Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, Cropped by Resist the Mainstream

Journalists on Saturday attempted to target Matt Walsh by highlighting his defense of the First Amendment rights of a nativist political website—but rather than retreat, Walsh doubled down on his principled position and refused to apologize for his positions.

The exchange began with a Huffington Post article that quoted a recent episode of Matt Walsh's eponymous Daily Wire show, in which Walsh defends the paleoconservative outlet Vdare, a controversial site that has been characterized as espousing “white supremacy.”

“The attorney general of New York, Letitia James, is of course best known for her campaign to seize all the assets of the leading presidential candidate, Donald Trump,” Walsh said in the relevant portion of his show.

“What she’s not so well-known for is her campaign to target the website VDare explicitly because of its inconvenient and unpopular beliefs. This is a story that’s gotten very little attention in conservative media, but it’s every bit as scandalous as what Letitia James is doing to Donald Trump.”

“VDare likes to talk about things like crime statistics and what happens in cities like Baltimore,” Walsh added. “So therefore, like Donald Trump, they need to be crushed. Every real estate transaction they’ve ever engaged in needs to be carefully scrutinized until they’re bankrupt.”

The article's author Christopher Matthias shared the piece on social media with additional commentary.

“Daily Wire's Matt Walsh defended white nationalist group VDare on his podcast this week, saying it's being targeted by the NY Attorney General because its views are 'unfashionable.' VDare once called for secession & the creation of an ethnostate,” Matthias said on X, linking to the Huffington Post hatchet job.

Quoting this post by Matthias, Walsh countered with an uncompromising defense of his positions.

“Correct. I do not think that any site should be targeted for political reasons by the Attorney General in a flagrant attack on free speech. I make no apologies for that whatsoever,” the hirsute pundit said.

Vdare was founded in 1999 by former National Review editor Peter Brimelow and has maintained a consistently critical stance of U.S. race and immigration policy—a position that has earned the ire of the media and progressive non-government activist organizations. The outlet, which advertises itself as “the voice of the historic American nation,” is described as a “hate website” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In a post made to the site last month, Brimelow laments the persecution of Vdare based on purportedly fraudulent legal pretexts, suggesting that the costs of fighting the site's legal battles is an existential threat for the rightist outlet.

“I launched VDARE.com on Christmas Eve 1999,” Brimelow wrote. “So it is perhaps appropriate that, on Good Friday 2024, the anniversary of Christ’s death,  I must announce VDARE.com’s crucifixion by New York State’s communist Attorney General Letitia James.”

Matthias's article concludes with a non-sequitur attempt to tarnish Walsh by making a tenuous association between The Daily Wire and the controversial pundit Nick Fuentes, on the basis of The Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing's “cordial livestream appearance” with Fuentes. This interaction did not involve Walsh in any way and is not immediately relevant to his defense of Vdare's First Amendment rights.