In my last piece, I reflected on the state of the NFL’s relationship with the rise of data analytics and how it’s been contributing to the progress of the transhumanist agenda.
It made me ponder more deeply the questions we as human beings are confronted with as we hurtle headfirst into a more and more technology-dependent society.
The things that gave men meaning in their lives have all but disappeared. And how do the masculinity gurus of conservatism address this? They cope.
As we become more dependent on technology to complete the tasks that human beings have always performed, we’ve come to the point where we must ask ourselves … what exactly are we?
My mind naturally began to think about the division of labor within traditional family households.
A wife and mother would traditionally be a homemaker and nurturer of the children. A husband and father would traditionally be the one who would labor out in the world and bring home the income and provisions.
This gender-oriented division of labor came into being almost entirely out of necessity. Sure, maybe social ideologies sprang up over time about gender roles that may or may not have been healthy. But fundamentally, a husband and wife performed the roles they did because a man can do things only a man can do and a woman can do things only a woman can do.
But now, we live in a different world, a very affluent, technology-dependent world. Everything is taken care of for us. Machines do almost all the essential work for us, and it’s only a matter of time until they do the entirety of it.
The American economy isn’t a manufacturing one any more. When most Americans go to “work,” it is not to labor but to provide some kind of service, which both men and women can do. And compared to the rest of the world, we make a lot of money performing these services.
It’s given us Americans security and time. And with security and time, we’ve gotten bored. So bored that we make up new problems for ourselves just to give us an artificial sense of insecurity. People are so free from their traditional gender roles (and therefore actual problems) that they now identify as new genders.
That conservative commentator Matt Walsh was able to produce an entire documentary dedicated to answering the question “What Is a Woman?” is a clear sign of how out of hand the situation has gotten. Everyone had a big, hearty laugh as they watched some blue-haired child psychologists squirm and struggle to define what an adult female human being is in exact terms.
But the problem is real, and it’s much deeper than a predatory pharmaceutical industry pushing kids and adults into gender-affirming surgery.
To fully appreciate the scope of the question “What is a woman?” we must ask the necessary (and more urgent) follow-up question: What is a man?
Seriously, what is a man in the 21st century … and beyond? It’s the most important question that absolutely no one is thinking about.
Think about what I’ve already said within this one article. We live in a time when all traditional roles have been stripped from both genders due to affluence, which is due to the development of automated technology.
And because we don’t make anything any more, what do we offer as an economy instead? Health care, education, retail, and entertainment.
Or in other words – nurturing, child-rearing, homemaking, and sex.
Any role that’s ever been traditionally feminine has been taken out of the households and plugged straight into the economy. In his book "The New Politics of Sex," political theorist Dr. Stephen Baskerville cites G.K. Chesterton on the matter:
If people cannot mind their own business, it cannot possibly be made economical to pay them to mind each other’s business; and still less to mind each other’s babies. ... The whole really rests on a plutocratic illusion of an infinite supply of servants. When we offer any other system as a "career for women," we are really proposing that an infinite number of them should become servants, of a plutocratic or bureaucratic sort. Ultimately, we are arguing that a woman should not be a mother to her own baby, but a nursemaid to somebody else’s baby. But it will not work, even on paper. We cannot all live by taking in each other’s washing, especially in the form of pinafores.
Motherly instincts have merely been bureaucratized, resulting in every woman either being cooped up in an office doing meaningless paperwork or cooped up in a shoebox apartment making OnlyFans content. Or both.
Meanwhile, masculine roles got absolutely and systematically shafted by modernity.
Wanna get married to the woman of your dreams and raise a family? Sorry, the no-fault divorce and state welfare machineries have all but made real, long-lasting marriage an unappealing artifact of history.
Wanna take masculine pride in your occupation or the money you make? Good luck. America hasn't been a manufacturing economy in decades. All productive jobs involving real labor have been outsourced to China, automation, or H-1B immigrants.
Any man who currently has a “masculine” job such as farmer, truck driver, construction worker, or oil rigger will be replaced by a robot running the latest ChatGPT woke programming within the next 25 years.
