Joe Walsh is a Democrat. Have you heard? He’s just one of many republican hucksters who switched sides in the last couple years because his party wasn’t profitable for him or just plain old didn’t want him anymore. But, is Joe Walsh REALLY a Democrat? Or just another wishy-washy Adam Kinzinger or Lev Parnas, thefting the left by their hearts with a bullshit redemption arc story and influencer campaign, marketing democrat empathy? He may not be exactly like that AIPAC whore John Fetterman, but he is definitely not in it for the people in my opinion. He has his own interests at play here. It’s still profits over people for this guy. Let me explain.
Walsh’s own explanation, posted to his Substack in June 2025 said, Trump is “a tyrant,” the GOP is “a real and direct threat to democracy and the rule of law,” and only the Democratic Party “values and practices” decency, tolerance, and empathy. Wow. Quite the change overnight, Big Guy. Funny, because Trump hasn’t changed since his first term, but all of a sudden, NOW he’s a direct threat to democracy. Hmmm…why now?
Let’s talk about it.
He said he wants to help build a “big tent” big enough to hold “a conservative like himself and a progressive like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” because he wants Democrats to win. He also made a point of saying he hasn’t actually changed his politics, just his audience. Last I checked, if you haven’t changed your politics, then that still makes you a Republican. But, I digress. He claims he’s still “a border hawk, an unabashed gun rights advocate, and an unyielding defender of free speech.” And he made the announcement around the same time a national poll put Democratic Party approval at an all-time low of 27 percent. He picked the exact moment his new party needed a hero most to cast himself as one.
First, let’s refresh our memories about why the Democratic Party approval was that low. Kamala Harris had just lost to Trump, and the party was in open civil war over why. Centrist Democrats like Rep. Adam Smith were publicly blaming the “extreme left” and progressive policies for dragging the brand down; the progressive wing blamed the party’s economic message and perceived corporate ties. Either way, voters were watching Democrats fight each other instead of presenting a unified front. Joe saw an opportunity to capitalize, not because his values changed. And Democrats just held the door open for him and welcomed him with open arms.
Are Democrats actually this gullible? …really?
This wasn’t a blip, it was the start of a slide that kept getting worse through 2025. By July, it hit a 35-year low, and by December, congressional Democrats were down to 18-19% approval. Walsh joined right as that freefall was beginning, not after it stabilized. He didn’t bet on a winner. Hell no. He bet on a party that needed a redemption story walking through the door at the exact moment it was most starving for one. And the Progressive movement was the easiest way in.
Walsh spent one term in Congress, from 2011 to 2013, as a Tea Party freshman from Illinois. He lost his seat to Tammy Duckworth in 2012. He spent the Obama years building an audience as a talk radio host, becoming just another celebritized politician. Why do we keep doing this, America? I don’t understand. Politicians are not celebrities. They are public servants, not personal fucking brands — and the second one starts charging a subscription fee, you’ve got your answer about which one you’re dealing with.
In 2019 he ran against Trump in the Republican primary, used the left’s language calling him erratic and cruel, got nowhere, dropped out after a bad showing in Iowa, and then tucked his tail and left the GOP. By then, Trump’s allies had taken over the state parties running the primaries in South Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, and Kansas. Walsh’s Republican party didn’t want him — they rigged the field so he couldn’t even compete. Ouch. He spent five years as an independent, building a podcast and a Substack around the brand of the conservative who saw the light.
Last year, he became a Democrat — a “conservative Democrat,” which let’s be real, that’s just a fancy way of saying, “shitty Republican.” He was careful to add, still a border hawk, still an “unabashed gun rights advocate,” just newly convinced that one party values decency. Three months later he was on social media, stealing leftist rhetoric, and dropping f-bomb’s at Hakeem Jeffries for not fighting hard enough. The ink hadn’t even dried.
Sounds like a man looking for his next paycheck in my opinion…
Now rewind, because the redemption arc only works if you forget the first act. And I don’t forget shit.
In 2011, while lecturing Barack Obama daily about fiscal discipline and refusing to put “one more dollar of debt” on America’s kids, Walsh owed his ex-wife and his own three children $117,437 in back child support. Anyone else would’ve been arrested and had their passport revoked for this. Not Joe though. He’s a special boy. He’d loaned his own campaign $35,000 and paid himself back $14,200 of it, while telling a judge and his own kids he had no money to pay child support. He also took international vacations while telling the court he had no money. Illinois lawmakers got so fed up they floated a bill barring anyone who owes more than $10,000 in back child support from holding office. Walsh settled the case quietly in 2012, right before reelection, and struck a deal with his ex-wife to have her give a joint statement saying he wasn’t a “deadbeat dad.” How convenient that he got to control the headline while the actual settlement number stayed locked away. The timing wasn’t a coincidence either. The settlement happened April 19–20, 2012, while mid-campaign, with the primary behind him and the general election against Duckworth still ahead as her campaign was releasing “deadbeat dad” ads. Coincidence? Nah...
After the Boston Marathon bombing, he told MSNBC it was time to start “profiling who our enemy is in this war” which was “young Muslim men.” He spent years insisting Obama was secretly Muslim. “Obama is a Muslim. Happy New Year!” was an actual tweet and even told his own constituents that “radical” Muslims in their own suburbs were trying to kill Americans every week. Stoking fear in other fragile white people and radicalizing racism once again in this god-awful country. In 2017 he watched a video of Muslims praying in a European square and decided it proved Islam had conquered Europe without firing a shot. Then, later said, “I wouldn’t call myself a racist, but I’ve said racist things on Twitter.” To that I say, well yeah Joe, it’s because you’re a fucking racist. Duh.
