I often say on Twitter that “the empire is collapsing.” No one takes me seriously. They don’t really care what I think unless it’s to punish me for a thought crime, which happens often. But I have two advantages in assessing our current situation. The first, I’ve been covering film and the Oscars for 25 years. The second, I’m not afraid to tell the truth.
What’s the truth? Why is the empire in collapse? The short answer is that Hollywood became the First Class section of the airplane. For a while, it was good enough for them to have that space all to themselves, but eventually, as with most utopias, they felt the need to make movies to persuade everyone to adopt their way of thinking. It has been a disaster for Hollywood, even if there are still some hits now and again. If they didn’t, they were cast out of utopia.
The longer version is that something dramatic changed after 2016. Hollywood took a side. At first it was mass hysteria that meant purging anyone accused of being a racist or a rapist. But by 2020, it became what looked like a full-blown revolution — a “Great Awakening” — that we felt all through the film industry and the Oscars. The Golden Globes were canceled as “racists.” The Academy implemented a mandate of inclusivity that took effect last year. The BAFTAs completely upended their voting to bring in a jury to hand-pick nominees so as not to appear racist.
It changed everything. It changed how movies were cast, what stories could be told, and how characters could be portrayed. Suddenly, what was virtue signaling became, I believe, a religion. Much of the devotion to it is driven by fear. No one wants to have happen to them what just happened to me. They live in such fear of it that they all must comply and even pretend to be fully on board. Some really are true believers but many go along with it out of fear.
Well, that fear has hollowed out the industry. It’s clear from the box office decline. It wasn’t just the strike. Movies like the Fall Guy, Furiosa, etc. should not have bombed. Something else is at play and it is not wise to blame it all on new technology. It is that we are in the midst of the pendulum swing, and the majority is starting to tune out the ruling class and the culture they’ve foisted upon them.
And that brings us to Matt Walsh and Am I Racist, which hits theaters in previews tomorrow, Thursday, then opens on Friday the 13th. If you’re interested in my review of it, keep reading. Otherwise, have a nice day.
The Left I used to know had no problem “taking the piss” out of the powerful. That’s because for most of my life the power was on the Right, specifically with Christian Conservatives. But over the past 20 years that switched. Now, the power — especially cultural power — is on the Left. They can’t “take the piss” out of themselves. They are too noble. They are too devout. It is verboten. It is blasphemy.
But nature abhors a vacuum. That has meant the Right has now become, more or less, the counterculture. Am I Racist is the first big test of Daily Wire as a defacto movie studio. So what is it about? It is more or less a follow-up to Matt Walsh’s first film, What is a Woman which explores the inability to define what a woman is on the New Left. But really, it’s a mockumentary, a chance for Walsh to poke fun at people who take themselves very seriously. He does the same thing with Am I Racist?
Is it funny? Yes, it’s funny. But mainly because humor doesn’t exist on the Left anymore. Does anyone really think John Oliver or Stephen Colbert are funny? They aren’t. They’re clapping seals for the establishment, and their tiny viewerships love them for it. They give them what they so desperately need — confirmation of a magic mirror that you are the fairest of them all.
So just watching someone wander into verboten territory reminds me of what it was like to listen to albums of George Carlin or Richard Pryor back in the day (yes, we listened to them on record albums). You knew you weren’t supposed to laugh but laugh you did. In fact, the more offensive the funnier it is.
When you see a little baby burst into hysterical laughter after being startled or scared, it’s a survival mechanism to keep things in perspective so fear and panic doesn’t take you under. Fear and panic must be reserved for the most serious threats and being suddenly startled by a dog wagging its tail is not one of those things. That is why we need laughter. It helps us stay sane. And we mostly need to laugh about things we’re not supposed to laugh about.
The funniest thing about Am I Racist is Matt Walsh himself. He is, in real life, a Conservative Christian who believes in traditional marriage, is against abortion, against transgender ideology, etc. But he’s funny. He has a deadpan delivery that somehow gives him a strong screen presence. In this film, he dresses up as what he would view as a “Leftist.” A man in skinny jeans and a man bun who is on a quest to become an “antiracist.”
In his travels, he encounters the most strident true believers in the “antiracist” movement, like the group that holds the “Race to Dinner” meetings, or Robin DiAngelo who wrote “White Fragility.” Much of this was already lampooned hilariously and brilliantly in Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction. Essentially the joke is one nervous white people who desperately want to be “saved” from their white guilt. They want/need absolution so they turn to people who will help them forgive themselves and “do the work.”
Here is a scene:
And another:
You get the idea.
The film is around an hour and 40 minutes. He does manage to punk the White Fragility queen herself, Robin DiAngelo.
The “antiracist” movement has always struck me as a way to justify the extreme wealth inequality in this country. It’s a way to see the white working class as oppressors and a way for the most wealthy whites to continue to use their status as long as it’s defined by whether or not they are “good allies.”
Obviously, racism exists. It is a problem that has not been solved, and we can’t pretend it has. I just don’t think and have never thought chasing around graduate students at Ivy League universities or thought policing people on Twitter is how you solve it. They want us to believe that all white people ARE racists and that the only way out of it is to “do the work.”
I think Matt Walsh wants to carve a path for an alternative viewpoint for young people to be able to grow up in a country where they aren’t damned as oppressed or oppressors from birth. Does that mean it gets people off the hook for obvious racism? Maybe. But we won’t solve the problem by forcing people to comply with wacky ideas that don’t work anyway.
Matt Walsh is surprisingly compassionate, I thought, with both this film and What is a Woman. You’d expect it to be the opposite: angry and mean. But it isn’t really. He comes off as a hapless traveler just trying to understand something that we’re all supposed to suddenly accept as normal.
Fear is the death of comedy, of art, of great movies. But it’s also true that, as Bob Dylan once said, “when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Most people in Hollywood have too much to lose. We need dissenters, whether it’s a comic who can only find an audience on YouTube, or it’s a Conservative Christian making a mockumentary no one on the Left would dare make. And to me, this is the problem.
I have no idea how many people will see this movie. The film Reagan had lukewarm box office results. It was no Sound of Freedom. I imagine that the way to drive box office for a movie like this to a culture war issue is to turn it into a cultural war issue, and then maybe people will turn out.
Either way, I hope it succeeds so that other outsider studios will start to challenge and break up the status quo that has all but destroyed what used to be a thriving industry.
You can buy tickets to Am I Racist by clicking here.