There’s an old story from the early 20th-century Russian empire. It goes something like this: A man on the street yells, “Nikolay is a moron!” A police officer hears this, and thinking that the guy is referring to the Tzar, Nicholas II, the cop arrests the man. The guy protests: “No, officer, I didn’t mean our respected Tzar, but another Nikolay.” And then the cop responds, “Don’t try to trick me. If you say, ‘moron,’ you are obviously referring to our Tzar.”
Who knows whether that story is true or not; it’s on Wikipedia so it’s probably made up. Whatever the case, it does reveal a fundamental truth about thugs and autocrats, which is that the more authoritarian they become, the more amusing they often are, if only unintentionally. They just can’t help themselves. And of course, we’re seeing that today, pretty much everywhere we look. One of the ironies of the death of humor on the Left is that, without realizing it, leftists have suddenly become some of the funniest people on the planet.
Case in point, yesterday afternoon I opened my email and found a message from someone named Jack Brewster. Jack said he works for a company called NewsGuard, which says it applies “various metrics of credibility and transparency” to news organizations and podcasts, so that, “consumers, advertisers, researchers, and others can make more informed decisions about which media they choose to consume and support.”
It’s all very serious stuff that we absolutely need shadowy organizations with Orwellian names like “NewsGuard” to handle for us; there’s no chance that people can come to informed conclusions about media outlets and podcasts on their own. We need Jack Brewster there to guide us. To that end, Jack Brewster (who happens to be a former operative for the Democratic Party) provided a series of questions for me, and demanded that I reply to them so that he can rank my show poorly and get me censored on social media.
WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show
I’ll get into NewsGuard’s real mission and the full text of Jack Brewster’s email in a second, but I’m not going to bury the lead here. Here’s the precise question from my new friend Jack that truly is the single best paragraph I’ve ever read in my email inbox, which maybe isn’t saying much, but it’s true. It brought joy to my day, and I want to spread that joy to you. So here it is, the totally earnest question from fact-checking savant Jack Brewster.
Jack wrote: “The Aug. 24, 2023, episode of ‘The Matt Walsh Show’ featured a bonus special segment in which Walsh stated: ‘Michelle Obama is a man. … I am increasingly convinced there’s some validity out there. No, I really am. Look, some people have looked into this…’ Shapiro interjected to say, ‘For God’s sake, Matt. You’re the only one in America who knows that women can’t be men. Stop it.’ Walsh replied, ‘I don’t know. Look, and some information has come out about [former President Barack] Obama recently that also confirms what we were told was once a conspiracy theory…’ Shapiro interjected again to say, ‘He [Barack Obama] did like dudes. He did like dudes. That is a thing he wrote…which is a weird thing to write to a girlfriend, by the way.” Walsh later asked, “Why are we dodging this question [about Michelle Obama’s gender]?” to which Klavan responded, “Yeah, Michelle is obviously a man.” Shapiro replied, “Oh God, guys. Please stop. She is not a man. She’s a woman… a very bad woman by the way.'”
Then Jack, smelling the Pulitzer, asks me the money question: “Why did Walsh and Klavan claim that Michelle Obama is a man?'”
Now, I’m not going to get into the various high-quality sources I was relying on when I made my remarks, which were obviously serious in every possible respect. I’m not going to talk about how Michelle Obama conspicuously doesn’t list her pronouns in her Twitter bio, even though most prominent Democrats, including AOC and Pete Buttigieg, are proudly doing so. I’m not going to talk about broad shoulders or deep voices or a weird lack of baby pictures or anything like that. I’m certainly not going to show you the footage of Ted Nugent’s infamous discussion with Kyle Rittenhouse from back in April, where he outlines some of his own observations on the topic. And I deeply hope that you don’t look up that footage for yourself, which you can find on YouTube or Twitter. None of that is the point here.
Instead, I’m going to do what NewsGuard desperately doesn’t want me to do, which is to provide some context. First of all, Jack at NewsGuard immediately gets a couple of obvious facts wrong. For one thing, I didn’t make these comments about Michelle Obama on my show, or a special edition of my show. I made the comments on a Daily Wire “Backstage.” And that Backstage took place on August 23rd, which was debate night, and not August 24th, as the fact-check guy claimed. So NewsGuard is obviously a shoddy organization that doesn’t actually care about accuracy.
You can watch the relevant portion of the clip (51:40) on The Daily Wire HERE.
