Dispatch from the Premiere of The Daily Wire’s Am I Racist?

The last place one expects to see The Daily Wire personality Matt Walsh is in a ramshackle biker bar on the outskirts of Hartsville, TN.  But midway through Am I Racist?, he’s in the thick of it as he converses with the watering hole’s regulars, including a guy in a shirt that says, “Vaginaterian.” 

In his trademark plaid and oversized glasses that peek out from his impeccably trimmed beard, Walsh resembles an erudite lumberjack more partial to CrossFit than Paul Bunyan antics. 

But during this scene, he’s in disguise as a soy boy certified DEI trainer complete with man bun and skinny jeans, who hopes to get some deplorable perspectives on structural racism from the cis white male source. It’s straight out of a Borat movie. Except that Walsh is much more generous than British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen has proven when he transforms into a Kazakh reporter to expose America’s foundational racism and xenophobia. 

This group of ragtag country folk would never make the final cut of a Borat sequel. They welcome Walsh into the fray despite the fact that the character he’s playing is much deserving of an ass beating. They talk about tolerance against the backdrop of a Confederate flag or two. They display no sign of the race hatred that most media outlets claim runs rampant at the Trump rallies filled with people like them. In fact, they treat this abrasive liberal interloper with more hospitality than what everyday Walsh (or a prominent conservative like Matt Gaetz) would receive when minding his own business at a venue like The 5 Spot.

Since the trailer for Am I Racist? dropped this summer, legacy media outlets and their imitators have responded with vitriol that far exceeds their expected scorn, including Rachel Leishman’s article in The Mary Sue that devotes a feature to a second-by-second reading of said trailer. “Sadly, if you watch the trailer for this movie, you will be disappointed to learn that it isn’t someone making fun of Matt Walsh,” Leishman writes with all the expected nuance. “No, instead, it is the actual Bad Matt Walsh thinking he is unpacking what being racist means by mocking the ‘liberal’ ideology that we should unlearn racism.” 

There’s little chance the Leishmans of the world will watch Am I Racist? when it debuts at over fifteen hundred theaters nationwide this weekend. And those that do will have to pretend it doesn’t exist or hope that their blanket accusations of racism still have enough juice left to serve as a deterrent for more moderate audiences who don’t pay annual subscription fees to DailyWire+. Such is a survival mechanism because Walsh’s movie cuts so close to the bone of those at the lower rungs of the cultural elite that any widespread attention could endanger their existence.

Thus, it comes as little surprise that local media had no interest in covering the film’s premiere last Monday, an event that proved so popular The Daily Wire had to switch locations at the last minute to the AMC Thoroughbred 20 in Franklin to accommodate the demand. Though Nashville’s film community has increasingly made its presence known at the national box office, a film produced by a local company and largely shot in the city has never had this large of a footprint. One would think that local journalists obligated to fully cover their communities would feel compelled to see what the fuss was all about even if it challenged their perceptions. But what Walsh and Company are doing in Am I Racist? is a dangerous thing—impossible to inoculate against if anyone outside the choir comes across it.

“They are going to live in their own prisms,” The Daily Wire personality Michael Knowles said at the film’s premiere of legacy media’s response to the film. “Even if they don’t recognize themselves in the mirror, I think the audience is going to recognize the farce that we are all living in.”

While the vast majority of conservative and faith-based films are, at best, innocuous red meat for their base, and, at worst, embarrassingly inept, Am I Racist? serves as an example of a project that challenges the accepted orthodoxy while never devolving into proselytization or one-dimensionality.  Despite what the few legacy media reviews will say, the film never posits that racism doesn’t exist. It doesn’t downplay America’s very real history of oppression or make a case that it should be ignored entirely. Rather, it takes direct aim at the burgeoning DEI industry that, in the wake of the summer of 2020, has ballooned into a $9.4 billion corporate enterprise. 

With its circular logic and cherry-picking of postmodern, deconstructionist thought that Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida pioneered in the 1960s, the Critical Race Theory that drives DEI has managed to create an unsolvable problem applicable to every institution in America. Consequently, it has cultivated an entirely new career path for pseudo-academics to gain a captive audience. As bestsellers like Ibram X. Kendi’s  How to Be An Anti-Racist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility have turned their authors into multimillionaire brands, they have created a cultural vacuum in which “the work” is nearly impossible to criticize lest one be labeled as part of the problem. 

“Racism is a terrible, wicked evil, but it’s been weaponized to cut down a certain group of people who stand in the way of DEI,” actor and Christian speaker Kirk Cameron said before the film’s premiere. “We can divide people with lots of different tools. Over religion, over politics, over socioeconomic classes, over vaccines. But racism is something no one wants to be accused of. So, Matt is blowing the cover off of this false narrative that white people are inherently racist and I’m so thankful for that.”

