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Daily Wire commentator and filmmaker Matt Walsh’s new film is now in theaters earning a 99% favorable rating (as of this writing) among moviegoers on the Rotten Tomatoes site, despite being utterly ignored by the almost-entirely progressive industry of film critics, and despite a coordinated campaign to threaten theater owners to cancel the film’s showings. In the vein of his very successful mockumentary What is a Woman?, Am I Racist? stars Walsh going undercover (sort of) to expose the idiocy, hate, and race hustling of the so-called anti-racism field of social justice.

“Disguised” in skinny jeans and an ill-fitting man-bun wig, Walsh presents himself to various key anti-racist figures as undertaking a woke “journey” to understand how to shed his white privilege and unconscious racism. That “journey” earned quite a few laughs and even a few shocked gasps from the audience I sat with in the Dallas area.

It’s mind-boggling to observe that none of the progressives he targeted recognize Walsh or that he is obviously toying with them, until you understand that the Left largely occupies a bubble when it comes to right-wing media; we know their media stars but they don’t know ours, apart from a very few ubiquitous superstars like Ben Shapiro.

Whether it’s disrupting a circle of self-righteous self-flagellants being lectured by a black “expert” about their threatening whiteness, or commiserating with a white Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) “expert” about their “racist uncles,” Walsh manages to expose the lucrative scam and open anti-white bigotry behind these repugnant anti-racism thought leaders, some of whom are white themselves. Along the way, he learns that the process is all about committing to “do the work” – the never-ending, demeaning work – of de-centering one’s “whiteness” from all public and private spaces.

By contrast, Walsh also questions everyday Americans who remain untouched by the kinds of radical ideology that have infected our cultural elites. He heads for a biker bar on Main Street USA to ask the patrons – black and white – there and elsewhere in the community what they think about the need to de-center whiteness. Needless to say, he gets an earful about what nonsense that is from people who are refreshingly not obsessed with skin color and false notions of structural power dynamics.

One of the most disturbing sequences of the film features Saira Rao, founder of Race2Dinner, a group that arranges intimate dinner events to “help white women confront their own racism.” Rao and a partner “help” these masochistic white liberal women by berating them for their whiteness and trashing America as a racist hellhole, a privilege for which Rao charges thousands of dollars. It’s clear from the glimpses we get into one such dinner event that she is a race-mongering, anti-American sadist who enjoys pushing the dinner attendees to tears.

Astonishingly, a comically bewigged Walsh manages to get (or at least buy off) best-selling White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo to sit down with him for what she thought was a social justice documentary. She later said things “felt a little off” from the very beginning but she nevertheless went through with the interview – likely because she was paid $15,000 (which she later donated) to participate in it. In one of the funnier, even jaw-dropping, moments in the film, Walsh offers a few dollars in slavery reparations to his black producer Ben and convinces DiAngelo to chip in some cash as well, after she apologizes directly to Ben for her part in systemic racism.

How effective has the film been in terms of putting heat on these hoax-mongers? As soon as the principal anti-racist racists featured in the movie realized they’d been taken in by a Daily Wire operative in a Michael Moore-style documentary investigation, they deleted their X accounts. Robin DiAngelo even felt compelled to issue a statement addressing the film in which she described it as “a Borat-style mockumentary… designed to humiliate and discredit anti-racist educators and activists.” A delighted Walsh tweeted “She couldn’t be more correct in that assessment. Thank you, Robin!”

A key lesson here for conservative culture warriors is one drawn straight from the activist handbook called Rules for Radicals by the late Saul Alinsky, who arguably ranks second only to Karl Marx in terms of his influence on Left-wing strategy. Rule Number Five in that handbook reads, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.” This is a brilliant strategy which the Left mastered long ago and has wielded against the Right like a bludgeon, and which conservatives need to adopt themselves more often.

As conservatives, our instinct is to debate our opponents and explain why our ideas are true and better, but reason is useless against the true believers of the cult of social justice. They derail our rational approach by declaring not only that reason and facts are tools of white supremacist power, but also that our denial of racism is itself the strongest evidence of our racism. Although facts and truth are important weapons to wield in the culture war against those who have ears to hear, we cannot win without also going on the offensive by relentlessly mocking the Left’s stupid, destructive agenda. Am I Racist? is a master class in terms of throwing the Alinsky’s strategy right back in their faces.

The most important takeaway from Am I Racist? is not the comedy but the tragedy – not that anti-racism seems ridiculous to normal people, but that it is so vilely and intentionally divisive, that it subverts America in many ways, and that so many white people are so eager to demean themselves in order to assuage the undeserved racial guilt they have absorbed from relentless anti-white cultural messaging from the kinds of scam artists highlighted in this film.

These self-proclaimed anti-racists are actually full not of empathy and compassion but of either vicious hatred and contempt (if they’re non-white, like Rao) or self-loathing (if they’re white, like DiAngelo). Theirs is a sick, racist ideology that is not at all designed to heal racial issues, of course, but to exacerbate them – to rub raw, as Saul Alinsky put it, the resentment of the people. As Walsh and other normal people in the film suggest repeatedly, the only solution to racial tensions is the colorblind one: to treat everyone the same – as individuals who deserve to be treated with dignity and decency as fellow Americans.

But that is a solution the Left rejects – because it can’t be exploited for power or money.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior