The Matt Walsh "Scandal"

because several of you asked me to respond....

Because I reviewed his film, “What Is A Woman?” in June, several of you asked me to respond to the recent Media Matters article about Matt Walsh’s previous radio show.

My Bias about Walsh

I am biased both positively and negatively with regard to Matt Walsh.

My positive bias: I see him as an effective culture warrior on issues I care about, and I agree with his politics somewhere in the neighborhood of two-thirds of the time. (He is very conservative; I am a right-leaning centrist.) I am a member of the Daily Wire, primarily out of gratitude for the stance they took against Biden’s vaccine mandates.

My negative bias: as I wrote in my review of his film, I find him grating and, often, “a troll with a healthy dose of asshole.” His public persona has a large component of trolling-but-not-really-trolling-but-also-yeah-trolling. I find this annoying, and I believe him to be extreme on some issues, often to the point of doing serious damage to his effectiveness on other issues.

The Controversy As I Understand It

I am not on Twitter anymore, but the readers who requested this essay sent me various links to Twitter discussions of the Media Matters article. It was mostly people who oppose Walsh calling him a groomer and pedophile, based on three things, all of which are in the Media Matters article:

1. comments he made on a radio show in 2010.

2. comments he made about Joshua Duggar.

3. comments he made about the pedophile priest scandal.

The Media Matters piece also accuses Walsh of physical abuse of an intern (because the show had bits including a taser, which was used on the intern), and of racism for impressions he did. I do not care about either of those “issues” in the slightest. A “shock jock” type show is an arena for immature males. Edgy jokes/impressions and physical stunts are two ways that immature males push the envelope. What’s that? A couple of guys in their early 20s were given a radio show on which they said and did idiotic, offensive things?

I will not be commenting further on those aspects because I don’t care.

Walsh’s Comments on the Radio Show

This is from the Media Matters transcript (italicized by me to set them apart from my prose; the bolding is from the original, choices made by Media Matters to emphasize those words. I have left their bolding in to make sure I address everything they regarded as most important.)

Teen pregnancy is a new problem.

…

In the sense that it's only recently that we decided that it is a problem, OK? But it is not a new problem in the sense that it’s a new phenomenon. It is not. In fact, ever since the beginning of time, teenage girls have been getting pregnant. It used to be more common.

…

That's my point, OK? So to all of a sudden act like this phenomenon of girls getting pregnant at that — at a young age — that we consider young, 16 or 17, to act like it's a new thing is ridiculous. It’s always been that way. … Girls between the ages of like 17 and 24 is when they're technically most fertile. 

What I'm saying, though, is that if society was, if society was different and that we stopped insisting that you're a kid until you're 25 and we just deal with the reality that at about 16, you're an adult who is mature and can make decisions — you are that at 16. I don't care what anybody says. And if you're going to tell me it's different, well, then how come for the first 10,000 years of human civilization, that's the way it was? It's just recently where all of a sudden we're all r------- until we're 25?

The first point Walsh makes is that women used to have children at much younger ages than is typical today, but it was not the culturally destructive thing that it is today, because women generally married in their teens. He is concerned with unwed pregnancies, not necessarily teenage pregnancies per se.

Walsh is deeply religious, so there is absolutely nothing surprising about his belief that out-of-wedlock pregnancies are a significant problem while pregnancies happening to married women, (even if the woman in question is young) are not a problem.

His statement about fertility is true, according to ACOG (the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists). From their FAQ:

The point that many of Walsh’s opponents pounced on was the last one. He asserts that “at about 16,” we are adults who are mature and can make decisions. How can he possibly oppose 16 year olds deciding to medically transition? After all, they’re adults who are mature and can make decisions—he said so!

The obvious counterpoint here is so obvious that I was torn about even writing this essay. Would I be wasting time addressing a completely obvious bad-faith argument—or is it possible that these people are all so dense that they really and truly don’t see the counterpoint?

Having missed many quite obvious things in my short life, I decided to assume good faith and explain the counterpoint for anyone who missed it. Here it is:

Walsh made these comments about 16 year old girls when he was 23 years old.

