Daily Wire host Matt Walsh challenged prevailing notions of national identity and the idea of being “native” in a recent episode of The Matt Walsh Show. Responding to ongoing debates over the place of South Africa’s White population—and claims that they do not belong on the African continent—Walsh contended that White individuals, even those with deep ancestral ties to a country, are often denied recognition as native.
In contrast, he argued, immigrants from entirely different regions are frequently embraced as indigenous to their new nations, regardless of how recently they arrived. Walsh criticized what he sees as a double standard in the use of these terms and accused the political Left of manipulating identity labels to serve ideological ends.
According to Walsh, the Left’s narrative leaves no room for White people to ever be considered native to any land, regardless of how many generations their families have lived in a country. He described this as part of a larger cultural effort to manipulate the public’s understanding of identity.
“White people, no matter where they are, are always the colonizers and never the natives,” Walsh said. “It doesn’t matter if their ancestors have been in the country for 20 generations or more. The Left insists they have no legitimate claim to the land they live on.”
Walsh pointed to the stark contrast in treatment between White South Africans and Somali immigrants in the United States. While White South Africans — many of whose families have lived in the country for centuries — are told they don’t belong, Somali immigrants who have only been in the U.S. for a short time are automatically considered as “American” as anyone else.
“Try telling the Somalis in Minnesota to go back home — you’ll immediately be labeled a far-right bigot. But when it comes to White South Africans, who’ve been there for over 400 years, they’re told to leave,” Walsh explained. “How does that make sense?”
He continued, questioning why White Americans who can trace their ancestry back hundreds of years are told they have no rightful claim to the land, while new arrivals from other parts of the world are immediately welcomed as equals.
“If a White person’s family has been here for 400 years, can they say they’re native to this country? How many generations does it take before we can call them native? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?” he asked. “And if the answer is never, then where is the homeland for White people?”
Walsh argued that the Left’s use of terms like “native,” “colonizer,” and “indigenous” has nothing to do with history or fairness — and everything to do with political manipulation.
“The truth is, these terms don’t have any real meaning anymore,” Walsh said. “They’ve been twisted into tools for controlling the narrative and dividing the public.”
WATCH:
They want us to believe that white people are somehow not native or indigenous to any place on Earth pic.twitter.com/azNI15SO0y
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) May 15, 2025
