Matt Walsh exposes anti-racist ‘grifters’ getting rich off white guilt: ‘Selling a disease without a cure’
Matt Walsh is just asking simple questions. But that can be a pretty bizarre task in today’s post-truth era.
In his 2022 film “What Is a Woman,” he challenged gender ideology at a time when even Ketanji Brown Jackson, then a nominee to the Supreme Court, was unwilling to define it since she’s not a biologist.
In his newest offering, “Am I Racist?,” which hits theaters Friday, the Daily Wire personality is taking on the anti-racism-industrial complex — which, after the Black Lives Matters protests of 2020, has flourished everywhere from corporate America to schools to the entertainment business.
And it’s made its high priests, like Ibram X. Kendi and “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo, extremely rich as corporate hired guns.
“I wanted to look at the supposed anti-racist experts, the DEI grifters. The ones who, from my vantage point, are driving a lot of the racial conflict. And they are making a lot of money,” Walsh told me.
The movement itself is devoid of humor or self-awareness, so it’s fitting that Walsh employs the former so deftly to reveal its absurdity.
Taking a page from Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, Walsh dons a sensitive-guy man-bun wig and dresses like a self-serious hipster professor to get his DEI certification off the internet. And he invites so-called anti-racism experts to teach him how to “do the work,” though the definition of the phrase seems to elude them.
What follows is a satirical odyssey through the movement. It was no inexpensive lark.
Walsh, posing as “Steven,” attends a support group led by Breeshia Wade, an anti-racist grief expert. “Her fee was $30,000 to host this workshop,” Walsh says in the film. “So obviously, she must be the best.”
“I will be so happy if you all feel extremely uncomfortable…,” Wade tells the circle of white men and women. “When I do this work, and these types of circles, I’m not safe.”
She asks the group what they feel when they hear the term “white people.” One after another, they self-flagellate and answer “cringe.”
Walsh interviews Kate Slater, a self-described “anti-racist scholar-practitioner” with a PhD. Slater is a white woman who says we should be speaking to babies as young as 6 months old — “before they can talk. I mean it” — about racism.
Naturally.
Slater, who calls America “racist to its bones,” complains that her 4-year-old daughter is still gravitating toward white Disney princesses.
Walsh proudly says that his own 3-year-old loves Moana and wants to be the character for Halloween — but it’s a pickle: Wouldn’t that be cultural appropriation? Slater agrees. Enthusiastically. With an f-bomb. She would not let her kid dress as an animated Pacific Islander princess.
So the white pre-schoolers are wrong for loving Snow White and Belle — but also for wanting to be Moana. How does a parent get this delicate Disney princess quandary right in the eyes of an anti-racist?
One does not.
“The message is that if you are a white person, you are a racist no matter what,” Walsh told me. “This is a sin you carry around inherently because of the color of your skin. You can never atone for it. You can never be free of it.”
And there’s a good reason why, he adds: “They’re selling a disease without a cure. If you cure it, then we don’t need the Robin DiAngelos of the world.”
Speaking of the “White Fragility” author, two weeks ago it emerged that DiAngelo was accused of ripping off the work of two Asian American scholars for her 2004 doctoral thesis, “Whiteness in Racial Dialogue: A Discourse Analysis.”
The timing, Walsh said, was “almost providential.”
DiAngelo charges Walsh $15,000 for the privilege of sitting down to discuss her work, which, she admits in the film, she has shared in workshops for Netflix, Google, Amazon and Snapchat.
Among the advice she offers: White people shouldn’t “oversmile” at black people, be it a stranger in a grocery store or a co-worker at the office. “That person likely knows why I’m smiling at them,” DiAngelo warns.
But Walsh turns the tables on her, suggesting they both offer reparations to his black producer, Benyam Capel.
“On behalf of myself and my fellow white people, I apologize,” DiAngelo says.
When Walsh offers Capel $20 out of his wallet to pay for the sins of the past, DiAngelo laughs uncomfortably and calls it “really weird,” saying that some people might be offended.
But how quickly she changes her tune when Capel, an excellent straight man in the movie, tells her, “I won’t turn down cash.”
“Are we going to allow ourselves to be uncomfortable and do what we can personally or are we going to sit around and wait for the system to catch up?” Walsh asks her, using her own language.
“I can go get some cash for sure,” DiAngelo says, hopping up to grab a paltry $30 from her purse.
Yes, it was so absurd, I laughed loudly and frequently.
But the movie’s crescendo is when Walsh infiltrates a “Race 2 Dinner” as a bumbling, plate-dropping waiter. For the uninitiated, the dinner series was created by Regina Jackson and Sairo Rao, who invite white women to pay thousands of dollars to be berated as irredeemable racists.
In this new form of BDSM, white women — like one who is married to a black man but doesn’t like it when her husband is too loud — submit to the realization of their white supremacy.
“When a white woman starts crying, it draws all the attention from the room onto that ‘poor white woman,'” Jackson says, explaining that a separate room has been set up for anyone who might get too upset. (Wade’s workshop has one, too.)
“Republicans are Nazis,” Rao tells them, adding, “This country is not worth saving. This country is a piece of s–t.”
Using a broad brush, Rao says that, as white women, “all you do is talk shit about each other.”
“Whiteness,” she proclaims, “also robs you of your brain. You know, you all gave up your reproductive rights. You wouldn’t even get off your Peloton bikes for 10 minutes to go protest that.”
Walsh, wearing a COVID mask with his sloppy man-bun, serves them dinner and affirmations. He gets so into it, he even sits at their table and gets the women to “raise a glass if you’re a racist.”
It’s as hilarious as it is awkward.
“I expected that I’d be able to interrupt once or twice before they kicked me out. I wanted it to end with me sitting down at the table, but I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off,” said Walsh, who, surprisingly, has no formal training in improv.
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