Morning Wire - Matt Walsh Journeys Through the DEI Industry in “Am I Racist?" | 9.15.24

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

Diversity Equity and Inclusion has become a prominent force in American culture, becoming a standard implementation in everything from government, all the way to private companies. In this episode, we sit down with Matt Walsh to discuss how he seeks to expose the costly DEI industry in his new film “Am I Racist?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement gets its moment on the silver screen this weekend in a new comedy starring Daily Wire host Matt Walsh. The Daily Wire produced film features Walsh taking what he calls his journey towards anti-racism. And after earning his DEI certificate, he gets a chance to sit down with some of the biggest names in the anti-racism industry. Teasers from the film have sparked damaging headlines all week for those DEI leaders and strong responses from viewers. In this episode, we sit down with Walsh to the same.

discuss his new comedy and the industry it sets out to expose. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's September 15th, and this is a Sunday edition of Morning Wire. What's the secret sauce behind wildly successful businesses? It's not great products or brilliant marketing. It's the unsung hero, the business behind the business. For millions of entrepreneurs, that hero is Shopify. Shopify boasts the number one checkout on the planet. With shop pay, they boosts conversions up to 50%. That means more sales and fewer abandoned cards. Shopify is the flexible dynamic commerce solution that growth-minded businesses need in today's market. Get a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Morningwire. That's Shopify.com

slash morning wire. Joining us now is Matt Walsh, bestselling author, host of the Matt Walsh show and now star of two feature-length films. Matt, so good to have you on his first time we've had a full interview with you. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why it took us so long to do this, but really appreciate it being on the show. First, congratulations on your film, not just making it into theaters, which is a big enough deal, but also getting a wide release due to big pre-sales on tickets. How many theaters is the film showing in now? We're currently over 1,500 theaters, which is drastically up from what we started with,

which I think was a couple hundred. And as you said, it was pre-sales. Pre-sales were really strong. We encouraged the audience to support the film early before it comes out, and they did and we're really grateful for that. So we're ready for hopefully a big opening weekend. You're now making a bit of a habit, making movies based on big questions that apparently need answering now. What is a woman tackled the issue of gender identity? Now you're asking, am I racist? What prompted you to make that the focus of the film? Yeah, it's another question,

as what is a woman's a question, obviously, but it's a very different kind of question. And in this film, we're taking more of a personal journey approach. We decided, you know, after the success of what is the woman, obviously we wanted to make another movie, really, for me, my first experience making a film. So my first time seeing up close just kind of the impact that a film can have on the culture. And it seems obvious to all of us that after we kind of tackled gender ideology and the trans issue, that the other big area of cultural controversy is race. and in particular, these days especially the so-called anti-racist industry and DEI.

So that's what we wanted to look at. We approached it from this kind of narrative perspective of me as someone exploring my own whiteness, as they call it, and trying to become an anti-racist myself. And that's the film. I think you were a pretty good anti-racist myself. Thanks. So look, the first movie, What Is a Woman, was funny. Intrinsically, this one is a comedy.

set out intending this to be a comedy or did it just sort of organically turn into one? Yeah, we did. That's what we decided early on that we wanted to explore the issue. We want to get the message across. We want to expose these anti-racist grifters. But we also, we exactly that. We want this to be a comedy. And, you know, I think maybe some people in the audience will be surprised. I've already heard people that were surprised by, I guess, just how much we're leaning into the comedy of it. And, you know, when we go into a situation, we go into a scene in this movie, we have in mind, again, the message that we want to get across what we're trying to expose, we're trying to explore, because it is also a documentary. But we see all of these scenarios also

as just great forums for comedy. It's just ripe for comedy. And we kind of put that first in the movie. We put the comedy first. And if you do that and you do it successfully, then ultimately you get the message across more effectively as well. Yeah, I can say as somebody that watched it in a theater, a packed theater, there were so many laughs and gas at the same time throughout the film. It really was striking. I mean, it is hilarious. It's shocking.

It's also hilarious. Look, one of the themes that comes up repeatedly in the film is money. You make a point of showing that DEI is not just a movement. It's an industry. What did you find in terms of the transactional nature of the experts you sat down with in the film? Yeah, they all wanted to get paid. And one thing we do is, as you saw in the movie, we put the price tags for all of these people on the screen.

