The media landscape these days brings to mind the scene after the giant asteroid smashed into the waters off the Yucatan 60 million years ago: everywhere the giant, rotting corpses of media brontosauri like the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN, which once bestrode the planet with force and credibility. Scampering around, feeding off the rotten flesh, burrowing underground to escape the harsh asteroid-cloud winter when necessary, are the rising new media mammals.
Many old-school journalists with a following like Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss have started successful subscription Substacks off which they make a good living, and plenty more younger guns like Freddy de Boer are on their heels. Almost everyone has a podcast. Some early podcast starters like Joe Rogan have built huge followings, and quite a few newer entrants, like Tim Pool’s Timcast, Megan Kelly, and the Quillette team have developed loyal followings and make a living for their presenters.
Online news outlets are also cheap to set up and run, and left/progressive-leaning sites like Vox and Axios are proliferating. With the naked woke partisanship of the Post, Times, and others alienating many readers of traditional news, there are opportunities galore to take online media high ground on the right. The satirical Babylon Bee fills a void once occupied by the National Lampoon For straight news, one rising star is the Daily Wire, a conservative media outlet run by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing. The Wire delivers a mix of news and personality-driven shows. They are fearless and unapologetic about their conservative leanings, unlike NPR which still probably believes it is objective. They have also taken to trolling their enemies and moving into spaces woke companies have created for them by alienating customers. For instance. Boreing’s Jeremy’s Razors and it’s cheeky commercial to take on Harry’s Razors after they pulled advertising from the Wire in response to a customer complaint. They make movies, including one starting Gina Carrano after she was fired from The Mandalorian for some not particularly scary tweets, and they are developing children’s content in response to the Disney’s woke diversion into LGB-etc. social justice programming.
Shapiro has his own show, an exhausting blast of rapid-fire news commentary. I can’t help but agree with him most of the time, but it’s not easy listening. Matt Walsh’s show is more laid back, although the message is largely the same. Walsh is defiantly against woke, in all its manifestations from CRT to gender ideology. His latest project is the film “What is a Woman,” available to Wire subscribers but likely up on YouTube as I write.
Rich Lowry from the National Review probably sums up the average critic’s position:
“I haven’t watched Matt Walsh’s highly praised “What is a woman?” documentary yet, but some of the clips are mesmerizing and extremely disturbing.”
In our era, clips of an event are whipping around Twitter or YouTube or TikTok or some app I haven’t heard about long before anyone has actually seen the show. It’s the old “ready, fire, aim” joke, except for journalists it’s “research, comment, watch.” According, credibly, to Walsh, no mainstream movie critic has watched the film and reviewed it. Many have sent him hostile messages saying they refuse to watch it on account of the film’s, or Walsh’s, alleged transphobia.
I listen to Matt nearly every day, and I agree with him much of the time. When I differ, I don’t cancel my subscription, I just occasionally hit the 30 second advance button if he’s on too long a riff where I’m not on board. I also actually watched his movie before forming an opinion, the day after it came out - the online premiere was made difficult by a denial of service attack by opponents who objected viscerally to a movie they, obviously, had not yet seen.
What is a Woman is well worth watching. I have a few minor quibbles. For one, there is a constant, ominous soundtrack playing that is rather ubiquitous in documentaries about serious subjects and could have been stopped at times to return the focus to the people speaking. I also wish he’d interviewed a few other tribes than the Maasai, or even other, more urban Kenyans, because they would have all said the same things and proven that America’s woke are not echoing some global phenomenon. The bizarre idea that sex is a spectrum, that anyone can choose their own gender, and that the rest of us should be forced to pander to them at the expense of respect for the actual truth, or even our own beliefs, is an exclusively Western, more accurately Anglophone one. Matt could have gone to Fiji, Formosa, the Philippines, or anywhere else in Africa and he would have found the same incredulity and fact-based reasoning as he got in Kenya.
What is a Woman makes some very simple points, mostly by showing gender ideologues saying things that are just plainly not true. The obviously female therapist who can’t answer “what is a woman” because, she says, “I’m not a woman.” The (apparently gay male) women’s studies professor who gets angry and threatens to end the interview because Matt starts talking about “the truth.” The (male to female trans-sexual) doctor who calls people who want to rid themselves of limbs “kooky” but can’t see the slightest analogy with people who feel they were born in the wrong body. The blue-haired female pediatrician who claims that puberty blockers are safe and fully reversible when that is not what current research shows, and is the reason some countries are banning their use for children as part of “affirmative” treatment of gender dysphoria. Those who preach gender ideology are remarkably sensitive to criticism or questioning of their new orthodoxy, in a manner akin to Savonarola or the Taliban. Walsh simply lets them show it.
Have what opinion you want, but watch the movie. Like Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, Helen Joyce’s Trans, or Deborah Soh’s The End of Gender, books which fairly and accurately discuss the epidemic of social contagion, medical malpractice, and mass delusion regarding gender in the West today, this movie will attract unhinged wrath and book-burning apoplexy from woke ideologues. They won’t even watch it, but everyone with an interest in returning to a saner national reality on this question should.