The Matt Walsh Report

Zero Days of Girlhood
This week, male performance artist Dylan Mulvaney celebrated his “Day 365 of Girlhood” at the Rockefeller Center, which, of course, is in fact day zero of girlhood. The commemoration really began a day before, when Mulvaney appeared on Drew Barrymore's talkshow, and sat there with a pleased expression on his face when Barrymore literally knelt at his feet and paid tribute to the trans deity. He went from there to the red carpet and an even more adoring crowd. His Day 365 included celebrity guests and big musical numbers. He pranced around on stage and basked in the applause of an adoring crowd, who had all come out to congratulate him for pretending to be a girl for the past year. A fawning article in Rolling Stone tells us that Mulvaney spent a week rehearsing his Day 365 performance. It also tells us that he started developing the concept six months ago, which means that Mulvaney had only been “transitioning” into a girl for six months when he decided that his transition needed to be celebrated with a star-studded gala in New York. But not everyone who starred in the show chose to be a part of it. In fact, I made a cameo appearance, along with the entire rest of the Daily Wire crew. Every good show needs a villain, and that was our role.

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I have to say, Mulvaney's absurdist “365 Days” spectacle is really quite powerful — powerful in how it proves all of the points that we have been trying to make about this man. After all, our entire criticism of Mulvaney is that he is not a woman but rather a performer wearing womanhood as a costume. His idea of womanhood is what he learned from Disney cartoons. And how exactly does he respond to this charge? By dressing up as a Disney princess, prancing around on stage, and delivering a tearful monologue while singing — a monologue that, by his own admission, he had been rehearsing for a week, as part of a performance he had been planning for six months. His tears are, then, about as authentic as everything else about him. Which is to say they are utterly contrived and staged — just more emotional manipulation meant to shut down valid criticism. Imagine a man in blackface singing a self-pitying song about how his heart breaks whenever someone tells him that his costume is offensive to black people.

Mulvaney pretends that he doesn't understand the criticism. The trans agenda runs exclusively on falsehoods, bad faith and emotional blackmail, and Mulvaney exemplifies all three. He puts on a cartoonish performance of womanhood that is as degrading and absurd as possible — he monetizes the performance, amplifies it through every platform available — and then when the criticism comes his way, he acts like he's just some random person trying to live his private life in peace. Speaking of his critics, he says he doesn't know what our goals are. I think he does, but for the moment I'll allow for the possibility that he's as stupid and oblivious as he wants us to think he is. And so I'll explain: our goal is to defend reality. It really is not any more complicated than that. And here's one reality: No real woman will ever get a red carpet extravaganza at the Rockefeller Center to congratulate her for simply existing. That is the kind of spectacle only reserved for Dylan Mulvaney. A privilege enjoyed by him and people like him. Why is that a problem? Well perhaps I can illustrate with a brief story.

I think about when our most recent set of twins were born. I will never forget the moment, two months ago, standing in the delivery room. The first baby born successfully with no problems. But then the situation began to turn dire with the second. The doctor, unable to safely deliver because of a prolapsed umbilical cord, had to make the split second decision to perform an emergency C-section. There was a lot of blood. I had never been in the room for any kind of operation before. I don't know what I was expecting exactly, but I wasn't expecting that much blood.

And then there was my wife. Laying there, calm but shivering, at several points on the verge of passing out. The only other thing I could do was hold her hand, and tell her the babies are okay, and everything will be fine. And I did tell her that, even though for a period of several minutes during this experience, I wasn't sure if it was true. But everything was fine in the end. And my wife has now taken on the task of caring for these two infants, along with four other children, with incredible grace and joy. I am not surprised to see her meet challenges this way. She is a remarkable woman. I have always known that. It's why I married her.

And yet there will never be an event at the Rockefeller Center to celebrate my wife's womanhood. She will not have any adoring crowds flocking to bask in her presence and applaud her and fawn over her. She knows more about being a woman than Dylan Mulvaney will ever know, or could ever know. She has experienced womanhood at the deepest levels. She bears its scars. She carries its burdens. She knows its blessings. She is a wife, mother, daughter, sister. She is all of the things that Mulvaney and his ilk have never been, and can never understand. And yet he is put on the stage with the spotlight and the corporate sponsorships. He is celebrated for being what he isn't. It's like giving the medal of honor to some dude who played Call of Duty in his basement.

It's not that my wife would want all of this fanfare. She's not a raging narcissist like Dylan. The point is simply that by elevating and celebrating these fake cartoon faux-women, our society has emptied womanhood of everything that is truly beautiful and meaningful and important. If it's any solace to women, they aren't alone in this boat. The same has happened with manhood. The same has happened with everything. All that is good and true is hollowed out — made artificial and absurd and ugly. It's funny that one of Dylan's cohorts on stage says that we — his critics — want to keep them in the matrix. As always, the truth is exactly the other way around. Gender ideology is the matrix. It's a fake alternate universe. An artificial projection meant to obscure reality. We are urged to play along, so as not to ruin the illusion. But we are tired of illusions. We are tired of the artificial. We are tired of imitations. We want reality. If we are going to celebrate womanhood, then we are going to celebrate the real thing. And that is not Dylan Mulvaney, and it never will be.

