Matt Walsh’s Personal Journey Through The DEI Industry In ‘Am I Racist?’

The following is an edited transcript of a Morning Wire interview between Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and star of the new movie “Am I Racist?,” Daily Wire host Matt Walsh.

The Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) 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” toward “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.

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JOHN: Joining us now is Matt Walsh, best-selling author, host of the “The Matt Walsh Show,” and now star of two feature-length films. Matt, it’s great to have you on the show. This is the first time we’ve done a full interview with you.

MATT: Yeah, I don’t know why it took us so long to do this, but I really appreciate being on the show.

JOHN: We appreciate you coming on. 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 these big pre-sales on tickets. How many theaters is the film showing in now?

MATT: We’re currently in over 1,500 theaters, which is drastically up from what we started with, which I think was a couple hundred. And, as you said, pre-sales were really strong. We encouraged the audience to support the film early before it came out, and they did and we’re really grateful for that. So we’re ready for hopefully a big, big opening weekend.

JOHN: You’re now making a bit of a habit out of making movies based on big questions that apparently need answering. “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?

MATT: Yeah, it’s another question just as “What is a Woman?” is a question, obviously, but it’s a very different kind of question. In this film we’re taking more of a “personal journey” approach. After the success of “What is a Woman?,” — my first experience making a film — we wanted to make another movie. It was my first time seeing up close the impact a film can have on the culture, and it seemed obvious to all of us that after we tackled gender ideology and the trans issue, that the other big area of cultural controversy is race. 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.

JOHN: I think you were a pretty good anti-racist myself. 

MATT: Thanks.

Am I Racist? Is In Theaters NOW — Get Your Tickets Here!

JOHN: Your first movie, “What is a Woman?,” was intrinsically funny. This one is a comedy through and through. Did you set out intending this to be a comedy or did it just sort of organically turn into one?

MATT: Yeah, we did. 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 — exactly that — we want this to be a comedy. And I think some people in the audience will be surprised. I’ve already heard people were surprised by just how much we’re leaning into the comedy of it. When we go into a scene in this movie, we have in mind the message we want to get across — what we’re trying to expose, what we’re trying to explore — because it is also a documentary. But we also see all of these scenarios as great forums for comedy. They’re just ripe for comedy. And we kind of put the comedy first. If you do that and you do it successfully, then ultimately you get the message across more effectively.

JOHN: I can say, as somebody who watched it in a packed theater, there were so many laughs and gasps at the same time throughout the film, it really was striking. It’s hilarious and shocking. Now, 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?

MATT: 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 there’s a lot of money to be made in the DEI industry. And we see this throughout the film — that 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 desperate to prove they aren’t racist — and they’ll do anything, they’ll spend any amount of money to prove it, which is what makes this business so lucrative. That’s what we try to bring out in the film.

LISTEN: Catch the full interview with Matt Walsh on the Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

JOHN: There have been several viral clips from the film making the rounds online. One involves the “Race to Dinner” duo, Saira Rao and Regina Jackson. First, the scene is hilarious, but it’s also pretty hard to believe when you watch it. For those who haven’t seen that clip, can you set the scene for us?

MATT: “Race to Dinner” is a real thing that these two women do where they will come to dinner and call you racist for two hours. That’s the basic idea.

JOHN: That sounds great.

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MATT: Yeah, it’s just a great time. Who wouldn’t wanna take advantage of that? It’s only white women, though. So white women can have these dinners and invite Saira Rao and Regina Jackson to come and call them racist. Now, when we decided to make this movie I had known about the “Race to Dinner” thing. I heard about it a couple years before and one of the first things I said was, “We have to get in the room for one of these events, we’ve 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 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 in. That’s how we got in the room for the dinner.

JOHN: Robin DiAngelo is the queen of the industry and I know she was 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 self-help schtick. That includes getting huge money from some of America’s biggest corporations. She actually rattles some of those off in the film. You got the chance to sit down with her at length. First, like most of the other experts, it cost you some big money. How much was that?

MATT: $15,000 is what she charged us.

JOHN: And that was for two hours?

MATT: Yeah, it was about a two-hour conversation, so, you know, a good $7,000 an hour or so.

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JOHN: 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?