That’s where we're at as men, and that's where we're going. We've been systematically disenfranchised. We've lost the means to exhibit patriarchal authority over the family unit due to the failure of marriage policy, and all opportunities to pursue productive labor and upward mobility are quickly dwindling due to automation.
The things that gave men meaning in their lives have all but disappeared.
And how do the masculinity gurus of conservatism address this?
They cope. They preach “primitivism” as the escape hatch from modernity. Go hunt. Go chop wood. Drink whiskey. Eat beef.
Even Matt Walsh gives his diagnosis on how to be a man: Don’t take any sick days from work.
Yeah, Stacey is girlbossing as she runs up racks with her nursing job and OnlyFans side hustle with $500K saved up in the bank while you're busy telling young, impressionable boys to man up and stay committed to an office job that will have him replaced within a decade, all from the comfort of your man-cave studio.
There is no “manning up” in 2024 and beyond. Wake up. The system has all but wiped out everything that once allowed men to find meaning in their lives.
So we need to tackle the question seriously and sincerely.
What is a man?
Damon Packard is the Los Angeles-based filmmaker behind such underground classics as “Reflections of Evil,” “The Untitled Star Wars Mockumentary,” “Foxfur,” and “Fatal Pulse.” His AI-generated work recently appeared as interstitials for the 18th annual American Cinematheque Horrorthon and can be enjoyed on his YouTube channel. After a long day making movies or otherwise making ends meet, he likes to unwind with late-night excursions to the multiplexes and art house cinemas of greater Los Angeles. For previous installments of the "Diary," see here.
Wobbled into an 11 p.m. show of "Am I Racist?" last night in Century City. As seemingly ripe as this subject matter is for satire, I found it mostly dull and not all that funny.
What struck me is how oddly staged the whole thing felt. These bizarre DEI, white privilege education workshops can't possibly be real, can they? People actually pay that kind of money to attend them? These people are real?
Anyone who still has some brain function knows how ridiculous and reality-manipulating the whole woke thing is — like any mainstream media-driven profiteering scam the dopey brain-dead masses fall for (take your pick, the world revolves around trillions of scams within scams).
So it's all about finding clever and humorous ways to point out the obvious hypocrisies and broken logic.
Walsh is no Borat, Eric Andre, Chris Morris, or Louis Theroux. This kind of humor is tricky, and it takes someone of unique charisma.
Heading into a nice, completely empty midnight show of this "Beetlejuice" stuff. Perfect night. Everyone wiped out from the heat, this whole place is quiet and empty. Will report back but I can't imagine I'll have anything of interest to say.
[Later]
"Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" was weird. It included some really odd needle drops — the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, and Richard Harris' "MacArthur Park" (which reappears in the climax in the form of Danny Elfman's orchestral version). Strangest of all was the use of Pino Donaggio's "Carrie" theme at the end.
I wonder if this was just music Burton happened to be listening to while making or cutting the movie. It was nice hearing these pieces in a theater, but do those songs really work for the scene? Eh.
I think Burton is probably an insightful, intelligent person with whom I'd enjoy discussing art, cinema, history, old Hollywood, etc. But for me his films range from mediocre to baffling to awful.
I just don't know what the hell to make of this thing. Danny DeVito frothing at the mouth as a disgusting dead janitor? Too much goofy, cartoony weirdness for this to work for me. And for a guy who loves stop motion, Burton includes some pretty mediocre stop-motion sequences here.
Maybe if I were feeling generous I'd give it a semi-pass — who else is giving Catherine O'Hara lead roles these days?
Watched "Tightrope" (1984) last night at a friend's house. I remember well when this played at the Mann National Westwood. Some have described it as Eastwood's "giallo." It's certainly very stylish, dark, sleazy, and moody and often feels more like a slasher movie than a thriller.
I did wonder if this was originally intended for another actor. Eastwood plays a divorced police detective named Wes Block, who is raising two daughters and five dogs. He also loves to have kinky sex with hookers while on the job. At one point he tells Geneviève Bujold he'd "love to lick the sweat off" her body, which you almost can't believe he just said.
