Matt Walsh on Mask Madness and Afghanistan Fallout

CLAY: We are pleased to be joined by Matt Walsh from The Daily Wire right now. He is @MattWalshBlog on Twitter. He also now lives in Nashville. You’re a father of four and fired up at the absurdity of the mask mandates that are taking place for kids, and we talked about this last week. I went to Williamson County, which is the county south of where Nashville is, on Tuesday. Wednesday you went and spoke as a parent against the mask mandate in the city of Nashville. What was your experience like? And thanks for being here with us.

MATT: Yeah, thanks for having me in. It was a little different from your experience, I think, because there was probably a larger contingent of pro-mask parents. I’d say it was about 50-50.

CLAY: In Nashville?

MATT: In Nashville, yeah. I could tell that the anti-mask parents… I don’t like to say “anti-mask.” Pro-constant sanity, pro-reasonable policy. I am anti-mask but there are plenty of parents who have no problem with masks in general.

CLAY: (chuckling) Amen.

MATT: They just don’t think their kids should be forced to wear it. Anyway, on the pro-sanity side, I could tell that there was some organization that happened, an effort to bring parents out. On the pro-mask side, there wasn’t as much for that organization. For me, it was kind of revealing because I was like number 20 to speak on the list.

CLAY: How many people did they allow to speak?

MATT: There were 50 people on the list and a lot of people didn’t show up.

CLAY: Yes.

MATT: So, I don’t know, maybe 30 actually spoke. We got kicked out before the end because they told us we had to wear masks. They decided like towards the end if you’re in the building you have to wear a mask —

CLAY: Oh, that’s just perfect.

MATT: — or you can leave, and so I said, “All right, I’ll just leave.” But it was sort of revealing to watch all of these pro-mask parents get up there because they were truly terrified — they were shaking and trembling in fear — that their children would die if another child without a mask on breathed near them, and I can tell that they really believed that.

Here is my speech to the Nashville School Board where I spoke out against the cruel and indefensible mask mandate for children pic.twitter.com/Eq5IFsKyja

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) August 12, 2021

They had been so taken by media propaganda that they really believed that a child without a mask would murder their child, and that was kind of revealing to me, because I wasn’t sure how much these parents had really bought into this or are they more concerned that they would get sick? Do they really think their children’s lives hang in the balance? And they do, at least from what I saw.

BUCK: So are they, based on what you were hearing — and again, I find the parents who are who are terrified… It’s very sad, but it’s also very important to get to the bottom of it because there are definitely teachers union representatives, folks like that who are playing politics with the masks in school, or it’s about they’re worried that adults are gonna get sick, right?

There’s that component. But for people who actually think that it’s a big risk to kids, Matt, are they just unfamiliar with the actual statistics and numbers? Do they not know? Did that come across? We’re getting into the one-in-100,000 kind of a number of fatalities for children who get this virus. Were they just ignorant of it, or do they not care? How does that brain process work? To the best of your ability, explain it to us.

MATT: I think it’s a little bit of both. A lot of it is also human narrate. I think a lot of people, they don’t find data and statistics to be all that compelling emotionally. What drives most people is anecdotes. So what I heard was just a succession of one anecdote after another people getting up there and saying, “Oh, I know a child that this happened,” or, “I know someone who knows someone that this happened.”

And then when it was my turn to speak, I said, “Okay, well, here are the statistics: 42 million children have contracted covid that we know of — probably a lot more than that — and 350, thereabouts, according to CDC by August had died of covid.” Assuming all that’s accurate, that is a mortality rate of like 0.008%. In the overall child population of the country 0.0004% of them have died by covid. They’re more likely to drown in a bathtub. They’re more likely, of course, to die of the flu, which is a really important point here. And you try to lay all that out. I know I’m not the first person make these points. You’ve made these points many time, Clay. But there is this kind of… It’s like you’re talking to a brick wall.

CLAY: Yeah, they don’t want to hear it.

MATT: They don’t want to hear it.

BUCK: I just said to Clay before you came in, we’ve gone into true religious symbolism now.

MATT: Yeah.

BUCK: Meaning, your belief in the face of contravening evidence about masks becomes more evidence of your devotion to the Fauci-ite masking religion. And I think if people double down on this even against facts. I mean, we look at the data on mandate cities versus nonmandate cities or mandate counties and when you line them up it’s just not possible to look at this and think that they’re a successful intervention tool.

We had Dr. Marty Makary on the show recently; he’s written in the Wall Street Journal a bunch of times about covid stuff, Matt. He said people forget that masks were the fourth mitigation tool in he remembers it of importance, right? Number one was, what, separating people, right, or essentially social distancing and keeping the sick away from other people.

So when do you think there will be more of a wake-up for those who still cling to this? I just came from New York where I had to get vaccinated to be able to go to my own brother’s wedding this week in New York City, full stop, no exceptions made. When do you think people realize how insane and authoritarian that has really become?

MATT: I think… I’m not the guy for silver linings. So if there is a rosy picture at the end of this, if there’s light at the end of the tunnel, I’m not the guy to point it out. I’m more of a doom-and-gloom type, I guess. So I would say that I think we’re at the point where if you’re still fully invested in the mask cult, then I don’t see how you’re ever gonna be rescued from it.