So we’re playing a game where you’re supposed to answer these funny questions. It’s not supposed to be an inquisition where everyone has to rigorously fact-check and cross-reference all of their statements and provide citations. That’s pretty obvious if you’re watching that clip and you don’t suffer from any debilitating disorders that affect your ability to perceive humor or sarcasm. I can only imagine what it must be like to have Jack Brewster over to your house for game night. You’re all playing Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity or something like that and Jack is sitting in the corner, by himself, sipping his La Croix, issuing fact checks. “Uh excuse me, I have rated your answer misleading. It lacks important context. I have also reported you to the FBI.”
I’m actually a bit disappointed that Jack didn’t go further with this fact-check. For one thing, Michael Knowles begins the segment by stating that he’s the “most popular game show host in America.” That is obviously a statement in need of scrutiny. Then Knowles goes on to say that some dishonest hack from Media Matters is probably going to clip our responses to this game, take them out of context, and pretend to take us literally, when we’re obviously just messing around on a boring debate night. Jack should have fact-checked him there and pointed out that in fact a dishonest hack from Media Matters did not take us out of context. Instead, a dishonest hack from NewsGuard did.
Now to be fair, Jack raised a few other pointed questions too. For example, he writes, “During the Sept. 14, 2023, episode, Walsh stated: ‘There are no clinical trials or studies that demonstrate that it’s safe or necessary in any way to give Covid shots to six-month-old children. Not a single one, not a single study.’ However, multiple studies — including this study in Pediatrics and this study in the New England Journal of Medicine, have shown that it’s safe to give COVID-19 shots to children ages 6 months old. Should Walsh have noted such studies instead of making such a broad claim?”
This is an example of spreading misinformation while claiming to combat it. Neither one of the studies that Brewster cites actually prove his assertion that the COVID shot is safe or necessary for six-month-old children. The first study, from the journal Pediatrics, isn’t really a study at all. It’s a “Research brief.” Here’s what it says: “We may have underestimated or missed potential safety concerns if the biologically plausible risk interval for an outcome differed from our specified risk interval.”
The researchers say their analysis is early and therefore has “reduced statistical power.” The second study, from the New England Journal of Medicine, also acknowledges that “wider-scale use of the vaccine in children after authorization may identify other less frequent or more serious adverse events, and continued monitoring of safety after emergency use authorization is ongoing.”
So, these are not in fact documents that prove that it’s safe to give your six-month-old child a COVID shot. They are tentative assessments of a very limited amount of data. And they certainly don’t even come close to suggesting the shot is necessary for these children.
That’s about the extent of NewsGuard’s factual questions for me. The rest of Jack’s email somehow gets even weirder. For example, he asks, “Can you comment on whether the podcast is dominated by one-sided opinion?” He wants to know the answer to that question because, “One of NewsGuard’s criteria for rating a podcast seeks to determine whether a podcast is dominated by one-sided opinion.”
Then the email cites a bunch of examples of me providing my opinion, without inviting someone on the show to argue with me.
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What’s funny about this line of attack is that, when other outlets have provided “both sides” of an issue, NewsGuard blames them for doing that. It is a lose-lose proposition. A couple of years ago, Red State reported that NewsGuard berated them for publishing an article with the headline, “Doctor Disagrees With the CDC/NIH on COVID.” What was wrong with that article?
According to NewsGuard,, “This headline suggests that there are two opposing sides of a debate, [the doctor] and public health authorities, and that both positions are equally supported by evidence. This is not the case.”
So, you’re damned if you present both sides, and you’re damned if you don’t. The only solution they want is for you to parrot their side. If you don’t do that, then they’ll do what they’re doing to me. They’ll whine because I have too much opinion on my podcast, even though it is an *opinion podcast.* The whole show is my opinion. That is the genre of the show. It’s like if I had a sports show and they criticized me for not talking enough about the budget deficit. Apparently NewsGuard has decided that opinion shows simply shouldn’t exist as a category. Or at least, not opinions shows centered around opinions like mine.
All of this is absurd and therefore funny, of course. But below the surface, it’s a little less amusing. You may not have heard of it, but NewsGuard is in fact a powerful and influential organization — one that you’re funding with your tax dollars. They recently received a massive grant from Biden’s Department of Defense, for nearly $750,000. As Michael Schellenberger testified before Congress earlier this year, “Both the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard are U.S. government-funded entities who are working to drive advertisers’ revenue away from disfavored publications and towards the ones they favor. … This is totally inappropriate.”
It’s inappropriate but it’s happening. It’s one of the reasons NewsGuard brought on Michael Hayden as an adviser. Hayden has said that unvaccinated Trump supporters should be sent to Afghanistan. He said today’s Republicans are the most violent ideological force he’s ever seen in the world. He suggested that Senator Tuberville should be killed. He also lied to Congress about the CIA’s torture program. None of that bothers NewsGuard, because Hayden didn’t make fun of Michelle Obama or anyone on the Left. And NewsGuard’s only job is to censor the political enemies of the Democratic Party.
