form, just run through it really quick, one more time? Because I think I agreed with it.
MATT WALSH: Abbreviated is always trouble for me.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, no, you don’t have to abbreviate it. Just say it again. Like, what are—the thing. You’re saying there’s left, right? I don’t even know what that means anymore. But like, people who share your values.
MATT WALSH: Believe in objective truth.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Okay.
MATT WALSH: They believe in truth. Number one.
TUCKER CARLSON: That there—
MATT WALSH: That there is a truth. Okay, I’m going to write this down. Hold on.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. Objective truth.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, objective truth.
TUCKER CARLSON: Whether or not there—can I just add one caveat? I’m not always convinced I know what the objective truth is. I’ve certainly been wrong. But I know it exists.
MATT WALSH: Right, exactly. And that’s exactly the point. We can disagree about what the truth is. We’re going to have those disagreements.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right?
MATT WALSH: But we have to be able to agree that there is a truth.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
The Foundation of Truth and Conservative Values
To begin with, when you’re talking to someone who’s a moral relativist, they’re on the left, you can’t even agree on that. So there’s no conversation to be had. We cannot even have a conversation. That’s the problem. That’s our problem in our culture.
And even above the truth, the reason why there’s an objective truth is that there is God, that there is a God. There is God, and he has designed the universe and everything and everybody in it. And that’s the source, that’s the wellspring of truth. That’s why there is a truth, because God designed it a certain way.
And so it is like, that’s the fundamental bare bones truth, is that God has designed it this way, that this is God’s universe and that is the truth. So I think that’s number one. Yeah, that’s number one. And then what are we trying?
TUCKER CARLSON: Everything flows from that.
MATT WALSH: Everything flows from that. What are we trying—but in America, as American conservatives, what are we trying to conserve? We’re trying to conserve American identity, our national identity. We’re trying to conserve the institution of the family, which is the foundation of the country and of civilization. We’re trying to conserve the institution of the marriage, which is the foundation of the family. So this is the foundation of the—
TUCKER CARLSON: Foundation, which is the foundation of American identity. Right.
MATT WALSH: And we’re trying to conserve all those things. And then at a broader level, we’re trying to conserve Western civilization itself, which grows from—
TUCKER CARLSON: So if you were to sum it up, you could say objective truth derived from a belief that this is all created, we are not the creators.
MATT WALSH: Exactly.
TUCKER CARLSON: And the family, the family unit, husband, wife, children, which is the basis of all human civilization. So objective truth, family.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, I think that’s—
TUCKER CARLSON: If I were writing this on my hand for the test. Okay. Yeah, probably in here, so the teacher couldn’t see it. It would just be objective truth, family. Yeah.
MATT WALSH: And I would also put national identity for—if we’re talking about American conservatives, which is what we’re talking about.
TUCKER CARLSON: But then the question goes like, what’s that?
MATT WALSH: Yeah, well, that’s a, and that’s also a debate, in a sense. I think there are some basic things. But again, that’s like, okay, as long as we agree that we need one, that we need, that we—yeah, we cannot. So we have a culture.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
MATT WALSH: We need to have a culture. And multiculturalism cannot be the culture. That’s not a culture.
TUCKER CARLSON: There has to be a unifying set of beliefs or customs that keep the country from breaking apart, otherwise it will break apart.
Defining Allies and Enemies
MATT WALSH: So, and that’s the point. So the things there, if we, if someone looks at that like, that’s—I’m speaking for myself and not just myself, I think a lot. But that’s my North Star. And if you look at that and you say, “Well, I want the same things, like, I’m fighting for it,” then you are on my side, period. Like, we are on the same side.
And we’ll have a lot of arguments again about how to do that, how to achieve that. We’ll have a lot of arguments about it. And those could be like fruitful arguments. Those don’t have to be angry, nasty, personal arguments. They could just be discussions, as adults, and we’ll do that, but we’re on the same side.
However, if you look at that and you say, “Well, I don’t need—I don’t believe in any of that. Like, I don’t believe in God. I don’t like truth. Who gets—we all have our own truth. The family. I think the family is like, marriage doesn’t matter. We don’t need the family.” If you’re—and a lot of people feel that way, so fine, you’re allowed to feel that way. We’re not on the same side at all, no matter what else you believe.
