Matt Walsh Documentary Exposes DEI for the Racism-Perpetuating Scam It Is (Part I)

I rarely have gone to the movie theater since the COVID pandemic. Last week, I went to see Matt Walsh's documentary "Am I Racist?", which has already ranked as the highest-grossing documentary this year at $9 million. I was both surprised and amused--surprised that people buy into white guilt and amused at the genius of how Walsh gave just enough rope to the anti-activists to hang themselves and expose their extremism, thereby discrediting themselves. I cannot remember the last time I laughed that hard. I really appreciated this comical take on the "anti-racist" crowd. Even Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle seemed to enjoy it enough. In the style of Borat, Walsh goes undercover to pretend he is a Diversity Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) specialist and sets up ruses to expose the DEI movement. A few gems from the documentary (Spoilers Contained):  

• So-called "progressive" white women pay $2,500 to attend a dinner hosted by anti-racist activists Saira Rao and Regina Jackson so they can be chided about how racist and privileged white women are. In the documentary, Rao and Jackson called Republicans Nazis and essentially called the United States an irredeemably racist hellhole that needs to be scorched.
• During the documentary, Walsh was interviewing Robin DiAngelo. In the middle of the interview, Walsh gives his black producer, Ben, some money as a form of reparations. Looking stunned and confused, DiAngelo goes to her purse and grabs $30 to give to Ben, although her honorarium for doing the interview was $15,000. She later was mad because she felt duped. She stated that solving reparations needed to be done on a systemic level. Maybe she was mad because it is not good for her business to be caught in her hypocrisy of not putting her money where her mouth is or exposing how much of a racket DEI really is. 
• In 2021, DiAngelo earned $728,000 from speaking gigs and workshops, nothing to say of book royalties (see DiAngelo's accountability statement here). It is not normal for someone to get paid for an interview, DiAngelo would not have taken $15,000. The fact that she does not openly take interviews to spread "the good word" suggests that DiAngelo's motive is financial. 
• Anti-racist activist and co-director for Black Lives Matter in Phoenix Sarra Tekola harassed two white male students in a multicultural center and accosted them trying to get them to leave. In the documentary, she ironically stated that all white people are racist and that we should abolish whiteness.  
• At the end of the documentary, Walsh hosted his own DEI training in which he earned $3,000. The training reached its apex of absurdity when Walsh pulled out whips so the attendees could engage in self-flagellation. What is even crazier is that some of the attendants were considering it. 

One of the features that Walsh illustrates is that with these DEI and anti-racism workshops, the demand for racism exceeds the supply. Pathological, white liberals and self-identifying "progressives" pay to be berated about de-centering whiteness, de-colonizing oneself, and not "tone policing" people. This level of gullibility means that DEI specialists can make money off of white guilt, which is illustrated by a global DEI 2022 market size of $9.4 billion. 

DEI makes racism and racial tensions worse.  As I brought up in 2018, there have been a plethora of studies done showing how diversity training and "implicit bias" training backfires (also read this article from Harvard Business Review here). Diversity training or dealing with "implicit bias" do not help with reducing prejudice. Apparently, the more you obsess over racial differences or publicly shame people for perceived "implicit bias," there ends up being more prejudice and less diversity. That makes sense given the obsession over race results in woke people being racist against white people in a way that eerily parallels Klan members. 

Even Mahzarin Banaji, who pioneered the research on implicit bias, wrote that "the typical DEI training doesn't educate people about bias and may even do harm" and that "people often leave diversity training feeling angry and with greater animosity towards other groups." Is it a surprise that Gallup polling shows a decline in race relations as DEI became more popular? No, because DEI is not about genuine reconciliation or moving past racism, but rather wallowing in racism. 

Not only is DEI discriminatory, but it perpetuates racism. Blaming everything on the nebulous, unfalsifiable concept of "systemic racism" means that the only solution in the woke mind is reverse discrimination. That is not merely my opinion. Anti-racist activist Ibram X. Kendi says that the only way to mitigate racist discrimination, and that the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. This traps us in a perpetual state of racism that does nothing to create a post-racial world. 

DEI tries to prop itself up using faulty reasoning.  For the DEI folk, they believe in collective guilt. This logical fallacy of guilt by association drives the inanity of the support for reparations. In addition to believing in collective guilt, it is not a question of whether racism took place in a given situation, but how it took place, which is a logical fallacy known as begging the question because the premise assumes the truth of the conclusion without any evidence. There is no room for alternative explanations in a given situation. As I will discuss further in Part II, not everything is caused by "systemic racism," whatever that unfalsifiable term means.

To solidify their moral high ground on their unfalsifiable accusations, the "anti-racist" grifters implement a logical fallacy known as a Kafka trap. What this logical fallacy entails is that someone who is accused of something and denies it is taken as evidence that they are the thing of which they are being accused. 

In this case, if you are a white person and you deny that you are racist, that denial is inaccurately taken as evidence that you are indeed racist. An example of "damned if you do, damned if you don't." No actual evidence of racism is required. Woke people claiming that all white people are racist is a) an example of the racism that they purport to be against, b) a way to trivialize actual racism, c) a rejection of such things as the scientific method and "innocent until proven guilty," and d) helps "anti-racists" avoid the counterfactuals and the massive amount of cognitive dissonance that comes with being "anti-racist." 

In Part II, I will discuss how DEI is problematic beyond perpetuating racism and how DEI does not mitigate racial tensions.