MATT: I was. The spoilers are already out there in the world, but I’m still pretending they’re not, so I don’t want to talk too explicitly about it – you’ve got to go watch the movie. But we had a general outline of where we wanted to take the conversation. 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. We wanted to kind of take her through some anti-racist exercises. That was our goal. Because prior to this scene in the movie, I went to a seminar and this is a big part of what she does, she does workshops. So we thought, could we get her to take part in something like that with me? I don’t want to give it away, but she did, she was game. She was a willing participant in our little workshop.

JOHN: She’s now finally broken her silence on that scene. Here’s a little bit from her response. So she called this, “a 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?

MATT: She’s half-right. She says that we were looking to embarrass and humiliate the anti-racist industry. If the anti-racist industry was embarrassed or humiliated, we didn’t do it, they did it to themselves. And if Robin DiAngelo 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 Sacha Baron Cohen has used. Although, it is interesting to me that when Sacha 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 “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 are looking to expose, we’re punching up. We’re going after academics and scholars and PhDs and the DEI experts. So you would think that if anyone would be accused of being unethical, it wouldn’t be us.

JOHN: 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 it, you just tee-up opportunities for them to say what they’ve been saying behind the scenes all along. It does not feel like you’re manipulating in the same way that somebody like Sacha Baron Cohen was. Even with all the money you had to fork over, was it difficult sometimes to get big names like DiAngelo to sit down with you?

MATT: Yeah, it was. I mean, we didn’t, of course, we did not get everybody we wanted to get in the film. We cast a pretty wide net, and 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 because, and I think it’s because they know that 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 sent an email, took a little bit of setting up. We paid her and she came in and she sat for two hours. She was very open at the time. Maybe now not so much though.

JOHN: I will sit down with you for two hours if you pay me 15,000. I just want to go ahead and say that to you. 

MATT: I could only give you 10. I’m, sorry

JOHN: That could work. Look, the media also plays sort of an unwitting role in your film. Can you talk about your media appearances as Matt, the “Do the Work” instructor?

MATT: 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 to really be an expert, then 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 to just call me “Matt the DEI expert,” and that’s what they called me. They never asked for the last name and that was pretty interesting.

Screenshot courtesy: DailyWire.

JOHN: 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?

MATT: Yeah, the really interesting thing is that, of course, we finished production and post-production on this film before Kamala 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, even Joe Biden has all but called her that, because he said that he was looking for a black woman to be his vice presidential candidate – and that’s what DEI is, that’s what it is, it’s like judging people based on their demographics, their skin color, excluding entire groups of people because they’re the wrong demographic. Not hiring based on merit, that is what DEI is, that’s what it is to and that’s how she ended up in the position that she’s in. So this movie is for her. I hope she watches it. We’ll send her a screener if she’s interested.

JOHN: You let the elite expose themselves in this film, but we also do hear from average Americans. And some of that is really 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?

MATT: I think so. As you point out, when we went and talked to normal people who are really outside of the DEI bubble, meaning 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. So for them, when we talk – whether white people or black people we talked 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 and it seems like just a household term. But again, you go outside the bubble and even that term was like they didn’t really even know what I meant by that, I had to explain it. So that’s a good sign. And that kind of shows you that a lot of this stuff lives in a very narrow lane. All you have to do to be free of it. If we could just ignore these DEI grifters – the Robin DiAngelos 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, unless they listen to someone like Robin DiAngelo, their default position is to not be all that focused on issues of race and racism and to just kind of live their life. And that’s what I think most people would do, if not for the DEI grift.

WATCH THE TRAILER FOR ‘AM I RACIST?’ — A MATT WALSH COMEDY ON DEI

JOHN: Final question. Did you ever imagine seeing yourself on the big screen? What’s it been like?

MATT: No, I didn’t. And it’s been pretty surreal. We had the premiere a couple days ago. 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 it on the big screen, and it was surreal. A little bit disconcerting in certain ways, but also, of course, a huge thrill and just really grateful for it. And 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 that is where we need to be if we want to make an impact.

JOHN: Well, I can say personally this is a great film, and I’m not just saying that 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.

MATT: Thank you very much, really appreciate it.

JOHN: That was Matt Walsh, star of “Am I Racist?,” which is now in theaters all over the country. This has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

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LISTEN: Catch the full interview with Matt Walsh on the Sunday edition of Morning Wire.