Matt Walsh is surprised by what people were willing to do to atone for their “white privilege” during the filming of his new movie Am I Racist?
The documentary is Walsh’s second original film and the first for Daily Wire+ to hit theaters. Despite the wide release, the movie is not getting the attention Walsh thinks it deserves. The movie focuses on how diversity, equity, and inclusion has turned into a “brainwashing” scheme done by money-making “grifters.”
While the film still features Walsh’s famous deadpan humor, there are some major differences between Am I Racist? and his first movie What is a Woman? Instead of just sitting back and letting people “tell their truth,” Walsh is intentionally disruptive in almost every scene. Walsh himself is surprised by how tolerant people were to his antics and actually became disturbed by how far people were willing to go in the name of DEI.
“I thought probably after the first time I interrupted, they would kick me out. But they didn’t,” Walsh said. “And it turns out that people don’t want to be the first person to speak up, and so we kind of exploited that a little bit.”
One scene in the film is a real event called “Race2Dinner,” where Regina Jackson and Saira Rao sit at the head of a table of white women and criticize them for two hours. Walsh describes the meal as a brainwashing session.
“They’ve been doing this for years,” Walsh said. “They explain to white women why they’re racist for two hours as everybody eats their meal. Just listening to these two women breaking these other women down psychologically, it’s a very intense kind of brainwashing session. It was unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed in person before. It was quite, just quite disturbing.”
In one of the last scenes, Walsh holds a class as a certified DEI expert. The plan was to set up increasingly ridiculous scenarios until no one was left in the room. However, when it came time for participants to engage in “self-flogging” Walsh was unsettled to find people full of “self-hate” willing to physically harm themselves as a part of becoming “anti-racist.”
Many films from Daily Wire+ have faced challenges in distribution, including censorship and lack of legacy media coverage. When What is a Woman? was streamed on X and Elon Musk had to intervene as Twitter employees were actually trying to censor the film. Daily Wire said for the movie Lady Ballers, they had to cast themselves because they couldn’t find anyone to audition. Walsh feels the hostility of the film industry is something the company is constantly fighting against.
“The issue now is the mainstream media, and especially mainstream film critics. None of them have reviewed the film,” Walsh said. “They had an excuse with What is a Woman because it was on our platform and behind a paywall. Which is a weak excuse, but at least they had one. Now we have a wide released film, in theaters, and top five in the box office. If you’re a film critic, your job is to watch it, and give us your opinion. But to this point, not a single one has acknowledged the existence of the film, which is pretty interesting.”
Am I Racist? currently holds a 98% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes among audience, and for the first week, it did not have a single critic review.
The marketing for the film went viral in its own right. Walsh took the opportunity to go undercover at the DNC as a Kamala Harris supporter, sporting a “White Dudes for Kamala” shirt topped with his movie character’s signature blazer and man bun wig. While photobombing a CNN live shot and the distribution of “Project2025.com” cards leading to the film’s website got him quickly kicked out by the police, the Left’s negative reaction to his presence at the DNC contributed to the film’s exposure.
“I was only there for a couple minutes before people started recognizing me,” Walsh said. “They were not quite welcoming of me there. Just me being spotted on camera by CNN, that was enough. That’s all we had to do to upset the Left quite a bit. They were very upset that I was there. You should be happy that I was there, being exposed to your ideas. If you’re proud of them.”
Walsh criticized the DEI industry for profiting off people’s guilt and the high fees charged for the DEI-related scams he paid to make the film.
“There’s a lot of money in it,” Walsh said. “When you convince people they have some sort of guilt because of the color of their skin, and then you tell them, ‘Hey, come to me to atone for your sins,’ which is basically what these DEI people say, people buy into that, and they’re willing to pay a lot of money.”
“For the purposes of making this film, we discovered that in order to get these people in the movie, we had to pay them,” he added.
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During the film, the price the team paid was plastered on the screen. Walsh was charged $15,000 to speak with Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility. DiAngelo deleted her X account in response to the film. He said her interview was one of the first things he was able to shoot, and once they got her on camera, he knew they had a movie to show what a scam DEI really is.
“If you really think that racism is a big problem in America, and you’re out to defeat racism, or whatever these people say, I know everyone’s got to make a living, but you would think that, hey, if I just want to talk to you about racism, that you’d be eager to sit down and talk,” Walsh said. “You wouldn’t need $15,000 to do it. But that’s not the case with these DEI grifters.”