The Matt Walsh Show - Matt Walsh’s Most Defining Speech Yet

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

At the American Principles Project’s Christmas Ball, Matt Walsh shares the explosive story behind his Vanderbilt investigation that shut down a gender clinic and led to a Supreme Court case. Calling out the two greatest dangers facing children—trans ideology and abortion—Walsh’s speech has been hailed as the pro-life movement’s most powerful defense, ever.   Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://bit.ly/4bEQDy6   - - -   DailyWire+:   Finish your Christmas shopping with one click. Go to https://DailyWire.com now and give the gift of DailyWire+!   My hit documentary “Am I Racist?” is NOW AVAILABLE on DailyWire+! Head to https://amiracist.com to become a member today!   Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://bit.ly/3EbNwyj   - - -   Today's Sponsors:   Tax Network USA - Tax Network USA - Seize control of your financial future! Call 1 [phone] or visit https://www.TNUSA.com/Walsh   PureTalk - Exclusive Discount for our listeners at: https://www.PureTalk.com/Walsh   - - -   Socials:    Follow on Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Rv1VeF   Follow on Instagram: https://bit.ly/3KZC3oA   Follow on Facebook: https://bit.ly/3eBKjiA   Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RQp4rs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you Matt Walsh. Thank you. Don't do that. Don't give me a standing ovation before I say anything. You set the bar way too high. I can only disappoint you now. Thank you all for being here. Thank you to the American Principles Project for inviting me to be a part of this very special night.

The timing of this event is, of course, quite fortuitous. Just yesterday, I was at the rally outside the Supreme Court, as the court heard arguments in a case that stems from the law we passed in Tennessee. banning quote unquote gender transitions for minors. And this fits well with the subject that I was asked to speak about tonight, which is the fight to protect children in our culture. How do we protect children in this culture? As far as I see it, to protect our kids,

we first have to identify the threats. What are the threats we're dealing with? And I'd like to speak about tonight the two great threats, threats, or two of the greatest, that children face. These are also the two issues that I have personally focused on the most and devoted much of my life to. Just as a side note, you know, I recently released a film called Am I Racist? That is, thank you. It wasn't just me fishing for applause. A little bit it was, but I haven't gotten used to the fact that, you know, that movie was a comedy, and a lot of people discover me for the first time from that movie, and so they

know me for comedy, and they expect everything I do now to be riotously funny. And so I was talking to a guy at the meet and greet, and he said, big fan, love the movie, can't wait for this speech. I know it's going to be hilarious. And I'm looking down to my speech now, I'm like, that guy is going to be so disappointed. Protecting children, not exactly a laugh a minute, but catch my stand-up set tomorrow at the chuckles down the street or whatever it is. So the first big threat, of course, is trans ideology. And that brings us back to yesterday at the Supreme Court. It was an interesting and quite revealing dynamic because outside in the cold, those of us on

team sanity were rallying together. But of course, team insanity also showed up. And they showed up in much greater numbers, if I'm being totally honest. You know, the pro-trans side, there were more of them, and they were louder. They set up their rally stage right next to ours and hoping to drown us out. They came with bullhorns and megaphones and blaring loud music and screaming in our faces while we were trying to speak. Now unfortunately for the trans activists, as a father of six, I'm quite accustomed to speaking

while deranged people scream at me. So you've got to work harder than that to throw me off. But admittedly, they did succeed in making things kind of difficult for us, and they did accomplish their goal of being really obnoxious and annoying. The left is very good at that. They're very good at it. That's their specialty. In the field of being loud and obnoxious, we are amateurs. This is their professionals. And that was very obvious yesterday. However, inside the court, it was a very different story. You know, the problem for the trans activists is that you can't bring your megaphone into the courthouse when Justice Thomas is

saying something you don't like, you can't blare a Cardi B song to drown them out. Each side gets a chance to speak. Each side is asked questions, each side is interrogated. You have to live or die on the strength of your arguments. Anyone who's listened to some of the audio from inside the court yesterday knows that the trans activist very much died, metaphorically speaking. Their whole case fell apart in dramatic fashion. It was ripped open and exposed for the utterly vacuous garbage bag of nonsense that it is.