Of course 16 year old girls seemed like adults to him; he was a 23-year-old guy! Most 16 year old girls are in fact more mature than most 23 year old guys. (Supply your own “not alls”). The sexes are different. We grow and develop at different rates. Females tend to mature faster and earlier than males. Most 16 year old girls are mature enough to refrain from edgy, racially-tinged humor and physical stunts involving tasers, particularly in public. Most 23 year old guys are not. (No, this is not an argument to set the age of majority differently for the sexes. A universal age of majority at 18 is a reasonable societal standard for legally binding contracts, full responsibility for actions, etc., that we’ve had for awhile and in my view does not need to be changed.)

In the time since he made these comments, Walsh has gotten married and had a lot of children. His wife is pregnant with twins, and he refers to driving around in a passenger van with his six children, so I believe that will make eight kids. (Possibly he has four kids and is counting the twins already; I wasn’t able to verify the Walsh child count.)

For the love of all things common sense — wouldn’t we expect a 23 year old guy’s opinions and worldview to change a lot once he gets married and becomes a father to many children?

Those of you who are parents: do you see the world the exact same way you did before you had kids? If your view has changed, did it change in the direction of believing that teenagers are significantly more mature and capable of adult decision making than is generally believed—and should be granted much greater leeway and freedom? Or did it change in the direction of realizing how little wisdom you had as a teenager, how much more complicated life was than you knew back then, and gratitude for not making bigger mistakes than you did?

Walsh’s Comments on Josh Duggar

Walsh wrote an article in the wake of the first Josh Duggar scandal, where it was revealed that, at age 14, he molested four of his sisters and a female friend of the family. The article is dated May 22, 2015. In May 2015, none of Josh Duggar’s subsequent scandals had come to light yet. It was before the Ashley Madison scandal, where his multiple infidelities were revealed, and it was before his arrest on charges related to explicit material involving the sexual abuse of children, for which he is presently serving a federal prison term. The narrative at the time—which was being publicly supported by the Duggar sisters who were his victims—was that he had repented, gotten counseling, and never done anything like that again. That was all the information the public had at the time.

In that context, here are Walsh’s words on how the parents reacted to the revelation of the crimes of 14-year-old Josh Duggar:

I know I'm opening myself up to serious criticism here, but let me be honest with you: If my own son, God forbid, came to me and admitted to doing what Josh Duggar did, I don't know that I'd immediately run to the cops.

Would you? Is it really that simple? The decision to have your child arrested as a sex offender would be an automatic thing for you? Really?

I guess I'm just a horrible person then.

I don't know all of the details. Nobody outside of the family does or ever will. But it appears that Josh's parents attempted to address the situation within their family before going to the church, and then eventually to a law enforcement officer. Again, there might be parts of this story that would change my analysis, but right now, based on what we know, it seems that they handled this the right way. Or at least, I can't say for sure that I would have known any better way to go about it.

As a parent, you have to think whether your 14 year old son deserves to have his life ruined over his mistakes. Maybe you'd decide that he does. I can't say I'd agree.

Either way, there's no good answer. No simple answer. No happy answer. Something really, really bad has happened, and now you have to figure out the next step.

I disagree with Walsh on whether or not police should be immediately involved. That’s an easy call for me, because I was the victim of sexual abuse as a child. (My extensive essay on the danger of normalizing pedophilia is here.) A parent in this situation has a duty to both the offending child and the victim child, but a greater duty to the victim child. The victim child needs the parent to communicate that what happened to them was wrong—so very, very wrong that it is absolutely a matter for the police. For the victim child to heal, they need to understand on a very deep level that it was not their fault. This is not a sibling squabble to be settled by parents; this is a serious crime, and thus it is something to be addressed by the structures in our society that address serious crimes. The parent can get the best lawyer possible for their offending child. They can do whatever is possible to help the offending child navigate the legal process. But they are not helping the offending child by enabling an evasion of criminal responsibility for having committed a crime.

