The ‘conservative Michael Moore’ taking on the ‘crazy’ diversity industry

'Our culture has slid into moral chaos and dysfunction and degeneracy': Matt Walsh
'Our culture has slid into moral chaos and dysfunction and degeneracy': Matt Walsh

Matt Walsh has been described as the Right-wing Michael Moore, a satirical filmmaker who invites people to walk into a trap of their own construction. In his latest movie, Am I Racist? – disguised as a liberal with a man bun – he persuades a white woman to hand $30 in cash over to a black man to atone for “400 years of oppression”. Not just any white woman: Robin DiAngelo, author of the book on anti-racism, White Fragility, a best-seller arguing that racism is systemic and subconscious, and acts of niceness are no solution.

The scene feels subversive; given the sensitivities around race, almost sacrilegious. It’s also painfully funny - with a dash of Jeremy Beadle. Critics call him a far-Right troll; he leans into it by describing himself on Twitter as a “theocratic fascist”. His usual costume is a plaid shirt and thick black beard, evoking a grumpy lumberjack podcasting from his cabin.

“In my view, our culture has slid into moral chaos and dysfunction and degeneracy,” he tells me over the phone from Los Angeles. His “vocation” is to use critique and comedy to nudge America back to the status of a “functional society”. He boasts nearly three million subscribers on YouTube. Elon Musk appears to be an admirer.

He’s cut through on several culture war issues because he combines unapologetic conservatism with top-level sarcasm. When Disney cast a woman of colour to play Ariel in its remake of The Little Mermaid, Walsh argued that if one wanted to be truly accurate, the underwater maiden should be not pale but “translucent”, having “no pigmentation whatsoever… She should be totally pale and skeletal where you can see her skull through her face. And that would actually be a version of The Little Mermaid that I would watch.”

CNN felt obliged to run a piece calling his comments “racially charged” and unscientific, adding “mermaids would probably have a specific type of pigmentation that allowed for both a deep sea and shallow water existence.”

Walsh, 38, started out as a shock-jock (literally: he played a game of trivia on air that resulted in an electric shock for wrong answers) before moving into political blogging and broadcast – joining the Nashville-based Daily Wire project in 2017, which itself has evolved from straight punditry to making movies, books, even children’s content. Walsh has written Johnny the Walrus, a picture book about a child who almost transitions into said mammal.

Matt Walsh in a scene from Am I Racist?
Matt Walsh in a scene from Am I Racist?

“The slogan,” explains Walsh, “is rather than just commenting on the culture, to actually make the culture.” Punditry is “noticing things... The next step is to create”. In his first documentary, 2022’s What is a Woman?,  he met figureheads of the trans phenomenon and asked them, simply, “what is a woman?” Their angry, bizarre responses were praised by the likes of JK Rowling for exposing the “incoherence” of a movement that can end in life-changing surgery.

The target this time is the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion industry – folks who make money schooling whites about racism – and perhaps because race is even more controversial than gender, Walsh chose to adopt a different approach. “I’m going to be skeptical and believe whatever they tell me and I’ll let them sort of guide me on my journey. And I’m going to try to put into practice all the things that I learned along the way, so that, rather than telling the audience how crazy this stuff is, hopefully we can show them.”

If What is a Woman? was confrontational, Am I Racist? is a conversation that reduces into Monty Python logical-absurdity. For example: we learn that it is racist to over-smile at a black person, but also racist not to smile at all, and to declare yourself un-racist is, itself, an unconscious sign that you are racist. Walsh attends a $30,000 seminar on racism (“Grieving White Privilege”), at which his enthusiasm to please becomes so surreal – he claims he often receives praise for having “17 black friends” – that the attendees smell an imposter and, incredibly, call the police.

Matt Walsh: 'I don't have 17 black friends - because I don't have 17 friends'
Matt Walsh: 'I don’t have 17 black friends - because I don’t have 17 friends'

Walsh has been accused of interviewing subjects under false pretences. “We don’t lie,” he insists; there are no hidden cameras, everyone signs waivers and nothing is “deceptively edited”. If a fee appears in big characters on screen – $15,000 for DiAngelo – his production company paid it. “If the question is, why would these people talk to me, and why didn’t they ask more questions... I think probably the money smoothed it over.”