And this is how it goes for the left. They can scream and shout and sabotage and frustrate, but when our ideas are put up against their ideas in a forum where both sides have a chance to be heard and get a fair hearing, they lose. They lose every single time. And that's why they're so desperate to make sure that they can control all the forums so that their ideas and arguments never have to speak for themselves. It's why they're still in a state of panic over Elon Musk owning Twitter, because we're given a chance to speak and be heard, and when that happens, we win, and they know it. Now, of course, the trans activists have many different ways of trying to shut down ideas

they can't intellectually contend with. Along with screaming at us through bullhorns and censoring us on social media platforms, they also make use of threats and blackmail and intimidation. Like many other people who've been in this fight against gender ideology for years, I have firsthand experience with this. I've been speaking out against the madness of gender ideology for close to a decade. But I hadn't really experienced the full ire of the trans activist until the year 2022. And that was the year that we released our film, What is a Woman?

Which exposed gender ideology. Thank you. Exposed it and its proponents by asking very simple questions, including the titular question, which is the simplest of all. A few months after the release of the film, I published my investigation into the Vanderbilt gender clinic in Tennessee, which revealed that they had been chemically castrating minors and that they were doing it by their own admission because it was a, quote, big moneymaker. Now, I've never said this publicly, but I will admit tonight that, because I don't think

this is being live streamed, is it? Let's hope it's not. Before we released our Vanderbilt investigation, the night before, I started to get cold feet. And I almost didn't post it. I almost didn't publish it, because I knew that it was really explosive. And I knew that our investigation would probably lead to the clinic getting shut down, which is good. But Vanderbilt's a very powerful organization. They have a lot of money. And I knew that trans activists are vicious and deranged,

and will do anything to punish and destroy those who they deem to be a threat. So I started to become very worried about the potential ramifications to my family. I thought that maybe this isn't smart. Maybe it's a reckless thing for me to put myself into the middle of something like that. Maybe now's not the right time. Maybe we should hold off and think about this a little bit. Just give it some time. I don't have to do it right now.

Let's just think about it. And I talked to my wife that night, and I told her that, you know, about the hesitations that I'm having and that I'm expecting some really serious blowback. And I said I wouldn't take the risk unless she's on board with it. And I don't remember her exact words back to me, but paraphrasing, she said something like, don't be a wimp, just publish it. Sack up, you wuss. Not her exact words, but that's what I heard.

That was the message. So we published it, and sure enough, the gender clinic was shut down almost immediately. The investigation then served as a catalyst for a law banning all medical gender transitions for minors. And that's the law that's now made its way to the Supreme Court. Let's talk about something that affects all of us taxes. The October 15th deadline is, past, and if you're not prepared, you could be in for a world of hurt. Do you owe back taxes, are your returns still unfiled? Did you miss the deadline to file for an extension? Now that we're

past October 15th, the IRS is probably gearing up for some aggressive enforcement, and trust me, you don't want to be on their radar. We're talking wage garnishment, frozen bank accounts, or even property seizures. It's not pretty folks, but before you start panicking, there's still hope. Tax Network USA has helped taxpayers save over a billion dollars in tax debt and filed over 10,000 tax returns. These guys specialize in reducing tax burdens for hardworking Americans just like you. Look, I get it. Dealing with the IRS is about as fun as a root canal, but ignoring the problem won't make it go away. So here's what you got to do. Don't wait any longer for a complimentary consultation. Call today at 1-800-958-1,000 or visit their website at tnusa.com slash walsh.

Their experts will walk you through a few simple questions and see how much you can save. That's 1-800-9-58,000, or visit tnusa.com slash walsh today. Don't let the IRS take advantage of you. get the help you need with Tax Network USA. So it had the positive effect that we hope for, but it also had the negative effect that we anticipated but did not hope for. Over the year that followed, I was, along with my family, doxed, harassed, threatened. I had to pick up my family and move to a new home because they were showing up to our house in the middle of the night.

People showing up, taking pictures of my children when they're playing outside. in the front yard. I was hacked. All of my personal information was exposed, demonetized on YouTube. We lost millions of dollars in advertising dollars, smeared in the media defamed relentlessly. Wah, wow, wow, wow, the whole story. All the bad things did in fact happen, and in many ways worse than I thought it would be. And I would do it all again in a heartbeat. It was all worth it. Every bit of it. The thing that I was worried about a couple of years ago in that I've worried about many times before and since is the safety of my wife and kids. I care about other people's kids.

I care about the most about my own kids, and I'm responsible for them as their dad. But what's propelled me into this fight and kept me in it and kept me going and compelled me to take certain risks is precisely this, that I'm a dad and I want to protect my kids. Trans ideology is an unprecedented threat to children, not just children in general, but like my children, your children. If this hideous evil is not defeated, if it's allowed to grow and gain more power and influence in the culture, no child is safe. No child is immune. We've all heard the horror stories from parents whose kids fell prey to the trans cult.

