Matt Walsh, one of the most-listened-to podcast hosts in America, defended a well-known white nationalist organization on his Daily Wire show this week. On Tuesday’s episode of his eponymous podcast, Walsh argued that VDare — a racist nonprofit listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — was being targeted by a government investigation solely because of its “inconvenient” and “unpopular” beliefs.
“The attorney general of New York, Letitia James, is of course best known for her campaign to seize all the assets of the leading presidential candidate, Donald Trump,” Walsh said. “What she’s not so well-known for is her campaign to target the website VDare explicitly because of its inconvenient and unpopular beliefs. This is a story that’s gotten very little attention in conservative media, but it’s every bit as scandalous as what Letitia James is doing to Donald Trump.”
Walsh was referring to James’ ongoing investigation into whether VDare’s 2020 purchase of a $1.4 million castle in West Virginia may have violated its New York nonprofit status. He also alluded to the fact that earlier this year James won a civil fraud lawsuit against Trump for falsely inflating his net worth, meaning that the former president could be on the hook for $454 million if he loses on appeal.
“VDare likes to talk about things like crime statistics and what happens in cities like Baltimore,” Walsh said, likely referring to the VDare website’s skewed, racist of coverage of “Black crime” in America. “So therefore, like Donald Trump, they need to be crushed. Every real estate transaction they’ve ever engaged in needs to be carefully scrutinized until they’re bankrupt.”
Walsh also complained that not enough conservatives were standing up for VDare. “Is there anyone in this country who’s even suggested sacrificing anything for a site like VDare?” he asked. “Of course not. They have unfashionable views. So they’re not going to be around much longer.”
For Walsh to claim that VDare merely has “unfashionable,” “inconvenient” and “unpopular” views obscures just how extreme the organization is. As noted by Angry White Men — a website that documents white supremacist rhetoric and was the first to report on Walsh’s comments — VDare has “defended the racist manifesto of the El Paso shooter” who killed 23 people during a 2019 anti-Hispanic shooting spree at a Walmart in Texas. And a video that VDare published on YouTube called for a secessionist movement that would result in the creation of a white ethnostate.
VDare’s founder, Peter Brimelow, has argued that “Hispanics do specialize in rape.” Brimelow has also attended events with white supremacist figures such as Richard Spencer, who helped organize the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
VDare was found in contempt of court last week for failing to comply with a subpoena issued by James’ office requiring the organization to turn over emails and other internal correspondences, court records show. James is investigating whether Brimelow and his wife, Lydia Brimelow, personally profited from VDare’s purchase of the medieval-style castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia.
Walsh claimed on his show that James “admitted out in the open that she was going to ignore the First Amendment and go after people saying things online that she does not like,” an apparent reference to a directive James issued years ago to combat a rise in antisemitism in New York state by creating a hotline to report hate crimes and calling on social media companies to “regulate hate speech and strengthen their policies.” An article in Haaretz about James’ directive makes no mention of her planning to investigate groups like VDare.
The Daily Wire did not respond to a request for comment about Walsh’s comments on James or his defense of VDare.
Earlier this week HuffPost reported that Jeremy Boreing, The Daily Wire’s CEO, made a cordial livestream appearance with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, telling the young fascist influencer — who has praised Adolf Hitler and called for the execution of “perfidious Jews” — that he’s “talented” and “very funny,” even if Boreing does have some “concerns” about Fuentes’ views.
Boreing claimed during the livestream appearance that The Daily Wire, one of the biggest right-wing media outlets in America, made $220 million in revenue last year and has over 1 million subscribers to its content.
The Daily Wire’s hosts frequently promote bigoted views that wouldn’t look out of place on VDare’s website. Walsh, for example, has embraced the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which claims that there is an organized, covert effort to replace white people in America and other Western countries with nonwhite immigrants. The conspiracy theory has motivated multiple white supremacist mass shootings in America.
Walsh promoted a version of this conspiracy theory during Tuesday’s episode of his podcast, lamenting that Scotland is “importing poor foreigners” and “so-called refugees” by “the boatload” to make up for the country’s flagging birth rate.
“The Matt Walsh Show” is currently the 12th most popular podcast in the “news” category on Apple Podcasts.