Matt Walsh has firmly established himself as a professional troll. I don’t use the term in a derogatory way. In many cases, his stunts bring needed attention to cultural and political issues, and he has a talent for reminding us just how absurd (and dangerous) certain contemporary trends really are. Writing faux LGBT children’s books, renting a house in a certain county in order to speak at its school board meeting, or promoting a satirical movie at the DNC are not the only ways to bring attention to our ongoing cultural crisis—and they are off-putting to some people—but they are pretty darn effective. And funny.

All of that holds true for Walsh’s latest escapade, this time in the form of a documentary (mockumentary?) on racism in America, Am I Racist? (PG-13) released on September 13, 2024. In it, Walsh plays the part of an earnest but confused white guy who, urged on by the propaganda that surrounds us, questions whether he is racist or not. Troubled by the thought, he takes a deep dive to become educated on America’s systemic racism, even earning a “DEI certification” and becoming an expert on the subject.

Of course, what’s really going on is that Matt Walsh is going undercover into the world of DEI scammers and hustlers, exposing the lack of intellectual substance behind the message and the fat paychecks that the peddlers of the ideology collect as they go about lecturing their fellow Americans on how racist they are.

The ease with which Walsh establishes himself as a DEI expert and begins making real money as such is troubling. Without every stating anything directly, the film strongly implies that the DEI industry is a scam, that America is not inherently racist, and that the solution to racial issues is to return to Martin Luther King’s policy of colorblindness.

The voices of reason in the film are the everyday people on the streets, both white and black, who share the commonsense ideas that obsessing over racism tends to perpetuate the problem, that America isn’t systemically racist, that we should treat each other as brothers and sisters regardless of skin color, and generally try to forget about race. Meanwhile, the pseudo-academics who write books and give workshops about “white fragility” or “checking privilege” sound increasing shrill, angry, and unstable.

A few distinctions should be made, however. Walsh’s film skewers a certain kind of sub-culture within the DEI industry consisting of whom I referred to as “pseudo-academics” above. These pseudo-academics are really activists who have latched onto the ideas percolating in the universities for the past several decades and made them profitable. In other words, they are not intellectual heavyweights, they are not the theorists behind critical race theory (CRT), and they do not represent it in its most rigorous form. I am confident that there are a lot of people who could present more reasoned and formidable defenses of critical race theory than the folks in this film. They’re still wrong, of course, but Walsh’s film might be accused by some of straw-manning the opposition.

Still, the point of the film isn’t so much to do battle with the deeply entrenched and highly obscure theories about race that prevail in academia today, but rather to show the absurdity that such theories eventually lead to in the everyday life of the average American. Plus, the film is rightly billed as a comedy, not a serious documentary.

On this score, it certainly delivers. Matt Walsh’s deadpan demeanor and intentional social awkwardness form the core of the humor. They’re the perfect means to unveil the foolishness of CRT and its devotees, whose disconnection from the real world is both sad and funny. One of the DEI “experts” loudly proclaims that “Republicans are Nazis,” another babbles on with half-baked psychoanalytical terms about our racist “shadow selves,” and a third tells Matt in all seriousness to start talking about racism with his infant.

Walsh’s awkward unresponsiveness or on-the-nose lines of questioning serve to perfectly highlight the ridiculousness and humor of such claims. I laughed out loud a great deal during the film, which I found to be more light-hearted than Walsh’s previous entry, What is a Woman? This film is probably best enjoyed more as a comedy than a serious critique of CRT, though that’s not to say that it doesn’t pack a political punch. The humor makes the film and its ideas accessible to a wide audience.

The theater where I watched the film was lightly attended, and I couldn’t help wondering, at times, how my fellow movie-goers were taking some of the more controversial portions of the film. It’s definitely going to be a divisive movie, and it’s squarely and unabashedly appealing to a conservative audience, although, as one critic put it, “Regardless of where you stand politically, Am I Racist? will be an eye-opening experience that will change the way you look at anti-racists and racism in America.”

Matt Walsh and The Daily Wire continue to explore how film, and especially comedy, can be effective weapons in the culture wars. At the same time, much of their work holds up on its own merits, and even if you care little about the political issues involved, you’ll still likely find Am I Racist? to be a quirky and diverting piece of entertainment.

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Image credit: YouTube