To be clear, it’s not just the U.S. government that’s backing NewsGuard. One of NewsGuard’s early investors was the Publicis Groupe. Who are they? Well, they have a subsidiary called Publicis Health Media, which works with the largest pharmaceutical companies on the planet, including Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Novartis, and many others. And Publicis Health Media has already announced explicit partnerships with NewsGuard. Starting to get the picture? The government and Big Pharma have a very close ally in NewsGuard, and now coincidentally enough, NewsGuard is going after conservatives who question the wisdom of giving the COVID shot to your six-month-old child. And NewsGuard’s lieutenants, like Jack Brewster, are active on Twitter, haranguing Elon Musk for daring to suggest that Tony Fauci might have funded gain-of-function research that made COVID deadlier.
Musk repeatedly interacted with two of the Twitter Blue accounts tracked by NewsGuard. Most of his interactions with these users were innocuous, though he did amplify an unsubstantiated claim that COVID-19 was human-made in a response to a post by @ Kanekoa The Great. pic.twitter.com/0WI6qsrmKi
— Jack Brewster (@jbruce218) April 6, 2023
They’re not just targeting me. They’ve done the same thing to Brietbart, Revolver, The Federalist, Fox News, Red State, Life News, PragerU, and various other publications. And they’re being as transparently partisan about all of this as you’d expect. As The Federalist reported, “Nearly every outlet that opted to ignore or discredit the [New York] Post’s reporting [on Hunter Biden’s laptop] maintains a near-perfect rating from NewsGuard’s accuracy and credibility score. Politico, NPR, and The New York Times maintain a favorable 100/100 rating while CBS scores a 95/100. The New York Post, on the other hand, suffers a grade of 69.5/100, and The Federalist, 12.5/100.” NewsGuard also promotes pro-abortion resources and punishes pro-life sites.
So if you lie to protect the Bidens, you’re credible. If you point out the corruption of the Biden family, you’re not credible.
NewsGuard is becoming big now for a very specific reason, which is that the Missouri v. Biden case is pending before the Supreme Court. That’s a case that could punish the Biden administration for pressuring social media sites to censor conservatives. In anticipation of a bad ruling in that case, the Biden administration is outsourcing its censorship apparatus to cut outs like NewsGuard. That’s why this all matters. It may seem like an organization like NewsGuard just exists to send annoying emails to people like me. If that’s all this is, who cares? But it’s not. They exist to suppress opinions that the Ruling Class disapproves of. They are the government’s way of getting around the First Amendment by enlisting third parties to carry out their censorship campaign.
So we are not looking at some corrupt, rogue Left-wing blog. NewsGuard is a core component of the Left’s evolving censorship apparatus. And already, it’s powerful. Its ratings have an effect on what you can see online. Microsoft, the Defense Department, the World Health Organization, and the State Department all have affiliations with NewsGuard. Specifically, Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, licenses NewsGuard’s “technology,” and NewsGuard is pitching it to other companies as well.
There are no GOP-funded equivalents to NewsGuard. There’s no cynical Right-wing effort underway to smear leftists with fraudulent fact-checks, in order to censor them online. Nothing like NewsGuard, or Media Matters, or any of these organizations, exists on the Right. This is a fight they’re winning because they have the field to themselves. We have to come up with an answer that goes beyond just mocking them.
But in the meantime, I must admit, it is fun to mock them. That’s why I sent Jack Brewster a response informing him that I cannot answer his question about Michelle Obama being a man until he provides me with a definition of the word “man.” Brewster emailed back last night:
“Hi Mr. Walsh, I understand what you are driving at, but my question about the Michelle Obama segment was not about the gender ideology debate. I was asking whether you or Mr. Klavan have any evidence to support the claim that Michelle Obama is — or ever claimed to be — a man.”
To that I responded:
“Hi Jack, It’s difficult to have any conversation about whether Michelle Obama is or isn’t a man until we are sure what the word means. As someone who works for a fact checking organization, I would certainly hope that you can provide a definition of this basic term. If you cannot define it, then will you provide a disclaimer in your report stipulating that you are unable to personally dispute my assertion that Michelle Obama is a man because you do not know what the term means in the first place? Thanks again!”
Jack did not answer after that. He’s been stumped, apparently. I guess we’ll never know what a man is, or whether Michelle Obama is one. And that is all very funny. But also disturbing when you consider how much power these people really have.