We paid them all to be in the movie, and we don't hide from that because that's part of the story. And what we found is that, look, there's a lot of money to be made in the DEI industry. And we see this throughout the film that, you know, when you position yourself as kind of this moral authority and someone who's in a position where you can help someone atone for their racist sins,

When you put yourself in that position, there's just a lot of money to be made in it. And the people that come to you wanting to give you money, many of them are just like desperate to prove that they aren't racist. And they'll do anything and they'll spend any amount of money to prove it, which is what makes this business so lucrative. And that's what we try to bring out in the film. There have been several viral clips from the film Making the Rounds Online. One involves the race-to-dinner duo Cyra Rao and Regina Jackson.

The scene is honestly first, hilarious, but it's also hard to believe. For those who haven't seen that clip, can you set the scene for us? Yeah, race to dinner is a real thing that these two women do where they will come to dinner and they'll call you racist for two hours. That's the basic idea. Sounds great. Yeah, it's just a great time. I mean, who wouldn't want to take advantage of that?

It's only white women, though. So white women can have these dinners and invite cyber around. Gene Jackson to come and call them racist. When we decided to make this movie, I had known about the race to dinner thing. I heard about that a couple years before that. And this is one of the first things I said, like, we have to get in the room for one of these events. We got to get there somehow. And we discovered, as we were in production, that they really do mean that you have to be a white woman and they won't accept anybody else, which is kind of interesting because that harkens back to the first movie. But we did discover that, yeah, you have to be a white woman to sit at the

table, but they're perfectly willing to have white men serving them in a waiter role at the dinner. In fact, they encouraged that. So that was our inn. That's how we got in the room for the dinner. Now, Robin DiAngelo is the queen of the industry, and I know that she was somebody that was probably a high profile focus for your team. She's the author of white fragility. She's made millions off of her anti-racism and DEI sort of self-help stick. That includes getting money from some of America's biggest corporations. She actually rattles some of those off touting how much influence she has in the film. You got the chance to sit down at length with her.

First, like most of the other experts, it cost you some big money. How much was that? $15,000 is what she charged us, yeah. And that was for what, two hours? Yeah, it was about two-hour conversation. So, you know, a good $7,000 an hour or so. Not bad. She engages in perhaps the most shocking moment in the film.

First, were you surprised at how things turned out in the scene with her? Well, the spoilers are already out there in the world, but I'm still, I'm just pretending they're not, so I don't want to talk too specifically about it. You got to go watch the movie. But we had a general outline of where we wanted to take the conversation. I knew that I knew that I didn't want to just sit down and talk to her and ask her questions, and then that's it. We really wanted to kind of take her through some anti-racist exercises.

That was our goal. Because prior to this in the movie, I went to a seminar. We've done workshops. And this is a big part of this is what she does. She does workshops. So we thought, could we get her to take part in something like that with me? And well, like I said, I want to give it away. But she did. She was, she was game. She was a willing participant in our little workshop that we did. Now, after reports of that scene went viral this week, she finally broke her silence on it. I want to read a little bit from her response. She called this a, quote, Borat-style mockumentary that she complained humiliates and discredits, anti-racist educators and activists. She also says she donated the $15,000 she required you to pay to sit down with her to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. What's your response to her statement?

She's half right. She says that we were looking to embarrass and humiliate the anti-racist industry. And if the anti-racist industry was embarrassed or humiliated, we didn't do it. they did it to themselves. And if Robin DeAngelo was embarrassed, she did it to herself. I will say that it's not a mockumentary. It is a documentary because this is a real issue that we are exploring. And these are real people. Everything that happens is real. So it's a documentary. And on the Borat end of it, I'll fully admit that we use some similar strategies and approaches to what someone like Sasha Baron Cohen has used. Although it is interesting to me that when Sasha Baron Cohen does it, or when someone like

Nathan Fielder does it. You don't hear the left complain very much. But when we do it, all of a sudden it's unethical. But the interesting thing is that, you know, Borat, I think it's a hilarious movie, but let's be honest, it's focused on embarrassing everyday average working class Americans in the heartland. Whereas we're punching up. I mean, we're going after academics and scholars and PhDs and the DEI experts. So you would think that, you know, if anyone would be accused to being unethical, it wouldn't be us. Yeah, and you get the sense from him. He really does trick people, hoodwink people into doing things.

Whereas with this film, I can say you just tee up opportunities for them to say what they've been sort of saying behind the scenes all along. It doesn't feel like you're manipulating in the same way that some of these other comedians do. Even with all the money that you had to fork over, was it difficult sometimes to get big names like DeAngelo to sit down with you? Yeah, it was. I mean, we didn't, of course, we did not get everybody we wanted to get in the film.

and we cast a pretty wide net. If you think about all the big names in that world, you name them, we probably sent out an inquiry. And some people were more cautious. There are some people in that world who are very, very cautious about who they talk to. But I think it's because they know that, you know, it's a very shallow subject matter and hard to defend.