Having shared why I think he’s wrong on that point, I don’t think Walsh’s take—which is nuanced; he says repeatedly that he isn’t sure and doesn’t know, so it’s possible that if he ever faces a situation of this nature, he’ll seek trusted counsel and decide to do the right thing—makes him a child sex abuse apologist or minimizer. I think it just makes him someone who lacks the perspective for how difficult child sexual abuse is to heal from, how easily children blame themselves, and how much power there is in seeing an offender face consequences. The latter puts momentum in the direction of the victim child being able to understand her innocence and see herself as someone who did not deserve to be violated. To understand that what happened to her actually mattered.

Josh Duggar’s subsequent sexual crimes (all of which came to light long after Walsh penned this essay) are numerous and horrifying. I do not believe that 14 year olds are irredeemable. If he had faced real consequences at 14, including the professional treatment that a court would likely have mandated, would he have grown up to be turned on by the worst of the worst in child sexual abuse material? (He was caught with, among other horrors, “Daisy’s Destruction” on his hard drive, a notorious video of a toddler girl being tortured by a couple of BDSM freaks.) Or would the root cause of his depravity have been addressed and healed? We will never be able to know this for sure, but it is at least possible that Josh Duggar could have been steered off the path of a sexual criminal if he had faced real consequences the first time he got caught.

I understand calling the police on a son for abusing a daughter would likely be the most difficult execution of parental duty imaginable, and probably the most difficult moment of any parent’s life. I am not saying it would or should be an easy thing to do.

But that’s why parental duties are called “duties” — because they aren’t easy.

Walsh’s Comments on Pedophile Priests and the Boy Scouts

Media Matters links to this tweet and says this is Walsh’s response to a sex abuse scandal in the Boy Scouts of America.

The replies to this tweet relate to the BSA admitting girls, not to any sexual abuse scandals. Also, May 2018 is when this announcement was made. PDF link here. So I think Media Matters is being disingenuous here.

On pedophile priests, Media Matters link to this tweet:

As many in the replies, including Walsh’s fellow religious conservatives, point out, the comparison is idiotic. 300 Catholic clergy in one state, all of whom committed crimes against children, being compared to 300 cases of sexual misconduct (which includes affairs with consenting adults and other inappropriate behavior that did not involve children) does not make Catholicism look good by comparison.

Media Matters also links to this video, wherein Walsh minimizes the scandal by saying that it’s about gay priests, not pedophiles. He claims that most of the victims were not prepubescent children.

This chart, from Wikipedia’s article on the study he cites, indicates that he got this wrong. 73.2% of the victims were age 14 or younger.

Walsh is a devout Catholic. His desire to minimize the crimes of pedophile priests is at least partly a desire to defend his “tribe,” a desire that any of us can understand. This doesn’t excuse him, however. This is the one aspect of the Media Matters article that makes a serious, legitimate point about something that Walsh got wrong.

Did he get it wrong because he secretly thinks pedophilia is not a big deal? Or did he get it wrong because he’s opposed to homosexuality and saw the scandal through that lens: that if there had been no gay priests, there would have been no sexual abuse scandal? Was this a chance to express a secret sense of leniency about pedophilia? Or was it a chance to express a deeply held and quite obvious opposition to homosexuality?

Cautiously and carefully, I am willing to give Walsh the benefit of the doubt here.

In the Interest of My Own Integrity

If Walsh were someone else politically—someone I saw as an effective culture warrior in support of causes I deeply oppose, or someone who I disagreed with a majority of the time—would I be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt?

I thought about this for a couple of days. I want to believe that I have sufficient intellectual integrity that I would come to the same conclusion with the same set of circumstances if it were someone who regularly scored victories in favor of causes I oppose.

I can’t be sure of that. People, myself included, are complicated. Our motivations are sometimes hidden to us. Our biases are not always easy to spot. I don’t know if I’d be able to be generous enough to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who was much more of a political enemy to me than Walsh is, and I want to own that.

Walsh’s Response to the Media Matters article

Walsh responded here in a video and here on Twitter:

I applaud this response. Never bend the knee and never apologize to the mob. It will only ever be taken as a signal of weakness.

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