The Irascible Pianist

His breadth of knowledge and experience is so vast that it is nearly impossible to write a headline about Michael Walsh. Pianist, to be sure; fancy music school, recitals in Budapest, foreign correspondent during the Cold War, opera critic, literary critic, screenwriter, book author. 

Walsh has a new book out this week—his 20th—called A Rage to Conquer (St. Martin’s Press) that he says is in praise of toxic masculinity. It is the story of twelve battles “that changed the course of Western history” including Achilles at Ilium, Alexander at Gaugamela, Caesar at Alesia, Constantine at the Milvian Bridge, Aetius at the Catalaunian Plains, Bohemond at Dorylaeum and Antioch, Napoleon at Austerlitz, Pershing at St.-Mihiel, Nimitz at Midway, and Patton at the Battle of the Bulge. If you are like me, you know nothing about Alexander at Gaugamela or even who Aetius was, let alone the Catalaunian Plains (it is a field about three hours northeast of Paris). But we need to know. 

I call him the irascible pianist to point out that the remarkable thing is that Walsh is both a sensitive artist and a cage-match fighter of ideas who cusses. He is not afraid to show what we are supposed to be ashamed of: male anger. But then he can sit down and play Liszt’s “Preludio” from the “Transcendental Etudes” and “Vallee d’Obermann”; Schubert’s “Auf dem Wasser zu Singen”; Handel’s “Chaconne in G Major”; Schumann’s “Fantasie.” This is the plan for his spring recital in Budapest. He will finish with Aram Khachaturian’s “Toccata.” Yeah, me neither. 

For years, Walsh flew under the radar, probably because he was traveling in worlds—Hollywood, lefty newspapers, New York magazines, big-time classical music—where our kind is not exactly open-armed. He was one of the early habitues of the super-secret meeting of closeted Hollywood conservatives called Friends of Abe. Along with Andrew Breitbart, he founded the website Big Journalism that grew into Breitbart News. For National Review, he wrote under the pseudonym David Kahane, named for a character in Robert Altman’s classic movie The Player. 

In one of thousands of essays, Walsh coined the term “cold civil war,” a phrase widely used about our current political divide but rarely attributed to Walsh or Kahane. The Kahane conceit was that he was a Hollywood liberal who had been red-pilled and was spilling the T on Hollywood. Under Kahane, Walsh published Rules for Radical Conservatives (Ballantine Books, 2010). 

It should be understood that Walsh was widely published under his own name. The Kahane dodge allowed him to write about conservative topics. As Walsh, he was a foreign correspondent for Time magazine. He covered classical music and opera for Time, too. This was when Time was not just a thing but a very special, massive thing. He covered the Cold War. He visited Checkpoint Charlie when it was not just a tourist spot. He was in the neighborhood when Chornobyl melted down. He knows Andrew Lloyd Webber and published a book about his life and music (Harry N. Abrams, 1989). 

I first heard of Walsh when he came onto the speaker phone of another super-secret monthly meeting of conservative leaders, this one in Washington, D.C., called…I can’t tell you. He was calling in from Los Angeles. Not long after, Walsh charged out of the conservative closet and wrote a book under his name called The Devil’s Pleasure Palace (Encounter Books, 2015). It introduced many of us to Cultural Marxism and the Frankfurt School—Adorno, Reich, Gramsci, et al. As I wrote in these pages back then, 

Michael Walsh tells a highly readable tale of these men, though he does not begin in the twentieth century, and he does not focus on sociology, psychology, or the other soft sciences, but rather on art, specifically opera. He shows how the ground was prepared for the Cultural Marxists by the artistic nihilists of the nineteenth century.

I took Walsh to the U.N., where he spoke to a room full of non-binaries who were well and truly annoyed. 

To demonstrate Walsh’s erudition, consider an essay he wrote for Bombardier Books in his book Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order. Who but Walsh would have made the connection between Davos of the Klaus Schwab crowd and the Davos that is the scene described in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which Walsh read in the original German? 

In The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp visits a sick cousin at the tuberculosis sanitorium in Davos. He ends up staying seven years, progressing from healthy visitor to patient. Castorp eventually leaves with the outbreak of World War I, “in which we assume he will meet death, random and senseless, that he has been so studiously avoiding yet simultaneously courting” at Davos. 

Walsh says, “Central Europe, it seems, is where the internal contradictions of Western civilization are both born and, like Martin Luther at Eisleben, go home to die.” And so it is with the Great Reset. In that essay, Walsh proceeds to take us on a tour of Abraham, Wagner, Nietzsche, the Serpent in the Garden, Schopenhauer, Marx, Kubrick, Pope, Wallace Stevens, Darwin, Hitler, Stalin, Christ, Alinsky, Ken Kesey, and many more.

And all along, this erudite pianist is also a tough guy. He is from an older, tougher school, where men were allowed to get angry, even to express anger. Walsh was born at Camp Lejeune and grew up on various Marine bases. He is also a Catholic who has no fondness for Pope Francis. He says he will return to regular practice of the Faith once “Pancho” is gone. You might consider him a Mel Gibson Catholic, in whose private chapel Walsh has worshiped several times.

Get Michael Walsh’s newest book on the twelve battles. Get the rest of his books, including his novel about Irish gangster Owen Madden, his book explaining opera, and his second book about Cultural Marxism; you get the idea. You won’t be disappointed. 

But remember, this irascible pianist will block you without hesitation if you post cat photos on Facebook.