At the time, Gene Siskel praised Eastwood for "risking his star charisma [to play] a louse." The villain is a sadistic psycho killer who creeps around stalking women in bizarre devil masks; he ends up beating and possibly raping Block's daughter. Eastwood cast his own 12-year-old daughter Alison in the role.
I did not expect to get through this, but somehow I watched this entire thing. Andrew McCarthy (whom I've always liked for his charming, neurotic quirkiness) did a good job.
At the same time I can't believe he actually had the gall to make an entire movie griping about his career.
Let's see: The world is collapsing in chaos, the starving masses swarm the streets like something out of "Soylent Green," and here comes poor Andrew McCarthy with a 90-minute, soul-searching documentary about how hard it was on him and his rich, beautiful celebrity friends when an article in New York magazine called them the "Brat Pack."
CineFile screening nights continued tonight with James Glickenhaus' spectacular overlooked 1988 action thriller/courtroom drama "Shakedown." Modern, CGI-heavy action movies with bloated $200 million budgets can't even come close to what Glickenhaus could do with $6 million in 1987.
Nowadays you probably wouldn't even be allowed to attempt some of the stunts they pull off. It's a reminder of how competitive the field was at the time. Stuntmen were eager to keep pushing boundaries and would take major risks, especially in small-budget films. You can also notice this in many of the Hong Kong films of the era.
Needless to say, those days are over. Glickenhaus wisely got out of the film biz and now runs a company that makes high-performance race cars.
Finally, someone else doing something somewhat creative with AI, showing the true faces of these ridiculous politicians, technocrats, and leaders.
That's exactly what all these idiots on the world's stage are: a bunch of gangsters, rubbing it in our faces like James Cagney with that grapefruit in "The Public Enemy."
A 3 a.m., Uber Eats delivery dragged me all the way out to Canoga Park on Topanga Canyon Blvd. (I made $20 for the whole night; sad, I know.)
I did get to revisit the former site of a movie theater from my youth, the Baronet: a huge, 500-seat auditorium with sticky floors. I remember seeing both "Damien: Omen 2" and "The Awakening" here at nearly empty showings in the early '80s when I lived in Chatsworth. It closed around 1986.
This isn't too far from the Topanga Twin Cinema, where I sat through "An American Werewolf in London" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" twice in a row in 1981. I believe it's a Crate & Barrel now.
This is one of most fascinating films I've ever seen. I watched the entire thing this morning, completely mesmerized.
This was supposed to be a Roman Polanski project, but he ended up handing over directing duties to Simon Hesera. Polanski is credited only as writer and second unit director.
But this strange, dream-like tale of miserable, angry characters on a rainy and cold beachfront is so artfully done that I suspect it's very much a Polanski film — much in the same way that "Poltergeist" was clearly directed by Steven Spielberg, despite being credited to Tobe Hooper.
I'm surprised it's been so overlooked for so many years. It sticks with you.
It's a great time to release a conservative documentary.
Since Dinesh D’Souza’s "2016: Obama’s America," the left wing's grip on the genre has weakened, making way for a proliferation of right-leaning films like "The Plot Against the President," "Alex's War," and "Hoaxed."
The movie presents a vivid example of the ugliness and abuse that virtue signaling can draw out of normal people seeking approval.
Now comes Matt Walsh with "Am I Racist?" Can it attain the kind of mainstream theatrical success formerly reserved for blatantly liberal fare like "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Bowling for Columbine"?
I have two questions I always ask when evaluating conservative documentaries. First: Does the filmmaker actually have something to say, or is he just using the film to promote his personal brand? Second: Has the filmmaker worked to present a genuinely persuasive argument, or has he settled for preaching to the choir?
As with his previous documentary, "What Is a Woman?" Walsh has picked a promising subject. And like its predecessor, "Am I Racist?" features Walsh blindly stumbling around the modern world, asking basic questions while pretending to be baffled. He's just a confused innocent earnestly trying to understand the latest bizarre concepts mainstreamed by obscurantist left-wing intellectuals.