Seeing your child's mind and soul claim by the delusion is like watching him die a thousand deaths. It's an unspeakable horror, and the only way to make absolutely sure that this never happened. to my kids is to burn the whole ideology to the ground, to destroy it, to rip it up by the roots and throw it into the fire. It's the only way to be sure. As a father, I know this is the surest way to protect my kids. And that's why I joined this cause and I won't be done until the job is done. I believe that trans ideology is a unique evil and the danger opposes to our children is likewise unique. Now why is that? Why is trans ideology so uniquely dangerous?

The answer seems obvious. This is a movement that wants to perform sick Frankenstein medical experiments on our children. It wants to turn our kids into lab rats. It wants to castrate, sterilize, mutilate them, and it's done exactly that to untold numbers of innocent children. That's what makes it so especially dangerous and wicked. But that doesn't tell the full story. You know, the medical abuse is a symptom of the underlying sickness.

It is an outcrop. It is the visible thing that we can see on the surface. Underneath all of that, what makes trans ideology so insidious is that it is a complete and total rejection of truth. Now, not just a rejection of one particular thing that is true, but a rejection of truth itself, truth as a category. A society that embraces trans ideology is a society that declares itself God over itself. It claims the right and power to define reality on its own terms. And there are consequences to this. there are serious consequences.

Many terrible things follow from a collective flight from reality, and the consequences are more and more dire, the more deeply the untruth burrows into the mind and into the culture. And the truth at the core, the untruth, rather, at the core of gender ideology, reaches down to the deepest conceivable level, because it wages its assault against our knowledge of ourselves. You know, a person fully enthralled to this lunacy has lost grip not just on reality in general, but on the reality of himself.

Transgenderism doesn't simply replace one notion of the self with some other newer notion. Rather, it replaces one notion of the self with no notion at all. This is the whole reason why the gender ideologues can't answer the what is a woman question. It's because there is no answer for them. It doesn't mean anything to be a woman. It doesn't mean anything to be a man. It doesn't mean anything to be anybody. Your very identity has no meaning, and therefore has no value, has no purpose.

And that's because the gender ideologue seeks to replace what is definable, definable, with a hazy, indecipherable mess of contradictions and falsehoods. He replaces light with darkness and soon gets lost in it himself and will probably eventually succumb to despair. And that's because a person cannot live in such a state. A person can't live in a state of self-rejection. They certainly cannot thrive or be happy in that sort of state. So this is the great danger of transgenderism. But there is an even greater danger,

one that has destroyed the lives of many more children and destroyed them in a much more direct and final kind of way. And that brings us to the other great threat. One that's never been very popular to talk about, probably less popular now than it's been before. And that is abortion. Now, abortion is still the defining issue of our time, and it is still the wall that separates one side of the political divide from the other.

It's a wall that is built with the bodies of 60 million dead babies. Over 60 million babies have been killed through abortion. And so anytime I hear anybody, especially to be on the right tell me that, well, this issue is not that important. Really? What's more important than 60 million? Can you point to something that has a bigger, greater death toll than that? You can't. Not one single genocide in the whole history of the world, not one single plague, not anything. The death toll is staggering, greater than anything the world's ever seen. These victims, these children, have been killed legally by human hands. In a number, in a number one,

a little building in your local shopping mall that you drive by on your way to work or to run errands. And they've been killed at the behest of their own parents with the help of so-called doctors, facilitated by the government. Every kind of person that children are supposed to rely on to protect them, all of those people have turned against them to destroy them. The most innocent of all people are children, and they're their precise ones that have been targeted for extermination. They've harmed no one. They're filled with joy and potential and love. If we can't see the value and worth of a child, then who can we see it in? I remain

confounded by the sorts of people who would look at an unborn child and see only a clump of cells. Clump of cells. I mean, we're all clumps of cells. If you go to Walmart sometime, you'll see many people who are far clumpier than your average infant. I like Walmart. I'm also kind of clumpy these days. But can you really not see the miracle in this life? Can you really not see the beauty of this life that you call a clump of cells? Can you really not see the tragedy in destroying it? And it's a tragedy that is compounded threefold because with abortion we not only reject our children, but we reject ourselves. You know, we have to remember the miraculous thing about conception, that moment when a new life comes into being, what is so mystical and beautiful about it

is that when you think about it, it's not just one life being created, but three, there is the child, a precious, vulnerable new life plucked by God out of eternity and sent here to begin its earthly existence. Then there's the woman who goes from being a woman to being a mother. She herself is created in this moment. It is a moment of becoming. She becomes something. She is born alongside her child. And the same is true of the man. He goes from being just a man to being a father. As a father myself, I can attest to the transformative nature of this moment of parenthood. I look back at myself before I had kids. I don't even recognize that person. I don't know who that person was. It was a different person. It was me,

but it was me before I became what I was meant to be. It was me before I knew why I was here. That was all prologue. You know, that wasn't even the story. You've probably seen these big wireless carrier commercials everywhere, right? Or the ones promising a free iPhone. But let's take a closer look at what free really means in a fine print. To qualify for that free phone, you'll need to trade in your current device, not just any device, but one worth about $1,000. Then you've got to sign up for their premium unlimited plan at $100 monthly.