One of Am I Racist?’s greatest strengths is Walsh and director Justin Folk’s focus on class disparities. In a pivotal scene, Walsh goes undercover as a caterer during a Race To Dinner event, a business venture conceived by antiracist educators Regina Jackson and Saira Rao in which they get paid to attend a meal at wealthy white women’s homes and highlight the ways their hosts are irrevocable bigots. Rao’s assertion that America should burn and is not salvageable may be one of the movie’s most memorable soundbytes. However, the way she and Jackson treat the help throughout the sequence is equally crucial. CRT and DEI are not a clash of the races. They are merely a catalyst for clout chasers to entrench themselves in the rarefied atmosphere while exploiting the multiethnic underclass.  

“People have figured it out,” Dr. Jordan B. Peterson said during the premiere. “We are seeing somewhat of a turn towards Trump among populations that have been more historically left-leaning Democrat. I think that minority communities, including the black community, are figuring out they are not well served by the leftist utopians.” 

Had any leftist utopians attended the film’s premiere, they would have a difficult time processing the diversity of the attendees. It’s quite common to go to a film festival opening of the latest documentary about systemic oppression or a random screening of an Afro-Fusion movie at the local arthouse and find oneself entirely in the company of the white liberal upper class. The crowd at Am I Racist?’s debut was anything but. College kids mingled with tux-clad Boomers, women with stylists, and blue-collar guys who represented nearly every census demographic.

“I am obviously an old, white Boomer,” Am I Racist? co-producer and actor Benyam Capel joked. “We have to stop accepting the presence of the left and stop caring what they think. They ignore us all the time. The reality is that this is one of the most diverse audiences I’ve seen. This is made by one of the most diverse crews and casts you’ve ever seen.” 

Though the film will undoubtedly spur comparisons to Michael Moore and Borat, what separates Am I Racist? from its lefty predecessors is Walsh’s ability to engage debate on both sides all the while making fun of himself. Lacking Moore’s savior complex and Baron Cohen’s contempt for the plebes that the late Christopher Hitchens articulated so well at the height of Borat’s cultural dominance, Walsh seeks to tackle the impact of CRT and DEI head on. His most potent tool is disclosing how much the CRT experts that the film features charged the production to participate. Rather than manipulate quotes or contrive elaborate stunts, Walsh serves as a conduit for participants to self sabotage with their own words–something CRT white whale Robin DiAngelo does spectacularly when Walsh cons her into giving Capel $30 of reparations from her wallet after the film reveals her $15,000 price tag for the sit down. 

“What Matt accomplished in this film no other conservative could have accomplished. He’s the only man who could have made this movie,” The Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing said. “I also think it's important for us to compete in places where the left is forced to keep score, and the box office still matters. It's still a place where you can record a success or a failure. We had huge successes on our platform, but those are easy for the left to ignore. We want to reach as wide an audience with Matt’s great talent as possible.” 

While the opening weekend numbers for Am I Racist? are still unclear, the film has had strong presales, according to The Daily Wire’s PR team. For Ben Shapiro, the film is poised to become water cooler fodder that he hopes will go far beyond his and his colleagues' base. “I think this will become a community event,” Shapiro said. “As it gets more coverage and as it performs at the box office this weekend, I think people are going to wonder what all the controversy is about and they are going to see it because people like a controversy.”

Though Walsh and his team couldn’t have predicted it, the film’s release just happened to coincide with the moment in which the major players in the DEI movement became mired in potentially career-ending controversies. Kendi faces allegations of mismanagement after his antiracism center at Boston University ended up on the financial brink despite millions in corporate support. DiAngelo has gone from perennial late-night guest to contending with charges that she plagiarized much of her academic research at a time when her Am I Racist? appearance is so damning it could have torpedoed her brand on its own. Both DiAngelo and Rao have deactivated their social media accounts on the eve of the film’s release. 

For Dallas Sonnier, The Daily Wire producer in charge of the company’s film slate, the movie’s release could not have come at a more pivotal time. “It’s absolutely the moment,” Sonnier said. “You’re seeing them in their own stupidity and their own grift just self-destruct in real time. Our movie knew it and it’s just perfectly timed.” 

Am I Racist? director Folk echoes Sonnier’s sentiments. “I can’t take credit for the timing, but I love the timing," Folk said. “We always felt she [DiAngelo] was a fraud to begin with so it's par for the course I guess.”

For the moment, Walsh has retired his man-bun wig and is ready to see how the public responds to what may be the movie that launches him further into the national spotlight. But regardless of the outcome, he’s happy to have the chance to reach the broadest audience possible. “A big part of releasing this movie in theaters is just for that reason—to reach more than just DailyWire+ subscribers,” Walsh said via email. “Being in the company of other 'mainstream' releases at the box office is how we get on the scoreboard in a way they can't deny and effect real change in the broader culture."

Am I Racist? is now playing in theaters.