Matt Walsh Tells Us How Johnny the Walrus Triggered Amazon

CLAY: We have Matt Walsh. But first for those of you out there that are not familiar with this story, I want to play a clip of Amazon employees losing their minds over the success of his children’s book, to kind of put into context some of the questions that we’re gonna be asking Matt here about. Let’s listen to that.

BUCK: Wow. That’s quite an endorsement of the book, by the way. Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire with us now. Hey, Matt, how you doing?

WALSH: Yeah, doing great. Once we do the — I guess will now be our fourth printing, I want to take some of those superlatives and put them there on the cover. Actually, “one hell of a problem” would be good.

BUCK: Matt, just so everyone understands, you speak from a perspective of particular knowledge because it is without question that you are a best-selling children’s book author/gender expert. And so what is Johnny the Walrus, like, so people understand what the book is?

WALSH: It is a legitimate children’s book, no matter what Amazon might say about it now. It’s written on cardboard, it’s a board book for preschoolers and it’s about a young boy who pretends to be a walrus and his mother is, you know, a little bit confused and kind of progressive and so she takes that self-identity seriously and endeavors to raise her child in his walrus self-identity and even trying to get him medically transitioned into a walrus.

But the good news is by the end, you know, there’s some sense talked into her and she realizes that just because her child does something and is pretending something doesn’t mean it’s actually true, and she learns to accept him and he learns to accept himself for who he really is. So, it’s actually… You know what? It’s actually a book of true self-acceptance – which, when I was a kid, it’s like every children’s book had a message of self-acceptance. And now, apparently, that’s a traumatic message to Amazon, anyway.

CLAY: It’s so interesting here because the satire — and thanks for joining us, Matt. The satire is so perfectly delivered. (laughing) I mean, you had Amazon employees basically brought to tears over the conceit of your children’s book. And yet I feel — and I’m curious if you feel this — that there’s suddenly… It felt like a long time ’cause a lot of us have been out here fighting this insanity forever, it feels like.

There suddenly is a recognition that the left wing in this country has completely lost its mind. Buck and I are feeling that uprising. Do you feel it as well, based on what you’re doing and when you’re sharing these videos, where you use to be — like us — a little bit outside of the mainstream, but now everybody’s like, “These guys that everybody was saying were extremists are actually totally normal and it’s the other people who have lost their minds”?

WALSH: Yeah, I definitely feel that. I mean, this is something that, like you said, for years I’ve been talking about this issue; we’ve been talking about it. And it does. I do feel like there’s something of a cultural shift. There’s the tied is turning able to say. I mean, the fact that — and Johnny the Walrus, it’s a small thing, of course it’s like a small salvo in the cultural battlefield.

But even in a small way the fact that the number one book in the country right now is a board boom for preschoolers satirizing gender ideology, that would have been unthinkable. Up until it happened was kind of unthinkable that it would happen but it’s a microcosm of this larger shift that is happening and I think it has to do with a lot of different things and one of them certainly is the fact that the left has just…

They’ve had victory after victory after victory of basically running unopposed in the culture and have just marched, kept marching forward, progressing in their own kind of way. And have they finally crossed over a line where people are saying, “This is too far. I can’t…” There are a lot of just sort of normal people in the country willing to tolerate and accept I think much more than they should have tolerated and accepted.

But you get to a point where it’s like this is just too much now. And when you’re going after children and people can see that you’re going after children, you’re doing it so explicitly, trying to indoctrinate them into this insane ideology, I think that maybe was just the final straw for a lot of people.

BUCK: It was also remarkable… We’re speaking to Matt Walsh. He is of course the Matt Walsh podcast at The Daily Wire and author of the book Johnny the Walrus, which we’re talking to him about, which caused obvious consternation inside of Amazon. We heard just a few moments ago Clay had that sound for everybody of some Amazon executive probably on conversational health or whatever, talking about how upsetting it is.

Very problematic, a hell of a problematic book that Matt has, but beyond that, Matt, I said everyone listening should know, they had an enraged customer leave a voice mail about your book that they then played in this Amazon meeting. This is all since come out. It’s all been leaked. Here is the enraged customer, and I wanted to have you respond to her complaint about your book.

AMAZON CUSTOMER: You’re selling a manual to teach kids to bully other kids to commit suicide! I talked to (audio drop) he said she was going to get the book off of your site. Now he is bragging that he has the number one book. You are still gonna continue to sell it. And now he’s bragging and that he’s glad it’s going to make the LGBTQIA kids — especially transgenders — commit suicide. He’s bragging about it on Twitter!

BUCK: What do you say, Matt?

WALSH: Well, I was certainly bragging about the book and have continued to brag about it. I obviously have not been bragging about it’s causing anyone to commit suicide, ’cause of course it actually will not cause that at all and this… She has basically come up with her own kind of dark, gritty, reimagining, reboot of my book.

She’s included a lot of plot details that are just not in it at all. In fact, the funny thing here is the book doesn’t mention transgenderism at all, and it certainly doesn’t call for anyone to be bullied or anything like that. She’s just inventing things. She’s inventing things in the book that simply aren’t there, nothing even close to it’s there.