I think there are people that will be masking, really, for the rest of their lives. Part of it is people aren’t aware of statistics or don’t care. But also for a lot of people their ability to assess risk and to come up with proportional responses to that risk has been utterly obliterated. So you’ll hear them say things like that, “Well, better safe than sorry,” and, “There is a risk; it mitigates it.”

CLAY: “If we can save even one life”?

MATT: “If we can save even one life.” Of course, if you try to operate that way, “as long as we can save one life,” well, then you would never drive a car. You’d never leave your house.

CLAY: Yes.

MATT: You’d never do anything. Driving your car is a really important point, because when you get in a car… Every time I you my kids in a car and I drive somewhere, even with seat belt —

CLAY: Yes.

MATT: — I know that they might die. I might actually kill them accidentally in the car. I might. I probably won’t; thank God I don’t. But I might. You know, you could do that. And yet you choose to do it anyway, because you’ve assessed that, although there’s a risk and it’s a terrible thing that could happen, the risk is not great enough to adjust your lifestyle to that extent.

CLAY: Putting that into perspective in particular, because I do think — and Buck and I try to do this on our show, and I know you try to do this with your audience too. Hammering home facts and data: 1- to 4-year-old kids drowning? You have 2.8 in 100,000 people drown, all right? Well, 0.2 have died of covid. Drowning, vehicle accidents — as you just mentioned — homicide, cancer, cardiovascular disease, the flu, the seasonal flu, suffocation.

All of these are wildly in excess in terms of death for kids under 14 years old. And yet we have almost no discussion about them. I was talking with my wife this weekend, and she said, “We need South Park to do an episode on pools shouldn’t be allowed, because far more kids drown than ever are impacted by covid.”

BUCK: Yeah, and if you want to keep your swimming pool in your backyard, you want kids to drown since you’re a bad person.

CLAY: You want kids to drown and die. Right.

BUCK: That’s the logic of the masks.

CLAY: From a satirical perspective. It’s as if people don’t care about this data, and you tell them, and it comes back to that anecdote where they saw something on social media and it’s the driving force.

BUCK: Yeah, so they don’t accept the data, they don’t care about the data, Matt, but also over the weekend we saw some new numbers out of… Now it’s Martha’s Vineyard I think in general but they had 74 confirmed cases, which this is a “highly sophisticated and vaccinated” population in general in Martha’s Vineyard but specifically the Obama birthday bash.

I think part of this was that has been the hardest to swallow for a lot of, folks, is how much and how blatant the hypocrisy of the controlling elites has been about the covid lockdowns. Do you think that might be more powerful than the numbers when all is said and done, when people finally realize that the people telling you to be terrified of covid aren’t themselves actually terrified of covid in a lot of cases?

MATT: Maybe that will do it. If that was gonna do it, then I would hope that it would have already, that would have sunk in for a lot of people. Because we’ve been able to tell that from the very beginning, that the people, as you say, who are telling us to be afraid of it aren’t afraid of it themselves.

That’s why I personally, with the Obama’s birthday thing, yeah… Well, in a way it’s not really hypocrisy because they’ve actually been pretty consistent about this the entire time. They’ve been pretty consistent that they are important people and so they get to have different rules and they get to do important people things and we’re not important, so we don’t get to do these things.

BUCK: So this is like the Lori Lightfoot haircut thing. “I’m public face.”

MATT: Right. Exactly. They’ve actually pretty explicit about that but, by the way, I think the lesson we take from that is just to do as they do ’cause they’re not worried about it. They want to have a birthday party and celebrate and eat, drink, and be merry. So go ahead and do that because also the other thing is, covid is out there. I think we need to start talking about this, that it’s out there; it’s probably gonna be out there forever.

It’s probably endemic at this point. Even the so-called public health experts, to the extent that we trust them, which is not at all. But even they’ll tell you that. So it’s always going to be there, so you have to figure out a way to live with that reality as this thing that’s lurking out there that probably wouldn’t you do you any harm but could. Certainly our elites have done that. They realize that it’s out there, but they rather enjoy their birthday.

BUCK: We’ll bring Matt back here to talk a little bit more about the Biden administration, maybe even some Afghanistan talk. We want to get his take on it, Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire with us here in studio.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Here in studio with Clay and joined by our guest today, Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire. Matt, one thing over the weekend with all the craziness in Afghanistan that kept coming up, at least in my mind, was how many disasters, how many terrible decisions with the Biden administration get away with before it’s clear that this isn’t gonna be like Jimmy Carter. It’s looking like it’s gonna be worse than Jimmy Carter.

MATT: Yeah, I mean, look. I think with the speech coming up from Biden, I don’t know exactly what to expect. I know that some people on Twitter are hoping that… (laughing) that he resigns, which I tend to doubt. But even that —

CLAY: (laughing) “Tend to doubt”? That would be a blockbuster of all blockbusters.