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Here's what you got to do. Head over to puretalk.com slash waltz today. Making the switch is surprisingly easy. And when you use that specific web address, you get an additional 50% off your first month. That's puretalk.com slash walsh, PureTalk, America's wireless company. But the reality is that while three lives are created at conception, only one is killed through abortion. The child has gone from the earth forever, never to be seen again in this world. The mother and father are still who they became. Despite what they're told, they don't go back to being just a woman and a man. You can't reverse the clock.

You can't go back on it. She's still a mother, he is still a father, they are still parents, but now they are the parents of a dead child. Now, there is no way to get around the fundamental fact that the pro-abortion movement wishes to deny, which is the humanity of the unborn, the personhood of the unborn. The pro-abortion advocate will try to say that the child's not a person because he's still developing, and he's entirely dependent on his mother for survival. And this means he'll say that the baby lacks some kind of moral standing. But, and it's always funny hearing that kind of argument from a lot of people who themselves are still relying on their parents living in their parents' basement,

but very late-stage fetuses, as they would put it. But, you know, this view that personhood is acquired by degree, and that it's forfeit if you're dependent on someone else for survival clearly implicates more than just the unborn. It would seem that the sick, the infirm, the disabled, the elderly, all get caught up in this depersoning net. By this line of reasoning, all of these people have, at a minimum, slightly less personhood. If personhood is on a spectrum, if it's contingent, then by this logic we have depersoned many categories of persons, which is a feature not a bug of pro-abortion logic. You know, they intend to widow. away at both ends of life, the young and the old, unpersoning one subset after another,

until the right to life has been extinguished for all but the privileged few. The only other option, aside from personhood being attained by degree contingent upon other factors like self-sufficiency, is that personhood and its attending moral rights and dignities is inherent to all living humans. And if something is inherent, that means it belongs to the essential nature of a thing. The idea that our human dignity, our personhood, belongs to our essential nature and cannot be lost or diminished is an idea that lies at the very foundation of this country, at the foundation of any notion of human rights. You cannot have human rights if you don't first have it built upon the idea that human beings have inherent dignity. Now, and this is an idea, by the way, that everybody in America pretends to believe most of the time.

There's not a single person in America you could ever talk to who would, who would, or very few anyway, who would reject the notion of human rights. They all accept it. Well, guess what? Human rights? That's a doctrine. That's not science. That's not something we found in a science book. That's a doctrine. That's a religious doctrine human rights. And part of that doctrine all stems from this idea about the value of a human and if you're taking value away from human beings that from one, one set of human beings, you're taking it away from everybody. If an unborn baby does not have inherent value, then human value is not permanent, is not essential, and thus, if he does not have inherent value, then neither do you. You cannot gain inherent value. You either have it from the first moment of existence, or you never do ever. Those are the only options that make any

sense. Now, the personhood argument for abortion is actually even worse than it sounds at first. It's so bad that even if it were true, it would do almost nothing to prove the pro-abortion case. Because the personhood argument for abortion is a syllogism with a missing premise. It seems to go like this. Premise 1, an unborn baby is not a person. It's merely a potential person. Conclusion, therefore we can kill him. Now, wait a second. Two does not follow logically from one. You're missing something. You skip the step. Just because someone isn't a person doesn't necessarily mean that it's okay to kill them. Since what is that the rule? Anything that isn't a person can be killed? That's a whole separate case you need to make. That's a whole other premise

you have to establish. So even if I conceded the point, even if I let you make the first logical leap to say the unborn child is not a person but a potential person, you still have an even bigger leap you have to make. And I'm not going to spot you that one. So now you're out on an island. You need to now prove that it's okay to kill the potential person. And I don't see how you make that case because if I agree it's a potential person for the sake of argument, it would seem to me to be the most valuable non-person thing on the planet. It would seem to be then at worst the second most valuable thing next to a person. And I don't see why I would be okay to kill the second best thing.

