With the Trump administration determined to strike a “death blow” to affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh demanded this week that women be barred from serving as police officers, calling the idea of female cops “absurd” and “DEI in action.”
Walsh — a far-right provocateur who has risen to prominence on the back of his transphobic and misogynistic punditry — used the example of an accidental shooting to make the case on Thursday that women have no business serving in law enforcement. Following a Florida traffic stop last month that saw a driver getting inadvertently shot when officer Mindy Cardwell removed the driver’s gun from his waistband, Cardwell was fired for incompetence after body cam footage was released this week.
According to Walsh, who has long blamed society’s ills on diversity hiring, insisted on his podcast that DEI programs were the root cause of the driver getting shot in Florida.
“I mean, almost always, when someone ends up getting shot or hurt during an interaction with the cops, it’s because they went out of their way at every turn to turn the situation into something violent and dangerous when it didn’t need to be,” he said. “But there are exceptions to every rule, and here is the exception. And this is an exception made possible by, of course, a female police officer.”
Adding that there are “plenty of male police officers who do dumb things,” Walsh went on to assert that “this is still a kind of thing that you inevitably get when you start bringing women into the force in the name of diversity and inclusion.”
Calling it “DEI in action,” he claimed that women who are “nervous handling a gun” only end up on the police force “through DEI” before saying the “eradication of DEI needs to go far beyond the federal government.” Walsh then took a broad shot at women in general.
“I know people will say, well, how do you know that she was hired because of DEI? You don’t know that. Well, I know because she’s a woman who, by the department’s own admission now, is incompetent,” he fumed. “She was fired for incompetence. Well, how do incompetent women get jobs like this? They get it through DEI. Right? That’s how. So it’s absurd.”
“I mean, if we’re being honest, female cops are absurd. It’s an absurdity. I’m sorry. It’s just ridiculous. It’s cartoonish. You’ve got cops on the force who can easily be overpowered by, like, 50 percent of the population,” Walsh continued. “And not just 50 percent of the population, by the way. Like, the majority of people who end up getting arrested, the majority of people who will go to prison are men… with a female cop, that means that the vast majority of the people that she is going to try to arrest during her career can easily overpower her. Easily.”
This isn’t the first time that Walsh, whose right-wing culture war documentaries have become rallying cries for the MAGA movement, has railed against law enforcement employing women. Following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last July, he called for the Secret Service to get rid of its female agents.
“There should not be any women in the Secret Service. These are supposed to be the very best, and none of the very best at this job are women,” he tweeted. “If there’s a woman doing a job like this, it 100 percent means that a more qualified male was passed over.”
