From early 2010 through August 1, 2011, Matt Walsh co-hosted a radio show called The Matt and Crank Program along with Andrew “Crank” Murr at WZBH “The Beach” 93.5 FM based in Georgetown, Delaware. The show featured all of the worst of Walsh’s bluster and bigotry without the production value given to his current work as a host for The Daily Wire, where he was hired in August 2017. 

Recently, Walsh has been helping lead a campaign against children’s hospitals providing gender-affirming care. On August 15, Walsh made the false, incendiary claim that these hospitals are “butchering, mutilating, and sterilizing their young patients.” The hospitals highlighted by Walsh and others have been inundated with violent threats — threats that the Daily Wire personality dismissed as a hoax before continuing his campaign.

A review of Walsh’s commentary for The Matt and Crank Program reveals that the pundit has previously praised violent political action, saying that enacting change means that “you have to make people hurt. … Holding signs and yelling loudly will not make anyone hurt.” 

The current Daily Wire personality and What is a Woman filmmaker also claimed that “we probably lost our republic after Reconstruction” and that “as the Anglo-Saxons, which were the original Americans, die off, our identity and our culture goes with it.” And he performed racist impressions and defended teenage pregnancy and marriage, saying that “at about 16, you're an adult who is mature and can make decisions. … It's just recently where all of a sudden we're all r------- until we're 25.” Walsh additionally encouraged subordinates to participate in sexually demeaning stunts, coercing an intern into exposing himself and allowing Walsh to shock him with a stun gun “in the ass.”

Matt Walsh’s violent political worldview: “You have to make people hurt”

While working at WZBH, Walsh attracted attention with a speech at a tea party rally glorifying violence, saying, “If you want extreme things to happen, you have to be willing to take — to go to extremes.

On air, Walsh expanded and doubled down on his comments, saying that “if you want extreme change, you must take extreme action. … You have to make people hurt” and adding that “we probably lost our republic after Reconstruction,” seemingly criticizing the country’s first attempt at a multiracial democracy after the Civil War. Walsh further derided members of the so-called tea party movement as “not willing to do what they [the Founding Fathers] did.”

Walsh has called for and defended political violence in many more recent examples, calling for “real men” to assault drag queens, defending secession after the January 6 storming of the Capitol, and defending violence against abortion providers in response to a mass shooting.

Matt Walsh defended pregnancy and marriage for teenage girls: “At about 16, you’re an adult who is mature and can make decisions” 

Walsh defended girls as young as 16 getting pregnant as long as they’re marrying men, saying, “The problem is not, per se, teenage pregnancy — it’s unwed pregnancy.” Walsh used an ableist slur to dismiss the idea that people are unable to consent to life-changing decisions before age 25 and said that girls “still in high school … want, biologically and metaphysically and with everything in their body, they want to settle down, they want to start a family.”

Walsh has repeatedly defended sexualization or sexual abusers of children in the more recent past, saying of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal that “the problem is not pedophilia; the problem is gay priests” and saying that the response to a sexual abuse scandal in the Boy Scouts of America was “a lesson to us all” that “surrendering to the Left” will lead to being “completely obliterated.” 

Walsh initially defended Josh Duggar after the reality TV star was accused of sexual abuse of children, minimizing the allegations before later issuing a retraction once it came to light that Duggar had also cheated on his wife as an adult. The Daily Wire host has also minimized the #MeToo movement, suggesting that it’s “a hysterical witch hunt” and saying that women who feel violated after casual sex “consented to, and participated in, [their] own degradation.”

Matt Walsh’s racist worldview: “As the Anglo-Saxons, which were the original Americans, die off, our identity and our culture goes with it.”

As a radio DJ, Matt Walsh promoted the racist great replacement theory, expressing anxiety about “the extinction of the Anglo-Saxon race” and saying that “as the Anglo-Saxons, which were the original Americans, die off, our identity and our culture goes with it.”

At other times, Walsh performed racist impressions of Black men, including calling Barack Obama Elementary School and pretending to be a father trying to enroll his son in the school. He pretended to have heard that the school was lenient with its grades, saying while posing as a Black man that Obama’s “main principle was that just cause you ain't put in the work for something don't mean that you shouldn't be supplied with it.”

Since this video, Walsh has said that white supremacists “don’t exist, for the most part” and the great replacement conspiracy theory is “just a fact.” Walsh has expressed doubt that racism exists and said that “when a white person says that all white people are inherently racist, all he’s really done is confess to being personally racist.” Walsh has also attacked Muslims, deriding them as “easily provoked,” and suggesting that “every mass attacker is Muslim.” One video from The Matt and Crank Program shows Walsh wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt.

Matt Walsh’s sexually demeaning workplace stunts: “I think we should shock you in the ass” 

At The Matt and Crank Program, Walsh appears to have sexually harassed someone at least posing as his employee (named only “Intern A” on camera), demanding that his subordinate remove his pants and allow Walsh to use a taser on his exposed butt despite multiple protestations.

This was part of a series of videos of Walsh, Murr, the intern, and another man called “Tater” participating in a series of fraternity-style challenges, sometimes involving sexually suggestive behavior. In another video, “Intern A” was dressed in a diaper, wrestling a man who gave his name as “Tater.” In a video called “Intern A Earns His Name,” the titular intern was encouraged to lick the inside of a dumpster.

A further video available on the old YouTube channel for Matt and Crank showed “the intern” washing a car in underwear while disco music played.

According to one report, Walsh announced his departure from The Matt and Crank Program just hours after recording his final episode on Monday, August 1, 2011, claiming that he wouldn’t be allowed to do further shows to say goodbye. The next day, he announced a two-week hiatus that he walked back the day after to let fans know that he’d be taking a job at WGMD, a smaller station in the region where he would work for less than a year. In December 2013 Walsh announced that he was “leaving radio forever” to spend more time with his blog. While Walsh spun this as voluntary, critics reported that WLAP’s programming director had said that the show had been canceled. After a period of time joining Matt at WGMD, reports say Walsh’s co-host returned to WZBH through 2015.