Daily Wire hosts call for extreme measures, including violence, against drag queens
Matt Walsh: “Real men” should be “grabbing that drag queen by the collar … and kicking him out on his ass”
Written by Brianna January
Research contributions from Jason Campbell
Published
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles called for drastic measures to prevent drag queens from being around children, with Walsh explicitly calling for violence against them by saying “real men” should kick a drag queen “out on his ass” and call the police.
Walsh also said that the adults in a room in which a drag queen danced in front of a child “should be going to prison,” and Knowles called on “the arm of the state to stop this.”
The Daily Wire's official YouTube account uploaded video of Walsh’s extreme comments, made during The Matt Walsh Show podcast, which has received more than 31,000 views. The video cuts off before Walsh’s explicit calls for violence but includes his claim that the adults should be arrested for letting a drag queen perform in front of a child.
YouTube has several policies that address harmful content, including a “violent or graphic content” policy that bans content creators from inciting violence “against individuals or a defined group of people” and a “hate speech policy” that bans “content promoting violence or hatred against individuals” based on attributes including gender identity and expression and sexual orientation.
The Daily Wire has gone after drag in the past, and these calls for violence or state action against performers come as drag queens and programs like Drag Queen Story Hour are facing threats. Anti-LGBTQ media coverage has helped create this dangerous climate; in the last year, anti-LGBTQ folks have attacked programs, forced cancellations of events, threatened arson, and introduced bills in state legislatures to limit drag queen story hours. In Texas, a right-wing radio host attempted to enter such a program while carrying a gun.
Walsh and Knowles are podcast hosts and columnists for The Daily Wire, a right-wing website that regularly promotes anti-LGBTQ, racist, sexist, and anti-abortion rhetoric. The site has several anti-LGBTQ pundits with large media platforms, including Walsh, Knowles, and Ben Shapiro, the site’s founder. They routinely push hateful rhetoric and play an influential role in making anti-LGBTQ content go viral. Just last week, Walsh lied that progressives will fight to legalize pedophilia because openly gay former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg helped a kid come out.
Furthermore, The Daily Wire is a notable example of right-wing content disseminators that social media sites like Facebook let break their rules. According to a Popular Information investigation, The Daily Wire operates a “clandestine network of 14 large Facebook pages that purport to be independent but exclusively promote content from The Daily Wire in a coordinated fashion. … This kind of ‘inauthentic coordinated behavior’ violates Facebook's rules.” The Daily Wire has leveraged this network in the past to fearmonger about trans athletes and spread dangerous misinformation about health care for trans youth.
On the March 2 edition of his podcast The Matt Walsh Show, Walsh claimed a video of a drag queen dancing in front of a child at a drag brunch illustrates “the collapse of Western society.” He called for violence against performers, saying that “real men” would be “grabbing that drag queen by the collar, if he has a collar, and dragging him out of the room, and kicking him out on his ass, out of the room, and then calling the police.” Walsh said that he believes that “all of the adults in that room, in that video, should be going to prison” and that the video should end with police officers storming the event.
Citation From the March 2, 2020, edition of The Daily Wire’s The Matt Walsh Show
MATT WALSH (HOST): Now, I also wanted to play this for you while we’re on the subject, like I said, of videos that illustrate the collapse of Western society. Here’s a video, maybe you saw on Friday, I wrote a thing about it. It’s a video from a drag brunch.
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Revolting. Vile. Evil. Infuriating. All those words and many others come to mind. First thing, obviously, you know what I’m going to say. This is child abuse. And everybody, all the adults in that room, in that video, should be going to prison. In a sane and just society, what you would see in that video, at the end, are a bunch of police officers breaking the door down and cuffing those people and throwing them in the paddywagon and bringing them to jail. That's what should happen.
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But there’s another thing that I wanted to focus on in that video. And that's the men in the background.
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Now, if those were real men -- and what I mean by “real men,” I mean men, not just in the biological sense, but also men who are interested in and capable of fulfilling their duty as men in culture -- then what they would be doing is they’d be grabbing that drag queen by the collar, if he has a collar, and dragging him out of the room, and kicking him out on his ass, out of the room, and then calling the police. That would be the appropriate response of a man. Instead, those people just sit there applauding.
Walsh made similar claims in a February 28 column for The Daily Wire.
Also on March 2, Knowles covered the same video of the drag queen on his podcast, The Michael Knowles Show. He similarly called for state action against drag queens, saying, “We should use the arm of the state to stop this ... radical sexual grooming that’s going on for young people.” He also asked for the country to introduce laws to prevent drag queens from being around children, saying, “We have always had laws against this kind of stuff in America.”
Citation From the March 2, 2020, edition of The Daily Wire’s The Michael Knowles Show
MICHAEL KNOWLES (HOST): Why is excitement so high up on the conservative side? Why are so many people being driven away from the left? Well, it might have something to do with their creepy, weird sex stuff that they keep forcing on children. Video goes viral, goes on TikTok, and then it made the rounds everywhere else.
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Everything about this is wrong. The drag queen is then touching the little girl. Drag queen not wearing a ton of clothing, by the way. There are some people who describe this sort of thing, even on the right, even conservatives, they describe these sort of scenes. They say, “Oh it’s a blessing of liberty. Isn't it great? We live in a country you can do whatever you want. We can never use the government to come in and stop this sort of thing. That’s not our place. It's un-American. There is nothing more American than tolerating this sort of child abuse, that George Washington would be so happy right now looking at this TikTok. James Madison would be so thrilled watching this video go viral on Twitter.”
That’s just complete B.S., OK? And I get why the left is pushing this stuff, but what really bugs me are the people who are allegedly on the right who are tolerating it. We need to stop this. We should use the arm of the state to stop this, OK? To stop this radical sexual grooming that’s going on for young people pushed by the political arm of the cultural left.
We have always had laws against this kind of stuff in America. The argument that it’s un-American to have laws against this kind of stuff is just not true. We have always had laws, and we currently have laws that limit people’s sexual expression. We currently, today, 2020, we have laws against adultery -- adultery, not weird child pedophilia grooming, drag queens twerking on kids. No, just adultery, we have laws against that in 19 states in America. Until the middle of the 20th century, until the sexual revolution, we had laws in most states against adultery, fronication, cohabitation, shacking up, living with your, your significant other before marriage, OK? So, it is simply historically false to say that to support a law against these kinds of things is un-American.