And then I might agree with you on—then you might go on in from there and say, “Yeah, but I really think that gun rights are important, and I think we need to restrict immigration, and I want to abolish the income tax or whatever.” I’d agree with you on those points, but we’re not fundamentally on the same side.
The Great Realignment
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s so smart. I don’t want to blow anyone’s mind, but I travel a lot, talk to people for a living. You would be amazed by the people I know who agree with you vehemently and sincerely on those two points. And they’re not all on the right at all, which is kind of interesting.
So it does feel like this is a—there’s like a true realignment happening now. I just know in my own life, the people who reach out to me in some cases are people you would expect. In some cases, they’re not all people you would expect. And they’re just—they’re hearing the same music and they’re motivated by the same impulses.
And that is one, a belief that we are living in a world we didn’t create. These rules aren’t ours. It’s basically the nature argument. Like, you can’t ignore nature because you’re not in charge of it. You cannot ignore natural law because you didn’t make it because God made it. A and B, in the end, your only true protection is your family. And your deepest connection is to your family. And that needs to be protected above all, which I think is a variety of what you were just saying.
The people who reach out to me who believe that, man, it would blow your mind. So I guess what I would say is it feels like a lot of our politics is artificial. It’s inorganic. It was—these divisions in some cases are real. In some cases, they were created in order to get us to not see that we have a lot in common with other people. Does that make sense?
MATT WALSH: I think so. Look, and if someone—the words left and right are labels that we put on things.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, people have always said that, but I never really believed it. That’s bullsh*t.
MATT WALSH: But it’s just—it’s a way of categorizing and organizing things so we can speak about them coherently. But sometimes the labels that we use, we have to shift it over. There might be people who—so but like anyone who you’ve talked to, who we would say is on the left, who agrees with all that. Well, then I would say they’re not on the left.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I agree.
MATT WALSH: They might even think they still are, but they’re not. And so they’re over on this side. And you can kind of call it whatever you want. I’m saying right, conservative. We could come up with any team name we want.
TUCKER CARLSON: I guess what I’m saying is your side is bigger than you think it is.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, maybe for the—during the—when we’re talking about the trans issue and I’ve sort of talked about the teams. What I’ve come to—what I’ve come to call the side that’s against all the trans madness is team sanity. It’s just we’re for sanity. Like on this issue, we’re sane people. And fully acknowledging that on that issue, there were people who—I don’t agree with them on anything else, but are sane on this. I can think of some of them.
Strange Bedfellows on the Trans Issue
TUCKER CARLSON: I used to have this woman on. Oh, I really liked her. I don’t think she ever liked me at all. I can’t remember her name. She was a radical lesbian feminist. And every—she would always come into the studio on the trans issue. Years ago. And she was like—I could—I could hear her thinking, “I can’t believe I’m in the same room as this monster.”
But we were so aligned on it. And I always wondered, like, why did she care? So, I mean, she—we must have been more aligned than either of us realized if she cared that much about it. Right. You must have dealt with a million people like this.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, yeah. And this is a conversation I would have sometimes with it because it’s very strange bedfellows. I would find myself aligned on that issue with some feminists. Like left, far left feminists.
TUCKER CARLSON: But the radical ones. Yeah.
MATT WALSH: But the point I would try to make to them, I think mostly unsuccessfully, is that, okay, if you, if we agree on this, that I think, like, if you can see the truth on this, then I think we should agree on a lot more.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s my instinct too.
MATT WALSH: Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: What would they say?
MATT WALSH: Well, for me, I’m not the guy to make an argument to feminists. They’re not going to listen to me. There might be someone who can be kind of the—
TUCKER CARLSON: I think you could convert a few, Matt Walsh.
MATT WALSH: I don’t know, it’s—my track record would say otherwise. But the point is that, like, the argument I would make to them is that actually, I know you call yourself a feminist. The reason why we have this problem is because of feminism. Feminism is actually the root of this problem.
And so if you agree with me on this, then I think really you are critiquing feminism. So you’re not a feminist. Get it together. Come over here. And they didn’t find that—that was mansplaining. They weren’t—
TUCKER CARLSON: That was definitely—they weren’t like ready to run to the patriarchy after that.