And like you pointed out, you know, it’s one of them if just one kooky woman comes up with that, Amazon is playing this in their meetings! They’re endorsing it. I mean they say in the leaked audio. They’re like, “She does a good job of summarizing the book” or whatever. So they are endorsing her version of it, which is a total fantasy.

But this is what you get on the left, that, yeah, I mean, what she’s describing is not the book at all, but they feel — you know, as the offended people, they feel — like that’s what the book is saying, and so since they feel that way, then that’s actually what the book is. That’s kind of the way they see it, I guess.

BUCK: It also feels Matt, like this is an extension of the speech that the left doesn’t like equals violence game that they play. It’s not just that they don’t like the book. The book is going to cause suicide based on nothing other than just existing. But it feels like this is something that is often done to justify censorship particularly on this issue is that it’s actually violence, like, “Your words are violence!”

WALSH: Yeah, absolutely. And the suicide thing in particular, I mean, we can kind of… You listen to that and you kind of laugh the woman ’cause it’s so absurd but at the same time there’s something really dark and insidious here. First of all, just using suicide as a cudgel in this way is really gross. But we get so used to it ’cause what you always get on the left, and especially when it comes to this issue.

Because the real serious thing… Like, they can say whatever they want about my book. But the thing is that line about, “Oh, you’re causing suicide,” this is what parents hear when their, you know, little 12-year-old girl comes home from school saying, “I think I’m a boy,” and they go to a counselor and the counselor will tell the parents, “Oh, well, you have to go along with the transition or she’ll kill herself.”

This is the kind of emotional blackmail that’s being used to very serious effect, to cause this, you know, 10 times — like 10X jump — in trans identification among the youth, and a lot of it is through exactly the kind of thing we just heard, this emotional blackmail.

CLAY: Do you think Matt, in your experience that one thing the left wing has not yet recognized because they’re so wrapped up in their own insanity is how much of losers they are? And I mean that in the context of comedy for so long… If you went back in time and you were talking about Howard Stern, for instance, before he lost his mind.

That call would be the kind of call that he would play on his radio show to make fun of that woman for being a histrionic loser. If you look at what happened with the Dave Chappelle protest — I’m sure you saw those videos which were so phenomenal where the guys counterprotested — and they were walking around saying, “Hey, we like jokes,” and they broke his sign, and like accused him of trying to use it as a weapon.

I think what’s puncturing the left right now is they don’t even realize how ridiculous they are or what total losers they are. They have adopted such an incredibly ridiculous position and they’re so unable to self-satire now because that would be the “words are violence” that Buck was referencing.

This is one of the most fertile comedic terrains I can ever remember, and there are still very few people trodding it. Do you feel that way when you’re kind of on social media on a day-to-day basis or you see…? I can only imagine how much you were cackling when you saw this video. It had to be like the greatest thing could have ever happened.

WALSH: Oh, yeah. It’s the pinnacle of my career, I think. I don’t know if it’s gonna get better than that. But I totally agree with you, and this is something I was talking about this morning. You talk about the cultural shift that’s happening, part of it is — and this is an underrated part of it but really significant part — is that the right, right now, is way funnier than the left.

And is having a lot more fun, I think, way better at kind of mockery, satire, trolling, all this kind of stuff. I think on the right is a much better source of that and that has not always been the case. I mean, for the longest time it was the other way around. I can’t remember the last time that someone on the left did, like, anything at all.

And it used to be completely reversed. And part of that is there’s so much low-hanging fruit here I can’t help it. They make it so easy to make fun of. And also of course on the left their ideology just forbids them from laughing about almost anything anymore, and I think that’s certainly hurting them as well.

BUCK: Matt, before we let you go, I’m just wondering you have gone around the country, I think you have a documentary about it where you ask a lot of activist left wingers, “What is a woman?” Has any of the trans activists or the left-wing apparatus folks…? Have any of them come forward to actually take up your challenge of a definition of what is a woman?

WALSH: No. We do have the documentary is gonna come out in a few weeks and I’ll have a lot more information about that in the next week or two. But, yeah, we did. I went all around the country and even across the world to the far reaches in some cases, and I did not find a single person on the left, not one single person — and I talked to some of the so-called experts too, some world-leading experts, and none of them were able to simply define the word “woman” or even talk coherently about it. And it is pretty incredible. That will all be in the film.

BUCK: By the way, can folks still buy Johnny the Walrus on Amazon?

WALSH: As of right now, it’s number one on Amazon, until I just poke the bear too much and they get so sick of it they have to take it down. For right now it’s still there and you can go buy it.

CLAY: How many copies of this book, by the way, have you guys sold of Johnny the Walrus, roughly? Do you even know?

WALSH: I don’t know exactly, but it’s been tens of thousands of copies. It’s so many copies we’ve sold of this book.

CLAY: What did you think that you might sell when you wrote this children’s book? You’ve sold tens of thousands. Has this wildly exceeded your expectations for what would happen?

WALSH: It has. I knew the market was there and so I thought that it’d be successful, but it has far outstripped my expectations for sure. But also it’s been a big assist from the left and from Amazon and some of the stuff that I just couldn’t have anticipated that’s, obviously, helped us quite a bit in selling the book.

BUCK: The book is Johnny the Walrus. The author is Matt Walsh. Matt, always appreciate you coming by. Thanks, man.

WALSH: Thanks a lot, guys. Appreciate it.