No Matt Walsh, You Are Not Racist

A review of the Daily Wire film

Let’s start with a racist joke. During the first Obama term, the Southern Poverty Law Center expressed alarm at the rapid rise in the number of hate groups in America. As the editor of a completely different publication at the time, one that identified strongly with liberal-left politics, I followed this research closely until 2017.

As the Trump presidency began, I discerned that the number of actual, real, not-imaginary racists in the United States had declined. What the SPLC and “hate group” monitors were seeing was simply the internet bringing people of similar mind together, so that they formed groups, and then often split up again, forming new groups. When I had found the same person leading three different groups in three years, I realized the joke was on me.

Racism certainly exists. Racists exist. I have personally encountered a man picketing a Tennessee highway with a sign endorsing white supremacy. I have heard racist jokes from co-workers and friends and random strangers. During my half-century living in the south, I have witnessed racist behavior by employers, police, and random strangers.

However, I have also witnessed a transformation. Interracial couples cheering their kids on a sports field are now a common sight at the most rural, backwoods high schools in Alabama. People do not tolerate overt racism the way they used to, here. That was already the situation when “anti-racism” came along. As Wilford Reily says in Am I Racist?, the new film from Matt Walsh and Daily Wire, there was not enough racism to go around, anymore, so new racism had to be created in order to meet the market demand.

Walsh, an avowed conservative, asks about himself in the title of this documentary. His critics, including the people who used to pay me to write about “right wingers,” say yes, of course he is a racist. They say this because Walsh denies that “systemic racism” exists, challenges myths about racist policing, and objects to racial quotas in hiring and education. In this film, Walsh adopts the new gods of the left, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and performatively ‘discovers’ that they are false idols. Having watched this film, I can answer the titular question for my former comrades: no, Matt Walsh is not racist.

He is an effective satirist of the new anti-racism. The people who cannot bring themselves to watch his film, who demand that theaters not show it, who denounce movie critic Jeremy Jahns for even watching it: these are the unreasoning bigots and humorless zealots, in this situation. I am old enough to remember Jerry Falwell telling his followers to picket theaters that showed The Last Temptation of Christ. Today, the “anti-racists” are the religious kooks screeching about blasphemies against their religion. I know fanatics when I see them. So does Matt Walsh.

The unspoken question that Walsh asks us to consider in the final reel of the film is not “am I racist,” but “am I a huckster?” The ‘plot’ of the film is that Walsh studies DEI principles from the very same people he later meets on camera, earning a “DEI badge” that he proudly shows strangers on the street, who soon inform him that he is actually being pretty racist. Matt Walsh does not start out racist: he becomes racist by applying his DEI ‘education.’ Walsh is the first person to cry and leave the room in the ‘white grief’ training. At the end of the film, Walsh performs the realization that he has made his ‘students’ more hateful. Emotional disregulaton is the natural state of the fanatic.

Slipping out of his costume, Walsh answers the question for himself, and us: yes, the new anti-racism is a psychologically-harmful form of hucksterism that creates hate where it did not exist before. ‘Race consciousness’ becomes racial self-hatred. The white people who embrace the teaching in this film all seem filled with hatred for themselves, for their families, for their lives. What the anti-racism workshop actually achieves is psychological splitting of the world into good and evil in a state of original sin. America is white supremacy and white people are born racist. Every white person must atone for their guilt.

Walsh succeeds in exposing this charade during his interview with Robin DiAngelo. Engaging her in anti-racism exercises, Walsh demonstrates that human beings can be conscious of race without being racist, that “microaggressions” are impossible to regulate, and racial reparations are ridiculous. Little wonder that DiAngelo, who was recently exposed for plagiarizing her PhD dissertation, chose to delete herself from social media over this documentary rather than that scandal.

As expected, the University of Washington has dismissed the complaint of plagiarism against DiAngelo despite more than 20 clear instances of citationless intellectual theft. DiAngelo further discredited herself by claiming that “black scholars have been targeted” by an “agenda to discredit DEI efforts” when she is credibly shown to have targeted scholars of color with her academic crimes. Perhaps Walsh, who has never finished college, should consider satirizing the modern student experience, next.

Walsh’s critics refuse to critique his film. They cannot bring themselves to watch it. That’s somewhat understandable, because the “uncomfortable conversations” that anti-racism and DEI instructors want to have are exactly the conversations that Walsh wants to have, too. Between the moments that made me howl in laughter, there were times when I could not keep my eyes on the screen. From the first reel of the film, Walsh poses the question: “Am I cringe?” The answer is yes, the more ‘anti-racist’ you are, the cringier you become.