MATT WALSH: No, no.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a shame.
Surviving the Pressure: Prayer and Perseverance
So here’s my last question. And again, it begins where we began, which is the fact that you’re like at the center of all of this. I really do think you’re the last person on the right, the official, well known official podcaster, right, who has a foot in two camps.
And so it’s just the pressure on you. I’ve just noticed it has been almost unbelievable and you’ve bore up under it so impressively. But how do you keep yourself from becoming a hater when you’re under just relentless assault? And not just your views, but your motives, your character, when people you really like or your friends are denouncing you.
And most people live an entire lifetime without that experience. It’s an unusual experience and it can drive some totally crazy, like they become foaming at the mouth haters. How have you avoided that?
MATT WALSH: Maybe the honest answer is, I have not avoided it. Well, but I think that, I mean, look, the correct answer is prayer. You have to have a rich prayer life.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
MATT WALSH: I do have a prayer life. I don’t think it’s as rich as it should be. And I think that, I think like a lot of people, you kind of go through waves. I go through waves and then I go through—and here’s what happens with me. And I think it’s probably relatable is that when you’re really frustrated and stressed out and things are not really working out how you want them to—
TUCKER CARLSON: Your—
MATT WALSH: Kind of prayer life can dry up too. And it starts because that starts feeling—everything just starts feeling kind of dry. Everything starts feeling like nothing’s working, no one’s listening. You feel frustrated. No one in your life is like hearing what you’re saying and you start to feel like God is not hearing you either.
And it’s just this kind of frustration and then it snowballs. And then it becomes a, it’s a self fulfilling prophecy because now everything’s feeling, everything feels kind of dried up and frustrated. And so that just happens with your prayer life. And then everything gets worse because of that.
And so those are the moments where you have to be very intentional and say, “I’m really annoyed and frustrated. I don’t feel like praying. I don’t even know if God’s listening.” He’s always listening. But in a frustrated moment, you feel like he’s not. And that’s when you have to realize that and then reorient yourself and become—and for me, when I have those moments, I’ve found that just being more structured, like sometimes you have to like anything in life that is good. You have to kind of force yourself to do it. Sometimes you have to get into a habit.
TUCKER CARLSON: What’s your structure, if you don’t mind?
MATT WALSH: Well, I think there’s—you set up a time for prayer in the morning, like you said, just times. This is my, this is my time when I’m going to pray. And hopefully it’s multiple times a day, but—and when you have a really rich prayer life and you’re in a good flow, it’s like you’re in a constant prayer. It’s like, it’s a constant, it’s a constant state of going to God even if you’re not on your knees.
TUCKER CARLSON: Rejoice in everything. Never stop praying. Yeah.
The Importance of Physical Prayer Posture
MATT WALSH: And I think that, you know, things like your physical posture when you’re praying, that can matter. And especially really if you’re going through a dry spell in your prayer life, I think like actually kneeling, being on your knees does matter. And you can pray without being on your knees, but it can kind of help to orient you in the right way.
And it’s kind of your body telling your mind something, which is that you are submitting yourself. Like you’re on your knees. You are submitting yourself to a power that is greater than you. That’s why you’re doing this. And so you’re reminding yourself that there’s someone greater than you who you are appealing to. And so I think stuff like that can help also.
The X Addiction Problem
TUCKER CARLSON: How much time do you spend on X?
MATT WALSH: Too much. Meaning, like, way too much. I don’t know.
TUCKER CARLSON: What effect does that have?
MATT WALSH: Not good. I mean, it’s also hard for me because it’s my job and not like my job request, you know, it’s like a, not like there’s a, I have to punch in the clock and go on X, but part of the job is to be clued in. And I’m also creating content every day. I do a show five days a week, four days a week now. And so this is where the conversation’s happening. This is where all the content, all the sort of content is, all the things I want to talk about.
Yeah, I also use it as kind of a, you know, it’s like I’ll start a conversation on X and then I’ll talk about it on the show. And it’s just kind of this feeds off of each other thing. But the problem and all that is good and I’m glad that it’s there for that reason. But the problem is this stuff sucks you in. Like, it just sucks you in.
