Matt Walsh at Amfest: 'The truth should not be suppressed'

Addressing the crowd at Turning Point USA’s Americafest on Saturday, the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh spoke about the importance of truth in today’s world.

Walsh began by discussing the spread of "progressive" ideology, stating that these ideas progress like "cancer progresses," rather than the progression of society. 

"So what about us? Well, we call ourselves conservatives. And it’s almost a cliche now to ask this question, but what are we conserving exactly? Well, we are tasked with conserving all that is under attack: history, tradition, the family, liberty, Western civilization itself," said Walsh.

"And underneath all of that is something even more fundamental, the most fundamental thing of all, which is truth."

"Our first and foremost job right now is to fight for, defend, and promote truth, because truth itself is under attack in a way that we have never seen before in the history of the human race. There is a war being waged on reality, and that is where we must be primarily engaged."

Walsh continued on to say that "we are arguing not just for propositions that happened to be true, but for truth as a concept, for the very existence of truth.

Noting those on the other side of the political aisle, Walsh noted that they are not just "promot[ing] untrue ideas and mak[ing] untrue claims about the world, but they also deny that anything such as truth exists to begin with."

"We all get our own truth. they say this is my truth, that’s your truth, and so every objective truth claim is false automatically, according to them, except the claim that there is not truth that somehow is still true."

Walsh noted the recent suspension of a number of journalists for doxxing, and the creation of a Wikipedia page entitled "Thursday Night MAssacre (Twitter)," saying that these suspensions were "not really a violation of free speech, it was jsut a social media platform enforcing its rules consistently for a change."

"Although honestly, I have to admit that even if it had been a violation of their free speech, I still would not have defended them. And I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. Because it's good for people to get a dose of their own medicine for a change. It is good," said Walsh.

"But the real reason I bring this up is to make the following point. My primary objection to the deplatforming of conservatives which has gone on for years, not just on Twitter, but on every major platform. My primary objection is not that it violates free speech. That is not my primary objection. The primary objection is that conservatives are deplatformed for saying true and correct things.

Walsh cited examples like posts stating "vaccines don’t stop the spread" and that cloth masks don’t work.

"Now the reason why it's so Orwellian and oppressive and bad to ban people for saying these things is not simply that people should be free to express themselves, but even more so it's that the truth should not be suppressed. The left doesn't merely ban free speech, it bans the truth and that's the point."

Walsh said he was in favor of all content save for doxxing, death threats, and porn being placed on social media, but added that "my point is simply is that there is no moral equivalence here because the campaign of censorship that conservatives have endured for years has really been a campaign of truth suppression."

"It's the same thing on college campuses," Walsh said, noting his own experiences with his What is a Woman documentary screening tour on college campuses, which were met with protests from liberal college students.

"What made this reaction so pathetic and disturbing? What made it pathetic? Is it that they were trying to stop me from expressing myself? Is it that they were lashing out at an opposing idea? Yes, but the really troubling detail is what specific opposing idea they were lashing out against, what exactly they were trying to stop me from expressing," said Walsh.

" I was there to defend the proposition that biological sex exists, that women are female, that men are male, and that only women can make babies."

"That is the particular opposing idea that sent them into demonic fits of rage. That is the opposing idea that is not welcome in higher education. And that’s what makes it so alarming, not that they’re shutting down free speech, but that they’re shutting down the most fundamental truths of life."

"Now, as for expressions of falsehood," Walsh said, "they have an enormous amount of tolerance for that."

"In our culture, you can say anything you want anything, as long as it's not true. Just as our culture is very open to artistic expression, we got all kinds of artistic expression. All kinds of artistic expression are celebrated and tolerated. As long as it's not good or beautiful. That's the only sort of art that we are narrow-minded about. Nothing beautiful, nothing good, nothing true. Those are the rules. As long as you follow those rules, do whatever the hell you want."

"And at the center of this nihilistic war on truth is, as already referenced, gender ideology. That's the reason why I've spent so much of the past few years focusing on this issue. It's why I made the film What is a Woman. And I've been asking the question, what is a woman, because it's a question which on its own, totally exposes the trans agenda for the nonsensical and destructive sham that it is."

Walsh continued on to state that if a man comes up and states that he identifies as a woman, Walsh asks the simple question, "a woman, what is that?"

"If they cannot define the term woman, which spoiler they can't, then the game is over. They're using words in their argument and they themselves don't know what those words mean. Game over, they lose."

Walsh stated that there are only two genders, not an expansive list of them, adding "it is not complicated, it is not confusing."

"I oppose gender ideology therefore because it is not true and I oppose all things that are not true. It is worth defending reality for its own sake."

"There are many terrible things that follow from a collective rejection of reality. And the consequences are more and more dire, the more deeply the untruth burrows into the mind into the culture," said Walsh. "The untruth at the core of gender ideology of the transgender phenomena reaches down to the deepest conceivable level. Gender ideology wages it's assault against our knowledge of ourselves."

"A person fully in thrall to this lunacy hasn't simply lost grip on reality in the abstract. He's lost grip on the reality of himself. He does not know himself anymore. And gender ideology doesn't simply replace one notion of the self with some other newer, better notion. It replaces one notion of the self with no notion at all."

Walsh spoke on how the left moved from requiring tolerance to requiring affirmation, and if a person doesn’t abide by this they’re called a bigot.

"Specifically, we are bigoted against falsehood," Walsh said, adding that "part of being bigoted against falsehood is seizing back control of the language."

"The left has smuggled its ideas into the minds of the general population through the manipulation of language. And nowhere is this more obvious than with this particular issue of gender ideology. They talk about preferred pronouns. But a pronoun is a grammatical construct that has to be deployed according to the laws of grammar and grammar, not the fickle whims of the individual to whom it refers."

Walsh later added, "The statements that I make are supposed to be reflections of what I perceive not what you perceive, and I perceive reality whether you like it or not. This is why we must stick by the truth no matter whose feelings it hurts. We cannot go along with any part of this agenda because it represents a war on truth."

"Truth matters," Walsh said in closing. "it matters more than your ideology. It matters more than your preferences. It matters more than your preferences. It matters more than your feelings. It matters more than your self-identification. It matters more than anything. The truth matters more than your life and more than mine."