In "What Is a Woman?" it was trans and gender ideology. In "Am I Racist?" it's DEI policies and anti-racist activism.
Walsh definitely has something to say, even if his characteristic acerbic personality often upstages his message. That just leaves the question of whether he can convince anyone not already fed up with the totalizing view of racial identity permeating every aspect of American life.
To that end, it is worth looking at the film’s approach. As my colleague Christian Toto puts it, Walsh is effectively trying to reinvent the Borat strategy of goading people into revealing their worst beliefs and prejudices by pretending to be an ally.
The film introduces Walsh as a bumbling white man grappling with the challenges of the post-2020 world, going on a journey of self-discovery to become a certified DEI expert and interviewing leading progressive voices like Saira Rao and Robin DiAngelo.
For the film to be truly persuasive, it needs to take the logic of modern critical race theory to it's inevitable conclusion. It needs to get the core of what “anti-racism” means in a modern context and why it’s bad on principle: its tendency to answer inequality with illiberal, easily exploitable social engineering, the way its relentless targeting of whites for their "privilege" and alleged sense of "supremacy" emboldens actual white nationalist groups to use the same arguments.
It needs to expose the cynical, self-perpetuating grift of professional anti-racists like Ibram X. Kendi, who argues, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Walsh comes remarkably close to accomplishing this. "Am I Racist?" is comprised of several hidden camera group sessions with Walsh in attendance, asking questions and nudging the dialogue in the direction he wants.
However, in its relentless desire to be a comedy, the film frequently stumbles.Throughout these hidden camera meetings, Walsh interjects and asks questions that derail the conversations, which proves detrimental from a journalistic perspective. He’s interrupting his enemies while they’re making mistakes.
"Am I Racist?" works best toward the end, when Walsh hosts a DEI group discussion. He rolls out an old man in a wheelchair, identifying him as his uncle who told a racist joke. Walsh proceeds to castigate the man (actually an actor), leading two women in the crowd to join in, yelling obscenities at their target and bragging that they've cut off their entire families for being racist. Here, the movie presents a vivid example of the ugliness and abuse that virtue signaling can draw out of normal people seeking approval.
Unlike "What Is a Woman?" "Am I Racist?" explicitly hopes to appeal to mainstream moviegoers. It's done fairly well with them so far, grossing $4.75 million in its opening weekend and landing in fourth place at the box office.
Conservatives are largely turning out to support the film, with Lutheran Satire creator Hans Fiene praising the film as “genuinely hilarious” and “very well done.”
The most notable, and surprising, nonpartisan review of the film has come from YouTuber Jeremy Jahns, who generally approved of the film as funny, thought-provoking, and “a good time, no alcohol required,” while highlighting the disconnect between activists and the desire of regular people not to have to think about race every second of their lives.
More positive reviews coming from nonpartisan or centrist content creators would help assuage my fear that "Am I Racist?" won't have much reach beyond the conservative media-sphere.As "Podcast of the Lotus Eaters" points out, the film's unabashed mockery of DEI — its steadfast refusal to take it seriously or consider it worthy of reverent attention — may be persuasion enough.
And yet the fact that progressives are brigading "Am I Racist?" so effectively is a sobering reminder of the vast propaganda machine at their disposal. Winning the hearts and minds of open-minded non-conservatives will take all of the creative and commercial power the right can muster.
“Very seldom do I recommend things to watch,” says Jase Robertson, who isn’t much of a media guy.
However, last weekend, Jase’s wife happened to bring up Matt Walsh’s 2022 documentary “What Is a Woman?”
Jase was shocked to discover that a film with such a title existed, and so, intrigued, he watched it.
His conclusion is that “What Is a Woman?” “needs to be watched by society.”
“All this guy did, to his credit, was simply ask a question,” he says, pointing to the “global controversy” that gender has become.
“When [Walsh] asked that question,” says Jase, he discovered that “the belief has become popular among those who attack the gender God-defined roles that it's impossible for them to answer.”
Jase shares his bewilderment that the socially acceptable answer when it comes to someone’s gender is basically “let the kid decide what they want to be.”
