(New York Post) 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.
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 ant-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 four-year-old daughter is still gravitating toward white Disney princesses.
Walsh proudly says that his own three-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.”
