Am I Racist?

I'm not Asking, but Matt Walsh's Brilliant and Witty Documentary Asks (and Answers) that Question.

There is a scene in Am I Racist?, Matt Walsh’s comic documentary which was released last weekend, in which multiple people berate an apparently senile and wheelchair-bound white man for his racism. It’s in the nature of the film that the scene generates audience laughter, but in other ways (like several other scenes in the film) it is a very poignant and uncomfortable demonstration of the radical venomousness of anti-white racism and how it has become mainstreamed in America. It’s one of several scenes handled with a deftness that elevated Am I Racist? beyond a film just looking for cheap laughs into what is a very sharply observed social commentary.

Am I Racist? follows around prominent conservative commentator and Daily Wire star Walsh as he goes undercover learning to be a DEI trainer and consultant while interviewing some of the most prominent people in the field. In some ways it’s a theatrical follow-up to Walsh’s very successful expose of the transgender industry, What is a Woman?, which appeared on the Daily Wire streaming service, but this is the company’s first theatrical release and they appear to have hit paydirt both commercially (the estimated $4.75 Million the documentary took in over its opening weekend will be either second or third biggest documentary opening of the decade) and artistically.

There are natural comparisons in what Walsh is doing here to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat films, and there are some truth to this comparison: Walsh, like Baron Cohen is very comfortable and unflappable in situations that would make most people extremely uncomfortable, and he doesn’t break character no matter how ridiculous the situation he finds himself in.

But While Baron Cohen punched down, usually making fun of ordinary people, many of whom simply were trying to show good manners to a person they recognized was crazy, Walsh is doing something much more difficult, going after some of the most prominent figures in the DEI field— bestselling authors and media figures.

Walsh also doesn’t portray his marks unfairly. He shows some people, even among the leftists he is mocking, walking out on him or his interviews or others, even those who care clearly true believers, clearly expressing skepticism about where he wants this to go. Even Robin DiAngelo, author of the #1 bestseller White Fragility and perhaps his most high profile target, is shown expressing some discomfort about one particular (and very funny) element of Walsh’s behavior. But in the end she (like so many others in the film) goes along with the absurdity, and that says just as much as the absurdity itself. Walsh makes his subjects look like brainwashed idiots and cringeworthy grifters because they *are* brainwashed idiots and cringeworthy grifters— but he still showed the buried humanity that was telling them to reach for something better.

Walsh’s satire is also much more deft than Baron Cohen’s was. While Borat was absurd and offensive in obvious ways, much of Walsh’s humor is far more subtle, asking questions that seem reasonable in the context of the conversations he is having and his interviewee’s assumptions about the world, but which will be viewed as clearly insane by normal people looking in on the outside. There’s a real art to proceeding in this way, and Walsh pulls it off with panache.

While Am I Racist? looks to do very well at the box office, it’s a shame that a number of people who really should most see it are not likely to give it a chance— or even hear about it. As of the opening weekend not a single “mainstream” critic had reviewed the film, one of the top four at the American box office in its debut week, and promising to be one of the biggest docs of the decade. This would be painful enough on box office grounds alone, but for a really well done movie, it’s beyond embarrassing. “Mainstream” movie reviewers simply reveal themselves to be another arm of the regime that Walsh is lampooning.

Am I Racist? also shows how deeply damaged and self-hating white leftists are. While there are plenty of minority grifters (and some white ones) portrayed in the film, their stance is somewhat understandable at least. There’s a lot of money it for them. But what will disturb many is the number of ordinary white liberals who will pay to be psychologically abused and berated. They are a particularly toxic and self-hating group, but also a particularly powerful one.

Walsh does sometimes reach for easy wins when a more complete story would have proven more challenging to tell— In a few scenes, he shows lots of ordinary working class whites and minorities decrying the stupid DEI talking points and claiming that we should judge people without regard to race. This is true, of course, and representative of the views of many everyday Americans, but ultimately our anti-white DEI regime is enabled by many ordinary people too, not just our awful elites. But this is a forgivable “sin”— Walsh is trying to appeal to mainstream audiences with a mainstream appeal, and if a bit of strict accuracy is sacrificed for that artistic choice, it seems like a reasonable trade.

One genuinely surprising element Am I Racist? is just how intellectually siloed people on the left are. Walsh is one of the biggest stars of the right-wing media ecosystem, with a successful documentary under his belt, a popular podcast, and more than three million followers on X. Yet, with the exception of one or two people who call him out at a group session, nobody appears to recognize him or even to have heard of him. (Save for the brilliant and iconoclastic black academic Wilfred Reilly, who Walsh interviews about his book on hate crime hoaxes, an interview skillfully edited to obscure the fact that Reilly clearly knows he’s talking to Matt Walsh the right-winger not “Matt Walsh” the character). Walsh even goes on several regional TV shows to do interviews about his DEI trainings without the interviewers recognizing him at all.

It would seem almost inconceivable that Walsh could pull off another film in this vein. He’s too well known, and this film will deservedly make him more so— even to mainstream audiences. But it will be interesting to see what he does for his follow up. He’s an immensely talented provocateur who has a real talent for pushing the left’s buttons while making insightful points.

Finally, some words about this as someone who has labored in these same fields with a very different sort of work. In the Unprotected Class I took on the DEI industry as well as skewering a number of other sacred cows that Walsh skewers in this film. As a serious piece of argumentation, I’d hope a reader would get a bit of a richer understanding about the totality of America’s ant-white regime from my book than you would for sitting down to watch a movie BUT (and it’s a big but) Walsh’s movie will doubtless reach orders of magnitude more people than work’s like mine ever will— not just because he’s a much bigger media figure, but because the power of the visual to tell a story to far more people than will ever sit won to read a serious policy book.

Walsh is engaging in Alinksyite ridicule as a tactic, and it wins the day. He doesn’t need to make a careful policy argument— he just needs to show the absurdity of our opponents, and he does this brilliantly. And he’s reaching audiences far beyond just white Americans. An “exit poll” of theatergoers, suggests the audience was just 64% white, while being 19% Latino 6% black and 4% Asian American, showing that there is a diverse group of people are hungering for a different message on race than what our regime is offering.

And it’s a good thing that a lot of people want something different, because Walsh shows time and again that no matter what whites attempt to do in our current DEI system, they can’t win. This was ultimately the central contention of The Unprotected Class and it is great to see it being made before a much wider audience in such a witty and biting package.

As Walsh wrote on X in the wake of the movie’s release: “The real dividing line is between those of us who are willing to do what it takes to win the culture war and those of us who are not.” Walsh clearly is willing to do what it takes to win, and having already slain scores of our enemies, and it will be fascinating to see what battlefield he chooses for his next fight.