TUCKER CARLSON: Because I bet I’m just guessing you’re not into, say, pornography or cocaine or…
MATT WALSH: Not at all.
TUCKER CARLSON: I knew that.
MATT WALSH: Zero percent.
TUCKER CARLSON: So, like, for a man like you, you’re, you know, you don’t, you’re not ruled by your addictions. But do you feel like X?
MATT WALSH: Well, it’s weird. Here’s the weird thing for me. The amount of time I spend on it sometimes would seem like an addict. However, when I go on vacation and I say I’m leaving, I’m not going to be doing a show. I’m out of the, I’m going to be out. I’m not paying attention to anything. And I go on vacation, I put the phone down, I have zero desire to pick it up.
I don’t even find myself, like, I got to find out what’s happening. I put it down, I’m on vacation. I have no desire. In fact, it’s the opposite. When I come back, I have to force myself to get into this again, and it’s ridiculous. I’m forcing myself to tweak because I got to get in the flow to do the job.
And so that tells me it’s not really an addiction. Something even worse, I guess, because when I have the chance to walk away from it, I so eagerly do. It’s like my soul telling me, like, you got this. This is what I actually long for is not this.
TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s a really good sign.
MATT WALSH: I think it’s a good sign.
Seeing Everyone Naked on Social Media
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you feel like when you, I’ll tell you how I feel when I go on it, because I know so many of the people who are tweeting their opinions. It’s like seeing all of your acquaintances naked. I feel like people reveal so much about themselves and it’s like, wow, you don’t look, I mean, I never really thought about you naked, but now that I can see it, you should put some clothes back on. That’s the feeling I have every time I go on there.
MATT WALSH: That is, that’s an interesting way of putting it. And I think that’s true. I mean, that’s, it used to be, right, if you were, like, a prominent person in some field. If you ever gave your opinions publicly, depending on the field, you might never give your opinion publicly, but if you ever did, it was like, in a structured, it was a very intentional kind of way.
TUCKER CARLSON: I try and stick to that.
MATT WALSH: And now we have, it used to be like, it’s hard for people, for kids these days to realize this, but it used to be that we would have all these, like, famous people and celebrities, and most of them, we never knew what they thought about anything. We had no clue what they thought. We didn’t even know what their personalities were. We only saw them because they were throwing a football or because they were acting in a thing or whatever. And now, yeah, we just know everyone’s opinion up to date on every…
The Disempowerment of the Elite Class
TUCKER CARLSON: So whoever thought that, I mean, if you told me 10 years ago that, like, all the people in charge were thoroughly banal and conventional at best, they had nothing interesting to say. They never thought about anything ever. Like, Hillary Clinton had not a single thought in her head and that some guy called Orrin McIntyre, whoever that is, would turn out to be, you know, or you or like, all these people who 10 years ago were not, they’re very far from what we might think of as a public intellectual.
All of a sudden, they’re, purely through the force of their ideas and the clarity of their expression, we’re kind of defining the terms. That is a huge change. It’s totally disempowered the poobah class and it’s given rise to this, like, genuinely interesting, bubbling conversation. Like, at best. Do you feel that?
MATT WALSH: Yeah, I do. Which is why, I mean, we talk about social media, talk about X, and I don’t want to talk as though I think it’s a, it’s a overall, like, nothing but a negative, because I do think it allows…
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, total. No, no. It’s a mixed blessing, for sure.
MATT WALSH: Yeah. So, and that is true, like, it allows and it obviously has created a situation where the institutions that used to control the conversation completely now, now don’t control it at all.
TUCKER CARLSON: And they’re like, they’ve shown that they’re just not impressive. That, like, in the true and fabled marketplace of ideas, they’re like a rummage sale, actually.
MATT WALSH: Yeah. They have nothing to say, but, like…
TUCKER CARLSON: Who would buy that crap? It’s just not, once we see it in its entirety, once the mystique has been stripped away, they have nothing to offer. Like, they’re just totally pedestrian. And then these, I mean, do you ever see random Twitter accounts? You have no idea who this is. It’s not someone who’s, anyone’s ever heard of making a point that’s so profound that, like, you can’t get it out of your head. Does that ever happen to you?
