Matt Walsh is not a particularly unique looking individual. He doesn’t appear to be very tall, large, or otherwise threatening. He has a neatly cropped beard and speaks in a calming, hesitant monotone. Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker from two decades back, has a cultivated public persona build from his enormous girth and his schlub presentation. Moore has used this non-threatening persona in the same way Walsh does to gain trust and get otherwise smart, media savvy people to appear on camera. When they do, the trap is sprung, and the unsuspecting victim is then asked, live, questions that will result in embarrassment.
There is one enormous difference, however, between Matt Walsh and Michael Moore. Moore is an unabashed liberal who puts his politics upfront. His documentaries have hit all the liberal themes and include a doc been about gun control (Bowling for Columbine), the medical system ( Sicko), and the run up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan(Fahrenheit 9/11). Moore would describe himself as a liberal, I’m sure. Walsh, in contrast, has made films that openly and with glee mock progressive pieties, with two simple films, What is a Woman? and Am I Racist? to show. These films use the style Moore perfected but turns them to a different end. Unsuspecting progressives are asked to appear on camera to discuss issues with someone they think is a friendly, and then Walsh asks them questions that will cause the subject to fume, get defensive, try to defend themselves, and typically, fail.
Here is an example of Moore’s style, where he was able to get an interview with National Rifle Association president Charton Heston:
And here is an example of Walsh’s style:
The technique is similar, and the results have been good for Walsh and Moore. Walsh’s films are getting theatrical releases and bringing in good box office. His films are funded and viewed online at The Daily Wire, the media company built by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. Moore had theatrical releases, strong box office, and something that Walsh doesn’t yet have: an Academy Award. Michael Moore was given the Oscar for Best Documentary for Bowling for Columbine even though he humiliated an old school Hollywood icon along the way.
Is there an Oscar for Matt Walsh in the future? For now, I doubt it. Walsh does not take on causes and offer comic perspectives that are popular in Hollywood where the academy voters live and vote. But, even if he doesn’t ever achieve the level of commercial success that Moore has enjoyed, his films offer an interesting picture of the cultural landscape. Matt Walsh is a filmmaker, making popular and successful documentary films, which is a medium completely dominated by the cultural left for decades. And he does it using the same mockery that the cultural left used against the ‘stiffs’ and ‘squares’ back in the day. The stiffs and squares and old people are in the academies and institutions they once attacked.
Walsh is but one media star with a right leaning message and following. Dinesh D’Souza has dabbled in filmmaking, Adam Carolla has made several films with Dennis Prager, Prager himself runs a conservative media channel called Prager U, and there are many others. The podcast landscape includes former Fox News hots Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson as well as the ‘Podfather’ himself Joe Rogan. Rogan moved his operation from California to Texas, and while he claims to be a liberal still, anyone who listens to his show will note his distinct rightward drift.
I have written extensively on the early days of the American counterculture. In the mid-sixties, most American institutions, including most of the American media, were conservative, at least by the standards we use today. The press was part of the overall American institutional landscape, and the counterculture was counter to the dominate culture. Hippies controlled nothing in the exact opposite way they have come to control everything.
Over time, however, what started on the fringes, with films like Billy Jack, and figures like Charles Manson and Jerry Rubin, migrated to the mainstream. The counterculture IS the culture now, and so in Matt Walsh, what I see is the latest manifestation of a turning of the culture again. It won’t be like the culture that was dominant until the counterculture hollowed it out, but the new culture will be further to the right.
This trend has been coming on for some time. I first became aware of it when I heard Milos Yiannopoulos on the Joe Rogan podcast say that he should be a liberal, since he was gay and British, but that he couldn’t be a liberal because the left had become so dogmatic and strict, so restrictive in what you could say or do, that he had to go to the right to find freedom and free expression. Yiannopoulos sums up the problem and solution right there; the counterculture is old, comfortable, restrictive, interested in maintaining power, and therefore, hostile to change and new ideas.
So, if you are Yiannopoulos or Matt Walsh or Joe Rogan or any number of other media figures, you have to trend right to find any new ground to trod. Only the biggest and most entrenched celebrities with institutional backing can safety trend left in the traditional manner. If the culture is turning, who dominates the institutions of the future will change. The days of counterculture dominance may well be coming to an end. The good ideas they had will endure, but their self-righteous restrictions will fall away. The guardians of the major newspapers, the broadcast networks, and the Motion Picture Academy are ‘the Man’ now, and their time is up. Am I Racist? is just another tick on the clock of culture as it turns.
12/9/2024 – I wrote the above before the election. The results, a big victory for Trump, and the rise of new media as a driver of public opinion, confirms that the culture is indeed, turning,. Harris had all the institutional advantages, including WAY more money, and it came to nothing. The aging hippies who came to power in the 1960s and 1970s, are at their end. It isn’t as though their ideas will disappear, but they have reached a logical end point.
TomRoushOnline 