MATT: But even that, I’m not sure we would celebrate that because that means we would get Kamala Harris. I’m not sure that’s a better circumstance. But I think with the Afghanistan thing for me, it’s important to draw this line, to walk a line. Because on one hand I think we can all agree that the withdrawal has been handled horribly.

That’s one thing. It’s one of those rare circumstances where everybody agrees on both sides of the aisle. But at the same time, this is something that needed to happen. It’s happened in the wrong way, but we did need to leave, I think. I also think it’s strange — and I’m not an expert myself in Afghanistan.

But then we know that the experts have failed us, so we just have to use our common sense and try to navigate these issues, whether it’s covid or this. But I also look at the fact that, you know, Afghanistan allegedly had an army of 300,000 people, Biden claimed.

BUCK: Mmm-hmm.

MATT: And they, what, didn’t fire a shot and gave up as soon as the American military leaves?

CLAY: (laughing) Yeah. They made the French in World War II look like die hard fighters.

BUCK: In the early days, there were some small units that were willing to fight it out and I think unfortunately very bad things were done to them when they surrendered. But as an overall cohesive force, yes, it was just… In fact, they had military units that handed over their gear and the leadership took payment from the Taliban to not fight right away, right off the bat.

MATT: I think that if a country has no will to exist, I don’t know how long we can prop it into existence. I know there’s this comparison I’ve seen on social media a lot saying that, hey, we’ve got bases in Germany and Japan.

BUCK: Germany, Japan. Those countries aren’t at war still. They don’t have active insurgencies still.

MATT: We could argue about whether we should have bases there, but they are countries anyway. We are not propping up this house of cards simply by being there like we are with Afghanistan. It just seems like there are a lot of people in the ruling class especially who say this should be an indefinite situation where we hold this country into existence for unclear reasons indefinitely. I don’t see how we can do that.

BUCK: That became the argument, that actually they think that referring to “forever war” is something that now blows back on the other side. “Oh, your forever war sending; look what happens.” But really the alternative of this is just the permanent presence. There are some people that are still making that case, by the way, which I think is a weak one but there are people who make it.

MATT: Yeah, and this also goes both ways, by the way, because each member of each country has to defend itself. The country has to defend itself and exist for its own sake. But that also is the case for us, because we have plenty of crises here in America to focus on. Even if I were to agree in theory that it’s a good idea to go across the world and build nations and so forth and be an imperial force, are we equipped right now to do that, even if it was a good idea, which I don’t think it is? I would say not.

CLAY: What about the domestic impact for the international failure, big picture, right? We can talk about the experts have failed against, but does Joe Biden bear a significant consequence domestically for what happened in a foreign country right now in Afghanistan, or a week from now has the average American completely forgotten about Afghanistan and everybody just kind of moves on and the long-range impact here is not significant? What is the legacy here?

MATT: Yeah, I think it’s the latter. The average American these days we have the memory of a housefly. We’ve seen this play out so many times where there’s this big story the media’s talking about, it’s a huge scandal, whoever the president happens to be and we’re told, “Ah, they’re never gonna live this down,” and then a week later no one’s talking about it. It’s like ancient history.

CLAY: Yeah.

MATT: That’s actually one of the stories about the American people and our culture — one of the most important stories — is our inability to focus on one thing and care about it for more than seven days or even seven hours many times.

CLAY: Yeah, and social media has exacerbated what was already that trajectory, right, to the point where everybody has the memory of a goldfish.

MATT: Yeah, exactly, ’cause there’s always a million things going on in the world and sometimes it’s a matter of which thing should I focus on? And then a lot of people outsource that discernment to the media, and the media tells us, “Oh, well, here’s what you should focus on now. That’s old news. Now focus on this instead.”

BUCK: Isn’t it amazing, Matt, to watch as they pretend now that it is, at least the withdrawal, an utter catastrophe — everybody can see it, it couldn’t be more obvious — now they’re asking the tough questions for a day or two in the Biden administration as if that’s something to be celebrated or it would be better if they’d asked questions before the whole thing fell apart.

MATT: Yeah. I saw the interview with Jake Tapper where he was —

BUCK: That’s his whole thing.! He asks the hard questions where there’s no other choice; then he wants a pat on the back.

MATT: Yeah.

BUCK: He’s the biggest of the frauds in my opinion. Go ahead.

MATT: Yeah. I also think it’s interesting that this is the one thing… Although it was handled terribly, again. But leaving Afghanistan is the one thing that the media decides to hold Joe Biden to account for. I find that interesting as well.

CLAY: Quickly, what’s the Ravens’ record gonna be this year? For people who are out there NFL fans, you’re a big Baltimore Raven fan.

MATT: I’m gonna go 13-3.

CLAY: You’ve got 17, remember?

MATT: Oh yeah.

CLAY: So 13-4? You think you’re gonna win the AFC North?

MATT: So 14-3, yeah. I’ll go 14-3. That’s based on nothing but that fact that I’m a homer. (laughing)

CLAY: They’ve been good. It’s gonna be interesting to see.

MATT: Undefeated in the preseason. Come on. That’s gotta count for something.

CLAY: Twenty-five games in a row or whatever the heck it is? Unheard of. He is Matt Walsh. Encourage you to go follow him @MattWalshBlog.