Matt Walsh on Gary, Memphis, and Zimbabwe

Matt Walsh’s new episode (Ep. 1828) is titled These American Cities Are Rapidly Turning into Zimbabwe.

Synopsis

Gary, Indiana is roughly 80 percent Black, spent nearly two weeks without power after the violent August 11 windstorm. Memphis, Tennessee — also majority Black — lost power to more than 100,000 households. Officials and activists quickly reached for the same explanation: environmental racism, systemic neglect, white supremacy.

Tennessee Rep. Justin Pearson immediately framed the Memphis outage as “another majority Black, working class city left in the dark.” Bernice King called the Gary blackout “part of a pattern” in which Black communities are expected to endure conditions that would be treated as intolerable elsewhere. Walsh takes direct aim at both, treating their comments as the familiar reflex that turns every infrastructure failure into racial grievance while ignoring the fact that NIPSCO’s leadership includes Black executives (CEO Lloyd Yates among them), Gary’s mayor and city council are Black, and Memphis is similarly led. While crews worked in Gary, someone shot at a marked utility vehicle, briefly pausing restoration. He then draws the comparison that gives the episode its title: Zimbabwe and South Africa declined sharply after the end of white minority rule, with failing infrastructure, high unemployment, and poverty. The core argument is that racial grievance politics shields local leadership from accountability, producing the same patterns of dysfunction.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Criticisms

Walsh underplays the sheer scale of the damage. The storm produced near-hurricane winds and destroyed hundreds of poles and transmission structures; Gary and Portage took the heaviest hits, and utilities restore by grid hierarchy. A lawsuit and the governor’s investigation focus on NIPSCO’s vegetation management failures—ordinary negligence by a monopoly utility, not a racial plot. The Zimbabwe/South Africa parallel is too neat; those collapses involved specific corrupt policies and deeper historical factors, not simply the race of the rulers. Gary’s long decline—steel industry collapse, white flight, tax-base erosion—predates the current Black leadership. The racism narrative was real and reflexive, but it was not the only response.

The episode is strongest when it insists that competence and accountability matter more than ancestry. It is weaker when the story becomes almost purely racial.