“They'll say your gender is whatever you want to be, including any kind of animal. I mean you can be a cat, you know, you can be a wolf,” he says.
“That’s nonsense,” is all Phil Robertson has to say about it.
To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.
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In 2022, Daily Wire host Matt Walsh produced a documentary called “What Is a Woman?” The film explored that very question — what does it mean to be a woman? — since society has decided to make that a controversial issue.
Now, Walsh has moved on to a new subject — white racism. In his latest documentary, “Am I Racist?” he explores the progressive agenda to push the narrative of systemic racism as a means of control.
Now, he joins James Poulos on “Zero Hour” to discuss the film.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
“Are you a racist?” James asks sarcastically.
“Well, I’m white, aren’t I?” says Walsh, adding that “the answer is automatically yes.”
“As you continue along the journey [of discovering your inherent racism], you just feel worse and worse about yourself,” he says. “That's really the goal. You just have to keep hating yourself more and more with each passing day.”
“The actual program is to get millions and millions of people to feel incredibly depressed and despairing and self-loathing, and then it’s much easier to control people when you have them in that state, right?” James asks.
“Exactly,” says Walsh, noting that the documentary, while technically a comedy, reveals a tragedy about society: “[Progressives’] goal is to build up resentment, self-loathing, suspicion, [and] guilt,” because “all of these things are very profitable to them.”
“Their core message is a simple one, which is that if you're a white person, then you are the villain of the story; you are history's great villain, and you have much to be ashamed of and much to atone for; although you can never really atone for it. ... If you're anywhere in the non-white category, which of course is a vast category, then you're automatically the victim; you're oppressed; you have no control over your life; you have no agency, no real autonomy. ... It's a very demoralizing and dehumanizing message to everybody.”
Unfortunately, “They've been very effective in pursuing that goal especially over the last decade,” Walsh laments.
“What’s it gonna take to roll it back?” James asks.
“I think what it ultimately takes is at this point, basically, just leaving people alone. I don't know that we need a competing message about racism. ... We don't need to talk about it all the time,” says Walsh, pointing to the famous “60 Minutes” interview with Morgan Freeman, during which he advised that we stop talking about racism.
To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.
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Director Justin Folk understands why people might liken his film “Am I Racist?” to the 2006 comedy “Borat.”
"Borat" found Sacha Baron Cohen going under cover as a boorish Kazakhstani. “Am I Racist?” follows Matt Walsh of “What Is a Woman?” fame posing as a DEI “expert.” Both deploy improv shtick in the “Candid Camera” mold. Each is uniquely hilarious.
The director insists his team didn’t take the DEI proponents out of context.
Folk sees a critical difference between the two.
“Sacha Baron Cohen set out to make fun of regular, everyday Americans. Yes, it can feel a bit mean at times, but at the same time it’s very funny,” Folk tells Align. “What Matt does is different. He’s not making fun of people. He’s making fun of bad ideas. ... These are not personal attacks. He’s after the ideas they’re propagating to the public.”
“Am I Racist?” is the first Daily Wire production debuting in theaters. The docu-comedy finds Walsh interviewing “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo and other DEI luminaries. He’s nominally in disguise, courtesy of a man bun and a herringbone jacket.
The point is to target the woke mindset, under attack across the culture in recent months, with humor.
“People are opened up to ideas when they laugh,” Folk says. “People are so tense over the issue of race. It’s important to find some commonality and lighten the mood.”
Walsh seems like a curious person to do just that. He’s a stoic presence whose strong Catholic faith infuses his podcast musings. On-screen, his unflappable demeanor is the perfect fit for a project like “Am I Racist?”
“[Matt Walsh] does deadpan better than anybody else I’ve ever seen. That allows him to introduce insanity into a situation without it being picked up on, without giving the tell,” he says. "He’s able to go all in into a moment without forecasting that it’s a joke.”
Folk and Walsh originally teamed up for 2022’s “What Is a Woman?” That documentary infected the mainstream and put the title on the lips of many Americans. The film’s brief appearance on X generated nearly 200 million views, according to one report.
