We Are the Beast

In Am I Racist? Matt Walsh learns more than he wanted to know

This post is free. Enjoy and share!

The other day, I finally succumbed to Fear Of Missing Out and saw Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist? in the theater. It didn’t draw a crowd in my neck of the woods but appears to be punching above its weight at the box office, more than recovering its production budget and climbing up the list of top-grossing documentaries. I would rate it about the same as YouTube critic Jeremy Jahns, who’s been coming under fire for reviewing the film at all: a good time, no alcohol required. But there’s one scene that wasn’t a particularly good time, and by Walsh’s account, it wasn’t a good time for him either. It’s a pivotal moment in the film, so if you care about spoilers for this sort of thing, here’s your spoiler warning.

The scene is captured during a fake DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) Workshop, run by Walsh himself as a self-styled “DEI expert.” Earlier scenes show him going through an actual online certification process and printing out an actual card, which he spends the movie waving about to droll effect. Because the whole edifice of DEI is built on a foundation of fakery, Walsh is able to pull off barely disguised Borat-style shenanigans, and his interlocutors are none the wiser. For most of the film, he’s “on a journey,” trolling various hucksters who have been snookered into bloviating to the camera (for a price—in Robin DiAngelo’s case, a price with five figures).

Then the third act arrives, and it’s time for Walsh to step fully into his “expert” role, at the head of a classroom full of unsuspecting “students.” This is where things start to unravel, in ways even he wasn’t expecting.

Some conservative Christians have debated the ethics of the film’s production tactics, which necessarily involved some, let’s say, sleight of hand. Various money shots with big fish like DiAngelo or Saira Rao (whose “Race to Dinner” grift is beautifully skewered in one of the film’s funniest scenes) would have been impossible otherwise. But since Walsh is Catholic, he’s come under scrutiny from Christian clergy and ethicists who argue that “owning the libs” is too weak of a goal to justify deception. In reply, Walsh doesn’t concede that he engaged in deception proper anyway, but even if he had, he believes the end of exposing an evil grift would justify the means.

Me, I struggle to care if Matt put on a bad wig and pretended to be a Robin DiAngelo fanboy. If she was so blinded by ego that she couldn’t tell she was being had, that would seem to be a Robin DiAngelo problem.

But it’s one thing to let a celebrity fraud hoist herself on her own petard with cameras rolling. It’s another thing to construct a social experiment that brings out the very worst in ordinary people. Walsh’s fake “workshop” was such an experiment. It was at this point in the film that I began to have my own serious misgivings about what he and the Daily Wire have wrought.

As the workshop progresses, Walsh continuously ups the cringe factor with the expectation that the participants will walk out, eventually leaving no one left to play along. A few of them do. But the rest stay…and stay…and stay. Finally, Walsh stages what he and the production team assumed would be the final charade, the bridge too far, when a (black) assistant wheels in a man he introduces as his racist “Uncle Frank.” (I haven’t been able to confirm if this really is Matt’s Uncle Frank, but who knows, it could be.) Frank’s appearance has been foreshadowed earlier in the film when a grifter tells Walsh that part of the anti-racist “journey” is finding the moral courage to confront one’s racist relatives. Walsh thinks of “my Uncle Frank,” famous for his un-PC Thanksgiving jokes. This hints that a future confrontation is set to be a key moment in his fake character arc.

Sly old Frank is fully in on the hoax when he arrives, slumped over and looking very out of it in the wheelchair. But to Matt’s “students,” who aren’t paid actors, Frank looks like a vulnerable old man, helpless to defend himself against bullying. That’s when Walsh starts to bully him. How dare he make that racist joke about Mexicans? How dare he?

To those of us not in the anti-racist cult, it all seems transparently over the top, transparently fake. But not to Walsh’s audience. After a minute or two, he stops and invites them to join him. In this make-believe world, he offers up Uncle Frank to a make-believe slaughter. Surely, he’s thinking, this is the moment when it will all stop, when everyone left will get up and walk out.

Except they don’t. “Honestly,” one woman says to Frank, “f*ck you.” Someone echoes her. Then multiple people pile on.

For anyone who was forced to read Lord of the Flies in high school, the scene is unnervingly reminiscent of that climactic moment when the mob of savage little boys descends on innocent Simon, declaring him to be “The Beast” in disguise. The Beast is the novel’s bogeyman, a figment of the boys’ imagination that looms progressively larger as they gradually lose all decency and reason on the desert island. Dancing in the dark, high on adrenaline, they convince themselves that the little blond-headed figure crawling out of the bushes is something monstrous. In a few mad minutes, they have killed the best of them all.

Peter Brook’s spare film adaptation adds a chilling soundtrack touch over the image of Simon’s body floating in the surf: a recurring sacred motif sung by choirboys, cut from the same cloth as the schoolboys in the story — “Kyrie, kyrie, kyrie eleison…”

Brook directed the movie in unorthodox fashion on a small budget, corralling 30 untrained boys on an actual Caribbean island and following them around with his crew for three months. They were given lines, but they were also given room to improvise. Brook judged the results to be well worth the subsequent editing nightmare. Decades later, the cast would reunite and look back on the shoot as a memorable and positive experience. Still, Brook would always be haunted by the performances he had elicited. As they prepared to shoot the second murder scene with poor doomed “Piggy,” the young actor came to the director looking white as a sheet, asking if he was really going to be murdered. Some of the other boys thought it would be amusing to convince him that it wasn’t going to be play-acting after all. Happily, he wasn’t scarred for life. But Brook was moved to reflect that the only fantastical element of Golding’s novel was the length of time it took for the plot to descend into bloody catastrophe. In the novel, it takes months. In reality, Brook guessed it wouldn’t take more than a long weekend.

I’m willing to take Matt Walsh at his word that he genuinely thought his little social experiment would end as soon as he wheeled out Uncle Frank. In a podcast interview, he mentions that they’d run the scenario with a couple of other sample groups who did balk. Then again, he also says that he kept trying to make his performance more emotional and convincing with each iteration, as if he was trying to inspire a different result. So did he want that different result, or didn’t he? And if he didn’t, what did he think was eventually going to happen? Has he never even heard of Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment with electric shocks, where unwitting volunteers had to be ordered to stop (so they thought) torturing people? Milgram first conceived the experiment in 1961. It has since been replicated, with the same disturbing results.

Despite “feeling bad” about the scene, Walsh is still glad that the moment was captured. From a filmmaking perspective, it is admittedly quite memorable, an effectively dark stroke in an otherwise light comedy. It also demonstrates why the business of exposing “anti-racism” isn’t just so much political bickering. We may struggle to understand how anyone can take Walsh seriously, but that’s because we are on the outside of the cult looking in. To those inside, it’s not a joke, and it’s not a game. It poisons hearts. It poisons homes. It turns children against parents, brother against brother.

Perhaps other filmmaking methods wouldn’t have exposed this darkness quite so memorably. But they would have had the virtue of being ethical.

Meanwhile, if Walsh was naive before, he can’t claim naivete now. He has arrived late to poor little Simon’s final epiphany: “Maybe there is a beast. Maybe it’s only us.”