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The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh devoted a segment of his Monday podcast to mock yours truly for criticizing his provocative new motto, “America First, America Only.”
Walsh, who claims to be both an ardent Catholic and an “American chauvinist,” said during a podcast last week that he wants “someone to unashamedly and single-mindedly advocate for Americans and Americans only. We want someone to say, you know, ‘The only thing I care about is helping Americans. The only people I care about in the world are Americans.’”
I responded to these comments on X, saying, “America First, America Only, is manifestly at odds with the Christian faith. This can’t be squared.”
A small but representative sample of the responses I received from Walsh’s fans: “Seethe harder zionist filth.” “OK Jew.” “Go live in Israel bro.”
On Monday’s podcast, Walsh read my post aloud in a mocking tone, claiming that I and others missed the subtlety of his point. What followed was a textbook rhetorical sleight-of-hand: He mounted a stirring, perfectly orthodox defense of “America First,” a position I share and have never disputed, while pretending that this was what he meant all along. He never once addressed the actual sentence that triggered the backlash: his proud declaration that a leader should be able to say, “The only people I care about in the world are Americans.”
Walsh then attempted to smuggle “America Only” into the views of the Founding Fathers and Thomas Aquinas. This was particularly egregious — and rich for a self-described nationalist and Catholic.
To be certain, the founders were “America First” to the core, and the Angelic Doctor would have approved of them for it. But they all would have recoiled at a rejection of universal charity.
Walsh cited a famous line from President George Washington’s Farewell Address as evidence of the first president’s “America Only” bona fides: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.”
While the line and the broader speech perfectly capture the “America First” worldview, it is not, and has never been, a call to disregard the fate of all non-Americans. Yet Walsh presented it as if it were both.
What would Washington have made of Walsh’s contention that he belongs in the “America Only” camp?
Consider a letter Washington wrote to the leaders of the French Huguenot Church in 1789: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable Asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong; but I shall be the more particularly happy, if this Country can be, by any means, useful to the Patriots of Holland, with whose situation I am peculiarly touched, and of whose public virtue I entertain a great opinion.”
Does that sound like the type of leader Walsh hankers for?
Walsh performed the same sleight-of-hand with regard to President Thomas Jefferson. He alluded to Jefferson’s 1801 inaugural address that “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none” to make the case that “America Only” is a historically mainstream position, and that Jefferson, too, believed that Americans were the only people in the world worth caring about.
But are we really to believe that Jefferson’s self-evident truths that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” were limited to American citizens?
In fact, Jefferson cared so deeply about the fate of liberty in France, even when France offered the United States no immediate strategic benefit and risked bankrupting the young republic, that he was willing to burn his relationship with Washington and Alexander Hamilton to the ground over it.
Years earlier, Jefferson played an intimate role in shaping the French Revolution, serving as the key adviser to Marquis de Lafayette’s draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the fundamental document of the revolution. In 1793, as secretary of state, Jefferson emphasized the importance of the revolution, writing to William Short that “the liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest.”
Does that sound like someone who “only” cares about America? “America First,” surely — but not “America Only.”
Yet on his Monday podcast, Walsh made the following remark: “Washington said that the great rule for the United States in regard to foreign nations is to have with them as little political connection as possible. Jefferson and John Adams agreed.”
Lumping President John Adams into the “America Only” camp is equally laughable. No founder leaned more heavily on Emmer de Vattel’s Law of Nations than Adams, who personally put copies of the book in the hands of every delegate in Philadelphia in 1776. He later called it one of the three books that “formed the American mind” on foreign affairs.
What did Vattel have to say in the book about one nation’s moral responsibility toward another? Vattel argued that while each nation has a duty to pursue its own interests first, they are nonetheless obligated to assist one another to the best of their abilities in times of distress. Grounded in natural law, Vattel’s “offices of humanity” include the moral obligation of states to allow innocent passage and temporary refuge to travelers and exiles, grant asylum to those fleeing unjust persecution, and relieve extreme famine or distress in other nations when doing so doesn’t harm the nation’s self-interest.
As president, Adams was ruthlessly “America First,” staring down France and establishing the Navy and Marine Corps. But to pretend this Vatell devotee and devoted Calvinist would ever stand before the nation and declare, “The only people I care about in the world are Americans,” is obscene.
But most shameless was Walsh’s attempt to stuff “America Only” into the mouth of Aquinas. While he accurately characterized Aquinas’s notion of rightly ordered love — that we are to love our family most, then our neighbors, then mankind — Walsh mistakes prioritization for exemption. In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas wrote that in cases of extreme need, one ought to provide aid to a stranger rather than their own father, as long as the father is not in equally dire need. Just because family and country should be given priority first doesn’t mean our obligations to the rest of humanity disappear.
As with the founders, Walsh is attempting to articulate an “America First” argument while pretending he never said that Americans should be the only people our leaders care about in the world. That’s because there’s no possible way to defend his initial statement on its own merits. And certainly not by appealing to Aquinas.
Worse still, after suggesting that all critics are secretly working on behalf of a “favored foreign country” — wink, wink — Walsh mocked religiously focused critics of his comments, including myself, by claiming that “none of these commentators can point to a citation for any of their claims because there isn’t one.”
Imagine thinking it’s impossible to find a citation in the Bible for the idea that all people, no matter their nation of origin, are owed moral consideration!
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The Bible doesn’t just disagree with Walsh here — it relentlessly hammers the point. Whether it’s Genesis 1:26–27 expressing that all people are made in the image of God, or Leviticus 19:33–34 stating that foreigners are to be loved as ourselves, or Matthew 25:35–40 that captures Jesus telling his followers that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine,” countrymen or not, “you did for me,” the biblical foundation for defying Walsh is overwhelming.
“America First” was sufficient for our founders, but not so for Walsh. His need to be endlessly provocative requires constant inching into a space that no serious conservative, Christian or otherwise, should ever follow him into.