Folk dismissed the idea of a sequel but wanted to keep his partnership with Walsh going. The duo settled on race, another “untouchable” subject.
Audiences may wonder how Folk’s crew captured the sequences from the film. Yes, it’s a brand of awkward comedy that dates back decades, but they ingratiated themselves with groups that wouldn’t normally rub elbows with Walsh.
Folk describes the process.
“Everything we do with these people is exactly what we told them we would do,” he says. “We’re making a movie about anti-racism. ... We’re coming to them as experts. Can you enlighten us? They agreed to do that in front of the cameras.”
The director insists his team didn’t take the DEI proponents out of context. Nor would his subjects backpedal on what’s said on-screen, he suspects.
“I do believe the things that these people say in the film they would 100% stand behind, even today,” he says. Several people featured in the film, including DiAngelo, have since gone dark on X.
Talk about "White Fragility"!
The rare documentary can have an outsized impact on the culture. Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” changed the way many Americans view climate change, no matter where you stand on the issue.
Folk hopes “Am I Racist?” has a similarly outsized impact on the culture.
“DEI is full of toxic ideas. It’s divisive. Personally, I think it should be illegal,” he says, citing the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting race-based preferences. “The timing is right for a film like this.”
“What Is a Woman?” rocked the culture while mostly living behind a paywall. “Am I Racist?” debuts in theaters nationwide September 13, 2024.
That matters, says Folk, who believes the multiplex is key to getting the message beyond the online conservative bubble — “so we’re not just talking to ourselves."
If you’re white, then apparently, you’re a racist — at least according to the anti-racism social justice movement that’s taken knitting circles by storm.
The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh set out to discover why that is for his new film, “Am I Racist?” where he goes undercover as a “certified DEI expert” and gets incredible insight from the leaders in the anti-racism industry.
He was a little surprised with what he found — but not when it came to the leaders.
“I wasn’t really surprised by the grifter types and the things that they said was kind of what I expected them to say,” Walsh tells Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable.” “Although, still quite disturbing to sit in the room and hear it.”
“The people that are getting sucked into this scam, into this cult, I was a little surprised by the fact that many of them to me seemed more genuine than I thought,” he explains, adding, “They’re true believers.”
When he originally started out, he was under the impression that most of what these followers are doing is simply virtue signaling.
“I think it’s more like 10% virtue signaling and 90% they believe it,” he explains. “They really think that they need to do this somehow to atone for their white sins. And I guess I was surprised by that.”
“Do you think that the 90%, that they are trying to punish themselves or do you think they’re truly hopeful that somehow they’re going to be able to break out of this supposedly white supremacist system and do good for marginalized communities?” Stuckey asks.
“I think it’s a little bit of both, but I do think there’s a kind of spiritual component to it,” he responds. “You can only go so far psychoanalyzing these people, but I do think that they walk around with guilt.”
They carry a guilt that would otherwise be washed clean through belief in Jesus Christ, but instead it follows them everywhere they go, as they are often not religious.
So they’re following a new religion.
“If you don’t have that religion, if you’re a secular person, then I think you still have the guilt,” Walsh explains. “But you have no way of understanding it. You have no framework for understanding it. So I think that these kind of anti-racist grifters come along and they say, ‘OK, well, you’re feeling this way, and I’ll tell you why you’re feeling it.’”
“‘It’s because you’re white, and here’s all the things you can do with this burden of guilt that you carry to be relieved of it,'" he continues. "Then of course, after they do it, they’re given the bad news that ‘OK, well good job for doing that, but you’re still just as racist as you were before.’”
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
Move aside, Goodnight Moon. The newest children’s classics are hitting library shelves near you … and they’re kinky in all the colors of the rainbow. I walked into my local Chicago Public Library (CPL) branch, heading over to the holds section to pick up my newest read. Book secured, I went to check out, passing […]
In “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu wrote, “To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.” In “Am I Racist?,” the satirical documentary released by the Daily Wire that’s in theaters now, writer and star Matt Walsh leans into that concept with gusto, doing the work necessary to become an anti-racist. Fortunately for him, […]
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