It would still be more valuable than say a sea turtle egg and sea turtle eggs are federally protected. Now, to be clear, again, I don't even for a moment by the idea that an unborn person is just a potential person. I rejected outright on scientific, moral, scriptural, and logical grounds. I'm just trying to establish that the argument doesn't even work on its own premise. This is the truth that cannot be escaped. Abortion is the intentional destruction of innocent human life and intentionally destroying innocent human life is always wrong, period. That is our case, as pro-lifers. It's as simple as that. Now, tragically, recently, a contingent of people who are supposed to be on our side have abandoned this simple truth. Indeed, it's one of the most shameful

and twisted ironies I've ever seen. Prolifers won the greatest human rights victory of all time with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But rather than some conservatives being emboldened by our historic achievement, rather than celebrating, rather than acting confident and triumphant, rather than saying, let's pile on now like the left does. We got this huge win, let's go get another one. Oh, you guys are crying now, we'll give you something to really cry about next. That's what the left does. Instead, some conservatives have over the past many months in the last couple of years, become very shy about this issue, very shy. Even blaming pro-lifers for some of the electoral defeats in recent elections. They claimed this last election was going to be the greatest

defeat of all time largely because of pro-lifers. They were scapegoating pro-lifers ahead of time. Well, how did that turn out? In fact, it turns out Trump gained ground with women who were supposed to be the demographic that was going to rally against him to get revenge for Roe. Didn't happen. But even if it had turned out that way, it wouldn't change my view on the topic. It wouldn't change how I talk about it. I would not compromise on abortion even if it really did mean losing every election from now till kingdom come. And the reason is simple.

It is that to accept child murder is to forfeit your soul. If we are really a country where child murder is so fundamentally popular that it's impossible to win by opposing it, then we're not a country worth saving anymore. We deserve at that point whatever destruction comes our way, God will strike us down for our sins. And I couldn't stand in the way of that if I wanted to, and I don't want to. I'll never accept abortion. I'll never compromise on it.

I won't give up any ground, not one inch, nothing. All abortion is wrong, always. It's never okay to kill an innocent human being ever, under any circumstance, ever. It is always our obligation to protect the innocent, especially our children. There are no exceptions, none, period, ever. But finally, the good news. The good news is that the whole premise is flawed. We don't have to give up every election until Kingdom come, as we just discovered.

The pro-life message can win in this country. It is winning, but only if we have the courage to fight for it and the intelligence to fight well. The pro-life message has already won in so many ways on so many battlefing. just like the anti-trans ideology message has won and is winning. We are winning on both fronts after so many years and so many sacrifices and so much put on the line by so many people. People in this fight way longer than me before I was even born there been people for decades and decades giving everything to this and they're winning. We are winning. Winning is our destiny because the truth always prevails in the end. Always. If you're a Christian, you have an advantage because you have the book and you can skip to the spoilers at the end of the book and you can see how it ends.

And so we know that we win. We stand in the truth when no one else will for that reason. We speak for those who cannot speak. We say what must be said and we do what must be done. And if we continue to do that without fear or compromise, eventually the day will come when every child is free to be born and to be born. to live and to be safe and to be innocent as they should be. Now, I see that day in the future. It's approaching, but we're not there yet. And so for now, we fight. Thank you. The executive producer of the Matt Walsh show is Sean Hampton.

Our associate producer is McKenna McAilis. The show is directed by Mark Jones and Trey Miller. Our production manager is Austin McAilis. The show is edited by Jeff Tomlin. Our lead audio engineer is Mike Coromina. Our audio engineer is Ryan Reese, our hair and makeup artists, our Cherokee Heart and Andrea Bauer. Our wardrobe stylists are Kristen Gala Raga and Cameron Lasko. Our director of post-production is Matthew Kemp.

Director of Production Operations is Pavel Vodoski. Our chief broadcast engineer is Jeff Govan. And our assistant broadcast engineer is Allegra Roar. Our lighting director is Keith Duggan. Our playback operators are C.J. Hickish and Finn Pope. Our show assistant is Holly Merritt. And our production assistant is Mike Moran. Executive in charge of production is David Wormis.

Executive producer is Jeremy Boring. Matt Walsh Show is a Daily Wire production. Copyright DailyWire 2024. Hi, this is Andrew Claven. If you like American flags and automatic weapons and shaking your fist at homosexuals while fighter jets fly over in formation, come to the Andrew Claven Show.

We don't have any of that. But we will be making fun of idiots and praising God and laughing our way through the fall of the Republic. It's like an insane asylum for happy people. That's the Andrew Claven show right here on Daily Wire Plus.