A popular conservative blogger and columnist is shaking his head after creating a Facebook video designed to satirize political correctness in America, only to discover millions of people thought he was serious.
Matt Walsh rose to prominence for his unflinching and vigorous blog entries in defense of conservative principle, particularly on the issues of life and family. He recently chose to mock politically correct sensibilities by pretending to suffer micro-aggressions by witnessing a mall Santa.
“A mall Santa in a public place in the year 2016. Apparently, this mall has never heard of the Declaration of Independence and the first amendment of it, which says that you can’t have religious holiday displays in places where there’s other people that are not of that religion. It says it right in there,” says Walsh in four-minute video that has nearly four million views.
Walsh says he made the video to document America’s deteriorating culture.
“Liberalism in this country has descended to a point of, I think, utter insanity. My goal was to try to make a parody of that or a satire of the overly offendedness and political correctness in our culture,” said Walsh.
He was stunned by the response.
“Of the four million hits, I’d say about 3.5 million of them are people who took it completely and totally seriously. They thought I was being 100 percent sincere,” said Walsh. “That’s because our culture is so absurd at this point that it’s hard to tell if anyone’s making fun of it,” said Walsh.
Walsh questions whether the leaders of politically correct movements actually believe what they’re pushing given how fast things are changing.
“You look at how rapidly these things have caught on. For instance, all this gender stuff. There are 56 different genders now and you can’t have men and women bathrooms. Five years ago, nobody was talking about that. Nobody cared. Nobody talked about it. Nobody believed that five years ago and here we are and it’s an accepted, mainstream thing,” said Walsh.
“It’s hard for me to believe that the people pushing it, whether they’re in academia or the media, it’s hard for me to believe they buy it. They didn’t buy it five years ago. They’re using it as a weapon. It’s a wedge that they can drive in there, identity politics, to control people,” said Walsh.
But whether the academics and media actually believe it, Walsh says an entire generation of young people believe it wholeheartedly.
“People in the older generation, a lot of them still reject it because they didn’t grow up with it. But in my generation, a lot of us have been indoctrinated into this way of thinking from a very young age. You have a generation now, from the age of four on or even younger, this is what they’re taught to believe,” said Walsh.
And he doesn’t see things improving anytime soon.
“I unfortunately think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. As the older generation’s going to die off and the millennial generation becomes the generation in charge, I don’t think we’re going to drop these things because this is how we were raised,” said Walsh.
Walsh was very critical of Donald Trump throughout the 2016 campaign, but he says there’s no doubt part of Trump’s win was due to a backlash against the aggressive liberal cultural warriors.
“I never thought that defeating political correctness is the number one job of the president. We shouldn’t necessarily elect a president based on that. But this is what happened. In a large part, I think liberals brought it upon themselves. They pushed a little bit too far, too hard, too fast. People lashed out and you ended up with Donald Trump,” said Walsh.
Walsh says there’s no magic bullet to reversing the liberal drift in the culture. He says it begins with each parent teaching their kids what’s right and wrong.
“The best thing we can do is to raise our families, to raise our kids to know better than this. Then maybe in the future, decades from now, we can have a sane country again. Who knows?” said Walsh.
