MRC Helps Transphobe Walsh Spread Lies About Target

The Bulldog Award it gave to vicious transphobe Matt Walsh shows how virulent the Media Research Center’s anti-LGBTQ agenda has become. It’s been a promoter and defender of Walsh for a while, of course:

• In the aftermath of a November gun massacre at a gay nightclub, Jason Cohen defended Walsh from suggestions by “twits on Twitter” who suggested that Walsh would like to have seen more dead gay people: “Just because someone is critical about something does not mean they want violence.” But he never quoted Walsh explicitly disavowing the sentiment.
• An April 13 post by Tim Graham complained that PolitiFact ruled Walsh to be “mostly false” in trying to directly link gender-affirming care to suicide, maliciously framing such care as “gender-denying care” and complaining that PolitiFact used facts he didn’t like: “Debating causation is tricky, but it’s weird that radical activist groups like the Trevor Project constantly warn that the “trans” kids are much more likely to commit suicide, but it’s constantly blaming that on “transphobia,” not on gender dysphoria.” Graham made no effort to actually disprove any of those “radical activist groups.”
• Catherine Salgado touted Walsh’s pronoun meltdown in an April 25 post:

The Daily Wire host Matt Walsh blasted YouTube for attempting to force him to use Dylan Mulvaney’s preferred pronouns last week.

In a speech at the University of Iowa, Walsh described YouTube’s draconian policy that barred him from using biological pronouns. “YouTube has decided that I’m not allowed to use biologically accurate language when discussing Dylan [Mulvaney] or presumably any other trans-identified person,” Walsh said, later adding, “Basically what they’ve told me is ‘[If] you want to keep the money that’s fine, keep the platform, just give up your integrity and your soul in its place.’ And to that I say, ‘Hell no.'”

In that same speech, Walsh also said, “I would rather be demonetized than use someone’s preferred pronouns one time. I’d rather you kick me off of every platform and banish me to Mars than use someone’s preferred pronouns.” Hence he will no longer post his full show on YouTube, despite the considerable amount of revenue he previously received from YouTube ads.

Quite the petulant child, isn’t he? Yet the MRC decided that this immature rant was award-worthy — and it eagerly signed on to promote a new anti-trans rage campaign. Tom Olohan merged hate with rah-rah in a May 24 post:

Conservative podcast host Matt Walsh is calling on conservative women to launch a Bud Light-style boycott to rebuke another woke company pushing the rainbow mafia agenda on children.

On May 23, The Daily Wire host Matt Walsh issued a call to action, asking conservative women to boycott Target after the chain store promoted “pride” month merchandise from a Satanist designer to children, including “tuck-friendly” swimsuits. Walsh responded to an account encouraging women to boycott Target by tweeting, “Yes. Women need to get in the fight. Some of them have but not nearly enough. It’s time to get serious. There’s only so much men can do to defend womanhood. You all need to step up.” He added: “It’s up to conservative women to make the Target boycott work. If you guys mobilize, you could crush Target. It’s up to you.”

[…]

Prior to his call-to-action tweets, Walsh condemned Target’s “pride” merchandise on “The Matt Walsh Show” on May 16. Walsh highlighted how Target not only marketed “pride” clothing and other merchandise to children, but also placed them in the front of the store to make a statement. As for the small “tuck-friendly” bathing suits, Matt didn’t mince words:

“We can clearly see that the bathing suits, though not in the kids section, are available in kid sizes. Either those are sizes for kids, or for very, very, very small adults,” Walsh said before brutally mocking Target. “Which I guess is the excuse they are going to go with, ‘No it’s not, this is just for extremely undersized adults, I mean you could buy it for your kid, but that’s not what it’s meant for’. That’s obviously what it is meant for.”

Olohan and Walsh are lying about the designer, Erik Carnell, by calling him a “Satanist” — he considers himself an atheist, and none of his vaguely Satan-adjacent stuff (done to make a political point, not to promote Satan) was ever sold by Target. They are also lying by claiming that “tuck-friendly” swimsuits were being marketed to children; kids’ swimsults are constructed differently.

But facts don’t matter when there are people to be demonized and companies to attack for a partisan hate agenda. Kevin Tober explained on the lies later in the day:

On Wednesday, NBC Nightly News dedicated an entire segment of their newscast to Target being forced to remove some of their clothing from their stores which visibly worship satan. In addition, Target announced they were reviewing some of their other clothing which caused a national uproar. Most notably, their “tuck friendly” bathing suits in which men are able to “tuck” their private parts in their bathing suit bottoms to pretend they’re women. 

In fact, not even the MRCTV post to which Tober linked offered evidence that anything sold at Target “worshipped Satan.” He went on to whine that “The left-wing correspondent parroted leftist gender ideology vocabulary like “gender-affirming operations.” –though he didn’t explain how being transgender is an “ideology” — then complained that things were fact-checked and others admitted they felt threatened by the hate campaign:

He then spoke to Ben Collins, NBC’s senior reporter who proclaims he’s on the so-called “dystopia beat.” 

“The misinformation here was that kids were being targeted with this stuff,” Collins proclaimed. “They realize if they can threaten enough people. If they can scare enough people in real-life locations that maybe support for the LGBTQ community will diminish among corporations.”

He provided no evidence that anyone has been “threatened” over this controversy.

Not to be outdone, Sarah Kate Ellis of the LGBTQ group “GLAAD” parroted the leftist line that different opinions from theirs constitute “violence.” 

“I think there’s this really small group who has an outsized voice at this moment in time and it’s of hate and it’s of discrimination and it’s violent,” Ellis cried. 

NBC allowed her to cry discrimination and allege violence without any pushback.

Alex Christy managed to avoid repeating any of the lies from Walsh and his co-workers in a May 25 post, but he complained that a transphobe didn’t get enough airtime on CNN:

The View’s Alyssa Farah Griffin and Rolling Stone’s Jay Michaelson teamed up on Wednesday’s CNN Tonight to attack conservatives for wanting to boycott Target for certain Pride-themed merchandise aimed at children. In things never said about liberal boycotts, Farah Griffin labeled it “very totalitarian,” while Michaelson warned of “stochastic terrorism.”

CNN did have an actual conservative voice in Joe Pinion to go up against Farah Griffin, Michaelson, and senior political analyst John Avlon. However, the three-on-nature of the panel—four-on-one if you count host Alisyn Camerota—meant that after references to various insanities coming out of Washington and New York he was sidelined as the other three ganged up on him.

Chrsity went on to dismiss Michaelsen as a “liberal rabbi and former Merrick Garland clerk,” then tried to play whataboutism: “One wonders if Michaelson, who once accused Antonin Scalia of all people of inciting terrorism, thinks Nashville was “stochastic terrorism” or does that label only get applied to hypothetical right-wingers? Either way, people aren’t going to suddenly believe that boys can suddenly become girls because that’s not hate, that’s just science.” Christy is referencing the Nashville gun massacre, which Christy and the MRC care about only because the shooter was allegedly transgender, not because guns were used to kill both adults and children.