MATT WALSH: Oh, definitely. I was just thinking, I saw, I don’t remember who the guy was, but, yeah, I read a tweet a couple days ago and it was this lengthy, like, really well written analysis of something I can’t even remember, but it’s like a random Twitter guy. I don’t know who that guy is. Like, what? And in a way, it’s kind of sad because I read that. I’m like, well, I don’t know. This guy is a philosopher. He should be in a different age.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, but affirmative action has kept them all out, so this is where they went. So you’re like, well, you know, we don’t have a meritocracy anymore. And the smartest, most impressive people literally can’t get jobs or grants or into college. So, like, what are they doing? And they’re sitting…
MATT WALSH: Tweeting. Yeah, tweeting these, like, morsels of incredible wisdom in some cases.
TUCKER CARLSON: But, you know, truly.
The Mixed Blessing of Social Media
MATT WALSH: Yeah, and, but this is, as you said, mixed blessing. The problem is that in between the morsels of great wisdom, you’ve got nothing but just slop, hate, and all this. Right? And so the best thing we can do is things like keep your prayer life alive and control. You have to have self control in how you interact with this. One of the worst things, and everyone does this. I do it. I think it’s the worst habit that almost everyone has now.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sure I do it too then.
MATT WALSH: Which is a bad habit. The first thing you do when you wake up in the morning is check your phone.
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t do that.
MATT WALSH: Well, then you’re, you’re in better shape than I am. And a lot of people never, and that…
TUCKER CARLSON: That is like the work I used to, that’s like having blueberry pancakes for breakfast. Which was a habit that was very hard for me to break. But once I did it, I realized that framed my whole day in the wrong way. Have you started the day with blueberry pancakes?
MATT WALSH: I have.
TUCKER CARLSON: You can’t get past it. Everything in your day is defined by blueberry pancakes. Why?
MATT WALSH: Because you’re longing for the…
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. You’re hungry all day, you feel shitty, you’re lethargic. Like, just don’t eat till noon and everything is better. But I grew up in a blueberry pancake world, like 100% blueberry pancakes and a cigarette. And that’s not a good way to start the day. And I feel like social media are even worse.
MATT WALSH: Just do the cigarette, don’t do the pancakes.
TUCKER CARLSON: That is, I can’t say this. That is still a great way to start the day. I don’t care what anybody says. It’s just a fact.
MATT WALSH: Yeah, but whatever.
TUCKER CARLSON: Sorry.
MATT WALSH: Totally kidding. The, the…
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MATT WALSH: Starting the day by looking at your phone is so horrifically bad. I do it all the time. Actually, I do. I shouldn’t.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s like the one thing you can’t, just don’t do that. That’s easy. Just like, because you use it as your alarm, right?
MATT WALSH: Yeah, my phone. Yeah, of course. Everybody does.
TUCKER CARLSON: I do, too. We don’t allow phone usage in the bedroom except for the alarm. That’s like ironclad rule. Get up, get a cup of coffee, get your face and a Bible, or just stare out the window, kiss your dogs, anything but that.
MATT WALSH: I totally agree. In fact, just this morning, I woke up, first thing I did, I checked my phone and I went on X. And it was just in my feed. It just happened. Like the first thing I read. I just opened my eyes 30 seconds ago. The first thing I read was, like, in my feed, something popped up and it was like, “Matt Walsh is a coward.” I’m starting my day with that like the first thing that enters my eye.
TUCKER CARLSON: What are you doing?
MATT WALSH: I don’t know. And I put my phone down. Like, why did I do that? Why?
TUCKER CARLSON: Hotel room though, right?
MATT WALSH: The hotel room.
TUCKER CARLSON: Because there’s no chick there. That’s why it’s so important to be married.
MATT WALSH: That is, yeah, that’s true also.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
MATT WALSH: And there’s no kids, like, totally. Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: Matt Walsh, some of us, probably not a huge group, but some of us. Just kidding. Really appreciate what you’re doing and your clear thinking and your self control and especially your summation of what actually matters. So thank you very much. Appreciate it.
MATT WALSH: Thank you.
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