Defining Wokeism
Last week, the Daily Wire published “Stolen Youth,” by Karol Markowicz and Bethany Mandel. The book exposes the Left's assault on childhood, which is waged largely through indoctrination campaigns by the media, the education system, the entertainment business, and the medical industry. It's an important book on a crucial topic, and I would recommend that you pick up a copy and give it a read.

Of course, the problem with writing a book is that, once it comes out, you have to promote it. And promoting it means doing an ungodly number of interviews where you answer the same sorts of questions over and over again. You'd hope that the repetition would make you sharper, with better honed answers, but it doesn't always work out that way. The excessive exposure to cameras and microphones can instead lead to minor flubs and gaffes — brain farts, to use the medical term. This wouldn't be a huge deal, except for the fact that we live in the era of social media, where the peanut gallery is looking for any opportunity to to turn a brief mental lapse into an entire news cycle.

That's what happened to one of the authors, Bethany Mandel, when she appeared on a show called “Rising” yesterday to promote her book. Asked to define the word “woke,” Mandel momentarily fumbled over the answer. And that was all the left-wing mob needed. Her name was soon trending nationwide. Thousands of people jumped on the dogpile. There were articles published in mainstream media outlets like the Washington Post and the Independent. The Left ruthlessly mocked her for not having a pithy definition ready to go, claiming that this lapse somehow proves that conservative critiques of wokeness are illegitimate. This Washington Post headline summarizes this line of thinking: “A viral moment reinforces the hollowness of 'woke' as an attack.” Meanwhile, leftists on social media claimed that the viral moment is evidence, somehow, that the term “woke” is a bigoted term. A guy named Toure posted: “At this point woke is a slur. The way the right uses it is an undercover way of saying 'those people,' or non-white people. It's a polite way of saying the n-word but in this case the n-word includes Blacks, LGBQ folks, and other marginalized groups.” Well, of course. Whatever else we can say about it, we must begin by calling it racist because everything is racist.

Two points here. First, if I was asked to define “woke,” I would say that it's a cult — or a secular religion — which teaches that society is systemically oppressive towards certain supposedly marginalized groups. The cult believes that our institutions were built expressly with the purpose of oppressing these groups, and the only way to combat the oppression is to tear down the institutions and restructure them according to the doctrines of the cult. Nothing can exist for its own sake. No institution can have any purpose above or beyond the enforcement of those doctrines. The ultimate goal, according to the cult, is equity. And equity simply means that the imagined oppression of their favored groups has been counteracted by policies that artificially elevate those same groups. Of course, in the woke religion, the Satan figure is the heterosexual white male — each member of this group inherits the collective guilt of the oppressor. In fact, you could probably define the term this way too. A woke person is anyone who thinks that heterosexual white males are the villains of history. If they hold that belief then it's almost certain that all the rest will come with it.

If some conservatives struggle to define the term woke, it's only because they are being too generous. Some on the right want to see the Woke Left as distinct from the Left generally. They seek to define wokeness in a way that lets what they consider to be the average leftist off the hook. There is no way to do that. Wokeness is just another word for leftism. There is essentially no daylight between the stereotypical blue haired woke TikTok they/them and the most mainstream Democrat political figure. Ideologically, they are identical. The term “woke” only becomes complicated and hard to define when you are trying to find some way to differentiate mainstream leftism from wokeness. But they cannot be differentiated. Woke is another word for leftist, which is why I personally don't use the term woke very often, because “leftist” suffices just fine.

Second point. Leftists are certainly not in a position to make fun of anyone else for struggling to define a word. If there is another defining feature of wokeness, it's that it creates a world governed from top to bottom by double standards. And here we find another one. These people cannot objectively define any of the terms they use, and yet they point and laugh at someone else for fumbling over a definition. Most infamously, of course, they cannot define the word woman. But the difference between “woman” and “woke” is that the latter is an ideology, which means that it is actually a human construct, it is actually somewhat fluid and changing. It really does exist on a spectrum of sorts. There are bits of it which are murky and vague. This means that it's not terribly shocking or hilarious when a person fails to come up with a pithy definition on the spot. I can guarantee that none of these leftists making fun of Bethany Mandel would perform any better if asked to define “fascism” on the spot. And although they throw the term around all over the place, I wouldn't necessarily blame them for not having a one sentence definition ready to go. Ideologies are a bit more complicated than that.

“Woman,” on the other hand, is not an ideology. Woman is an objective, biological reality. Human beings didn't invent womanhood. It's not an idea. It's not a political concept. Woman has a basic one sentence definition — adult human female — that every rational person should know and should be able to cite whenever asked. And yet the woke mob cannot provide this definition. Mandel briefly struggled to define an idea. These people struggle to define ideas, but they also struggle to define literally everything else, including the fundamental biological realities of nature. It is one thing to put an ideological label on someone else and then briefly struggle to define that label. It is another thing entirely to label yourself something — like saying “I identify as a woman” — and then be completely unable to define what it is. That's not just a minor gaffe or a gotcha moment; rather, it reveals the fundamental incoherence of your entire worldview. But that again is another feature of wokeness. It is perhaps its defining feature, before anything else. It is an ideology that contradicts and negates itself at every turn, an ideology that asserts things as true and yet denies that truth exists. It is an ideology of confusion, most of all.

Matt Walsh
-Matt

Matt Walsh
Host, The Matt Walsh Show