But Robin DiAngelo, it wasn't that difficult to get her to sit down. I mean, we just sent an email. We took a little bit of setting up. We paid her, and she came in, and she sat for two hours. It was very open at the time. Maybe now not so much, though. Well, I will sit down with you for two hours if you pay me $15,000.

I just wanted to go ahead and say that to you. For you, I could only give you 10. I'm sorry. That could work. Look, the media also plays an unwitting role in your film. Can you talk about your media appearances as Matt the do-the-do-the-work instructor? Yeah, that's as we get later into the film and I become my own DEI expert. After I feel like I've done the work to really be an expert, that I could have my own seminar.

and we go to multiple local news channels and do interviews where I'm just advertising my seminar. And that was interesting too because there was very little background checking going on apparently with these news channels. They didn't even ask for my last name. I never gave it. We said that to just call me Matt, the DEI expert. And that's what they called me.

They never even asked for the last name. And that was pretty interesting. Again, it's remarkable, painful at times to watch. but hilarious. Look, DEI has become one of the most influential forces in American culture. It's in the government, education, Hollywood. Of course, the Biden-Harris administration has really leaned into this. Vice President Kamala Harris, she comes up a lot in this film.

How does she play into this DEI agenda? Yeah, the really interesting thing is that, of course, we finished production and post-production on this film before Conno Harris was actually the presidential nominee, but she's still in the movie a lot. it just so happens because she's been one of the main proponents of it. And the reality is that, look, she is the DEI presidential candidate. So this movie hits at a really fortuitous time. And that's what she is. I mean, Joe Biden has all but called her that because he said that he was looking for a black woman to be his vice president candidate. And that's what DEI is,

judging people based on their demographics, their skin color, excluding entire groups of people because they're the wrong demographic, not hiring based on Mary. That is what DEI is. That's what it is a tea, and that's how she ended up in the position that she's in. And, you know, this movie is for her. I hope that she watches it. We'll send her a screener if she's interested. Well, I'm sure she'll love it. You let the elite expose themselves in this film, but we do hear from just sort of average Americans. And some of that is really, it's encouraging to hear expressions of unity and a sense of hope about what really makes America America. Do you see any signs of the DEI momentum in America being checked or even reversed lately? I think so. And as you

point out, when we went and talked to normal people who are really outside of the DEI bubble in that, you know, most of them probably didn't go to college, so they didn't get the brainwashing there. They're not in corporate America, so they're not getting the HR, DEI seminars and all that kind of stuff. And so for them that when we talk, whether white people or black people that we talk to in the film, they don't even speak the same language. I mean, we use terms like, systemic racism that even to me, now I think systemic racism is a false narrative, but I'm extremely familiar with the term. To me, it seems like just a household term, but again, you go outside the bubble and even that term. It's like they didn't really even know what I meant by that.

I had to explain it. So that's a good sign. That kind of shows you that a lot of this stuff, it's kind of a very narrow lane. And all you have to do, to be free of it, if we could just ignore these DEI grifters, the Robin DeAngelo's of the world, if you ignore them, if they're not a part of your life at all, then it'll be okay. We're not going to be in some kind of racial utopia, but I think most people in a modern America, their default position, unless they listen to someone like Robin DeAngelo, the default position is, you know, to not be all that focused on issues of race and racism and they just kind of like live their life. And that's what I think most people would do, if not for the.

DEI Grift. Final question. Did you ever imagine seeing yourself on the big screen? What's that been like for you? No, I didn't. And it's been pretty surreal. We had the premiere a couple of days ago, and it was my first time actually watching myself. I've seen the movie probably 20 times throughout the process of making it.

But my first time watching it with a crowd, and certainly my first time seeing on the big screen, and it was surreal, but a little bit disconcerting in certain ways. But also, of course, a huge thrill and just really grateful for it. You know, we'll see what happens this weekend. I'm pretty optimistic. This is what it means to compete in the culture. That's where the culture happens in places like movie theaters. And this is where we need to be if we want to make an impact. Well, I can say personally, this is a great film. I'm not just saying this because I'm a daily wire employee. And watching the audience respond to it was pretty remarkable. It's clear that it's going to resonate with a lot of people. Matt, thank you so much for coming on and great luck with this film. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. That was Matt Walsh star of Am I Racist, which is in theaters all over the country now. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.