The next year he praised Hungary’s Viktor Orban for saying Islam was killing Europe — the guy Walsh held up as a model just a few years before deciding decency only lives in one political party. Now the man he praised has been thrown out by his own country in the most decisive possible terms, after the rest of Hungary’s political spectrum collectively decided one election cycle wasn’t enough chances. Walsh’s taste in strongmen aged about as well as everything else on his resume.
In between, he wrote a 2012 op-ed calling the two-state solution "insanity" and proposed Israel annex the Palestinian territories outright, offering residents "limited voting power" or the option to leave for Jordan — a plan people who study this for a fucking living call it, soft ethnic cleansing with a byline.
Here is the link to the op-ed: Myth of a two-state solution
That's not me being dramatic, that's Robert Wright at The Atlantic, who read the actual op-ed and called it an endorsement of "ethnic cleansing of the soft variety." The Chicagoist didn't bother with euphemism either — their headline was just "Rep. Joe Walsh Suggests Apartheid As Solution To Israel-Palestine Problem." Even J Street, a pro-Israel group, said his position amounted to "nothing short of a call for an end to Israel as the democratic home of the Jewish people" and that it could no longer be waved off as some fringe outburst.
Eight months earlier, Walsh had already introduced a congressional resolution backing Israel's outright annexation of the West Bank. When he laid out that vision to Washington Jewish Week, talking at length about Israeli sovereignty 'from the Mediterranean to Jordan,' he never once got around to mentioning what happens to the political and civil rights of the people living under it. A man who never shuts up about anything somehow forgot to mention the one fucking detail that mattered.
Six months into being a Democrat, on a Substack interview with journalist Mehdi Hasan, Walsh got the actual question put to him point-blank, and this time it's documented on camera. Mehdi pushed him on why he'd call Russia's war on Ukraine a genocide but won't call Israel's war on Gaza one, on his attacks on the International Criminal Court for having an "anti-Israel bias," and on his refusal to condemn Israel's mass displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank. Walsh didn't go quiet this time. He went combative. He accused Mehdi of making it sound like a "one-sided affair" and argued the deliberate killing of civilians is "policy" for Hamas, not Israel. He had a genocide word in his vocabulary the whole time. He just doesn't spend it on the people whose deaths don't fit the narrative he's selling now.
Apparently, his empathy has an asterisk, and the asterisk is Gaza.
Let’s not forget about Tammy Duckworth.
Walsh ran against her for his old seat in 2012. Duckworth is a Black Hawk pilot who lost both legs and partial use of an arm when an RPG hit her helicopter in Iraq. Walsh, who never served a day in uniform, told a town hall, “Now I’m running against a woman who, my God, that’s all she talks about. Our true heroes, it’s the last thing in the world they talk about.” A veterans group called for his resignation, because, yeah, fuck that guy. What a high grade piece of shit talking about our combat veterans like that. He refused to apologize because he’s a piece of shit. Did I mention he’s a piece of shit? Anyway, he lost the race, like the loser he is, by ten points and spent years sounding like he never forgave her for making him say it out loud. You earned that loss, Joe. I love that for you.
In 2016, days before the election, he tweeted that if Trump lost he’d be “grabbing my musket.” Twitter suspended him and made him delete it before reinstating his account. It wasn’t his first armed-uprising tweet.
Months earlier, after officers were shot in Dallas, he’d posted “This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out Black Lives Matter punks. Real America is coming after you.” Umm, excuse me? REAL America? Keith Ellison called for an investigation. Both times, Walsh said afterward that he’d only meant it metaphorically. But, that’s the pattern with these pukes, say the violent thing first, walk it back once consequences come knocking on their door.
None of this was a phase. It’s a track record, spanning years and year and years, and it tells you exactly how he operates. He finds the loudest, angriest version of a position, rides it reverse cowgirl for the attention, and then apologizes only after the bill comes due. Zero integrity.
So look at what he’s doing now with fresh eyes. He has a Substack with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. He charges extra for a weekly call, called Thursday Night Live. That’s not decency, that’s a subscription funnel — built on the same instinct that told him to profile Muslim men and mock a double amputee’s war wounds. He just pointed it at Trump, because that’s where the paying audience is now. The party switch isn’t conviction. It’s a rebrand, timed to a fucking market and democrat voters are flocking to him and his slimy circle of opportunity-bros, like Lev Parnas, Denver Riggleman and Dean Blundell. You gotta be fucking kidding me.
“Oh but he’s changed!” they say. And to that I say, this is why our country is fucked. This is why we never get anywhere in the United States of Embarrassment. Discernment is gone.
He can call himself a Democrat. Words are free. But forgiveness isn’t supposed to come with a paid subscription tier, and accountability isn’t supposed to be something a man performs for an audience that never made him sit with any of it and earn it. Redemption arc’s aren’t performed behind a microphone. It takes years and years and years of arduous, consistent work in private.
So, what exactly is Joe Walsh apologizing for, if the only thing that’s changed is who’s paying him to hear it?
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Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
Did I miss where you talked about his current BS saying Mamdani needs to apologize for calling AIPAC monsters?
Walsh is another fascist dressed up in democrats clothing and IMO, do-nothing centrist democrats are useless. We need a lot more great leaders like AOC who don’t play b.s. word games nor take truckloads of cash from AIPAC.