Matt Walsh Doesn’t Understand Anything

Ignorance: the foundation of conservatism

Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh speaking with attendees at the 2022 Young Women’s Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas. Image Source: Gage Skidmore Image License: CC BY-SA 2.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

I wasn’t planning on writing another piece covering some of the responses from the right to the killing of Henry Nowak in England, but I’ve been seeing Matt Walsh try and wade his way into discourse on this issue. Far be it from me to pass up on an opportunity to explain why Matt Walsh is completely wrong about something, I thought I’d give my take on his whole response to this.

For the unaware, Henry Nowak was an 18-year-old British boy and a student at Southampton University who was tragically murdered at the end of last year by a Sikh man. Body cam footage from officers who dealt with Henry Nowak has been released, and it is a pretty shocking state of affairs. Henry explained to the officers on the scene that he had been stabbed multiple times and that he couldn’t breathe, and the officers ignored him with the utmost callousness.

The part of the story which is getting the most attention from people on the right is that Henry was accused by the person who stabbed him of racial abuse, and as a result, he was put in handcuffs. What people on the right are trying to claim this story represents is a rise in anti-white racism and woke police training, leading to claims of racism being taken more seriously than white lives.

Nigel Farage, probably the most prominent figure in the British right-wing, claimed that the treatment of Nowak by the police is indicative of how the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities. As I mentioned, I’ve already written my thoughts on this whole affair, so I’m not going to go over it again, but I am going to spend some more time going over the right-wing response to this affair, especially from Matt Walsh.

Walsh responded to a particular post on Twitter from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressing sorrow to Henry and his family by saying that “It’s not “knife crime,” you gutless rodent. It’s anti-white violence. It’s the systemic hatred, oppression, and marginalization of white people in your country, carried out by your government. But you know that.”

To once again give some background on this case, there’s no evidence that Henry was attacked and killed simply for being white. Keep in mind that Henry wasn’t killed by the police, but by a fellow citizen of Britain. To frame this as anti-white violence and a part of a broader systemic trend of anti-white oppression and marginalisation is nonsensical. I would be a bit snarky here and say that Matt Walsh knows this, but given that he is so cognitively limited, I wouldn’t count on that.

One thing I do want to stress here is the almost certainty that Matt Walsh doesn’t know anything about this case. Matt is American, and I sincerely doubt he pays that much attention to British politics, certainly not of specific murders like that of Nowak. He is simply going off his gut reaction and whatever he’s already seen from the right-wing outrage machine.

As for Matt’s specific point about this case representing the systemic oppression of white people and a broader trend of anti-white violence, this is also wrong, absurdly so. Henry’s killing is a single instance; it isn’t part of some broader trend of anti-white violence. I’d wager that Matt doesn’t even know the motivations for Henry’s killing, which renders his claim of this being anti-white violence nonsensical.

Not only this, but there is no evidence of Henry’s killing representing any kind of broad trend. It’s not like there’s a string of other murders of white people with explicitly anti-white motivations behind them. Again, it’s not even clear that Henry was killed simply for being white, and there’s even less evidence for this being part of some broader trend, as Matt claims.

White people are also not systemically oppressed in Britain by any metric. White people are the majority for one thing, which straight away proves his point about marginalisation wrong, but also most of our politicians are white, most people in the media are white, and most people in positions of power in general are white. Every single Prime Minister in British history, apart from Rishi Sunak, has been white.

For someone like Matt to claim that Henry Nowak’s murder represents the systemic oppression of white people, I’d really question if they know what these terms mean. To reiterate, Henry Nowak’s murder was a single, isolated event, and there’s no evidence of it being part of some wider trend. Furthermore, there’s no evidence that the British government is complicit in this kind of anti-white oppression. As I just mentioned, white people represent the majority of people in government in Britain, including the Prime Minister.

By what standard are white people oppressed in Britain? Granted, it’s not even just Walsh who is running with this argument but pretty much the entirety of the right, especially in Britain. Yet when they have to explain how this situation constitutes anti-white oppression, the best they can offer is loosely connected anecdotes and falsehoods about the case of Henry Nowak, hardly stellar proof of their claims.

What’s funny is Matt also put out a video in which he said Henry Nowak’s case was far worse than the case of George Floyd, an indefensible claim that falls apart after the most basic scrutiny. The reason why George Floyd’s murder was so tragic, and the reason why it outraged so many people was because Floyd was murdered by an agent of the state, and it was just another example in a long list of high-profile killings of innocent Black people by police in recent years.

Not only this, but it also took place in a country with a long history of racial oppression of Black people, including at the hands of police. This is obviously not equivelant to the case of Henry Nowak. Nowak was killed by a citizen, not an agent of the state. Yes, the police treated Nowak horribly, and this needs to be taken as an urgent call to change the nature of policing in Britain, but it’s not the same as George Floyd.

Furthermore, and this is the thing that right seems to be intent on ignoring, the coroner’s report into Henry’s death found that there was nothing that could have been done to save him. Again, this is completely different to being singled out and killed by police for purely racist reasons, as we saw in the case of George Floyd. Despite the right intentions to equate these two cases, there is no possible standard by which they represent the same phenomenon.

All of this seems very pathetic when we look at the actual state of race relations in Britain. If you look at somewhere like London, Black people are up to 48 times more likely to be stopped and searched by police; this goes far beyond any non-racist justification. The metropolitan police has also been found to be institutionally racist against Black people in Britain many times over the years, yet we never hear the right mention this.

Ultimately, what this all indicates, especially when coming from Matt Walsh, is that the right simply has no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to these matters. Matt clearly doesn’t know anything about Henry’s case or politics in Britain more broadly, such is clearly indicated by his ignorant ramblings. And now, white people are not oppressed in Britain, regardless of how much people like Matt want to insist they are.