“I don’t have 17 black friends,” he clarifies, “because I don’t have 17 friends. Who has time for 17 friends?” But the black man who DiAngelo pays off is one of the movie’s producers and a pal, along with Sean Hampton, who co-made the movie as well as Walsh’s podcast: “and they love the film.”

Perhaps the most bizarre sequence is two women of colour who, for a fee of $5,000, will attend a private dinner with a group of white women – waiter served, Walsh in disguise again – and explain to their hosts why they are bigots and discuss how to fix it (they start the ball rolling with: “tell us one instance when your racism has shown up recently?”)

How does he account for this sado-masochism? “You have the people who are getting paid,” he explains, and “they are put in a position of being moral and intellectual leaders, gurus… and I think that strokes their ego quite a bit.” More interesting is the psychology of the women “that are at the dinner table [willing] to be insulted for two hours.” Some of this is down to “standard issue virtue signalling”, but the “larger part is… they have been brainwashed into thinking that they’re inherently racist and they’re part of some, like, systemically racist structure in society”. They want to “atone for their sins.”

Walsh is a conservative Christian: I put it to him that DEI might be a mutation of Jesus’ teaching, urging whites to seek forgiveness without ever giving it in return. One black activist says in the programme that “kindness is not what is called for.” Walsh notes that St Paul would disagree. “Love can sometimes be uncomfortable”, occasionally you have to tell people you love things they don’t want to hear, but one is still supposed to “care” about others and show “empathy”. By contrast, the activist who eschews kindness “is telling us that there are times when you should not be empathetic, which is a very interesting message.”

Of course, some would say that what he does for a living – tricking, embarrassing and exposing others – is fundamentally unkind. Walsh disagrees: “Sometimes kindness means confrontation. If there’s an evil in society, and you actually care about people and you’re a loving person, then you need to confront that evil and try to expose it…. I have a daily podcast where it’s a much more direct [method]…. But I actually think that doing these films using humour can be an even more effective way of approaching it.”

This brings us to the question of why conservatives have taken so long to do what Daily Wire is doing: why have Left-wing comedians been allowed to dominate the field of political satire?

Walsh has thought about this a lot: “Part of it is that comedy is often in some way subversive and transgressive… and, for a long time, conservatives ran the culture and the institutions that produce culture, and liberals were the sort of insurgent, rebel force…. But in recent times, it’s flipped, and liberals own all the institutions - the Fortune 500 companies, academia, media, it’s all liberal. So conservatives find themselves on the outside.”

The classic example is Trump - “he came in as very much an outsider… playing that role”, and is often amusing (if you get the joke). Walsh names Shane Gillis – who does one of the finest Trump impressions – and Louis CK as examples of comics who, if not conservative, are not liberal (both were cancelled, one for racial insensitivity, the other for sexual misconduct).

The flip side of the Right becoming funny is the Left losing the ability to laugh at itself, clinging to respectability at the cost of laughs: “A dyed-in-the-wool Left-wing comedian? That would be hard to name one that I think is actually funny.”

Throughout the interview, Walsh’s misanthropic persona holds – till we discuss comedy, and suddenly the voice animates. It’s long been my suspicion that many of the Right’s most controversial figures are, at heart, entertainers longing to be acknowledged for their creative talent as well as their politics. Doesn’t Ann Coulter want to be Dorothy Parker? Greg Gutfeld, Johnny Carson? As for Walsh being compared to Michael Moore, “I don’t agree with anything he believes, but he’s a brilliant filmmaker [who] made some of the best documentaries of the last 30 years… So I’m flattered by the comparison. Honestly.”

Finally, I wonder if the Democrats have done Am I Racist? a favour by nominating Kamala Harris for president, a woman who conservatives joke was only put on the ticket in 2020 to add racial balance.

“She’s very clearly the DEI candidate, and… it’s not Right-wingers who came up with that, it was Joe Biden who said that he’s going to look for a black woman to be vice-president. That’s what DEI is” – the triumph of representation over ability. In a way, Harris “makes the film. I think the film would’ve been relevant regardless,” but now “it hits the zeitgeist even more.” As for her chances of winning in November, it’s “50/50… it’s gonna be very, very tight.”


Am I Racist? is in US cinemas from September 13